Charles Lane in the Washington Post and David Rothkopf on Foreign Policy make the same angry point: the Freeman affair has devolved into a regrettable argument about whether Israel's supporters in this country have dual loyalties. Lane wants President Obama to repudiate the charge for the health of our "political culture."
Even if Freeman had a perfectly legitimate grievance, even if he had been maligned, he wouldn't be entitled to respond in kind -- much less to brand large numbers of his fellow citizens as fifth columnists.
These two are not the first to get up in arms about what they see as a false issue. Gabriel Schoenfeld and Alan Dershowitz both responded to Walt and Mearsheimer 2 and 3 years back by saying that the scholars were implicitly accusing Israel supporters of dual-loyalty conflicts-- an antisemitic canard.
Hold on. The answer to all these men is: Of course, American supporters of Israel are vulnerable to a dual loyalty charge. Many supporters of the Iraq war have exhibited the dual-loyalty problem. For the record:
--Joe Klein, speaking of neocons he knew personally, wrote last year that the fact that Jewish neoconservatives pushed the Iraq war as a way of magically reforming the Middle East inevitably raised the question of their "divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel."
--John Judis of the New Republic courageously stated that "dual loyalty" had become an "inescapable part" of the Jewish organizational support for Israel--and he included surely his own boss Marty Peretz.
--Harvard Yiddishist Ruth Wisse said at the Center for Jewish History that young American Jews should consider themselves part of Israel's "army" and just give up a couple of years of their lives to fight as advocates here against Arab voices on campus. Eric Alterman spotted this and said it was a call to dual loyalty. (And yes I've mentioned this.)
--New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is a major supporter of Jewish and other American institutions. His wife Myra told the Israeli press on a visit there that her sons could fight for Israel but not for the U.S. "As for joining the army, over Vietnam, I would have had an issue, because I didn't believe in it. The same goes for the war in Iraq. I don't know why we're there. I would hate to have one of my sons fighting there. Iran's the problem, not Iraq. But, as far as fighting for Israel is concerned, there is no problem."
This list could go on and on. No wonder ex-CIA man Michael Scheuer has said that dual loyalty is an issue, and Chas Freeman has said of the foreign service, "There has been, historically, a sense that it's better not to put ardently pro-Israeli American Jews to the test by putting them in the middle of U.S.-Israeli relations, where they will anguish over where their duty lies."
This issue was created by Zionists. And anti-Zionist Jews identified this as a problem again and again in the first half of the 1900s; they said creating a Jewish state with a Law of Return, under which I can move to Israel as a citizen tomorrow (and Mustafa Barghouti who was born in Jerusalem cannot go there), would generate poisonous questions about loyalty.
Those poisonous questions were put off for many years, till the Iraq War, when as Joe Klein wisely observed, the neocons' plans for remaking the Middle East could not be separated from their religious devotion to Israel. Or as Elliott Abrams, a former Bush aide during the Iraq war dream, wrote in the late 90s: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live.... [Jews] are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people.”
If that kind of religious statement is not a recipe for dual loyalty, nothing is. The issue won't go away. It came up during the Freeman controversy when Steve Walt quipped that Freeman had spent four decades serving the American government, while Freeman-critic Jeffrey Goldberg's idea of service was going off to serve in the Israeli army. Jacob Heilbrunn defended Goldberg, in the National Interest (!), terming Goldberg's service an act of "idealism."
Yes it was an act of idealism: of Zionist ideals, which led Goldberg to serve in an Israeli prison where Palestinians were abused.
The difficulty here, just as the anti-Zionists predicted it would be, is that the Jewish state with its discriminatory Law of Return has cast a regrettable shadow over many public American Jews' motivation. This is the reason that the banker Jacob Schiff, who saved my Russian ancestors from pogroms, wanted nothing to do with Zionism. Or for that matter why Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who built the Times into the greatest newspaper in the world, called himself an anti-Zionist. They wanted no lien placed on their loyalty to their homeland, the U.S., they cried. Today when Michael Oren moves to Israel and serves in its army and then comes back here to proselytize Americans about our historical love of Zion going back to George Washington, I don't trust him. Or when Time Magazine's Matt Cooper, who says his grandparents were "fervent Zionists," is fed the Valerie Plame info by Scooter Libby, a fellow Jew, during the Iraq war disaster, and I ask him whether he's also a Zionist and he declines to answer me, I find that unsettling. Ditto the commitment of Rahm Emanuel, or Howard Berman.
We're talking about this for the same reason that Barack Obama was able to defeat Hillary Clinton: because the Iraq war is the greatest disaster in a generation. There are countless examples of Jewish neocons/liberal hawks who supported that disaster, including Tom Friedman, Paul Berman, Bill Kristol, Lawrence Kaplan, David Frum, David Wurmser, and Richard Perle, who said that the fact that Saddam Hussein had paid for Palestinian suicide bombers was a reason for us to go to war with Iraq. To which the only response must be emphatic: Israel's war is not our war; and the confusion over this matter has killed a great number of innocent people.
