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Jeffrey Blankfort

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  • Doorstop book by Texas scholar suggests New Historians are bustin out all over
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 24, 2010 at 1:06 am with 1 replies

      The threatened goal of the resassessment speech was to demand that Israel pull back to the 1967 borders both Ford and Kissinger had been frustrated by Israeli intransigence in the form of its refusal to comply with prior agreements to pull back from areas of the Sinai that had been captured from Egypt. Intimidated by the letter signed by 76 senators Ford never made the speech. Since that time, Israel has been able to call on at least the same number of senators to threaten other presidents when, in what they perceived were the best interests of the US, they had the temerity to challenge Israel. They have already sent three such letters to Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the last one telling her and by implication Obama, that differences between Israel and the US, when they arise, should be kept hidden from the public. What was hidden from the public, thanks to the Zionized nature of the mainstream media, was the fact that these letters, drafted by AIPAC, existed at all.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 24, 2010 at 12:57 am with 1 replies

      It will be streaming on http://www.kzyx.org on Wed., March 26, from 9 to 10 AM (Pacific Time). It is not archived at the moment. The interview will begin at 9:20 following news and opinions much like I express here.

  • House votes 410-4 to award another $205 million to--
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 20, 2010 at 11:59 pm

      When Eisenhower was in its presidency, the Zionist operation was in swaddling clothes compared to what it has become today and while the American Zionist Council, the precursor to AIPAC, had a program, which it spelled out, to lobby every sector of American society, it was only in the early stages of doing so and had not achieved the dominant position in so many of them, such as the media, which it holds today. But even Ike had to make some concessions to Israel's domestic agents, but nothing like what we have seen since.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 20, 2010 at 9:28 pm with 5 replies

      The Israeli Leviathan has successfully penetrated every critical sector of US society and has either taken it over or immobilized it from acting in US interests and the anti-war movement is certainly one of those critical sectors by every measurable standard when it comes to this issue. What for example is the most important thing that Richard Becker of International Answer tell us in his new book on the US-Israel-Palestinian relationship? That the problem is not only NOT the Israel Lobby but he would want us to think, it is the US government, in this case, the Obama administration, that has provided "the lobby" with its power.

      Of course, to put forth this piece of nonsense, he has to ignore what happened to Gerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bush Sr., not to mention Bill Clinton who was also brought into line when he pressured Israel too much. Just to make sure that Clinton got the message, AIPAC had 81 senators sign a letter telling him to chill. The problem even affects the Palestinian organizations that are afraid to deal with the issue and still invite Chomsky and Zunes to speak at their events.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 20, 2010 at 8:27 pm with 6 replies

      Back to the issue at hand. Stark has probably the best voting record in the House when it comes to opposing AIPAC but since he never makes speeches about it (or apparently is asked to by Bay Area activists who have ignored him) AIPAC lets him alone.

      That the retiring rep from Cindy Corrie's district Brian Baird, plus Keith Ellison, Jim Moran (who blamed the Jewish establishment for the Iraq war but who has since been gelded) and Nick Rahall (who usually votes against aid to Israel) voted for the appropriation is another indication that at this point in time, despite criticism from outside the beltway and on the net, the pro-Israel Leviathan is more powerful than ever.

  • Desch: Bloom misses the historical shift re anti-Semitism
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 7:35 pm

      Excuse me for barging in here, but I doubt that "eee" has ever been to Israel or if he has he has never ventured into Jerusalem where the hassidim or haredi or "black hats." as they are referred to, hate the secular Jews who in turn are disgusted by the haredi who want to run their lives under the Jewish equivalent of sharia law.

      The haredi/hassidim routinely trash bus stops that show a woman in a bathing suit (and they do it outside of Jerusalem as well), and they will stone any woman they say that walks through their neighborhoods showing any skin below the waste, or any car that has the nerve to drive through their neighborhoods on a Saturday. Of course, all their women keep their heads covered.

      They do not recognize any sect other than their own as having any humanity, let along legitimacy, and the words they call each other would be labeled anti-semitic were they spoken by non-Jews and this is true of those who live in New York, as well.

      They are principally anti-zionist, since the Jewish state was only to come with the advent of the Messiah, but with the exception of Neturei Karta, a distinct minority, they are only too willing to take money both from the state of Israel and from the US government. Leading members of the haredi community have been caught running a number of scams on the government in order to get grants to which they are not entitled, seeing Washington or Albany, only as a cash cow to be milked and to which they have no sense of loyalty. That these escapades along with the reports of child molestation on the part of some of their leading rabbis have been kept out of the mainstream press, or covered only as local news is a tribute to their political power as a voting bloc in key sections of NY and LA.

