The Israel lobby has always feared public awareness. But the Iraq war and Gaza have ended the politics of ignorance; awareness is growing, especially on the left. Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation reports on a Zogby poll that shows surprisingly high #s of Americans not wanting a special relationship, and seeking pressure on Israel. From the sound of these numbers, Obama could begin the slow process of educating Americans about the horrors of the occupation… [emphases mine]
According to the poll, when asked if the United States should "get
tough" with Israel in order to back up its call for an end to
settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, fully 50 percent of
Americans said yes, with just 19 percent saying "do nothing," and 32
percent not sure.
Hiding in those numbers, however, is an overwhelming partisan gap,
and that is the really striking thing about the Zogby poll. From my
notes:
Asked whether the interests of Israel and the US are
identical, only 28 percent of Obama voters agreed, while 59 percent
disagreed. Among McCain voters, it was the reverse: 78 percent of
McCain voters said US and Israel interests were identical and 15
percent said they are not…And on the crucial question, is it time to get tough with Israel,
the gap was a veritable Grand Canyon. Among Obama voters, 71 percent
agreed and 18 percent disagreed. Among McCain voters, 16 percent agreed
and 73 percent disagreed.
…What does it mean? It says that President Obama will have the support
of his base, including Democrats and Independents, if he decides to
force the issue in coming months with the Israeli leader. According to
John Zogby, part of the reason is demographic: black voters, Hispanic
voters, and young (18-30) voters are far less attached to the
US-Israeli special relationship than are older, more traditional
voters, especially among Christian evangelicals.
This scenario ignores the most import factor . . . money and power. Since when does a poll of what average citizens think influence politicians? We would have single payer health care by now if that were true. Congress is beholden to Israel because the lobby contributes to their reelection and if they don't toe the line, AIPAC will come after them with a vengeance, pouring money into the campaign of their challenger and smearing them in every way possible. And, the politicians know how ruthless AIPAC can be. Even Obama is afraid of the Likudniks. They can bring him down in the next election.
"Asked whether the interests of Israel and the US are identical, only 28 percent of Obama voters agreed, while 59 percent disagreed. " Well, then they better get busy and get rid of as many of those 45 Jewish Zionists in Congress as possible in the next election — 95% of whom are in the Democratic Party. That might also help prevent a war with Iran. Why does the national Democratic Party keep running candidates so out of sync with what its base wants on such a crucial issue? It’s really managed to hamstring its own president.
They already tried to bring him down in the last election and failed. Their playbook is tired and voters are getting wise to their game. That said, of course everyone is afraid of them. Bar none, they are the most dangerous force on the planet.
Is Weiss nervous about confronting the real issue? It's money. 'Progressive opinion', just like conservative opinion, is worthless. Whoever pays the parties writes the rules.
Most Americans never pay attention to foreign policy. Beck had a segment on Obama-Netunanuh (sic) last night; that was what he said in his introduction, imply stating the obvious in his semi-jocular way. He had two guests, one a former N staff man, now in the US MSM, stating the usual hasbara basic fallacies, and Scheer (sic?) on the other side, actually stating the opposite, that is, Israel is of no strategic to the USA, and N is as much a religious fanatic as M of Iran. It only lasted a few minutes; Beck said he would have both men back to finish the debate.
I agree. If the opinion of the general populace mattered then the country would be a different place. It's about money and affluence and the Jewish Establishment has a monopoly on that. Our body politic is corrupt.
Anti-Arab racist, Avigdor Lieberman, said in late April that essentially he is not worried about the new Obama admin. because the US will do whatever Israel wants. Jackass. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1080097.html At least Haaretz has the guts to print stories the US media ignore. How ironic.
Stacy, thanks for calling Lieberman what he is. Remember how the BNP and their Austrian, Swiss and French counterparts are portrayed in the media. Why are right-wing European politicians characterized as 'racist' and Israelis aren't? The answer to that rhetorical question tells you why he isn't worried.
I think the important thing — the one that Phil is highlighting — is that the fiction that AIPAC constantly trots out is starting to fall apart. The majority of Americans no longer believe that Israel can be trusted on the I/P situation. Congress can no longer say all its constituents agree that the US and Israel have "identical" agendas in the ME. The tide is turning.