As the Freeman case shows, the Iraq war chapter will not be closed until the special relationship with Israel is publicly debated, and till the dual-loyalty issue too is explored. Does my opinion carry influence? Don't worry, reader, it does not: I have said as much for years, and god knows the politicians and journalists and intellectuals have ignored me for years; and even realists Walt and Mearsheimer sidestepped this issue--leaving me, a lefty, to talk about "the American interest"! And still, the issue edges into our debate, for a simple reason: it is important.
Very well written article, Phil, thank you.
Arguing dual loyalty is simply a classic anti-semitic POV. The fact of the matter is that those of us who support the state of Israel support it because we believe that it is in America's interest to support the Middle East's only democracy and the Middle East's most stable state.
I suppose most American Communists supported the Soviet Union because they thought it was the world's greatest workers' democracy.
The fact that they may have been sincere in that belief doesn't mean that they were not guilty of dual loyalty.
Great post!
The whole subject of this unqestioning US support for Israel and how it has been achieved needs to be on the table and debated just like anything else.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is about LAND and resources. Who gets to own the land and build on it and use the resources. Everything else that has happened emanates from that root.
There is no conflict anywhere that can be resolved unless the root problem is acknowledged and dealt with.
In the interim, Americans pour billions of dollars into the Israeli side of this land battle, and these American taxdollars have at times been used to build the Jewish settlements that fuel the controversy.
But, we here in the US are all supposed to chant, "Israel has the right to defend itself, Israel has the right to defend itself" and chant this forever and continue to pour our taxdollars (that do not cover our own expenses) into this endless controversy that cannot be solved until WE GO BACK AND LEARN WHAT IT IS ABOUT AND HOW WE HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED INTO NOT QUESTIONING THE PRO-ISRAEL AMERICAN JEWISH POSITION.
Well, this is going to become an increasingly difficult position to defend as the younger generations of Americans assume leadership positions.
A truly, truly excellent piece, IMHO…
@aristeides,
Maybe dual loyalty only becomes a problem when your special interest group (that represents your first loyalty which is not to your own country) is able to control most of the foreign policy of the world's superpower. And, the resulting foreign policy that they control is not in the best interest of the majority of the citizens of that superpower. And, the cost of it poses a major burden to the current and future taxpayers.
Weiss: “This [duel loyalty] issue was created by the Zionists.”
True enough, on the specific issue of Israel. But the culture of subversion and utter contempt for the interests of the majority seems to come out of a certain interpretation of Judaism, possibly a messianic Jewish cultist interpretation, as revealed by an ongoing pattern.
Jewish Bolsheviks who targeted Russia demonstrated an ideological pattern and identity comparable to the Israel lobby: both seditious, alien movements conspiring to take control of a countries’ people and institutions and put them to work on their own messianic agenda through domestic subversion, bullying, and in the case of the Bolsheviks, murder. The Bolsheviks and their Stalinist partners were going to usher in a Communist “utopia” in part on behalf of the acceptance of Jews; the Zionists and their Neocon partners were going to “remake the Middle East” in part on behalf of the acceptance of Israel.
Both, not coincidentally, targeted for extermination non-Jewish religious peoples whom they regarded as more conservative, backward and primitive than themselves: the Bolsheviks/Stalinists targeted Christians, and the Zionists/Neocons targeted Muslims.
Will rooting out Zionists bring an end to this culture of contempt and subversion? Not unless the subversive, messianic Jewish cultist mentality and its contempt for gentiles, which in addition to the Israel lobby, exists from Wall Street to Hollywood, is rooted out along with them.
great article phil.. thanks! zionism is at the root of the problem… ironically someone is suggesting talking about dual loyalty is anti-semite!! it's a great question that puts these same zionists on the spot! if israel is where your loyalty lies, go and live their instead of being a leech on the usa..
So what do we do about the dual loyalist?
The best thing we could do and the kindest thing for everyone would be to send a hit team after the zionist and their political money bag men and cut off the head of zionism in the US.
But since no one voted for that solution it looks like we are going to have to have 'the debate'….and it's going to be ugly and it's going to arouse a lot of ugly feelings in a public already ready to rumble about how they have been fucked over in another thousand ways by their vichy government.
It's going to be a mess. The debate is going to have to be very clear and precise about the dangers and harm of dual loyalties to a nation. At the same time we have to clearly seperate Israeli zionist from non dual loyalty Jews without going so far as to give Jews carte blanche to continue to think they are entitled to put themselves and Israel over the interest of America and other Americans. That's going to be quite tricky.
