I'm still a little stunned from hearing Israeli Ambassador Gillerman's "bigot" comments about former President Carter yesterday. Such chutzpah, and condescension. And keep in mind that he didn't do this at the U.N. or the Israeli consulate. No, he was at Skadden, Arps, a big law firm that claims to care about diversity and that shares the gleaming 4 Times Square tower with Conde Nast.
That's the problem. The Israel lobby--certainly The Israel Project, which hosted Gillerman-- is well-connected; and it's used its position in America to grant Israel an immunity from criticism for its behavior. As Tony Judt said, Israel is a country that won't grow up. And neither would you, with such forgiving backers. Here's my transcript of Gillerman's comments re Carter:
Speaking of supporting moderates against extremists, I must express my very sad feelings following the unfortunate visit of President Carter to the region. I am saying this with great sadness. The only feeling I can muster when it comes to President Custer-- Carter--is actually one of great sadness. because I think it is a shame to see that person who may not have been one of the greatest presidents this country had but for a while was a very decent former president and did good things, turn into what I believe to be a bigot and someone who went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khalid Meshaal, the leader of Hamas. While he was here, Hamas was shelling our cities and maiming and injuring and wounding Israeli babies and Israeli children. I think it's a very sad episode in American history, and I'm really sad to see Jimmy Carter reach that very low point in his career. I think that anybody who wants good to come out of the Middle East should indeed encourage, bolster, and embolden the moderates and not be seen as cajoling and befriending the murderers and extremists on the other side.
If you can find anyone living more courageous and morally consistent than Mister Carter at age 84, please name him or her. Israel has peace with two Arab nations thanks to him (and tons of American annual tax dollars). Now, he's a bigot because he talked to democratically-elected Hamas when no current USA government official will do so, though they all claim we are in the Middle East to spread democracy. Res ipsa loquiter (sic?)
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"The Israel Project (TIP) is an international non-profit organization devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel."
"Educating" — what a lovely euphemism for "lobbying." A site called rightweb outs TIP for what they really are:
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The Israel Project (TIP) is a Washington- and Jerusalem-based lobbying outfit that aims to provide journalists and the public with information about Israel and the Middle East with the goal of giving a "more positive public face" to the country. Claiming to be a "nonprofit, nonpartisan organization impacting world opinion to help achieve security and peace for Israel," the group advocates a number of positions similar to other hardline and neoconservative pro-Israel groups. It supports the controversial wall along the West Bank, advocates a hardline against Iran, and actively promotes the work of hawkish think tanks and writers.
At TIP's July 19, 2007, press conference held on Capitol Hill to publicize the "Iranian threat," a number of current and former congressional members and well-known neoconservative pundits spoke, including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. According to TIP's website, among those speaking at the event were Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), Rep. Jon Porter (R-NV), and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY). Engel, who serves on TIP's board of advisers, told the audience: "This is our Munich. We need to stand up to Iran and tell them they cannot thumb their noses at world opinion."
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/4430.html
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Ambassador Gooberman, sneering at ex-president Carter, sounds like TIP's kind of guy. But if TIP thinks that such effrontery is going to present "a more positive public face" for Israel, they'd better think again.
The old saying that "politics stops at the water's edge" applies in reverse, too. Plenty of Americans who may have mixed opinions about Carter are not going to be amused at seeing him slimed as a bigot by the ambassador of "that shitty little country" (as the French ambassador famously called Israel at Barbara Amiel's dinner party), which itself is the world's last apartheid state.
I say revoke Gooberman's visa, and frog-march him out to JFK this evening for the night flight to Tel Aviv. Who needs this rude foreigner yapping at us? For $3 billion a year, he ought to be lickin' Carter's ass in gratitude.
This is disturbing since Jimmy Carter is the greatest living American.
