Yesterday Vladimir Putin said that he likes George Bush, it is the people around him he can't stand. A king is no better than his court. This is a reference to the neoconservatives, who gave us Iraq and helped to give Georgia Ossetia. Joe Klein says the same thing about McCain in scatological terms: "It's been really enjoyable watching the neoconservatives splash and play in the mud and defecation of the McCain campaign."
You'd think this is a clear wedge issue between Obama and McCain. McCain is in bed with the foolish neocons who gave us Iraq. Yet Obama has never said it. I think I heard Biden say neocons once last week. But it's not in ads. You'd think that such an appeal would have more resonance out in America than Ron Rosenbaum's idea that Obama should run against the hedge fund guys on Wall Street who screwed up the economy. And it would. Americans don't like the Iraq War. They'd like to guillotine the idiots who gave it to us. The same braintrust that is now serving McCain.
The reasons that Obama is not pushing this issue are: Neoconservatism, which came out of the Jewish intellectual community, is seen as a code word for Jewish, and neoconservatism is actually widely adhered to across the Democratic party. By neoconservativism, I mean the idea that Arab societies must be made into democracies in order to solve the terrorism problem in the Middle East. That idea is widely shared, by Mel Levine Democrats, the former Joe Lieberman Israel-first wing of the Democratic Party that has not gone over to McCain. Robert Wexler, Howard Berman, Steven Grossman, Marty Peretz. And yes, obviously, there is a Jewish component to this wing (which justified the Iraq war because Saddam paid for suicide bombers in Israel) and it is simply too important financially to the Democratic Party to alienate in any way. Jewish money, said Seymour Hersh.
So to repeat, the reason that Obama is not going after the neocons, a potential 70-30 wedge issue among the American people who would like to know how we got into the mess in Iraq, is that: Jews are mobbed-up with neoconservatism and the Democratic Party is mobbed-up with Jews. Simple, true answers, I'm afraid. Are all Jews mobbed up with neoconservatism? No. Just look at Dean Velvel's valiant attack on the Jewish neocon bastards who gave us the Iraq War, whom he deems a disgrace to his religion. Just look at Joe Klein's valiant attack on the Jewish neocons who promulgated the benign domino theory of making Israel safe by invading Iraq. Look at Glenn Greenwald's attacks on the neocons, and David Bromwich. But these are all brave smart outlier Jews. Even Jacob Heilbrunn who wrote a whole frikkin book on the Jewish neocons didn't have the balls to call them out as Joe Klein has. And even Joe Klein took 6 years to tell us about his conversations with the best and brightest of Iraq, and did so only because he was worried they were gonna torch Iran.
Neoconservatism continues to be embedded in the larger liberal Jewish community for a few reasons: We all know neocons. It's not like Christian anti-abortion fundamentalists we've never met–no Marty Peretz gave every smart liberal Jewish journalist work. All the neocons were once liberals anyway; they sit at our dinner tables just like the nutjob members of other families who the rightthinking ones might raise their eyebrows over but would never denounce publicly. But it goes further: the neocons are licensed, even by progressive Zionists, because they are out there fighting for Israel. Because even liberal Jews have come to accept what Henry Herskovitz discovered when he saw the shocking militarism of Israel and came back to scream angrily at his own synagogue: violence is a vital tool of the Jewish state, and liberal Zionists turn a blind eye to it. Which is to say, in the U.S., liberal Jews out of love of Israel give a pass to the neocons. The Democratic Party platform refers to an undivided Jerusalem, a neocon principle. And when you ask liberal Jews why we're in Iraq, they almost invariably offer The Single Gunman theory: George Bush did it.
All this will change. Walt and Mearsheimer will change it. The students at Yale will change it. Velvel will change it, David Bloom and I will change it. We are driving a wedge inside the Jewish community and asking, What has Zionism done to you? This is a grassroots intellectual activist process. The battle in the synagogues over Tony Kushner's amazing script for "Munich" was precisely this issue: How long must the cycle of violence in the Middle East escalate in the name of the Jewish state? And only when that schism has actually taken place, when the American Jewish community divides over the costs of Zionism, will Obama be able to take on the neocons. He needs a lot of landsmen behind him. Because Jews are simply too important to the political process and he cannot alienate them. 2012?
