Understanding Jewish Power
Who has helped create a war-addicted America?
I recently was asked to speak at an online conference entitled Deep Truth: Encountering Deep State Lies. My panel addressed Understanding Zionism: Deconstructing the Power Paradigm and my own topic was How Jewish Power Sustains the Israel Narrative.
Working on my presentation, I was forced to confront the evolution of
my own views on both the corruption of government in the United
States
and the ability of powerful domestic lobbies to deliberately distort the
perception of national interests to benefit foreign countries even when
that activity does terrible damage to the U.S.
My personal
journey began half a century ago. I became part of the U.S. national
security state after being drafted for the Vietnam War when I graduated
from college in 1968. I was at the time, vaguely pro-war, having bought
into the media argument that international communism was mounting a
major threat in southeast Asia. I also found the anti-war student
movement distasteful because I was acquainted with many of its spokesmen
and knew that they were chiefly motivated by a desire to avoid the
draft, not due to any perception that the war itself was wrong or
misguided. I knew a lot about the Punic Wars but precious little about
former French Indochina and I suspect that those chanting “Ho-ho-Ho Chi
Minh” might have known even less that I did.
Because I spoke
some Russian, I wound up in an army intelligence collection unit in West
Berlin for three years where I and my fifty or so comrades did
absolutely nothing but drink and party. It was my introduction to how
government really works when it was not working at all and it did
provide me with GI Bill money to go to grad school. After my PhD came a
relatively easy transition to CIA given the fact that my degree was so
obscure that no one but the government would hire me.
The journey from
an army unit that was asleep at the wheel to the CIA, which was in full
downsizing crisis mode post-Vietnam, was educational. Whereas the army
was too bloated and complacent even to fake it, the Agency was fully
capable of creating crises and then acting like the defender of American
interests as it worked to resolve the various situations that it had
invented. The war against Eurocommunism, which I was engaged in, was
hyped and billed as the next great threat against the American way of
life after the Vietnam blunder, swallowing up resources pointlessly as
neither France, nor Spain nor Italy ever came close to entering the Red
orbit.
As I climbed up
the CIA ladder I also noticed something else. There was the equivalent
of a worldwide conspiracy to promote threats to keep big national
security-based government well-funded and in place. When I was in Turkey
I began to note considerable intelligence liaison reporting coming from
the Israelis and others promoting their own agendas. The material was
frequently fictional in nature, but the danger was that it was being
mixed in with more credible reporting which gave it traction. U.S.
government consumers of the reporting would inevitably absorb the
dubious viewpoint being promoted that Arabs and Iranians were
fundamentally untrustworthy and were in bed with the Soviets.
There was considerable negative reporting on Saddam Hussein also coming out of Israel and motivated by his support of the Palestinians. Some of this ultimately surfaced in the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz-Doug Feith
assessments of “intelligence that had been missed” which eventually
became pretexts for the catastrophic Iraq War. I later learned that both
Feith and Wolfowitz had a virtually revolving door of Israeli
intelligence officials and diplomats running through their Pentagon
offices in the lead-up to that war.
It did not take
much to connect the dots and realize that Israel, far from being a
friend and ally, was the principal catalyst for the many missteps that
the United States has made in the Middle East. U.S. policy in the region
was being deliberately shaped around Israeli concerns by American Jews
ensconced in the Pentagon and White House who certainly knew exactly
what they were doing. No one should blame the Israelis for acting in
their own self-interest, but every loyal American should blame the
Libbys, Feiths and Wolfowitzes for their willingness to place Israeli
interests ahead of those of their own country.
After my
departure from government in part over my disagreement with the Iraq
War, this willingness to place the United States in peril to serve the
interests of a foreign country began to bother me, and there is no
country that manipulates the U.S. government better or more persistently
than Israel. I gradually became involved with those who were pushing
back against the Israel Lobby, though it was not generally referred to
in those terms before Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer produced their seminal work The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2006.
It does not take a
genius to figure out that the United States is deeply involved in a
series of seemingly endless wars pitting it against predominantly Muslim
nations even though Washington has no vital interests at stake in
places like Syria, Libya and Iraq. Who is driving the process and
benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended beneficiary of a coordinated
effort mounted by more than 600 Jewish organizations in the U.S. that
have at least as part of their programs the promotion and protection of
Israel. Ironically, organizations that promote the interests of a
foreign government are supposed to be registered under the Foreign
Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) but not a single pro-Israel
organization has ever done so nor even been seriously challenged on the
issue, a tribute to their power in dealing with the federal government.