      What I have described in Israel I have seen for myself and what I describe here can be found in the noxious pages of the Jewish Press, which bills itself as the largest independent Jewish newspaper.It used to run columns by Rabbi Meir Kahane and the equally racist mayor, Ed Koch, it praised the Hebron mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein and even rationalized the murder of Yitzhak Rabin who it has deemed a traitor. Here's the URL:
      link to jewishpress.com

      For a quite a different and a refreshing view I recommend the weekly Forward, which is the only Jewish paper which not only tells the truth about the haredi/hassidim, but also frequently runs articles critical of Israeli policies and even, occasionally of AIPAC and the ADL: http://www.forward.com

      The paper edition to which I have subscribed since it first came out more than 20 years ago occasionally carried a comic strip by one of the nation's premier comic artists, Eli Valley, that could not be published in ANY other paper and who spares nothing and no one in the Jewish community, here or in Israel, from his wit: link to evcomics.com

  • Harold Bloom says at least half the countries do worse things than Israel
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 1:08 pm with 3 replies

      I didn't say that Shakespeare and Dickens were Jew haters which is unfortunately the way those who criticize Jews for anti-social behavior tend to be categorized by Jewish tribalists. I said they drew their characters from real life in which Jews were the money-lenders and Jews also ran sweat shops as other Jews would do later when they came to the US and still do. Since in the US they were able to own real property some became and remain slumlords. Certainly, the ownership of prime real estate is today a Jewish domain whether it is in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. This is all in an area where I think any Wondering Jew should tread lightly.

      You want a modern day equivalent of Shylock? I don't know any personally but how about Lloyd Blankfein or AIG's Maurice Greengerg of Lehman Bros. Richard Fuld? How about Penny Pritzker, Obama's campaign treasurer who was among the first to issue sub-prime loans?

      If you want a current Fagin, I give you Sholom Rabushkin:
      link to chicagotribune.com and then this about how his fellow Chabadniks support this miscreant:
      link to chicagotribune.com

      If you really want the low down on Rabushkin here's a link to the website of the Jewish weekly Forward which, unquielym has had the courage to expose him and other exploiters in the Jewish community:
      link to forward.com

      Next question.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 12:36 pm with 5 replies

      Go back and read "The Fateful Triangle" like I did before writing my article on Chomsky (www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html) and you will see, after his harsh blasts at Israel which he still does to this day, he ends up placing the blame not on Israel or its Jewish supporters in the diaspora (who he consideres irrelevant) but on the US.

      What is more important is that he bragged about openly opposing the notion of sanctions against Israel, [see article] claiming that the Israeli public would be against them, and then, in the next moment, he tells the stunned interviewer that it is the US that should be sanctioned. One assumes from that that the wishes and desires of the Israeli public are more worthy of respect than those of his fellow Americans, since it is obvious that the majority would not consent to be sanctioned (although the US fully deserves it).

      Then he was also adamant about not using the term, apartheid, to refer to the conditions under which Palestinians in the OT have been forced to live. Not only has such a description been applied to their situation by anti-zionist Israelis and prominent South Africans, but it is clearly a term that most thinking Americans are familiar with and has more a pejorative connotation than does "occupation" which is itself a misleading term implying something static that is anything but.

      So we shouldn't be impressed by Chomsky's anger over Israel's behavior when the next minute he undercuts the efforts of others to bring it to a halt. Add to this his opposition to the Palestinian right of return and to a single state and you have the whole package neatly wrapped.

      Those who wish to listen to a half-hour virtual debate between Ali Abunimah and myself vs. Chomsky, here's the URL:
      link to vomena.org

      It had to be a virtual debate because Chomsky refused to debate either one of us.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 11:14 am with 20 replies

      What is extraordinary is how Anthony Julius and Harold Bloom do go on about the "anti-Semitism" of Shakespeare and Dickens for their introducing the world of literature to Shylock in the Merchant of Venice and Fagin in Oliver Twist, when one only needs to open the pages of the New York Times or the Jewish weekly, Forward, particularly, the latter, to read critical pieces about the Shylocks and Fagins who exist and periodically become an embarrassment (but only when exposed) in the Jewish community today.