Something about that felt like a clever move. There is more to it than this lately quite iterative meme. (Olmert, Lieberman). Projecting strength? Trying to win a new partner in the larger "war on terrorism"? Get Russian support against the roadmap? Russia on your side in the Middle East? Lead by following?:
US Russian Jews seem to have quite a bit of sympathy for Lieberman: Russian Jews
this nitwit asks: What do you mean by Congress? Both Senate and House of Representative? If so this would mean these Zionists represent 8,44 %. And they push a herd of impotent sheep? If they are gone things will change dramatically? Simply trying to understand. How do you suggest Democrats should do this, without ceasing to be democrats?
The problem is that voters enlightened on the subject of Israel/Palestine do not hold candidates to account on the matter. The Likudnik-neocon-AIPAC machine and voters who obey its line will smash a candidate who has ever said a single word of criticism of Likud policy. Voters who dissent from this process will still vote for a candidate who toes the Israel line if the candidate is acceptable on other issues. Many Americans with serious doubts about Israel will still vote for politicians who compete to increase the size of its welfare check, improve the special relationship, etc. What if your generic politician began receiving messages to the effect that "no matter how much I like you on all the other issues, I will be voting for the candidate who is most courageous in questioning Israeli policy and US support for it. If both you and your opponent are trying to outdo each other in being obsequious to Israel I will be voting for a third party candidate." I have an uncle running for Congress. I will tell him that if he toes the AIPAC line I will be contributing the Libertarian in his race.
The key is getting the American people to understand that taking a real interest in our foreign policy matters as much to the future of our country as internal domestic policies do …Than maybe they can be educated on how our foreign policy has been manipulated by certain powerful foreign lobbies to our country's detriment .
Juan Cole says the meeting was a train wreck for Likud. http://www.juancole.com/ Netanyahu said he did not want to rule the Palestinians. That is an evasion. If he won't give them a state, then they remain citizens of no state and inevitably Israel "rules" them in the sense of making the important decisions about how they live their lives.
I solidly agree with Mr. Weiss's assessment. He is far ahead of the curve than most of his posters on the workings of the US political system. The US is a REPUBLIC! Its not a democracy and can't be made into one no matter how many times its falsely claimed to be one. Government in America is a "PUBLIC AFFAIR," inclusive of all ethnics, ideologies, creeds singular or several and that includes Zionists. The amorphous people DO NOT RULE! Not one singular individual or group corporate or private in America CAN RULE. To say otherwise is as great a fallacy as whining about corruption, sheeple and all other nonsensical utterances simply because public affairs don't exactly go their way. Constituencies local and national elect delegates who RULE IN THEIR PLACE every 2, 4 or 6 years. Only after swearing an oath of office do they than put on the 'robes of office' in which powers executive or legislative inhere. Contrary to popular opinion an elected official is not required and cannot be forced to abide by any individual's will, or even the sentiments of the constituency that elected him/her. In a republic its not demos but populism that's the main force or driver of the sentiments of the majority in national affairs, which gets a shot to express itself every 2, 4 or 6 years. Especially as regards the US presidency, which is the only office nationally elected by the masses. That's what got Obama elected. It wasn't the Democrat party and least of all its extreme left wing that abuses itself with such notions. Presidents that rely on party affiliation, ideology and loyalty to get elected wind up with divided government perpetually deadlocked in stalemate. Obama is a shrewd and extraordinarily competent politician for his years and demonstrates a remarkable grasp for the complexities of American governance. Obama appears to be adept at knowing where the center of American sentiment lay, not imagining or believing what they are. Currently, popular support is strongly on his side and if he can maintain and hold that support no constituency singular or several, or all the money in the world can defeat him.
Amen. The public needs to understand that if the US doesn't get it's foreign policy right their pet domestic issues won't matter. But the 50% on this question…"when asked if the United States should "get tough" with Israel in order to back up its call for an end to settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, fully 50 percent of Americans said yes, "….shows a huge increase among the public who understand 'exactly ' what Israel is doing with those 'settlements'. It means people aren't just reacting to Israeli 'rampages' in Gaza, they actually have looked into the details of the conflict and understand what Israel 's 'real' motivations are in keeping the I=P war going.