Maybe even worse is the opinion piece is WSJ by Levy:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120908506974843623.html
Carter is a classic anti-semite out of the replacement theology school. And it figures that he feels like he is amongst friends when he kisses the Hamas leaders. He fucked the shah and look what we got instead. I know you guys are for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and every other bunch of camel jockey ragheads that inhabit the earth and live to kill Jews but when it comes to Carter, if the kaffiyeh fits……..
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The author of the WSJ editorial linked above is Bernard-Henri Lévy, another foreigner.
More than a dozen Members of Congress serve on The Israel Project's advisory board. And they've been busy beavers indeed. Now they are handing out awards titled "Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition" for … wait for it … "Excellence in Public Diplomacy in Support of Israel." I am not making this up:
http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.672811/k.DFA5/About_TIP.htm
We don't just give them $3 billion a year … we hand people awards saying "thank you for lobbying us so effectively." It's so sick, you gotta laugh.
Noted New York intellectual and literary light Eliot Engel (D-Israel) — who serves on TIP's board of advisors — reveals that Jimmy Carter "fabricated" part of his book. But he's not naming his source:
"Jimmy Carter wrote a book, 'Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,' and fabricated portions in that book. I spoke with the former leader of the Carter Center, who said he was with Jimmy Carter on a number of these meetings and the accounts that Jimmy Carter wrote in his book were absolutely incorrect and falsified because he was in the meetings with Jimmy Carter and took notes."
http://tinyurl.com/4934za
Mwa ha ha ha … as George W. Bush might say: "Jimmy Carter wrote a book. I read one."
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Sorry, I put the wrong link for the "Excellence in Public Diplomacy in Support of Israel" awards. Here is the correct link, from the Jewish Agency.
http://tinyurl.com/3ojvjg
I was struck by the fact that the AP report of the above immediately followed it with the sentence, "Reacting to the ambassador's comments, MK Yossi Beilin on Friday urged the state to recall Gillerman from his post." This sentence was omitted by YNet but included by Haaretz. The AP story ended with him saying, "Basically, Syria and Iran, together with Hamas and Hezbollah, are the main axes of terror and evil in the world."
Both links here:
link to niqnaq.wordpress.com
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JPost report Beilin's remarks in their latest rewrite of their Gillerman story, but suppress the ridiculous "Basically, Syria and Iran, together with Hamas and Hezbollah, are the main axes of terror and evil in the world."
A pygmy biting the ankles of a giant.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12740
Pollard's Ghost
Latest arrest exposes Israel's fifth column in the U.S.
by Justin Raimondo
Whenever the subject of Israeli spying in the U.S. comes up, the journalistic handle is always the same: the infamous Jonathan Pollard. His ghost hovers over the increasingly troubled "special relationship" – and he isn't even dead yet.
Convicted of espionage in 1986, Pollard did such damage to U.S. national security that top intelligence officials threatened to resign if Bill Clinton acceded to Israeli demands to pardon him. He is serving a life sentence for stealing secrets deemed so valuable that the Soviet Union reportedly agreed to trade them for the release of tens of thousands of Russian Jews for resettlement in Israel.
Pollard had top-secret clearance and was able to procure a long list of documents for his Israeli handlers, but what baffled – and alarmed – top intelligence officials was that he had known the titles and in some cases the serial numbers of specific documents. These could only have been provided by someone in a much higher pay grade – a top official privy to ultra-sensitive, need-to-know secrets.
This was the basis for the long-standing suspicion that Pollard was but the outer layer of a deeply-entrenched Israeli spy ring. In addition, a May 7, 1997 story in the Washington Post reported the National Security Agency had intercepted a communication between an Israeli embassy official and the head of Israeli intelligence that strongly implied the presence of a top-level mole in the U.S. government. During the course of the conversation, according to the Post, the embassy official – eager to gain access to certain communications between Warren Christopher and Yasser Arafat – wanted to "go to Mega" for the goods. The Mossad chief, Danny Yatom, remonstrated with him, averring, "This is not something we use Mega for."
