Who says politicians can’t be funny? Nearly everything that President Donald Trump says cannot be taken seriously which means it is intended to be a joke and now it is also being reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to an observation that there is a lack of free speech on podcasts in the United States by feigning surprise and saying in apparent astonishment “What? You’re regulated? You should be able to say anything you want!” The irony is, of course, that Netanyahu and his proxies in the US Israel Lobby have done more to strip Americans of their free speech than any other group, demanding inter alia that certain things cannot be said about the state of Israel or about Jewish behavior because to do so is a crime referred to as “antisemitism.”
To be sure, America’s willingness to think positively about its “best friend and closest ally” Israel is a contrivance, based on the deliberate misrepresentation of the country and its people carried out by the US media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, all of which have been to a large extent heavily influenced or even dominated by the Jewish diaspora since the 1930s. Throw into the hopper higher education and government, which have been substantially corrupted by Israel Lobby money, and add to the mix the brain dead Christian Zionists who would be “rapturous” to see Israel bring about the world’s end a la Armageddon, and you have a formula that results in Congress and the media competing to kiss Netanyahu’s behind every time he deigns to visit Sodom on the Potomac to give Trump his instructions.
Fortunately, Israel’s highly visible brutal slaughter of the Palestinians has changed some minds in America and it is refreshing to see opinion polls that reveal that a clear majority of voters now has negative views of the Jewish state. But wait! The many friends of Israel are beginning to panic and are organizing a counterattack to restore the old balance whereby the Israeli tail was running free to wag the American dog. To my complete non-surprise, I read last week about a new production studio called Founders Films that is being established in Dallas with the intention of turning out wholesome “conservative” programming to compete with all the liberal rubbish that the established studios produced. I would have ignored the article completely but somehow when someone starts promoting “traditional American” values my brain automatically puts a “neo” in front of the word conservative and I frequently get a whiff of the growing Israeli-spawned National Conservative movement.
A story on the new initiative with my emphasis describes how “…a set of prominent figures close to the software firm Palantir are pitching a new project to shake up streaming TV and film with a portfolio ranging from feature films about daring Israeli and American military operations to a three-part treatment of an Ayn Rand tome. In a pitch deck circulated to investors in recent months, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, and investor Christian Garrett are raising money for Founders Films, a new production company based in Dallas that aims to push for films with a nationalistic bent and unsubtle political overtones. The company said its projects would adhere to a set of rules: ‘Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP’… The slate includes, a feature film about the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11 (‘courage is contagious,’ the tagline reads). The company also hopes to create a three-part adaptation of, and a film about killing Qasem Soleimani. The company brands itself as explicitly pro-American, but many of the projects also celebrate Israel. Founders’ proposed film slate also includes, a movie about the recent attack against Iran, which depicts Israel as “striving for nuclear non-proliferation and exercising its right of self-defense against a crazed regime intent on destroying it.” The proposed projects also include, a film about Israel’s 2024 booby-trapped pager operation against Hezbollah.”
Actually, of course, the projects that appear to be in the pipeline are perhaps what might be expected if one is out to celebrate American and Israeli heroism with what one might presume to be the nasty bits, like shooting and starving children, left out. Far more interesting to me would be a film exploring the probable prior knowledge by Israel of 9/11, the fruit of a massive spying operation in the US, and even the possibility that the Jewish state was complicit in a false flag operation to destroy the World Trade Center which was intended to turn Washington into an ally in a war against the Muslim world. And as far as one might consider Iran as evil, it is in fact Israel that is the nuclear proliferator with a crazed regime, not the Iranians. And what can one say about the booby-trapped pagers, a triumph of death dealing ingenuity that could only come out of the warped minds produced by Zionism. And oh yes, there is the killing of the Iranian head of the Revolutionary Guards Qasim Soleimani in 2020 by Donald Trump during his first term. Soleimani was in Baghdad on a peace mission at the time, which is more than one can assert about Trump as the self-designated “man of peace.”
While one is no doubt comforted to learn that a new Hollywood style production studio will shortly be depicting America’s closest allies in a fashion suited to their heroism it is also nice to know that loyal sons and daughters of Zion are engaged on other fronts to celebrate what that great man of peace Bibi Netanyahu has been accomplishing with the aid and assistance of Donald Trump’s United States government and the national media. “With only rare exceptions,” Norman Solomon writes, “US news media and members of Congress continue to dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, normalizing atrocities on a mass scale.” Solomon appeared on The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion regarding Israel’s contrived case to justify the genocide of the Palestinians and how the US media creates a false narrative to ignore Israel’s brutal actions.
Given the increasing level of pushback from respectable observers like Solomon, when in doubt, all real Americans go to the nation’s newspaper of record the New York Times to glean the insights of its brilliant Op-Ed page interpreter of all things Israeli, Bret Stephens. Bret’s most recent offering is No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza which appeared on July 22nd, and it comes on top of his other recent pieces Israel Had the Courage to do What Needed to be Done written shortly after the June bombing of Iran as well as And For Israel, It Pays to be a Winner that appeared on July 8th.
Bret, who is of course Jewish, has an argument to support his headline that goes something like this: Israel, with its enormous advantage in lethal weaponry and trained manpower, could have killed many thousands more Gazans than the 60,000 or so being reported by Gazan health authorities, so that means it is actually acting with considerable restraint and is not engaging in anything that a fair observer would regard as a genocide. Bret of course ignores credible estimates that put the number of dead at closer to 300,000 as many bodies are still buried in the rubble and he also conveniently ignores the orders to shoot unarmed Gazans issued by the IDF as well as the deliberate withholding of food and medical supplies imposed by the Israeli government. Bret’s back-up argument is, inevitably, that the use of the word genocide in the context of Israel’s behavior fuels antisemitic sentiment around the world. He conveniently ignores that both starvation and the indiscriminate killing of civilians are war crimes and the clearly stated intention by Netanyahu and his associates to kill or remove the Gazan population by force, an objective supported by Donald Trump, amounts to genocide, which is defined under international law as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” That is very clearly what is taking place.
I will leave the last words on what is wrong with how the slaughter in Gaza is being portrayed by the American media and its associated “entertainment” entities to an American Jew whose father was a Holocaust survivor and an Israeli Jew who responded to Stephens’ genocide article in letters to the Times, with the American observing that “The stampeding of desperate civilians from one corner to another of a sealed-off territory; the persistent, lethal bombing of homes, hospitals and refugee centers; and the denial of food and medicine to a starving population are not incidental acts. If the historical parallels are too uncomfortable for Mr. Stephens to accept the term ‘genocide,’ perhaps he’d agree to ‘intentional barbarity.’” The other Times letter from the Israeli Jew was equally to the point, asserting that “Mr. Stephens’s leniency toward Israel’s actions in Gaza gives rhetorical cover to policies causing immense human suffering and a huge number of civilian deaths. Whitewashing the genocidal nature of Israel’s war is a serious moral failure — especially when urgent public clarity is needed to push for change. Mr. Stephens argues that if Israel intended genocide, its military could have caused far more deaths. But genocide is about intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group. Dismissing genocide because a powerful state didn’t maximize killing reduces it to a numbers game and ignores reality.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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