Ali's Notepad: Sixty-One Years Ago…
Please don't idealise Obama. His appointment of the butcherous McChrystal, and his evident intention to turn Pakistan into another Cambodia, are objectively speaking as serious offenses to world peace as would be his giving Netanyahu 'permission' to attack Iran.
Not if congressional support is perceived to be immoral and will have to be explained later. That may be what happened when Senator Schumer pulled out of the pro-settler conference.
No, lobbies can fall. Faster than you think. Lookit the railroad lobby after the Pullman strike. Or the Taiwan lobby after the Nixon trip. Omnipotent one day. No one wants to be caught dead with the the next day. The Lobby has thrived from bipartisan cover. The poll shows clearly that Israel is becoming a partisan issue. That means the Lobby is dead. Now, there's plenty of time to hang on zombie-like as the old generation of bought politicians (e.g. Joe Biden) cycle out and a new generation of skeptics (e.g. Donna Edwards) cycle in. But to think about this clearly, you need to have a long view (Likud certainly does, as does Hamas). And long term this is death.
Was it Scheuer on the opposite side? That's actually kind of a breakthrough. And if as you say Beck was neutral, that's amazing. Look, Rush and Hannity and all the other ones are Hasbara'ed out to the gills. Glenn Beck, nutty as he may be, is the new face of obnoxious right-wing punditry. If he's not taking a clear position, that's amazing.
No. Beck wasn't neutral. I think that's why he said they would be back to finish the discussion and then…they were gone.
Jewish Zionists in House of Rep. = 32 or 7.4% Jewish Zionists in Senate = 13 or 13% http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1039304.html Jews comprise under 2% of US population, and Jewish Zionists something less than that. Yet the Jewish Zionist Democrats profess to be “progressives” and are elected under that pretense (whereas, say the Christian Zionists, while equally loathsome, don’t run as progressives and aren’t co-opting votes from the progressive base.) In fact, this could be said of all the Israel-supporting “progressive” Democrats in Congress: they’re engaged in an elaborate fraud. And voting out of fraudsters can only be good for the country.
“Presidents that rely on party affiliation, ideology and loyalty to get elected wind up with divided government perpetually deadlocked in stalemate.” And that’s a bad thing? Doesn’t that beat marching the military off to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and soon, possibly Iran? Or are progressives out to “save” the world, too, by using the ham-handed federal government in all its corruption and wisdom? Idiot left-liberals shouldn’t be attempting to socially engineer anyone either at home or abroad any more than should the idiot Statist Right. Heal thyself, “doctors.”
Steve Israel will make a run for the Senate opposing the seated Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. That would be 2 male senators of Jewish descent for New York's senate vote. That sounds like fair representation.
I'm guessing you don't live in New York. Actually it is fair representation, considering the fact that more Jews live in New York than anywhere else!
What is more disturbing is the absolute lack of mention as Nasrallah, Arafat, and Ahmadinejad for who they really are/were… bigoted racists.
Juan Cole also thinks that Israel is the only reason that the Palestinians are stateless. He's blind to the decades of aggression by Arab attackers, blind to the Arab leaders that called for Palestinians to flee, blind to the incessant propaganda that keeps Palestinian kids brainwashed, blind to reality. Evidence of Arab complicity in the Exodus: In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948-49, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return” (The Memoirs of Haled al Azm, Beirut, 1973, Part 1, pp. 386-387). According to Dr. Walid al-Qamhawi, a former member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, “it was collective fear, moral disintegration and chaos in every field that exiled the Arabs of Tiberias, Haifa and dozens of towns and villages” (Joseph Schechtman, The Refugee in the World, NY: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1963, p. 186). As panic spread throughout Palestine, the early trickle of refugees became a flood, numbering more than 200,000 by the time the provisional government declared the independence of the State of Israel. Even Jordan’s King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs, blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem: The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue (Yehoshofat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes To Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972, p. 364). “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.” — Palestinian Authority (then) Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) (Falastin a-Thaura, (March 1976) Juan Cole is even blind to the Nazi-Palestinian connection: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3248081...
