Ynetnews.com today publishes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “list of millionaires,” a group of people Netanyahu identified as potential donors to him ahead of the 2007 primary elections in Israel.
What’s important about the list of donors that Netanyahu identified is what it says about the Israel lobby and the Democratic Party in the United States. It goes a long way in explaining why hard-right Zionist views can be found among Democratic politicians.
There is little to no difference between how Democrats and Republicans in the United States act towards Israel; criticizing Israel is a “third rail” in American politics, and some of the donors included on this list show why.
It makes sense why this is the case with the Republican Party, as the ideology of neoconservatism and military interventionism is a core part of the party, and matches up nicely with Likud’s way of looking at the world and, in particular, the Palestinians. But with the slightly more rational and liberal Democratic Party, which captured the House and Senate in 2006 in part because of growing opposition to the Iraq War, it makes less sense.
That is, until you look at some of the donors who Netanyahu reasonably thought may give him money and notice that at least a couple are heavy contributors to the Democratic Party.
Among the potential donors listed are Haim Saban and Mortimer Zuckerman.
Saban is a wealthy ”entertainment mogul” whose “greatest concern is to protect Israel” and who is “one of the largest individual donors to the Democratic Party,” according to a May 2010 profile of him in the New Yorker. The profile notes that “in 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party.” But his political views match up with the Israeli right-wing, a decidedly illiberal set of viewpoints.
From Marwan Bishara’s Imperium blog on Al Jazeera, here’s Saban in his own words, taken from a 2006 interview with Ha’aretz:
On his worries for Israel:
“… Israel does not worry me. Israel’s neighbours worry me … History proved that Sharon was right and I was wrong. In matters relating to security, that moved me to the right. Very far to the right.”
On Iran:
“The Iranians are serious. They mean business. Ahmadinejad is not a madman.
“When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler. They speak the same language. His motivation is also clear: the return of the Mahdi is a supreme goal. And for a religious person of deep self-persuasion, that supreme goal is worth the liquidation of five-and-a-half million Jews. We cannot allow ourselves that.
“Nuclear weapons in the hands of a religious leadership that is convinced that the annihilation of Israel will bring about the emergence of a new Muslim caliphate? Israel cannot allow that. This is no game. It’s truly an existential danger.”
On the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran:
“Is there a higher price than two nuclear bombs on Israel? So they will fire missiles, all right then. Iran is not Lebanon, where you pinpoint specific targets: this bridge here, that building, half of that courtyard over there. In Iran you go in and wipe out their infrastructure completely. Plunge them into darkness. Cut off their water.”
“Would I prefer a defence minister who is capable of looking at a map and saying, ‘Half a division here, two divisions there, send the commandos from the north and let the navy hit from the south’? Yes, I would prefer that. Because to negotiate with management on behalf of the unions is a skill, but it’s a different skill from planning a war. In our situation, for all time, at least in our lifetime, we need a defence minister who has a thorough understanding of these subjects.”
Zuckerman is a media mogul who owns the New York Daily News and is the editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, and is a major contributor to the Democratic Party, according to the Center for Reponsive Politics’ Open Secrets website. He is a former head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and espouses hawkish views when it comes to the Palestinians. For instance, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Zuckerman calls Jerusalem ”its capital” and refers to the illegal settlement of Ramat Shlomo in East Jerusalem as a “Jewish suburb.”
The Democratic Party is beholden to people like Zuckerman and Saban, who were listed as potential donors to a right-wing Israeli political party whose official platform states that Likud “rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”
No wonder Likudnik views get play within the supposedly liberal party in American politics.
This article originally appeared on Alex Kane's blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
I see sheldon adelson ronald perelman are right up at the top of Nettie’s donors. What other country’s domestic party politicians are financed so much by foreigners? Is there not something drastically upside down about this? What is it, 98%? And the same hand full of people in the USA finance, what 40% of Demos campaigns and 25% of Repub campaigns? The whole thing reminds me of the European court jews who financed both sides of conflicts back in the ye old days across the pond. What’s modern at the deep and hard core of contemporary life, other than technology?
An excellent article from Alex Kane.
again ;)
Haim Saban does not pay one dime in Us taxes. (Don’t have the link for it, but you can google.)
MRW,
you mean this article where he paid 250 million to the government?
link to articles.latimes.com
After the fact, yonira.
Here’s another from the NYT
“Tax Cheats Called Out of Control.”
link to query.nytimes.com
“After the fact, yonira.”
Oh, yes! Always after they’ve been caught the hand in the honey pot..
I commend you MRW, you’ve graduated to 1/2 truths, congrats.
The whole truth is that Saban has been giving piles of his money to Israel and withholding his honest tax share to the USA–until he is finally caught by the IRS. Happy, yonira?
In the 1930s, some people decried the (they said, excessive) power of [a few] Jewish bankers. From this they decided (illogically) that ALL Jews were enemies.
Nowadays, we see that [a few] powerful Jewish moguls (but are they bankers?) control vast media empires and control major political parties in the USA and Israel. Wow! Isn’t democracy wonderful? For them, I mean.
