The Jewish Lobby
Over the course of the last year or so, I've been entertaining ever more negative views of the state of Israel and particularly the Jewish effort in the United States to advance Israel's strategic interests at the expense of America's. I've even allowed some ugly tin-foil-hat type thoughts involving Zionism and disproportionate Jewish power to cross my mind.
I came to the realization that my unwavering support of Israel was based primarily on my extreme dislike for the Palestinians and their activities- dancing in the streets after 9/11, suicide bombing their children, suicide bombing other people's children, etc. There's no doubt, they're a pretty terrible group of people on the whole and have been consumed by the Islamist culture that I despise.
However, the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Jews in America, acting on behalf of Zionism, may have done far more to damage America than Islamic extremism ever has.
So let's discuss. Here's a good starting point.
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
U.S. foreign policy shapes events in every corner of the globe. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East, a region of recurring instability and enormous strategic importance. Most recently, the Bush Administration’s attempt to transform the region into a community of democracies has helped produce a resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman. With so much at stake for so many, all countries need to understand the forces that drive U.S. Middle East policy.
The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.
This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives. As we show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel.
Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.1
Israel and the Iraq War
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element. Some Americans believe that this was a “war for oil,” but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001‐2003), executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now Counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the “real threat” from Iraq was not a threat to the United States.139 The “unstated threat” was the “threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a University of Virginia audience in September 2002, noting further that “the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”
On August 16, 2002, eleven days before Vice President Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hard‐line speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that “Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.”140 By this point, according to Sharon, strategic coordination between Israel and the U.S. had reached “unprecedented dimensions,” and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programs.141 As one retired Israeli general later put it, “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non‐conventional capabilities.”142
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when President Bush decided to seek U.N. Security Council authorization for war in September, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let U.N. inspectors back into Iraq, because these developments seemed to reduce the likelihood of war.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002 that “the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.”143
At the same time, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op‐ed warning that “the greatest risk now lies in inaction.”144 His predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Case for Toppling Saddam.”145 Netanyahu declared, “Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,” adding that “I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre‐emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.” Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003: “The [Israeli] military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.”146
But as Netanyahu suggests, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam conquered in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both the politicians and the public enthusiastically favored war.147 As journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, “Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.”148 In fact, Israelis were so gung‐ho for war that their allies in America told them to damp down their hawkish rhetoric, lest it look like the war was for Israel.149
Essentially, Jews in the United States have played on American's (inexplicable) guilt over the Holocaust and religious fundamentalism to sacrifice American lives and American treasure to achieve Israeli foreign policy goals. With friends like these...The Great Silencer
No discussion of how the Lobby operates would be complete without examining one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti‐Semitism. Anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro‐Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy—an influence that AIPAC celebrates—stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti‐Semite. In fact, anyone who says that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti‐Semitism, even though the Israeli media themselves refer to America’s “Jewish Lobby.” In effect, the Lobby boasts of its own power and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. This tactic is very effective, because anti‐Semitism is loathsome and no responsible person wants to be accused of it.
...
This is why pro‐Israel forces, when pressed to go beyond assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti‐Semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel.112 In other words criticize Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti‐Semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that Caterpillar manufactures the bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that it would ʹhave the most adverse repercussions on ... Jewish‐Christian relations in Britainʹ, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: “ʹThere is a clear problem of anti‐Zionist ‐ verging on anti‐Semitic ‐ attitudes emerging in the grass 25
roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.”113 However, the Church was neither guilty of anti‐Zionism nor anti‐Semitism; it was merely protesting Israeli policy.114
Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist. Instead, they question its behavior towards the Palestinians, which is a legitimate criticism: Israelis question it themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Rather, Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely‐accepted human rights norms and international law, as well as the principle of national self‐determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
. I don't believe it, there's no way that the Iranian government would deal with the same Taliban that murdered the Iranian diplomats at Mazar ê-Sharif less than a decade earlier. Perhaps that the Iranian government funded some Shi'ite splinter group, but it doesn't make any sense for them to fund the Taliban as a whole. There's one sentence I find troubling in particular:
Bookmarks