A long time ago I suggested creating laws and expanding our antiquated treason laws to reflect the modern political realities of today. I still think that is the best way to deal with the complexities of "democractic representation vr. political corruption in foreign affairs"…particularly where it regards governing bodies like congress. That would not only deal with specific individuals and ther acts instead of tarring entire groups in whole, but it would put a huge restriction on congress and goverment agencies about how they deal with foreign lobbies and foreign interest.
So we can either create some laws and enforce them or we can keep having these free for all conflicts of interest and subversions leading to a zero sum out come for eveyone.
Wow, this post is just amazing. My take on this is that dual loyalty given the history and breath of Jewish culture and the attachment within that culture to the land of Israel is a natural thing. It's when that gets in the way of America's foreign policy by way of lobbyist that I thing it is extremely harmful.
@ aristeides: "The fact that [American Communists] may have been sincere in [their beliefs] doesn't mean that they were not guilty of dual loyalty."
Great point, which goes to all delusional, one size fits all utopianistic ideologies that rely on force or coercion, from Communism to the kind of globalizationist ideologies peddled by the Neolibs: they foster subversion, and focus hostility and contempt (and often mass murder) on the non-enlightened.
Jewish cultists want to keep their bloodlines pure, and so don't proselytize their "religion", so in order to gain control over non-Jewish hearts and minds, they instead proselytize their messianic ideologies. Their sick partners go through similarly stunted mental processes, minus the Jewish supremacist angle.
I think it would be instructive to ask whether Irish-Americans who support the IRA (or "The Real IRA", now) are similarly exhibiting 'dual loyalty'. The salience of the question varies according to the relations between the US and the UK governments. It seems fairly clear to me that Tony Blair extracted a quid pro quo from G W Bush, in return for his notoriously uncritical support of the Iraq war, to the effect that G W would see to it that support for the IRA/"Real IRA" was clamped down upon, quietly but firmly. Now, that deal is off, and the urban guerrilla conflict has duly returned to the streets of Northern Ireland's cities.
While this inference, if correct, is interesting enough in itself (I hope), my real point is that the salience of the question of 'dual loyalty' is determined by external factors.
Most intelligent American Zionists know they have a "dual" or "divided" loyalty problem–which is why they continue to argue so strenuously that American and Israeli interests are identical expecting that this will heal the division between loyalties. And that is why Mearsheimer and Walt are such threats.
There is no such thing as "dual loyalty." These people whom you claim have dual loyalty to Israel and the U.S.A., have actually pledged their first allegiance to Israel, and a distant second to the United States. Their actions are best exemplified by the neo-cons when they pushed the United States into war against Iraq, to the great detriment of our own security, international standing, cost in lives of American soldiers, and waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. One can only conclude that they were pushing for war because they believed it to be in Israel's best interest, regardless of how much harm it caused America. I am glad we are (finally) having this debate, but it's more helpful to be clear in our language and "dual loyalty" is a bit generours and inaccurate.
Jesus said it best when he said, "No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other."
New Knesset members to annul foreign passports
link to jta.org
Israel offers automatic citizenship to any person of Jewish decent in the Diaspora, but when it comes to serving in the Israeli Knesset they are required to renounce any dual loyalties. Is this behavior rooted in the practice that dual citizenship is a useful weapon against other governments and peoples, while its seen by Israelis as an invitation to treason by Israeli politicians and government officials? One would think what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Haaretz
Three dual-citizen MKs ordered to annul their foreign passports
link to haaretz.com
quote
The Basic Law on the Knesset states that "a member of Knesset holding an additional citizenship that is not Israeli … will not take the oath of loyalty until he has done everything he can to relinquish it."
Dual loyalty is not a proclivity limited to Jews.The ethnicities and religions that fill this country are not immune from promoting changes in U.S. policies they view as detrimental to the welfare of their countries of origin. But more often than not, their activities come and go based on an issue of the times. On the other hand, since the establishment of Israel, Jews have succeeded in turning the norm into a lingering art form, having mastered the arts of education, politics, finance and media. But why blame Jews for doing what comes naturally? We number less than 3 percent of the U.S. population. The problem is systemic and structural. It resides in the minds of the designers of the architecture of American education, politics, finance and media.
@ Michael Brenner | March 15, 2009 at 12:03 PM
Arguing dual loyalty is simply a classic anti-semitic POV.
Please explain why, with examples, so the rest of us can understand exactly what you mean. It certainly can be that antisemites weave the notion of dual loyalty into antisemitic arguments, but recognizing obvious dual loyalty is in and of itself not antisemitic.
The fact of the matter is that those of us who support the state of Israel support it because we believe that it is in America's interest to support the Middle East's only democracy and the Middle East's most stable state.