I have gone right off Justin Raimondo, and Eric Garris, and that whole crowd. They are basically just an extensuon of Lew Rockwell's site, which in turn is a front for the 'Mises Institute', a pseudo-university for right wing capitalist fantasy. The only material worth reading, or listening to, on their site, that is not simply borrowed from elsewhere, is the occasional articles by, and audio interviews with. Phil Giraldi and Gareth Porter – I admit that Scott Horton is a good interviewer. It is especially striking that Lew Rockwell still carries articles by the religious fascist pundit, Gary North.
good information is good no matter where it comes from…truth is truth here there and everywhere.
"What is striking about all this is the sheer size and ambitious scope of the Israeli underground in America. Pollard, Kadish, Rosen, Weissman, Franklin, that holder of "very senior security positions in the Clinton and Bush White Houses" – all worked in tandem with, and sometimes inside of, the aboveground Israel Lobby. These fifth columnists are bold to the point of brazenness and have operated relatively freely up until now. Their ability to cover their tracks – and cry "anti-Semitism" in answer to rude inquiries as to the treasonous nature of their activities – has so far served them well: their luck, however, may be running out, along with Uncle Sam's patience."
that isn't "good information," it's stale news with antisemitic spin, rumor, and insinuation added. I can see through Justin, baby.
Come on Burke, you can do better than a psychotic anti-semite who likes to take it up the ass.
The spirit of the Pharisee is alive and well! To those who would attack Carter, you better buy a mirror. What Carter is doing is not an "extreme" position in Israel. Reagan met with the Soviet Union. Were not the commies would killed millions, starved millions and enslaved millions any less evil than Hamas? Please! This has everything to do with land and resources and nothing to do with "how evel!!!!" those durn' Arabs are. Israel will be finished within two generations if they don't address the demographic issue and soon. I suspect that the intransigence will remain until we have a full-scale ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories. Such is the indifference and callousness of the Israel Lobby Chickenhawk and friends of "Let's get Americas to Die for our Iraq Project" nuts. It just burns you guys up to acknowledge that Jewish fanaticism is just as dangerous as Muslim or any flavor for that matter. Kudos to Phil for having the guts to expose you armchair generals that send American boys off to war. It is mad Jews like you that drive the vehicle of antisemitism. The Protocols of the Elder of Zion that you can purchase in Cairo isn't the only reason why Jews are held in suspicion. Try being a bit more introspective.
I don't think Justin's sex preferences have much to do with it, except that possibly that may have been a factor in alienting him from the GOP. I certainly wouldn't call him psychotic. The thing is, we live in societies in which the most successful war criminals get to run the governments and the media. In the absence of social security systems that will keep them fed and housed and clothed, journalists, like everyone else, have to whore for survival.
It's one thing to question Jimmy Carter's effectiveness.
But when you question his integrity, decency and love of humanity then your monomaniacal, single-minded obsessive focus on the selfish interests of a supremely selfish country have made you officially delusional.
Justin may be filled with a self-rightgeous air, but on facts, and when weighed in the balance, how many people have been killed in behalf of the foreign policy he has advanced? That was the policy America took prior to WWII. That was the policy we took before Korea, Nam and a thousand other adventures that have served no particular good. Where was William Kristol and his ilk when Clinton was bombing Serb civilians? Once again, the Fifth Column of Israel Firsters show they care not about innocent people dying unless they happen to be in a Tel-Aviv cafe to suicide bomb.
David, the USA, like any other capitalist economy, has to expand or perish. That is the nature of 'market forces.' There is no such thing as a steady-state capitalist economy. Thus, the whole 'libertarian' concept is completely utopian, and not in an innocent way, but in a disingenuous way, by which I mean it pretends to be more naive than it really is. The Mises Institute pseudo university website is really creepy. Though the .pdf's of Murray Rothbard's early work are interesting, he also seems to me to have been thoroughly dishonest. There is always money available for people who want to preach the gospel of private enterprise, and a gospel is what it is, a system of blind faith that can only be maintained by deliberate blindness to reality.