Those who are in
the drivers’ seat of the Israel promotion process are what some would
describe as the Israel Lobby but which I would prefer to call a subset
of the Jewish Lobby, which in itself is supported by something I would
designate Jewish Power, an aggregate of Jewish money, control over key
aspects of the media and entertainment industries plus easy access to
corrupted politicians desirous of positive press and campaign donations.
This penetration and control of the public discourse has resulted in
the creation of what I would refer to as the official “Israel
narrative,” in which Israel, which claims perpetual victimhood, is
reflexively referred to as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and
“Washington’s closest ally and friend,” assertions that are completely
false but which have been aggressively and successfully promoted to
shape how Americans view the Israeli-Arab conflict. Palestinians
resisting the Israeli occupation are invariably described as
“terrorists” both in the U.S. and Israel.
Jewish Power is a funny thing. If you read the Jewish media or the Israeli press, to include Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Haaretz or the Jerusalem Post, you will find frequent references to it, nearly always seen as completely laudable. Bottom feeder Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard recently boasted that
“Jews should not apologize for being so rich, controlling the media or influencing public debate…they have earned it…never apologize for using your strength…”
For many Jews
like Dershowitz, Jewish power is something to be proud of, but they also
believe that it should never be noticed or examined by non-Jews.
Gentile criticism of Jewish collective behavior is something that must
continue to be forbidden, just as the expression “Israeli Lobby” was
largely taboo before Walt and Mearsheimer. Israeli partisans regularly
engage in the defamation of individuals, including myself, who do not
conform to the taboos as anti-Semites or holocaust deniers, labels
deliberately used as weapons to end discussion and silence critics
whenever necessary.
So why do I
think that we have to start talking about Jewish Power as opposed to the
euphemism Israel Lobby? It is because the wars in the Middle East,
which have done so much to damage the United States and were at least in
part arranged to benefit Israel, have been largely driven by wealthy
and powerful Jews. If America goes to war with Iran, as is increasingly
likely, it will be all about Israel and it will be arranged by the
political and financial services Washington-Wall Street axis, make no
mistake.
To my mind,
Israel is America’s number one foreign policy problem in that it is able
and willing to start potentially catastrophic wars with countries that
it has demonized but that do not threaten the U.S. And those doing the
manipulating are bipartisan Jewish oligarchs with deep pockets that
support the multitude of pro-Israel organizations, think tanks and media
outlets that have done so much to corrupt America’s political process.
Hollywood producer Haim Saban, a principal Democratic
Party supporter, has said that he is a one issue guy and that issue is
Israel. Principal GOP funder casino magnate Sheldon Adelson,
who served in the U.S. Army in World War 2, has said that he regrets
that service and would have preferred to be in the Israel Defense
Forces. They as well as others, including fund manager Paul Singer and Home Depot’s Bernard Marcus,
are Jews laboring on behalf of the self-proclaimed Jewish State while
the neoconservatives, fiercely protective of Israel, are also nearly all
Jewish. Asserting that the fact that they are Jews acting for a Jewish
state should be irrelevant as they are also doing what is good for
America, as is commonly done by their apologists, is logically
inconsistent and borders on absurdity. As for the frequently cited Bible
belt Christian-Zionists who support Israel, they are, to be sure,
numerous, but they do not have the access to real power in the United
States that Jews have.
Jewish Power is
also what has in part driven the United States into a moral cesspit.
Israeli snipers shoot dead scores of unarmed Gazan demonstrators and
hardly anyone in Washington has anything to say about it. America’s
Ambassador to Israel, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer named David Friedman who
has multiple ties to Israel’s illegal settlements, uses his position to
defend Israel, ignoring U.S. interests. Last week he held a press
conference in which he told reporters to “shut their mouths” in their criticism of Israel’s slaughter of Gazans.
When a young Palestinian nurse is deliberately targeted and killed while treating a wounded man, it hardly appears
in the U.S. media. Arab teenagers are shot in the back while running
away from Israeli gunmen while a young woman is sentenced to prison for
slapping an Israel soldier who had just shot her cousin and was invading
her home. Heavily armed Israeli settlers run amok on the West Bank,
beating and killing Arabs and destroying their livelihoods. That is what
Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are all about and that
is precisely the kind of a nation that America should not want to
become, but unfortunately the role of Washington as Israel’s obedient
poodle has our once great country moving in the wrong direction. This
has all been brought about by Jewish Power and it is time to wake up to
that fact and address it squarely.
*
This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip Giraldi, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Philip Giraldi, Global Research, 2018
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