The American public is getting wise to the Israeli trick of blaming the victims. Change is coming.
The US is not going to let Israel act against Iran on anything like the timetable Israel would want nor is the US going to let Israel dominate the region any longer. That leaves Israel's insanity out for the US public and their own public to see as they maneuver themselves fully into the apartheid spotlight. That will sap Israel's strength. That will rupture the special relationship and turn Israel into just another ally. That is why Israel is pretending the US battles are their own. To cover for the loss of the special relationship which will soon be just a matter of lip service.
Look at this. I posted this elsewhere for test reasons. This software keeps swallowing some of my html tags lately and substitutes them with empty links: Headlines: http://tinyurl.com/cz98h3 http://tinyurl.com/cz98h3 Last paragraph: "The much more urgent problem is to seek a resolution" of the Iranian nuclear crisis, the report says. "That is a project on which the United States and Russia need to cooperate more closely." Interesting. Somehow I wonder, was Lieberman aware of this project, and who suggested first Europe could be endangered by Iranian nukes? http://tinyurl.com/cz98h3 "Believe me, America accepts all our decisions," Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets. Lieberman granted his first major interview to Alexander Rosensaft, the Israel correspondent of one of the oldest Russian dailies, not to an Israeli newspaper. The role of Israel is to "bring the U.S. and Russia closer," he declared. Compare the headline with this: During the interview, Lieberman said Iran is not Israel's biggest strategic threat; rather, Afghanistan and Pakistan are. This comes after years of Lieberman warning about the growing Iranian threat. Now, he has dropped Tehran to number two, with Iraq coming third.
So it isn't enough to want unity; one must organize to accomplish the conditions which will bring unity: Grassroots organization. Petitions, fliers, posters, billboards, etc. Things individual average ordinary people like me can do, in addition to voting. Repeating a message different than what we hear so that others will hear also. The good news. How to turn this into a good news story? We need a win. We do need a sign from our government that we are being heard, in order to get more space in which to be heard. I'm such a bad loser; I admit. I am discouraged. It's like: we are all racists now.
The drones just aren't enough.
rfjk: “Presidents that rely on party affiliation, ideology and loyalty to get elected wind up with divided government perpetually deadlocked in stalemate.” Ed "And that’s a bad thing?" In spades! In the 60's & 70's the Democrat party turned so far leftward it lost the faith and popular support of the American people. The Republican party did not triumph over the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Ideologue democrats turned so far leftward they destroyed themselves and Ronald Regan merely glided into office over the ruins. The Democrat party did not triumph over the party of Ronald Reagan. Ideologue republicans turned so far rightward they destroyed themselves and Barak Obama merely glided into office over the ruins. What Reagan and Obama likely share is their natural affinity and luck in the American people, but unlucky in their parties that's the primary threat to their power and standing with the American people. So long as I continue hearing the gnashing of teeth of maniacs and insane asylum escapees on the far left of the Democrat party, I will be assured Obama is ruling wisely and not deviating from what he perceives the middle of the country. Speaker Pelosi's problems are an excellent example where Democrats will lead the party if they have half a chance.
Yes, it was Scheuer. Beck was totally amazed at what Scheuer said and sought assurance from the Zionist guest; last night Beck sought assurance again, this time from Bolton (now there's an unbiased voice) that Scheuer was plain wrong. It's pretty amazing how locked into the hasbara talking points Beck is considering his inquiring mind on so many other political issues. What bothers Beck is that he had a very high opinion of Scheuer's honesty, intelligence, and integrity and said so…
If your not a politician, party leader or high ranking uniformed or career civil servant in the power structures of the US government, in the grand scheme of things all the rest of us are drones. The vast majority of Americans get a one time shot to express their collective sentiments at very specific intervals in time. In between they are free to vent or petition their frustrations or pleasure at the outcomes of their choices. But beyond that they are powerless until the arrival of the next scheduled election to vent their angst or pleasure.