I kinda wish that American politics were not available to the highest bidder, but these guys were listening when Will Rogers said Americans had “the best Congress that money could buy”. And now the US Supreme Court, ever alert to efficiencies of scale, has opened this ownership up to the corporations.
I wonder what Lawrence Tribe has said about that SCOTUS decision. If memory serves, there were 3 dissenting opinions, which I agree with; the most obvious fruit is the flood of tweedledee’s and tweedledum’s corporate-funded campaign ads we are seeing on TV as November 2 approaches.
I think you are mistaken to think the dems are any different than the republicans. They all voted for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, supported the contras in Nicaragua, rightist murderers in El Salvador and Guatemala, and dictatorships in Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, and the anti semitic dictatorship in Argentina. The Dems escalated the war in Vietnam dramatically. They support the Israelis to the hilt. They just talk more sweetly than the republicans. There is only one party–the republocrats.
You mean the plutocrats? The dems have more moneybag funders than the repubs. Take your pick MSNBC or FOX talking heads, all funny guys and girls. For pure twit, though, how can you beat Newt G?
Yes, we’re up against the top elites, the ones who make the big calls, in the case of pubisher Zuckerman, for example, his not saying a word about President George W. Bush’s lying to us about those WMD’s. Let’s see, how many hundreds of thousands of lives did Zuckermans cover up cost? Which means we’can’t count on MSM to put out what the public must know; if, that is, it’s to become involved. So without MSM how will the the word get out? We’ll get it out, that’s how.
Hence the importance of how the Obama regime is trying to cut off the latest and former Wikileaks projects in the name of protecting persons named in the docs; when Wikileaks asked our government for the names so they could black them out before releasing the docs, the government said in effect, “No thanks, we rather sue you.” Shows how they operate. Obama is cracking down more than Shrub did. Obama could have pursued the case against those AIPAC hotshots, but he buried that sore just beginning to open. Can we have another Pentagon Papers with AIPAC and Israel involved? So far, all we have is that PFC sitting in jail as the suspected source for the docs released by Wikileaks.
I find it amazing that Yediot can publish Netnayahu’s personal list of political donors link to richardsilverstein.com
with notations about who’s most generous, while American newspapers and TV reveal nothing at all about US political donations (although there have been a lot of hints about Wall Street backing of Obama and his resulting debt).
Just proves Israel (for all its faults) has, at least, a free press.
Easy to explain the situation, RP. A shonda for the goyim means, roughly, that someone of the Jewish faith is not only doing something shameful (shonda), but doing it in front of non-Jews
Alex,
This is an excellent article, sir. I really appreciate your dedication to making a difference.
By “abroad” he means donations mainly from the USA, and some from Canada and England. It’s not just Nettie’s party that gets such funds.
Alex..Thanks for this “bomb”..Posted it myself..
What this article confirms for me is the fact that American Jewish Zionists have a lot more influence on Israeli policies than generally recognized. Uri Avnery comments on this all of the time. Israel, like the US, has elections which require massive campaign funding to succeed. Much of this funding comes from Jewish-American oligarchs. These same oligarchs finance settlement construction, think tanks, etc. In other words, Israeli society is heavily influenced by these Jewish-American oligarchs, who are extremely right-wing, financing Likud, but not Labor, or extremist parties when Likud is insufficiently right-wing. Israel is the way it is in no small measure do to the influence of these US oligarchs. These are the same people that finance the Democrats and Republicans. The relationship between Obama and Netanyahu takes on new meaning when you realize that they both work for Haim Saban and friends.
A change of Jewish-American leadership is what it’ll take to topple these vicious and cruel U.S. oligarchs. No problem, though, because said leadership change already’s underway.
Some honest bright lights think the US is already doomed, and they tell you why, for example:
March 24, 2010
Good-Bye
Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”
And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”
The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.
Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.
Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.
I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.
When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.
As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.
Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.
Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.
I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”
For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.
For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.
The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.
America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.
These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.
The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Yep. When you clear away all the sentimental smoke gushed by these oliarchs concerning their love for Israel (sometimes with their love for America tacked on, depending on how wide the range of the audience) it seems to boil down to they view Israel (beyond the cheap romantic aspect) as an insurance policy for themselves–in case a diaspora government finds itself in need to open up the can of worms at last. They can always escape to Israel, which is really stingy with extradition allowance as to its Jews. They stir up Holocaust memories to get the little Jews on their side. Their insurance policy would not be so easily assumed if Arab Israelis had equal rights in Israel.
Based upon what Haim Saban says about Iran, it would appear that he is deranged. I’m talking about a ‘dissociative state’ where he has lost contact with reality.
Dissociation – link to en.wikipedia.org
One of the most discouraging phenomena in American politics is the widespread belief that the Democrats somehow represent a more peaceful wing of our society. They are indeed artisans of death along with the Republicans.
Vote Libertarian or other third party. Boycott the torturers.
I did, except for some of the local slots where there was no choice except for a repub or demo. I finally decided not to buy the bromide that the only thing practical to do, given our two party system, is to vote for a demo or repub. The system itself, the roots of it, have to be changed and those will never change under either major party.