That change will come I seriously doubt. Until the goyim are permitted, in a rational banner based on facts and evidence,
to discuss the wealth, power, and influence
of organized Jewry in this country and to point out the often disastrous effects of
said wealth, power and influence WITHOUT
automatically being vilified and marginalized, nothing will be different in our political discourse. The Jewish elite
and the Judaized non-Jewish elite are highly
unlikely to allow such a profound alteration.
We are on a collision course.
As in the 100th monkey, the penny drops, the hidden becomes apparent.
Reidentifying what it means to be a Jew, might be the only hope.
The Neocon philosophy has been obscene, and is only a sympton of what has been an accumalation of what has anyway been going on.
It seems to me, that all the differing strands of truth are coming together, and the fallout, blowback will be unstoppable.
There is untold violence going on internationally, and how Neocon is it? How Jewish is it? And how much mental and emotional violence in parallel, to curb the growing dissidence.
"Henry Herskovitz discovered when he saw the shocking militarism of Israel" – these people do NOT retire, they continue, the times are saddening.
Can Judaism be redifined – isn't it now associated with violence? and control, and interference.
And isn't the morality, at this point, looking f a l s e?
An excellent analysis Phil. But I dont share your faith that change will come. Remember that the time is limited. In 10 years the present USG will not exist.
The big question is: Is Obama really mobbed up with Democratic Party, or is he only faking it to get elected? I continue to believe there may be hope.
An even more promising wedge issue is to attack Congress, which is detested even more than Bush according to the polls. If Obama has not turned on Congress by one year into his term I will give up hope.
If the reader is paying attention heshe may have noticed an apparent contradiction between my belief in impending demise of USG and my tenative hope for Obama. To clarify, I dont think Obama can fix the USG but maybe he can ease the side effects of its downfall.
"Reidentifying what it means to be a Jew, might be the only hope."
No morris, it is the Zionists who have redefined the term. We need to return to the original meaning:
A Jew is someone who heeds the word of Yahweh.
I see morris said "Reidentifying" so maybe he means the same thing.
Phil,
You embellish your importance, or the result of your actions.
And, it results from your own approach.
Phil, clearly Jim Lobe deserves to be on your list. He may even be a front man among Jewish-American anti-Neocon's.
"Jews are mobbed-up with neoconservatism and the Democratic Party is mobbed-up with Jews." As is the Republican party.
So Obama "taking on the neocons" is about as likely as a UFO landing on your lawn. He works for the corporate oligarchy, which finds the neocons' endless overseas provocations highly lucrative.
Vote for the white one or the black one, but ObaMcCain isn't to going to bite the hand that feeds. ObaMcCain needs a steady flow of able-bodied plebes to feed into the Afghan meat grinder. Like Emperor Augustus's doomed gladiators in the Coliseum, this election is mainly about noisy, nationalist bloodlust as entertainment and community bonding ritual.
Obama vs. the neocons? Man, they OWN his skinny black ass.
Question, indirectly related to the issue discussed: Would it behoove a lower middle class/working class white gentile American to look at why so many look at his collective's impact over the years to "demonize" him, though he may be personally uninvolved and not much, ever and if any a beneficiary?
Same question to the Jews because they always take it as principle that anti-semitisim sprang full blown from the head of a rabid medusa.
I love it when Phil uses expressions like bloods and mobbed up. Like he grew up on pleasant avenue or bay parkway. Instead of who he is. A middle aged suburban Jewish guy.
Ron Paul said (a few days ago) vote for one of the alternative candidates.
And he sees very little difference between the two major parties.
The four candidates: Independent Ralph Nader, the Green nominee Cynthia McKinney, the Constitution Party’s Chuck Baldwin and the Libertarian Party’s Bob Barr along with Ron Paul agreed on the following four key principles:
http://morris108.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/ron-paul-describes-voting-as-more-the-pretense-of-democracy-than-a-real-democracy-vote-for-an-alternative-candidate/
What organised Judaism, with Zionism at its center is doing, is a calamity, there are no checks and balances.
And there is very very little hope.
Being a Jew has become divorced from nature and humanity.
The internet is seething with revelations.
Uri Avneri:
AT THE funeral of Abie Nathan, I said to myself: the Israel-as-it-is takes its leave from the Israel-as-it-could-have-been.
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1220736636/
All that is left is gangsters, deception and fundamentalism.
I am in big trouble with organised Judaism, I guess a lot of people are.
There is nothing humanist left. Just hegemony and punishment. And demands of devotion to that.