Who said anything about economics? We are talking about Justin's foreign policy, are we not? I don't consider myself a libertarian when it comes to economics and find some of their "hands off" approaches to be unrealistic.
This whole post was about why we should continue to support (without question) another state that has a so-so record of human rights that bears little in the nation interest of the United States now that the cold war has been won. If you must bring economics into this conversation, we could start by asking what America gets from Israel for the billions we pump into it each year? What part of Israel's output couldn't we purchase on an open market? If we stopped pumping cash into their state, would they stop developing Intel chips or innovative technologies?
The answer is no.
For decade after decade the conflict has been going on in Israel. If they were to actually solve it, think of all the unsavory Muslim states that would no longer hide behind the poor human rights records of their own hand. America needs to lead the way by playing an honest broker. At the Camp David talks Clinton (I'm picking on him again, but there's been plenty of nonsense to go around) and his aides (many who had worked for The Lobby) kept on slipping the Israeli's documents before the Palestians had a chance to look at them. That's not honest peace brokering. In the Wild West, if someone was caught with cards up their sleaves, they'd be shot. I and many other Americans who have been paying attention to he foreign affairs as it relates to the Israel/Pal. conflict as nothing less than suverting the national interest.
There's nothing wrong with advocating on behalf of Israel, but it must be done by Israel's foreign minsiters, not by Israel Firsters within American administrations. The talk of dual-loyalty, spying, subterfuge and other unpleasantries can all go away if American policies are first and foremost in the National Interest and not that of a foreign power. Virtually all Americans agree on this count. They just haven't done the homework yet as to how influential the Lobby was in pushing them to war.
The only people that think it was someone else is the extremist left who thinks there's always a mega company behind everything. Blackwater may have profitted by the war, but it was Kristol, Kagan, Wolfowitz and the link on national T.V. telling us that the war would pay for itself, be over in a weekend or two and we'd be welcomed as heroes.
Such thinking is so 2003.
david, if you haven't grasped the relationship between "libertarian" economic views and foreign policy views, then you simply haven't read them.
anyway, I just looked at the Tony Judt article that Phil linked to, and I was struck by the fact that although almost two years have passed, exactly the same bunch of time-wasting clowns have posted comments to it that would appear today, unchanged from year to year, making the same stupid remarks, heartfelt pleas, sadistic racist insults, and so forth. Plus ca change, at Haaretz anyway. I can say this now because I have been banned for good for calling it a fascist newspaper, which it is, funnily enough, in the formal technical sense, according to which JPost and YNet are not fascist, only Haaretz. I have in mind th eorganised deception Haaretz conducts, similarly to the London Guardian, which I consider also to have taken a technically fascist turn of late, according to the same technical criterion : that it supports an elite conspiracy to deceive the public into war, and that is fascism.
um… "but surely," i hear you say, "there is much more elite warmingering deception in those other two papers than there is in Haaretz."
well… to me, the level of deception involved in the work of, for instance, Caroline Glick, is too obvious to count. I know she is trying tio deceive me because she doesn't even conceal it. It's like Mya Himmer in Brion Gysin's novel, "The Process":
“Just say the WORD, Hassan, and you are Emperor of Africa, have you seen the Foubla faggots, my dear, the most beautiful boys in the world, and that’s official, and me married to the Richest Little Kid in the World, the best things in life are stolen, you know, you are feeling the BOR BOR? No, don’t panic, it will make you see things more clearly, what you’ve known all along, so don’t be silly and say you won’t be Emperor of Africa, after all, it’s a game, and we’ll cheat you if we can, now isn’t that fun? You only have to say it, you know, the Word … “
I am quite familiar with the Libertarian line of thinking when it comes to foreign policy and monetary policy. While they are wrong to say that America shouldn't engage in all affairs (a logical fallacy they need to correct) they still have their head screwed on tighter than the neocons by a measure and a half.