Please explain how it is in America's interest to support Israel. Even if Israel were the Middle East's only democracy and most stable state, neither attribute explains why it is in our interest to support Israel at all, much less Israel's ethnic cleansing and colonization campaign.
Also, Iran is a functioning democracy. It is highly imperfect to be sure, but then so is Israel's. Israel's may be less imperfect, but it is incorrect to say that it is the only one. You are buying in to propaganda. Check for the truth yourself, don't just take anyone's word for anything and repeat talking points.
Please define what you mean by stability. If you think that there is a government in the Middle East more likely to cease to exist in the next 50 years, please name it and explain why. I use government in the sense of the bureaucratic machinery of the state which creates and implements policy. I am not referring to people or nation. For example, Syrian people have been living in Syria for at least two thousand years, and have lived under many governments. It may be that Israel is the most stable, but that is saying next to nothing because the competition is execrable. The proper question to ask is which is the least unstable.
An even better question is which governments in the Middle East is it in America's interest to help become more stable. After all, should not our rapidly dwindling resources be spent wisely? If you think there is a moral argument that can be made that America should choose a sub-optimal resource allocation with respect to our own interests, i.e., spending money and political capital on Israel when we get nothing back, then please make your case. Don't forget the ethnic cleansing and colonization, and I consider it a useful exercise to make such a moral case with the constraint that Israel has ceased ethnic cleansing and colonization. If they withdraw behind 1967 borders and cease to undermine Palestinians' legitimate right to self-government (far, far too late for that, too many colonies and no political will to remove them), or agree to a new bi-national state where everyone has equal rights, then supporting the health and well-being of Israel or a successor state would be a completely different matter, and I would willingly part with my tax dollars to help them out. But there can only be hostility to the Lobby until our involvement with and subsidization of Israeli ethnic cleansing and colonization ceases. If you think this view is antisemitic, please explain why.
#
"Jesus said it best when he said, "No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other."
Posted by: Ana Sanchez
That quote brought to mind experiences I have had and something simmilar I notice in the attitudes and comments of many zionist activist.
A Cuban quest speaker at our school fifty years ago talked about the attitudes of some Cubans who had fled to the US. He said basically that these Cubans were going to be a problem because far from being grateful to America for taking them in, they resented America and Americans because they felt their status lowered here as compared to the status they had in Bastista's Cuba and they particulary viewed Americans as stupid and easily minupulated because they had never experienced a government upheaval. He said resentful people bite the hands that feed them.
A few years ago I had the same experince with a Mexican..that attitude toward Americans as rubes and inferior to them as a defense mechanism because they actually see themsleves as losers who couldn't make it or control their fate in their own country and had to become refugees and immigrants and depend on the good graces of Americans.
I see the same thing in a lot of jewish zionist…that resentment of gentiles and Americans..of everyone really ..even as we take them in and offer them all the same rights and opportunities. They still have that.. 'we secretly hate you because you've never been losers and lost eveything' ….and they translate that to somehow Americans are innocent stupids and easily fooled …and yet see Americans as superior to them at the same time because they haven't ever lost anything big..so they have to ridicule us for their own ego needs.
It's very convoluted and warped emotional type reasoning in the psyche's of people who have lost big..especially as it gets passed around in these groups.
Colin Murray, have you been doing this long? If so, you are a marvel of patience. Since the Israeli attack on Gaza started, I have been following threads on many websites concerning Zionism. One thing that became plain was the complete impermeability of Israeli supporters to any kind of facts. No many how many times the facts were patiently pointed out to them, no matter how many times they were chided about their standards of debate, nothing ever changes. They come back the next day, or the next hour, spouting the same canards, the same evasions the same special pleading and the same attacks. It's been going on for weeks, months.
When you get down to the bottom, these people have no real interest in Israel's survival, unless it can survive and prevail on a basis which gives them the advantages (whether mercenary or emotional, and I suspect mostly the latter) they seek. Israel must be their way, or no way at all.
The thousands, millions of Jews in Israel who do not have the ability to leave if things go sour they have no concern for, except as human shields for their advantage. And when the advantage they seek is almost entirely the ability to feel a certain way about Israel, they become contemptible.
Michael Brenner wrote:
"The fact of the matter is that those of us who support the state of Israel support it because we believe that it is in America's interest to support the Middle East's only democracy and the Middle East's most stable state."
Why then do you put such a special emphasis upon same, and why does it need such a great effort?
After all there's *lots* of things that are in America's interest: How come we don't see preponderately jewish groups arguing and lobbying for … environmentalism, say, or for free trade, or for "fair" trade, or for whatever? Of course the response might be that lots of jews are in such groups, which is true, but not preponderately. And the opposite is simply undeniable: most of the members of, say, AIPAC are indeed jews. So why is this the case if it has nothing whatsoever to do with a special interest in Israel on the part of American jewry?