      Shakespeare and Dickens didn't invent these characters out of whole cloth any more than he did others in his plays. Bloom's defense of these anti-social creatures is essentially no different than those, like himself and Julius, who equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism. Whatever they do, the Blooms, the Juliuses, as well as some posters on this blog, tell us, Jews, as Jews, are never to be blamed. That includes even some who claim to be "anti-zionists." For them, the real criminals behind the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are those who have allowed them to do it and for Chomsky and his acolytes, Zunes, Maher and David Green, it's all the fault of the US. That's what I have called the "Chomsky Defense," and I imagined Gen. Augusto Pinochet standing trial and claiming that "Washington made me do it!" Was Pinochet any worse than Ariel Sharon or Menachem Begin, both of whom, when they visited the US after their bloody war on Lebanon in 1982, were welcomed and feted by the American Jewish Community leadership and returned to Israel with checks for millions from American Jews stuffed in their pockets?

      Does it matter that Time Magazine refused to defend in a NY court its own reporter who claimed that Sharon was responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre because Sharon's court costs were being paid by the Nakash brothers, owners of Jordach jeans, one of the magazine's largest advertisers? Might that fact have something to do with how Time has the conflict? This is a subject that those who shield The Lobby never address.

  • Dog wags tail (against the Israel lobby theory)
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 1:48 pm

      DiMaggio, basically a decent guy, really didn't know what he was talking about when it came to Jewish contribution and neither does David Green, and more importantly, I don't think he wants to. In my article on Chomsky, cited with URL above, I wrote that in 2000, according to list of the top contributors to the 2000 election campaign compiled by Mother Jones from FEC contributions, and which the magazine ran under the headline, The MoJo 400, 7 of the top 10, 12 of the top 20, and at least 125 of the top 250 were Jews (at which point I stopped counting), 75% of whose money went to the Democrats and the balance to the Republicans.

      After I cited these figures in an article "The Israel Lobby and the Left:Uneasy Questions" link to leftcurve.org
      Mother Jones dropped the list from its website. The magazine had begun keeping such lists in 1996 but 2000 was it last. Wonder why?

      In 2002, Haim Saban, profiled in the current New Yorker, gave $12.3 million to the Democrats, $7 billion in one check with which the party built its new Washington headquarters. (That's also the same amount he gave the Brookings Inst to set up the Saban Center and the same amount he used to spy Spanish language Univision. I forget how much he gave AIPAC to build its new building but it was considerable.

      None of this apparently is relevant to Chomsky, Zunes, Maher or Green who are still in denial about the suffocating role that Jewish money plays in "our" elections, even when faced with the facts. Zunes, who in 2008 received $89,500 from the Council of Foreign Relations' Peter Ackerman's International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (check that out!), still claims that the aerospace industry gives more money to members of Congress than do supporters of Israel despite being twice confronted with the 400 list and just the other day, Chomsky quoted Zunes as the authority on the subject. If we weren't talking about people's lives here, this would be a colossal joke.

      And I am not focusing on Chomsky, Mr. Green, but on the role of the Jewish Zionist establishment in shaping the policies that continue to oppress the Palestinians and I will take on anyone, you included who, by your and their actions, provide damage control for that establishment.

      For the last word on the subject, I will turn to the late professor Israel Shahak who was a friend of mine as he was of Chomsky's and who, by Chomsky's own admission, was the one who convinced him to begin writing and speaking about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is from my article, Damage Control: Noam Chomsky etc., in which I quote a from a letter from Shahak to me in 1991 after I had written him about Chomsky's dismissal of the notion that AIPAC or the lobby had anything to do with the first Gulf War:
      ---------------------------------------------------
      Much of what Chomsky tells us is "not controversial," invariably proves to be very much so and particularly when it comes to the relations between Israel and the White House. The late revered Israeli scholar and human rights activist, Professor Israel Shahak pointed out that Chomsky’s analysis suffers from his

      "undoubted tendency of demonizing the American presidency and the Executive in general, while ignoring the Legislature, but also from his very mistaken, in my opinion, tendency of assuming that not only the principles but literally everything concerning the American imperialism was laid in detail long ago, in 1944 or about that time, and from then on the policy is, so to say, a follow-up of instructions from a computer.

      "This ignores not only the human factor in the US itself but also the completely different nature of the foes and the victims of the US during the last decades. There can be no doubt, in my own opinion, that the actual policies of the US are complex even when they are evil, influenced, as in the case of all other states, by many factors of which AIPAC is one and human stupidity (for which he never allows) is another."

