Continuing his trajectory as the neoconservative favorite, Senator Marco Rubio came to New York this week to raise money from a gaggle of rightwing pro-Israel donors, at the offices of Phil Rosen of the Republican Jewish Coalition. The same day Rubio tweeted his “prayers” for Israel.
My prayers are with the people of Israel and the victims of the recent Palestinian terror attacks
and the message “Israel deserves our support and respect.”
Phil Rosen is a pal of Sheldon Adelson– see the photo below– and Rubio is said to be close to getting Adelson’s endorsement.
The Forward touts the scale of an Adelson nod:
An endorsement from Adelson could bring Rubio a river of cash. In 2012, Adelson spent more than $100 million on Republican candidates. A formal endorsement by Adelson — derisively known to Democrats as the ‘Sheldon Primary’ — could come as soon as the end of October, the sources said.
Rubio has certainly been very busy in the last ten days pushing Adelson’s main issue. Here (thanks to Eli Clifton at Lobelog) is Rubio’s latest audition tape for Adelson. Obama has followed a tragic and dangerous policy.
President Obama’s approach to Israel is dangerous. Watch this video and RT if you agree. https://t.co/VpS6EesUi2
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) October 7, 2015
The Rubio script says no people have suffered more than Israelis, and he will support them unconditionally.
What this president and his administration are doing in Israel is a tragic mistake. What they’re doing is dangerous and it betrays the commitment this nation has made to the right of a Jewish state to exist in peace. No people on earth want peace more than the people of Israel. No people have suffered more at the hands of this violence and this terrorism than the people of Israel and they need America’s support unconditionally. If I become president, that’s exactly what they’ll have.
The same week Rubio released a statement condemning Palestinian violence. And hinting that Obama and Hillary Clinton are anti-semitic.
And what has been the Obama administration’s response to weeks of official Palestinian incitement, anti-Semitism, and violence? President Obama refuses to criticize Abbas or demand that he stop the incitement and violence. Instead, the administration plays the moral equivalence game…
Indeed, the indifference that President Obama and Hillary Clinton display toward incitement and violence against Jews fits a long-running pattern of callousness and neglect toward the Jewish state.
I’d point out that Rubio’s biggest sell to Adelson– who has called on Obama to nuke Iran— is that he plans to reverse Obama’s Iran policy on Day 1 in the White House. Last August Rubio made that promise on Fox:
Rubio: This is not a treaty. There’s nothing about this that’s binding on the next administration, and if I’m the president of the United States, in my first day in office, we will lift what the president is doing, we will reimpose sanctions, and in fact, I will ask Congress to increase sanctions, and we will back it up with a credible threat of military force.
Bill Hemmer: So, the votes to override a veto are not there, so in essence, this is a done deal.
Rubio: It’s a done deal for the next 18 months. But again, it’s not a treaty. There’s nothing legally binding about it. This is basically the president has decided to use the national security waiver of the current sanctions that are already on the books, and he’s going to use that waiver to lift sanctions on Iran. When I’m president of the United States, we will reimpose those sanctions on day one, and then I will go to Congress and ask them to even increase those sanctions more, and I will back that up with a credible threat of military force. A simple message to the Ayatollah: If you try to build a weapon, we will destroy your program.
The Washington Post performs disinformation on Rubio’s overtures. Tom Toles says that Adelson’s interest is the casino industry (where he’s made his money), not a word about Israel.
I don’t like to appeal personally to the Mondo staff, but can somebody tell me what the hell is going on here:
“Following up on my post below, I wanted to call your attention to this piece in The Atlantic by Jeff Goldberg, discussing the current round of violence in and around Jerusalem but coming to a very different conclusion, at least a different emphasis. By all means, read the piece because there’s only so fully I can capture his argument. But the gist is this: This violence isn’t driven by settlements or really any of Israel’s current policies. It goes back at least a century and is in essence one of Muslim supremacism and secondarily Palestinian-Arab supremacism, mixed with various obscurantist and paranoid ideas about Israeli intentions. As Jeff correctly notes, there were similar incidents almost a century ago, long before Israel was a state, let alone before the Israeli army conquered the West Bank in 1967. Let me say simply that Jeff is right.” Josh Marshall TPM.