Secondly, if it's just a matter of supporting what is already in America's best interest, why is such a huge, ferocious effort to do so needed? Why are such savage tactics as with Freeman needed? Presumably if it *was* indeed invariably in America's interest the vast majority of Americans would support that without the need for an AIPAC and its 24/7 operations and all it does, and without the need for all the monitoring and spending that constantly goes on in all the political races and etc., etc. Or are you suggesting that somehow gentiles are just too stupid to recognize their own interests and it's only the jews who are smart enough to perceive the truth? Or that jews are just that much more spectacularly patriotic than gentile Americans?
Your comment just gets you deeper and deeper into insulting idiocies.
It's just beyond foolish to argue that there's no natural tug of loyalty for many jews to Israel. No different than there was a natural tug of loyalty between many coming here from their homelands. But that coming here meant something and that is this country comes first. So that if you were Polish or Eastern European, yeah, you might have wanted to see the U.S. go to war with the Soviets to liberate your ethnic brothers and sisters. But there was a limit in the recognition that while that may be good for them it wouldn't exactly be good for your American neighbors and so you swallowed your ethnic tugs because you had made a choice.
Because Israel didn't exist when lots of jews came to America they never felt they had "made a choice" and so I think that plays into a difference. As does the Holocaust. To a degree. But the fundamentals are the same: there are going to be many instances in which you still have to choose, period, and nobody is going to be persuaded by you pretending for some ridiculous reason that America's interests are always and forevermore precisely identical with those of Israel. And the more you proclaim that the more people suspect you aren't just simply fooling yourself, but trying to fool them.
And beyond that I think most American jews *do* know and honor the fundamentals. It's just a splotch of hyper-zionists who pretend to speak for all jews who pretend that they don't exist.
The United States does have an interest in preserving Israel proper I think. (I.e., Israel within its pre-'67 borders.) Stability, respect for past international agreements and etc. And even showing some historical sensitivity because of the Holocaust and the history of the persecution of the jews. But there are still limits, and they don't extend to supporting Israel taking and keeping those territories it seized in '67.
So first proclaim yourself opposed to that and then maybe your argument will not be so manifestly ridiculous.
Its a bullshit argument for the generalization in the term "Israel Lobby".
There probably are a FEW individuals that are unqualified for government roles on the basis of conflict of interest relative to prior direct engagements for the government of Israel.
ANY other generalized prejudicial litmus test in legal requirements or even in attitude, is a fascist approach, that resembles exactly the OPPOSSITE of what constitutes a democracy.
Even an elected Congressperson whose constituents regard Israel's health and the US relationship to Israel as important, is JUSTLY and RESPONSIBLY an effective and appropriate representative.
You are ILL-SERVED by choosing to bring up the issue. As I said in an earlier post, the question of dual loyalty as applied in the generalized fashion that YOU use the term "Israel Lobby", allows a black child (as he/she should be encouraged) to become president but prohibits a Jewish child.
I would love if you found a less racist invocation to state your case more specifically.
Between your dual loyalty theme and your "divide the families" approach, you've sailed off the edge of the humane world.
When I see you again, I'm tempted to call you Ezra.
@ Vera Beaudin Saeedpour: "Dual loyalty is not a proclivity limited to Jews…The problem is systemic and structural. It resides in the minds of the designers of the architecture of American education, politics, finance and media."
–
I agree that there is a structural problem in any system that would allow a fifth column to infiltrate and set up essentially a parallel government pursuing its own agenda within our system. But remember, the Zionist fifth column has systematically gone about creating the conditions to allow its own “success” by systematically eroding and undermining traditional American structures and culture. I know of no other ethnic group that has so systematically gone about setting up a parallel government to in order to game the system, and any other ethnic fifth columns to follow in its footsteps are the beneficiaries of Zionist corrosion.
What you are arguing is akin to saying: the mafia may have bribed the judges, bought of the jury and intimidated the witnesses, but the reason it can get away with this is because the legal system is flawed.
Is it the legal system, or is it the character of those who refuse to uphold its integrity that is the problem?
The system as set up by the founders was not perfect, but if it had been followed, and we had kept government within the Constitutional limits prescribed by the founders, I can almost guarantee you the Zionist fifth column would never have even gotten to first base. But the Zionist fifth column used the American Left and left-liberalism to erode the system and the character of the nation to the point where it could infiltrate and prosper to the extent that it has today. And the Right has also taken advantage of this dumbed down nation to mainstream its own ignorant agenda and its culture of greed.
We are today suffering from a mainstream Left and a mainstream Right that essentially wants to keep the US citizenry ignorant, dependant and submissive — like cattle.
