Only the Jewish Press Calls a Spade a Spade: New Pro-Iraq-War Group Is a Jewish Group

I often wonder about the origins of Christians United for Israel.

I have received the organizations literature for a long time, and for many years it looked like standard Zionist hasbara and many of the names associated with the organization seem Jewish. In some places like Kansas City, it seems to have been run out of Jewish Federation offices.

Is Hagee a creation of the Zionist Lobby just as Madonna is a creation of the music industry?

Just throw in some high powered marketing, and it is possible to turn a mediocrity into a superstar. Jabotinskians have always tried to use Christian groups as fronts, and with the Camp David accords, suddenly the Israeli government had lots of unaccounted cash to spend on someone like Hagee in the late 70s.

When one starts watching really closely the neo-con media and their policy recommendations, it is almost easy to predict what kind of propaganda campaigns will follow.

In this case, anyone who reads the National Review Online and the Weekly Standard knows that this whole "surge" diversion was conceived really fast as an answer to the Iraq Study Group's recommendations and the loss of the election. They had to provide an alternative really fast, and after a couple of weeks of numbness when all they could was attack the ISG's credibility in vain, they did. Within a few days, Kaplan and Kristol got this baby rolling, had an American Enterprise Institute team make a PowerPoint presentation in the White House and a desperate Bush was manipulated into going for it.

Now propaganda takes over. This is how Freedom Watch figures in this pattern, and so does the Pollack-O'Hanlon media blitz of a few weeks ago, preparing the ground for the major event, the slam-dunk, the Petreus "Report".

The only good thing that came from the ISG and Baker was that the neocons had to slow down their efforts to get Bush to attack Iran, their number one priority became to end those silly discussions about withdrawal. But once they succeed – hopefully after September and the Petreus "Report" – to end this discussion for now, expect the campaign against Iran to get back to full speed again.

It is not just the neo-cons btw. It is astonishing to see how the pro-Israel crowd, Left or Right, joins efforts to get the US to do Israel's bidding. Neo-con publications, Jewish billionaires, liberal commentators, senators like Lieberman, Brookings "scholars", they all work together in tandem.

As Tony Judt has said, "neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf". I would add the Jewish billionaires who provide the money needed for the necessary propaganda campaigns.

Joachim, I suspect you already know this, but the executive director of Hagee's Christians United for Israel is David Brog. Brog, author of the recent book, Standing With Israel, is a committed Jew who studied law in Tel Aviv.
http://davidbrog.com/displayarticlebyauthor.php?id=12

I wish Phil would stop conflating religion with ethnic tribalism. With exceptions, the Israel-firsters are completely secular. Go to that video of the Christian Zionist convention if you want to see people whose ideology is religiously based. We're talking about something very different here.

I suspect Phil was just trying to avoid the whole minefield of "is-it-a-religion-no-it's-a-race-no-it's-an-ethnicity"; but sooner or later we're going to have to discuss just what it really is, and it doesn't help to use language sloppily.

The "surge" was the brainchild of Kristol and Kagan, at least publicly – meaning I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that someone in Israel came up with it and Kristol then presented the idea in the Weekly Standard. Then Kagan and a few others went to the White House and did that PowerPoint presentation to Bush. Then Bush decided to go for it. This is all in the public record. See for example:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HL22Ak01.html

Then we had Kimberly Kagan (supposedly) writing the glorious "surge" reports for the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal.

Now we have Freedom Watch running those ridiculous ads in support of the "surge". And it has been reported who is behind this.

As for the liberal commentators providing the fig-leaf, take your pick! Too many to choose from.

And the Brookings Institution? Pollack-O'Hanlon? Read Glenn Greenwald's "The truth behind the Pollack-O'Hanlon trip to Iraq":

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/12/ohanlon/

And the upcoming Petreus "Report"? Here is Greenwald again on this guy's credibility:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/19/petraeus/index.html

Grrr. Now I forgot an apostrophe. Should have been "… Gen Petraeus' name". I need another vacation.

Christian Zionism is nothing new among evangelicals; it was religious without the overtly political edge back in the 1970's and 1980's. Pressure from within or without has turned the movement among many denominations into the slavering pro-war contingent that it now seems to be.