Have you noticed what John McCain is up to lately? He wants to get in the face of North Korea, China, Syria, Iran and not to mention Russia. The man has a livid hatred for peace and thinks the only solution to foreign affairs is military, perhaps (God forbid!) nuclear. A man that jokes about bombing people (yes, they die when you drop bombs on them) with his silly song of "Bomb, Bomb, Iran" is unfit to be POTUS.
The democrats while not nearly as vicious as McCain, are still immoral thugs. Neither Obama nor Clinton will ever admit that the United States committed war crimes by attacking the Serbs or any of our other military adventures where indigenous people have never attacked the United States. Remember, it was the Serbs that helped us overcome the Nazis and this is how we've repaid them? Atrocious.
David, my theory about this would be described as marxist in europe, but because of the retarded nature of US political culture, you can't even call it that, unless you want to be relegated to the status of a sect, so my school of thought in the US follow Veblen, and refer to what they do as "institutional analysis." The best people on this that I know of are called Nitzan and Bichler, and they have managed to resolve a lot of the obvious problems that people pose when one simply says that capitalism needs war for growth :
they are the only people who have argued consistently that high oil prices are a US policy goal, and thus that these stupid trips that Bush & Co. make to supposedly plead with the Saudis to glut the market, are just window dressing.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/978126.html
"U.S. fumes after Israeli envoy to UN envoy brands Carter 'a bigot'
he United States registered an official protest with Israel against its ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, for calling former U.S. President Jimmy Carter an "enemy of Israel" prior to Carter's recent visit to the region.
A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the U.S. administration's dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former U.S. President."
I've stripped the bullshit and padding out of these two items as presented in Haaretz (for instance, they insert a refernce to "the Syrian nuclear reactor" as if it was established fact):
(1) The US registered an official protest with Israel against its ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman. A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the US Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the US administration’s dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former US President. In addition, the State Department is planning to issue a public statement condemning comments made by Gillerman at a press conference in New York on Thursday. Foreign Minister Livni refused yesterday to respond to the demand by MK Beilin that Gillerman be recalled for his statements against Carter. A Foreign Ministry source said that Gillerman is due to leave his post in the coming months. The same source said that Gillerman’s attack on Carter “surprised and embarrassed” Jerusalem.
(2) Defense Minister Barak postponed a trip to Washington scheduled to begin Sunday in the wake of Thursday’s CIA briefing. Barak had been slated to meet with senior US officials including Cheney and Gates during the two-day visit.
From Yossii Sarid’s this weekend on Haaretz ( quote):
“Let’s let old Carter be, so he may let sleeping warriors lie; he will not be back. The contents of his words, however, should not be ignored. “Apartheid,” he said, “apartheid” – a dark, scary word coined by Afrikaners and meaning segregation, racial segregation.
What does he want from us, that evil man: What do we have to do with apartheid? Does a separation fence constitute separation? Do separate roads for Jewish settlers and Palestinians really separate? Are Palestinian enclaves between Jewish settlements Bantustans?
There is no hint of similarity between South Africa and Israel, and only a sick mind could draw such shadowy connections between them. Roadblocks and inspections at every turn; licenses and permits for every little matter; the arbitrary seizure of land; special privileges in water use; cheap, hard labor; forming and uniting families by bureaucratic whim – none of these are apartheid, in any way. They are an incontrovertible security necessity, period.
The white Afrikaners, too, had reasons for their segregation policy; they, too, felt threatened – a great evil was at their door, and they were frightened, out to defend themselves. Unfortunately, however, all good reasons for apartheid are bad reasons; apartheid always has a reason, and it never has a justification. And what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck – it is apartheid. Nor does it even solve the problem of fear: Today, everyone knows that all apartheid will inevitably reach its sorry end. ”
Hello, america?