Michael Brenner: "The fact of the matter is that those of us who support the state of Israel support it because we believe that it is in America's interest to support the Middle East's only democracy."
There are two issues here. The question of whether a country can be both "the Jewish state" and a democracy is at the very least open to debate. As for your belief that it is in America's interest to support Israel, I think the evidence demonstrates otherwise. America is hated around the world for its support of Israel. Our wholesale support for anything Israel wanted to do was one reason the terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Israel is not our friend and hasn't been since it deliberately killed 34 sailors on the USS Liberty. Finally, a lot of Americans just don't want to be friends with Israel for the same reasons we didn't want to be friends with South Africa in the apartheid era or currently Somalia.
@ Witty: "allows a black child (as he/she should be encouraged) to become president but prohibits a Jewish child."
The race of the child is irrelevant. The question is whether the child grows up to be (or is indoctrinated into being) a representative an alien fifth column hostile to the sovereignty, interests and ethics of the American people, their culture and their Western civilization identity and its legal traditions.
No Jew would be discriminated against in an anti-Zionist America, unless he was a member of and pursuing the agenda of the Zionist fifth column. The precedent for this is American anti-Communism, which certain fifth columnist Communists and their sympathizers also tried to claim was “racist” during the Cold War.
@ witty spoke
"There probably are a FEW individuals that are unqualified for government roles on the basis of conflict of interest relative to prior direct engagements for the government of Israel.
""""ANY other generalized prejudicial litmus test in legal requirements or even in attitude, is a fascist approach, that resembles exactly the OPPOSSITE of what constitutes a democracy."""
Even an elected Congressperson whose constituents regard Israel's health and the US relationship to Israel as important, is JUSTLY and RESPONSIBLY an effective and appropriate representative.
I would love if you found a less racist invocation to state your case more specifically."
Posted by: Richard Witty>>>>>>
And we, witty would love it if you wern't so constantly stupid and lied so constantly about that racist 'Democracy" of Israel.
ROTFLMAO
From Haaretz
Three dual-citizen MKs ordered to annul their foreign passports
By Shahar Ilan
The Central Elections Committee has ordered three Knesset members with dual citizenship to annul their foreign passports by next Tuesday's swearing-in ceremony, or at least begin steps to cancel them.
The three lawmakers are Yohanan Plesner of Kadima (who has Danish citizenship), Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz (a Polish citizen) and Yisrael Beiteinu's Anastasia Michaeli, who holds a Russian passport. The Basic Law on the Knesset states that "a member of Knesset holding an additional citizenship that is not Israeli … will not take the oath of loyalty until he has done everything he can to relinquish it."
Ed, before we talk about anti-semitism in America, or Jews being discriminated against in America, can I have a minute to chase away the ghosts of millions of Africans brought here as slaves, and those pesky Native Americans killed in a genocidal war against them by the US. If they're not around it's much, much easier to talk about discrimination against Jews in the US without getting this really ashamed and queasy feeling. For some reason, when anybody talks about anti-semitism in the US they're all I can see.
@
The problem is systemic and structural. It resides in the minds of the designers of the architecture of American education, politics, finance and media.
Posted by: Vera Beaudin Saeedpour | March 15, 2009 at 01:44 PM>>>>>>
The problem dear lady is that America is actually a real democracy. The fifth column zionist were able to do what they have done to America precisely because of the democractic rights of our ctizens. The zionist jews just used and peverted those democratic 'tools' for their own agenda.
The jews here have used our democracy to support the non democratic state of Israel as I illustrated above.
In the Jewish state you will never find a lobby of citizens who work for any other nation. Israel doesn't give citizens the democratic tools to use against the state because they know that is what jews use in democratic countries to support Israel and won't allow the chance of it's citizens doing the same thing against them as jews do against the other countries they live in to subvert it's interest for the benefit of Israel.
Ed is right btw.
@ Mooser’s red herring ,
Slavery and ethnic cleansing were, for centuries, millennia, horrible realities all over the world. In many places in the world, and amongst many primitive peoples, they are horrible realities even to this day. But thankfully, the American Founders wrote the instruments into the US Constitution that became the levers of their demise in the America. Thankfully, ethnic Jewish and Christian moralists wrote the instruments in the New Testament that become the levers of their demise amongst most of Western civilization.
—
But let’s not get sidetracked. I’m more interested in the question of whether certain American Jewish Zionists are beginning to have second thoughts about indoctrinating their children to be dues paying members in the Zionist fifth column, and perhaps beginning to regret sending their children to Israel for Zionist education, “service,” and further indoctrination to this end.
More and more, it’s looking like very poor parenting, and calculation, indeed. Particularly for those who might have had political aspirations for their children. And all this time, they thought membership in the Zionist network was going to be a political meal ticket.