It would take a miracle to bring back the shine or glitter.
It is now wanton destruction.
Yahweh? Humanity, Diversity, Individuality, Pacifism. Yahweh without a state, and without an institution, maybe.
Jim Haygood,
You don't think McCain/Palin are more likely to get us involved in a nuclear war with Russia than Obama/Biden?
I can more easily imagine a confrontation with Russia in the Ukraine or Georgia escalating with hothead McCain than with cool Obama.
Could anyone explain this image please?
It is Bush with religious Jews?
The same photos can be found with all the other Western leaders.
And these photos are produced by Jews, and yet appearing on anti Jewish sites.
And we are in continual warfare.
http://www.delawareonline.com/blogs/uploaded_images/Bush_Corm-756361.JPG
Sorry image was too big:
Do you get the feeling, you wouldn't like to be in trouble with them ???
This is the main story, at least the first story to appear at their web site (www.chabad.org):
Current:
Life Vs. Terror: a 9/11 Anthology"
Compiled by Yanki Tauber
We deposed the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq. Yet we're still locked in this battle of life against terror…
Their top story is about war!!!
israel is not really a state, rather it is a vast criminal organism – with operations involving weapons sales and smuggling, drug smuggling, financial manipulation and money laundering, terrorism of all types against all kinds of legitimate states and a long-term, subversive war against its greatest patron: the United States. israel was founded by terrorists and jewish mafia and these elements were folded into the official government of israel – do you think their criminal activity ever went away ???
zionism is failed experiment – the social progressives were supplanted by militants and mafias entirely and zionism is now the greatest poison on Earth. Jews can live in peace and prosper if they wish to be good neighbors, but their criminal enterprise, israel, is a cancer and the world must treat it so it can harm no more. israel must go back to the '67 borders, de-nuclearize, allow return of Palestinian refugees, begin to build-down its vastly over-size military, and stop medding in the affairs of other countries.
The U.S. needs to finally face the fact that israel is no friend, but rather the most urgent Clear and Present Danger to the United States through their operatives and their control of our war-making, foreign policy, financial institutions, and endless spy operations against us.
Amdocs and Comvers need to be banned from the American market and fully investigated for spying on Americans. All zionists (jew or otherwise) who fund the terrorist settlers in israel need to be investigated, prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned or deported for their treason against U.S. policy.
Philip,
I don't know if you actually read these comments, but if you happen to see this, please go see "Nakba," a very powerful documentary by Japanese director Hirokawa Ryuichi." Just saw it last night here in Tokyo, and it left me pretty convinced that Zionism (at least in its post-1967 form) is a kind of disease.
I know it's playing in theaters around Europe, but I'm not sure about the states. I'll have to look into it.
-Ryan
"Remember Pearl Harbor"
Superb post, Phil.
Thank you very much for your fine blog.
Thanks, Ryan. I'll be looking for that.
(I had heard of Hirokawa Ryuichi before. He's the man who made those famous films of the Sabra/Shatilla massacres from 1982.)
Obama needs to be careful not to offend, same as you, if he wants to get peace accomplished.
If he wants to pressure, then he will lose his mantle of unity by convincing, rather than unity by brow-beating.
And, that would be a very large characteristic to lose.
Nakba, Paletine 1948
by Ryuichi Hirokawa
Phil,
What I find depressing about Obama is his timidity.
There's no weight to his critique. It's marked by his shallowness in dismissing Vietnam as old news, Iraq as a bureaucratic bungle, Iran as the boogeyman of the moment. He hasn't traveled the final, essential distance MLK did in understanding empire as menace, as systemic poison.
The choice of Biden, the kowtowing to AIPAC, the promise of expanding troop levels: no one discontented with the permanent US war economy or imperial wantonness can take comfort in this brand of comic book audacity.
No, these are the marks of a system man, a status quo obliger. You may foment serious reflection on Zionism but your interventions won't budge Obama or his party away from commitment to empire — and that is the larger and more troubling problem, the one that subsumes US commitments to Israel.
morris says: It would take a miracle to bring back the shine or glitter.
morris i think you are missing something. The word of Yahweh endures forever. Try reading it.
"Yahweh without a state, and without an institution, maybe."
Yes definately. Yahweh for lovers of Yahweh.
What i would like to get at is the recreation of pretemple Shamonic Judaism.
morris i looked at your blog. I wish i could read it. Maybe you should abandon the fancy formatting.