I have a relative who made one of the Christian tours of The Holy Land back in the mid 60's. They weren't spit on like some of the groups back in that time, before evangelicals were discovered to be cash cows. Apparently their tour guide company knew the ropes and the neighborhoods to avoid. This relative's group watched a man training a beautiful horse on the beach near Tel Aviv. The man happened to be bald, with an eye patch, and of military bearing. So my relative handed him a Bible tract and told him about Jesus; he was very courteous but declined offers of further information.

I've often wondered if she so enraged Moshe that he arranged for the USS Liberty to get hosed…

Pearlman trying to be witty and erudite is neither funny nor informed.

Dammit Phil – Delete the posts little Rowan keeps complaining about. I'm tired of hearing his whining about this. It's getting in the way of all the jew bashing and that is the main attraction of your little blog.

Phil Weiss, you can't be responsible for controlling all the comments here, but you really ought to delete that fake post that Rowan pointed out. It's not fair to him. Also, the post is one of those "he's an antisemite" ones, and we all have a responsibility to trash and ridicule every claim of "antisemitism" we come across. The word no longer has any meaning and it's use has resulted in too much harm to the world.

conflating religion end ethnicity
____________________________________

The Jewish people IS the religious community. A non-believing, non-observant Jew is a member of that community who lives in sin. To be Jewish is like belonging to a club from which there is no resignation.

I was wrong when I said some time ago Bill Pearlman could quit that club by revoking his contract with Yahwe. He can't, his only choice is to become a Jew who lives in sin. As far as Israel is concerned they don't care whether their supporters live in 'sin'.

"The United States has given Israel $51.3 billion in military grants…most of it after 1974…$11.2 billion in loans for military equipment, plus $31 billion in economic grants, not to mention loan guarantees or joint military projects. But major conditions on these military grants have meant that 74 percent of it has remained in the U.S. to purchase American arms. Since it creates jobs and profits in many districts, Congress is more than ready to respond to the cajoling of the Israel lobby. This vast sum has both enabled and forced Israel to prepare to fight an American-style war. But the US since 1950 has failed to win any of its big wars."
Israel's Last Chance by Gabriel Kolko, AntWar.Com, March 17, 2007
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/kolko.php?articleid=10689

Thanks for all the money.
BAE Systems, Bechtel, Boeing, Elbit Systems, General Dynamics, Halliburton KBR, Honeywell, IMI, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Northrop, Rafael, Raytheon, SAIC, SIBAT, United Technologies, etc., etc., etc.
Sorry about your kids.

Rowan, Phil has often admitted he rarely reads his comments section. Your best chance is to e-mail him directly. If he is not responding, maybe he is on vacation or something. Or maybe his e-mail filter thinks your e-mails are spam and deletes them automatically, in which case your best bet is to use other accounts and friends to e-mail him. Someone should get through.

It seems to me that there are probably quite a few right wingers who would support me in a slander action against you, Phil.

In fact, the web is crawling with people who hate your guts.

Did you consider that before deciding to ignore my requests to remove the criminal slander?

Jumpin Jehozaphats, if the Jewish cabal is so friggin SMART, how come a bunch of goyisches lunkhead blog commentators got em ALL FIGURED OUT?? Hey, mebbe its true, maybe you goyim's is da MASTA RACE. You so SMAAAART!!!!!

Rowan – Phil admitted earlier that he is afraid of reading his comments. Not kidding. Your best bet is too simply post some comments on the page in question explaining that someone else is using your name and then explain how your genuine views differ from whatever they have tried to tie to your good name. I'm sure any fair minded person would be able to discern truth from fiction in that case. If you have your own blog you may wish to make clear how your views differ from whatever ideas people are associating you with.

Phil – In reading your blog I think you are really focusing on selective evidence in order to bolster your beliefs.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14420

Beating The ‘Rachel Corrie’ Rap
The Palestinian narrative gets a thorough airing Off Broadway, with nuanced scripts and shrewd marketing.
Eric Herschthal – Staff Writer

It appears safe to say that the ghosts looming after the raucous New York debut last October of “My Name is Rachel Corrie” — the politically explosive play about an American killed by an Israeli bulldozer while guarding a Palestinian home — have departed.