Oh Lord: “For Jews, Israel – ironically even more the West Bank – is the cradle of their history, where they became a people and lived for about a millennium (depends where you want to disentangle history and legend). They were partly expelled once and returned. They rebelled against the Romans twice in the late first and early second century, the result of which was the destruction of almost all of Jewish society, mass killing on a genocidal scale and much of the rest of the population sold into slavery. ”
The Atlantic article I’m afraid to go near. This is from the Editor of TPM? A “historian
Other than Netanyahu has Sheldon ever backed a winner?
Rubio would be such a perfect candidate. He sells out more readily than even Jeb! would.
Tom Toles’ disinformation(cowardice, really) about the central role of Jewishness/Zionism for Sheldon isn’t going to last if Rubio would be the GOP nominee.
It won’t matter which nominee the GOP fields, they are all going to lose, but if it’s Rubio, at least it would be useful in highlighting the role that Zionist cash plays in American politics.
This would be compounded if Hillary is the nominee as she will try her hardest not be outflanked on the right over who can support Jewish Apartheid with the most vigor.
@Mooser
With Iran temporarily off the Hasbara script the “terrorist violence” in East Jerusalem and the West Bank has come as a gift to the Zionosphere Ministry of Propaganda .Obviously engineered by Nitay and his cronies by means of the “Temple Mount” incitement.Sooner or later Iran will be worked into the equation as being the true evil behind it all. Blaming Iran and Isis at the same time is a tricky one but for a nation which invented the cherry tomato I am sure that they will manage it.
As for Rubio and his comments eg:
“Indeed, the indifference that President Obama and Hillary Clinton display toward incitement and violence against Jews fits a long-running pattern of callousness and neglect toward the Jewish state.”
They are indicative of the power that the Zionist lobby and their lucre have over politicians across the spectrum in America – something thankfully which is simply not possible here in the UK , not least because the MSM here is not controlled by the aforesaid lobby and TV interviewers tend to query and frequently dismember absurd allegations and downright silly comments.
Latterly I sense that the pro-Israel crap which is being spewed out by the likes of Rubio is becoming even more ludicrous and outrageous. This probably reflects the fact that the exiled Judeo-Samarian backers such as Sheldon Adlebrain are getting desperate and they are insisting that their poodles earn their donation dollars by cranking up the pro-Israel rhetoric.
Hang in there.
Even Chris Matthews put the screws to Rubio and who owns him the other night. Will go look for the segment.
Zogby has a hot potato up at Huff Po. Although only four comments…Demonstrates what he is saying in the piece about the “willful ignorance” on the I/P issue and the complicity of the mainstream media keeping folks in the dark about facts
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/the-debate-we-have-the-de_b_8315400.html.
The Debate We Have, the Debate We Need
“Since the end of the Vietnam War, every US president has been consumed with and defined by events in the Middle East. During all this time, we spent more money, sent more troops, fought more wars, lost more lives, and expended more political capital in that region than anywhere else in the world.
During Gerald Ford’s short term in office, he had to deal with the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Carter’s one term brought success with the Camp David Peace Accords and failure with the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan was occupied with the Lebanon Civil War, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the deadly attack on the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, and then the long Iran-Iraq war, and the Iran-Contra scandal. George HW Bush built an international coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation and then turned his attention to convening the Madrid peace conference. Clinton was consumed with years of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. George W Bush responded to the 9/11 terror attacks by launching two failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He tried to compensate for years of neglect by attempting to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It was left to Barack Obama to attempt to clean up the mess that was left to him. He tried to: end the Iraq and Afghan wars; restore US standing in the Middle East; and create a framework for Israel-Palestinian peace. These Herculean tasks were made more difficult by the hyper-partisanship he found in Washington, the intransigence of a hardline government in Israel, and the region-wide chaos that resulted from the Arab Spring.”