In the long run, treachery never pays. But that’s a lesson certain stubborn people shun, and studiously refuse to reconsider. But, whatever…
But, EDDY, there is no zionist 5th column in america. There are only white supremacists practicing a nazi style nationalism, like you, that is infecting the political body.
Yes, you are a product of piss poor parenting. But, as you yourself understand, your treachery toward American ideals will not pay.
@ Michael Brenner
Not so fast: "Arguing dual loyalty is simply a classic anti-semitic POV." The early jewish anti-zionists thought that zionism was a fertile dung heap of dual loyalty issues; that is why they were opposed to zionist programs. Were they all self-hating jews too? Check it out, ignoramus. How can this issue of dual loyalty stop so long as all jews anywhere have the insurance policy that is Israel, a first class insurance policy, with the Palestinians paying the premium despite they had nothing to do with the Holocaust in Europe? And, al la Kant, what if every ethnic group (let's not start the shell game of what is a jew) had the same insurance policy? Obviously, that's a recipe for armed deconstruction of the current reality of statehood. Back to the caves, tribal feuds. You say the Shoah is unique? I say, only in that the Germans were and
are well organized and adept at technology. I don't see a Gypsy State. Nor one for the Kurds.
Thankfully, ethnic Jewish and Christian moralists wrote the instruments in the New Testament that become the levers of their demise amongst most of Western civilization.
So maybe the African slaves and the Native Americans should be grateful to us? Sure, that's the ticket.
Okay, if you want to say that the Jewish experience of anti-semitism and discrimination in America is in any way comparable to the experience of African slaves and Native Americans, I admire your chutzpah it's a hell of a lot more than I've got. Or are you saying the Jews were exempt from that because we, along with the other worthy Gentiles, wrote the Bible verses which were used, at one time or another, in abolitionist literature? Give me a freakin break. Or shall we delve into the role of Jews in America's slave trade, shall we?
Again @ Michael Brenner
"The fact of the matter is that those of us who support the state of Israel support it because we believe that it is in America's interest to support the Middle East's only democracy and the Middle East's most stable state."
It may be a fact that you and those like you support the Israeli regime's conduct as you believe it's always in the USA's best interest too. So what? The German-American Bund believed honestly that the both the USA and Germany's best interests were one and the same. Many legitimate American heros took that stance. Ask the state's surrounding nuclear Israel, with its doctrine of preemptive war, and its history of wars, whether Israel is the most stable state. As to democracy, Israel is a Jim Crow state–you can point to the Arab states, but nobody in the USA holds them up as a standard. We just need their oil. So what's so great about Israel that we should support it like we do, draining our flesh and blood and tax money to do so? At least we can say, apropos real politics, that we get oil from Saudi Arabia, for example, the universal commodity needed most at this time. So why Israel? Nothing in the Nuremberg Trials offers rationalization for Israel's actions. Start there, don't go back to the Apaches; we like to think we have learned something.
"I suppose most American Communists supported the Soviet Union because they thought it was the world's greatest workers' democracy.
The fact that they may have been sincere in that belief doesn't mean that they were not guilty of dual loyalty.
Posted by: aristeides"
Yep. And a very disproportionate of those pinkos were jews. Check it out.
Citizen, I have been following this issue since Israel's first attacks on Gaza in this go round. The Zio-trolls have not, no matter how many times they have been presented with the facts, changed their tune one bit. Nor have they ever deigned to answer any of the moral, religious and legal questions which Zionism forces on Jews and non-Jews.
They are not interested in Israel's survival, not really, not unless it entails Israel surviving, well, prevailing in exactly the form and the way which satisfies the dictates of their moral vacuum, and validates it. And of course, we are hearing from people who either don't live in Israel, or have the easiest outs. For the Jews of Israel for whom escape to a western democracy may be all but impossible, they have no campassion whatsoever. They are just there to be used.
Remember, Zionist and Israelis treat each other according to the same principles they use to treat with everybody else.
But, Chris B (AKA SOG, Bill Pearlman), there is a zionist 5th column in america. Any gentile white supremacists practicing a nazi style nationalism have long been kicked to the curb in terms of any effective politics, but the likes of you is what is infecting the political body. Your are a Likud or further right Zionist. You, Bill Pearlman, are the problem for patriotic Americans, and universal humanists.
Yes, you are a product of piss poor parenting. But, as you yourself understand, your treachery toward American ideals will not pay.
@ Witty
"ANY other generalized prejudicial litmus test in legal requirements or even in attitude, is a fascist approach, that resembles exactly the OPPOSSITE of what constitutes a democracy."
Exactly, and this is why the attack on Freeman was fascist in basic nature. That's Israelifascist BTW.