How else can one explain the popular and critical success of two Off-Broadway productions — “Masked,” written by Israeli Ilan Hatsor, and “The Black Eyed,” by Palestinian-American Betty Shamieh — both of which opened earlier this month?

Both plays view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exclusively from a Palestinian perspective, but neither has attracted the public outrage, production mishaps or sheer spectacle that defined “Rachel Corrie.”

Slated to run at the New York Theatre Workshop in March of 2006, “Rachel Corrie” was derailed after the theater’s director, James C. Nicola, decided it would create too much controversy. Six months later, it ran at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, backed by different producers. It had a two-month stay, a month longer than expected, but most performances were accompanied by activists handing out pamphlets both for and against the Palestinian cause.

What might be called “the Rachel Corrie effect” — fear that plays dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would be impossible to produce so close on the heels of that production — has largely been unsubstantiated.

And people involved with both “Masked” and “The Black Eyed” think they know why: A mix of carefully crafted marketing strategies, and, perhaps more importantly, scripts that avoid simplistic political judgments, have made both productions examples of how to do political theater, and how to do it without all the mess.

“I always thought it would be an issue,” said Sam Gold, director of “The Black Eyed,” about getting both financial and popular support in the wake of “Rachel Corrie.”

“But it never became one,” he said.

His play imagines four Arab women — ranging from the biblical Delilah to a modern-day Palestinian suicide bomber — who debate the morality of martyrdom. All the women defend their actions with conviction.

While Delilah and Aiesha, the suicide bomber, justify their violent tactics, Tamam, the wife of a murdered Muslim during the first Crusades, along with a character known only as “The Architect,” denounce death, whatever the injustice. The play remains ambivalent as to whom the heroes are.

Shamieh, who is of Christian Palestinian heritage, “does not take a position,” said Hala Nassar, a professor of modern culture and literature at Yale, who spoke at a post-performance discussion. “She just puts it out there for you — even the martyrs themselves are questioning their own actions.”

Avoiding judgment has been crucial to the play’s success, said Gold. “The Black Eyed” has been showing to mostly at-capacity audiences, as was the case when this reporter attended a recent Thursday evening performance. It will close, as planned, after more than a month on stage on Sunday, Aug. 19.

“To me, the play is about women, about neuroses, about Arabs — I don’t think it speaks to one community,” said Gold. The 29-year-old director, who is Jewish, came across Shamieh’s play at the Hanger Theatre Lab in upstate Ithaca, in the summer of 2002. Gold was part of a panel responsible for choosing the 10 best plays worthy of production, and deciding which of those he himself would workshop and direct. He chose “The Black Eyed” and has been working on it with Shamieh for the past five years.

For her part, Shamieh said in an e-mail, “I see the play as a showdown of the pacifist and the militant.” She added that she “tried [her] best to have each character fully articulate their differing perspective.” Still, she avoided making any clear judgment on the issue of martyrdom — even if it involves suicide bombing.

That fact in itself could expose the play to controversy. But none has arisen, those involved with the play said.

Nassar, the Yale professor, said however that the play was still vulnerable. “I’m afraid of how some Westerners [might] receive this play.” She strongly condemned suicide bombing, but added that Western audiences “should look at it from another perspective. Look at what breeds it.”

“The Black Eyed,” oddly enough, has been showing at the New York Theatre Workshop, the same complex that scrapped production of “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, declined to comment on the “Rachel Corrie” controversy, but the theater’s managing director, Lynn Moffat, acknowledged that there was initial concern.

“We thought that there might [be] some questions from people about ‘Rachel Corrie,’ but that was the extent of it,” Moffat wrote in an e-mail. She said the marketing strategy — ads placed in The New York Times, Time Out magazine and elsewhere — remained the same though.

The producers and director behind “Masked” — which focuses on three Palestinian brothers forced to choose between joining the first intifada or being accused of collaboration — said they had been unaware that “The Black Eyed” would be debuting simultaneously with their play. But since, they have begun cross-marketing with one another.