I followed the link to Joe Kleins column. It says that Obama called for extending the war to Pakistan long before Bush saw the light. So that settles it for me. Obama is not a change. He is a regular Democrat.
I'm not sure what to do now. I might support McCain on the grounds that a stupid Devil is better than a smart one. But by now the US seems to be coming apart fast enough that it hardly matters who gets elected.
I might support the Greens on grounds of telling the truth. But I wonder if they have anything that new to say. No one will hear them except their supporters.
So I suspect the best course is simply to save my time and my breath, and regard the election as an unpleasent but unpreventable natural disaster.
Paul,
The greens, nor the libertarians, tell the truth.
Also, pre-temple Judaism was not shamanic. It was an entirely different time.
The emphasis on spirituality (shamanic) in Judaism is a modern and current emphasis, a struggle that continues in each community and person.
Religion:
Most of what is contestable in religion are really failed attempts at science. For example, the literal interpretation of "the world was created in six "days"", is a speculation as to physical science. (All Jewish scripture is primarily NOT literal.) And, like all theories get refined, rejected, clarified, the theory of creationism has shifted from a science of "the world was ACTUALLY created in six days" to "the world is so elegant and complex that there must have been some design process and "designer" involved and presently involved."
The objectivists descibe the laws of nature through evolution a complex algorhythm, while the subjectivists call the algorhythm designed with the implication of an "external" or alternatively "intrinsic" design"er".
The material of merit in religion is also a theory in dialectical development, but it is about human character and consciousness. What combinations of principles, practises, sequence result in righteousness (in fact), and how should they be incorporated into person, family, community, society, ecology.
The most innovative religious thinkers note a great similarity of approach with extensive self-reflection. Integrated, balanced emphasis between ethics, health, introspection, charitableness.
Expressed in all one's relations, and in all one's choices, inter-personal, family, community, political, ecological.
EVERY religion.
To the extent that habit is adopted in any respect, it ceases to inform and animate, and instead compels conformity to unanimity.
(Conformity is a process by which external pressures, say political correctness, compel everyone to parrot a common "truth". Unanimity or concensus is a process by which everyone at a time conclude similarly independantly from complete and freely weighted information.)
There is NO WAY that my political views on Israel/Palestine or any other issue that I am informed about can be described as "conformity". I do NOT test my views against any neo-conservative or "pro-Zionist" talking point.
I am motivated to propose mutual health, peace.
And that means BOTH. It does not mean anyone's agenda or political conclusion, and that is what I argue against.
That the conflict/struggle has lasted a very long time is a tragedy. For dissenters that keep to Phil's assertion of emphasizing the needs of the underdog primarily, or only, as the time period is long, that ends up a fascism of excluding Israel's and Israeli's needs habitually and over an extended time.
Even if 1/5th of Phil's postings related to Israel's genuine needs, then the discussion would get to peace.
When its 98% critical, it gets to perception of demonization.
Hence the strident "dialog" with Ralph Seliger, who agrees with Phil on 98% of political emphases and most specific proposal (although Phil is morally remiss in not putting his backbone into clarifying or supporting his proposal).
Differences RANTED about, rather than common cause.
It makes one think, me, that the purpose of dissent is more than partially vanity.
At the same time, I respect the dilemma's of running a campaign (political or a movement), of having to repeat and repeat and repeat.
But that repitition is NOT to the converted, but to an audience.
Picketing a shul and then failing to initiate conversation with the shul members' is NOT an example of moral courage. Its an example of distrust.
people like you give me faith in humanity. For non-jews like me, it is very disheartening to see what's happening in Israel. I find there's a big separation between the jews that fight for human rights and the Zionists. Nobody seems to want to make the connection in public: Zionism is walking and quacking like fascism of old: nationalistic propaganda, with hegemony as its only aim. It is the only major pre-WW1, European nationalistic organisation to still wield so much power. I'm sad to say Zionism survives on the suffering and tragedy of the holocaust.
You have to talk louder, with more voices or else many 'gentiles' will end up equating Jews with intolerance, oppression and control. I hope that the old monsters will not raise their heads again, as Jews have given and are giving a lot to humanity.
there is a true lie and a lied truth. you could throw the words all day it would make no difference. you could dance around them. you have it on your flag. you wear it on your neck. its the curse that you need to get rid off.