@ Berel: "there is no zionist 5th column in america. There are only white supremacists practicing a nazi style nationalism"
LOL. According to the Zionist 5th, when Americans are killing Muslims in the Mideast for Israel, they're American patriots, but when they're doing America-first rhetorical battle with the Zionist fifth columnists in the US, they're "nazi nationalists." C'mon. How long did you really expect to be able to get away with this absurdity? The clock on your game is finally running out. Deal with it.
@ Rowan
Irish Americans do not have dual loyalty, the subject of this blog article here, hence its thread. Further,
Irish Americans are not in any way as singly focused on one issue as Jews are. Could I also mention that Ireland has been the continual home of the Irish in a sequential way that the land desired by Likud & further to the right Israel has not been? If you want to compare the proportionate sacrificed of Irish Americans and Jewish Americans to the American cause, it is very lop-sided, and this continues to this day.
If Tony Blair extracted a quid pro quo from G W Bush (which I don't doubt), in return for his notoriously uncritical support of the Iraq war, to the effect that G W would see to it that support for the IRA/"Real IRA" was clamped down upon, quietly but firmly, and if now, that deal is off, and the urban guerrilla conflict has duly returned to the streets of Northern Ireland's cities, so what? How does this relate to the I-P situation? Please clarify. You can start with explaining what you mean here for us imbeciles:
"While this inference, if correct, is interesting enough in itself (I hope), my real point is that the salience of the question of 'dual loyalty' is determined by external factors."
"Wow, this post is just amazing. My take on this is that dual loyalty given the history and breath of Jewish culture and the attachment within that culture to the land of Israel is a natural thing. It's when that gets in the way of America's foreign policy by way of lobbyist that I thing it is extremely harmful.
Posted by: Josh.A "
The historical problem is that this dual loyalty goes back to beyond ancient Rome, and comes back down to the current USA. I hope you don't think that the jews were kicked out of so many lands simply because
of a mental defect in the non-jews labeled as a dna problem called "anti-semitism."
American society knows what to do with Moslem dual loyalists. John Walker Lindh received a twenty year sentence in a federal penitentiary for fighting for the state of Afghanistan in its civil war with the Northern Alliance. Americans caught spying for Israel also receive long prison sentences. Unfortunately, Americans who populate settlements in Palestine or serve in the Israeli Defense Forces are not prosecuted for the same crimes John Walker Lindh was, despite following similar paths to becoming combatants.
To Ed and American,
I beg to differ. So confident were the architects of American systems in the superiority of their structural designs,they confused liberty with license.
Man! that you make sense!The problem with dual loyalists is that they are no happy here or there. As the dogs that are tease with a positive and a negative reward, they end mad. Look at Pipes,Horowitz,Dershowitz to point a few.
It appears that Citizen has joined Adam on the antisemitism band wagon.
My argument that "the salience of the question of 'dual loyalty' is determined by external factors" seems to have gone rather over people's heads. I wonder whether any of you are familiar with the work of Ian Lustick, especially "Unsettled States, Disputed Lands", in which he compares the questions of Ireland, Algeria, and Palestine, using Gramsci's concept of hegemony? This book will illustrate what I mean by 'salience'.
"At the same time we have to clearly seperate Israeli zionist from non dual loyalty Jews without going so far as to give Jews carte blanche to continue to think they are entitled to put themselves and Israel over the interest of America and other Americans. That's going to be quite tricky."
I agree, American. I'll go even further and say that a harsh example needs to be made of these poeple in order to discourage new immigrant groups from using the system for their own group interests in the future. Only a complete fool believes that immigrants are largely coming to this nation witout grudges or bias, with the intent of fitting in or without group interests. This problem needs to be taken care of now. I often marvel at the fact that Americans are rarely beaten about our heads with the Rosenbergs these days, and the reason for that is pretty clear when you think about it! Do the Rosenbergs even make high school texts these days?
"But, EDDY, there is no zionist 5th column in america. There are only white supremacists practicing a nazi style nationalism, like you, that is infecting the political body."
Talk like that makes me want to take to the street with a crowbar.
I sense Todd's still worrying over dark-skinned hordes stealing his country's purity.
Give us a specific example of the harsh example you have in mind, Todd.
D, why would I respond to nonsense such as yours?
"Does my opinion carry influence? Don't worry, reader, it does not: I have said as much for years, and god knows the politicians and journalists and intellectuals have ignored me for years; and even realists Walt and Mearsheimer sidestepped this issue–leaving me, a lefty, to talk about "the American interest"!"
Phil, I would probably never agree with you on what the preferable end result should be, but I have to give you credit for trying. I think it is a stretch to call the politicians, journalists, intellectuals or realists who ignore the issue of dual loyalty anything but cowards. I would call the politicians sell-outs, and the rest suely don't qualify as journalists, intellectuals or realists.