That is just the latest in a carefully planned marketing strategy that has been a key element to that play’s ability to stave off controversy, producers say. The marketing plan focused on limiting publicity during its pre-production and preview phases.

For instance, initial preview performances, which began in mid-July, were reserved mostly for targeted Jewish and Muslim groups. Press releases and ad placements also began about three weeks prior to the play’s opening, rather than a more customary two to three months, said Seth A. Goldstein, one of the show’s main producers.

Marketing also involved hiring a special “community outreach” consultant who drummed up support from varied Jewish organizations, some of whose leaders now participate in the “Urgent Conversations” series that follows many of the show’s performances.

The DR2 Theatre, where “Masked” is being staged, announced this week that it was extending performances through Nov. 4. Though it had scheduled an open run, the last performance was originally scheduled for Sept. 23.

Still, Goldstein said, “it was harder for us to raise money because of ‘Rachel Corrie.’” He added that at least one Jewish leader backed out of a post-performance discussion after that leader’s organization expressed concern over the play’s content. Goldstein would not name either the leader or his organization.

Nonetheless, recent post-performance discussions have featured several local rabbis, Jewish artists and activists, and even Ruth Dayan, first wife of the iconic Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan. (She is also a distant cousin of the director.)

While producers said it was initially difficult to get Arabs and Muslims to participate in the play, both as panelists and as audience members, recent weeks have been more successful.

Last week, Imam Samer Alraey, an assistant sheik at the Islamic Cultural Center, participated in a post-performance discussion, and this Sunday, Linda Sarsour, the director of the Arab American Association of New York, will be a post-performance discussant. At a recent post-performance discussion, too, a Palestinian in the audience voiced his admiration of the work.

“The idea that an Israeli wrote this,” said Ami Dayan, the Israeli-born director, in an interview from his home in Colorado, “resonates with an Arab audience.”

Dayan has noted that “Masked” was one of the first highly touted plays written by an Israeli, in 1990, to view the conflict exclusively from the Palestinian perspective. When the play first debuted in Israel, at the well-regarded Acco Fringe Festival, it won the top prize, and has since been translated into dozens of languages and performed in scores of countries.

Goldstein also realized that its Israeli provenance — despite its indirect slights at Israel, as evidenced by scenes discussing the killing of a 7-year-old Palestinian by the Israeli military — made it more palatable to a Jewish audience. “Because it’s an Israeli writer,” Goldstein said, “it’s a comfortable context.”

Like the team behind “The Black Eyed,” Hatsor, who wrote “Masked,” said in an e-mail from Israel that it was his play’s non-polemical nature that ultimately has made it a success, both internationally and now in New York.

“As a playwright, I’m not neutral,” he wrote. “But I try to bring my audience as many points of view as I can. That’s the advantage of theater, and I use it.”

Rowan Berkeley
_______________

From what I remember, Rowan is intellectually a couple of notches above the usual anti-Semitic suspects. Why does he care? Immanuel Kant was an anti-Semite by today's Jewish mind-police standards but he had quite a following among German Jews of the enlightenment. Karl Popper – besides Wittgenstein probably THE philosopher of the 20th centuary – considered Judaism's concept of 'the chosen people' an "evil concept" – so what?
People who equate criticism of Judaism with Nazi-thought would have been a couple of notches below Karl Popper's contempt (and Kant's if he had lived in our times).

Do you have something against blond hookers Mr. Pearlman? Or just Arabs and blond hookers?

The Rowan Berkeley situation seems quite a problem as even some of the posts requesting deletions seem possibly fraudulent. I have had serveral sites actually change the text of what I wrote (Jewlicious.com for one) but as far as I know, no one has tried to usurp my identity (though there is at least one other unique LanceThruster it seems). It's sadly telling that those claiming to have a credible argument resort to such tactics. It appears "by any means necessary" and "war by deception" are alive and well with the Z-Team.

Yawn.

People don't realise what we are dealing with here.

Read and weep:

1) Who is Sibel Edmonds?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds

2) "What the heck is Sibel Edmonds’ Case about? And why should I care?"

http://www.outlawjournalism.com/news/?p=4584

3) Sibel Edmonds on the hijacking of a nation:

Part I:
http://nswbc.org/Op%20Ed/Op-ed-Part1-Nov15-06.htm

Part II:
http://nswbc.org/Op%20Ed/Part2-FNL-Nov29-06.htm

4) Interviews:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9774.htm
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=6934
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=7032

If the criminal Zionist invader population returned the property that it stole, restored the residence rights of which the native population was deprived, turned over the genocidal Zionist leadership to the Hague for trial, and paid compensatory and exemplary damages for the crimes of Zionism, I have little doubt that suicide attacks would cease.

Pearlman whining is typical. "We Jews are not responsible for the suffering that we have created. The fault lies with the people that we have wronged."

I call it the "Polish Jewish estate manager's lament."

"I am just doing what is in the best interests of the Polish lord. So what if I profit even more than he, and the serfs suffer unbearably."

Often when the Polish lord actually understood what the estate manager was doing, the lord would execute the manager, and of course the Jewish community would whine about opression (especially when the family of estate manager bribed the local rabbis to eulogize the executed estate manager) even though the actions of such an estate manager tended to make the serfs hostile to Jews and even though dissociation from and condemnation of the estate manger would have been both rational and ethical for the ordinary Jews that received no benefit whatsoever from the estate manager's greed.

I have read several cases of such executions including one by a Potocki prince noted for his Judeophilia.

In any case, because I have worked in areas where there was a danger of a suicide attack, I have had the discussion about blame with my wife, and after explaining all that I had seen of Zionist brutality, I told her that in the event of my death she should blame only the Zionist government, the Zionist military, the Zionist civilian population and racist ethnic Ashkenazi American traitors that have manipulated the US government into supporting Zionist criminality.

I discussed the issue with an Israeli Palestinian friend, whose family business was subjected to a suicide attack, and he took exactly the same postion.

And I should add that Vladimir Jabotinsky recommended to German Jews in 1939 that they should undertake suicide attacks against German non-Jews (whether Nazi or not) even though conditions for Jews in Nazi Germany in 1939 were far superior to the conditions under which Palestinians live in the Occupied Territories.

As I remember, Elie Wiesel justified the murder of a British civilian policeman in mandatory Palestine in his novel, "Dawn," because it served Zionist ethnic fundamentalism and the goal of stealing Palestine from the native population.

If we do not call Zionist racists hypocrites, we have to agree that they have a strong case of situational ethics.

"to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers"

So the "suicide bombers" are a thing of the past. Richard Witty must be proud.

Let's be clear if I have not. I will have a lot more sympathy for Israeli Jews if the State of Israel returns the property it stole, restores Palestinian residence rights, and pays compensation for damages.

Until then, the Zionist thieves and interlopers simply have no legitimate complaint when desperate Palestinians do a fraction to Zionists of what Zionists have done to Palestinians.

And I cannot think of a legitimate pragmatic, ideological, or ethnical reason why the USA should support Zionist criminality.

So tell me Bill. If you have to choose between US and Israeli interests, which would you choose? All American Israel supporters must answer that question.

I asked a general question that is independent of an individual's judgment of interests.

If you have to choose between US and Israeli interests, which would you choose?

The US and Israel are distinct countries. Do you disagree that situations could arise in which US and Israeli interests conflict?

Are you able to distinguish US interests from Israeli interests?

Sorry, OT, but can anyone advise how to configure Firefox (with AdBlock and NoScript) so that comments display? Having said that, in IE I can view the comments thread for this post but no others so neither seems to work for me.

For Israel as is today stands for the triumph of brute force and illegality over fundamental human rights and legality. Israel is, in the ultimate objective analysis: 1- a successful colonialist project that bore fruit in the decolonization era of modern times; an era that supposedly ushered a more egalitarian world. 2-the outcome of a successful joint Western/Jewish effort to plant a, culturally and demographically, alien nation/state in and on a region and culture at considerable variance from its own. 3-could only be achieved through the denial of an indigenous people his right to self determination in his homeland of many centuries duration (to be continued)