      And finally, this very insightful paragraph:

      "But such simplistic theories, backed by his memory and ability to pick isolated examples (sometimes from a long time ago like his stock example of Eisenhower in the case of Israel while ignoring everything else from 1967 on) can appeal to [the] young who look for certainty and also for those who don't want to [be] engaged in actual work and so find substitute for it in crude and useless display of emotion. "
      -----------------------------------------------------
      Those last three lines speak volumes about Chomsky's fans. Now, I assume Green will add the late Dr. Shahak to his list of targets.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 11:50 am

      Mark Twain was on target when in 1909 he noted that the only "native criminal class is Congress" as was Will Rogers when he said "America has the best Congress money can buy." That being said and acknowledged, it still remains the only game in town and it can be subjected to pressure from the streets as we eventually saw with the winding down of the war in Vietnam and the vote NOT to fund the Contras (which led to the Iran-Contra affair in which Congress let Israel off the hook.)

      There has never been a national campaign, until recently, to make Israel pay economically, nor has there been any campaign that I'm aware of to make those members of Congress, and the liberal Democrats, in particular, pay for towing Israel's line. Is that the fault of the members of Congress or those in the movement who have been led astray not only by Chomsky and his devotees but by the movement's leadership that prefers to blame everything on the White House and that insists that the US really supports Israeli expansionism and that the routine humiliations to which American officials from the president on down are subjected to by Israel, if they are mentioned at all, are all part of the game, nothing more than a charade.

      The latest to do this is Dick Becker, the head of International ANSWER who begins his new book on the Israel-Palestine conflict with a section of The Lobby. Its power,according to Becker is enhanced by the White House for its nefarious purposes. Try telling that to Obama as the letters pressuring him to bend over for Israel signed by 3/4 of both Houses Congress pile up on his desk.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 9, 2010 at 1:38 am with 2 replies

      Well, sooner or later, as I expected, one of The Lobby's second line of "damage control" specialists, David Green, has arrived on the scene, venting his spleen with nothing more than ad hominem attacks on me and on those who have had the courage to take on the albatross or leviathan, take your pick, that has Congress in its clutches and is tearing away what little is left of American democracy.

      Green has problems with the notion of "dual loyalty." Perhaps, if I used the term, "Jewish tribalism," which seems to be his affliction, it would hit much closer to home. In any case, there is nothing approaching the refutation of any statement of fact in Green's screed and if he has any criticisms of my article on Prof. Chomsky, factual criticisms, that is, I would like to see them. Chomsky himself, towering intellectual that he is has said that he will not read the article (which provides a wonderful excuse not to refute it). For those on this list who have not read the article:"Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict" here's the link:
      link to leftcurve.org

      What is interesting but not surprising is that Green makes the same accusation regarding people who raise the issue of The Lobby as does Chomsky, that WE are the ones who are hurting the Palestinians. I have yet to have a Palestinian tell me that.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 8, 2010 at 8:17 pm with 1 replies

      This Bandolero is loaded. Should the Iraqi government end up being close to Iran which seems all but inevitable, this will in fact play into the hands of Israel and it supporters who are eager to keep the region destabilized and thus justifying Israel remaining armed to the teeth and ready to strike. And, oh yes, holding on to its settlements.

      Those who deny the role of Israel and its US supporters in pushing the US into war with Iraq while claiming it to have been a war for Iraq's oil--apart from knowing nothing about how oil companies have worked in the region--have a hard time explaining why the current war was opposed by George Bush Sr., Jame Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, all of whom have closer ties to the big oil companies than anyone in the Bush Jr administration, including Cheney. Moreover, at last glance, the major oil contracts have gone to China, Russia and Malaysia, with the Americans reduced to mainly smaller service contracts. As Bob and M&W have shown, both Iraqi and Iranian oil would have been available to the US and the world market without war or the threat of war.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 8, 2010 at 8:03 pm with 2 replies

      With one exception, it is difficult to find over the years, prior to the election of Bill Clinton, in which the State Dept., to use a term from the Israeli press, was "Judaized," any statement by an American official, not speaking before a national Jewish conference, that refers to Israel as a strategic asset or that support of it has been in our national interest. That one exception was Ronald Reagan and no serious person can credit him with having any real sense of what the term meant.

      Well before the Christian Zionists emerged as a movement, AIPAC and the Zionist establishment had things well under control in Washington, feeding major donations to key Republicans as well as providing the largest sums for the Democrats. What the Christian Zionists have added is clout within the Southern and Midwestern sectors of the Republican Party, making it far more difficult than in the past for a Republican to speak critically of Israel. While no one seems to question their influence, it is much more difficult to get people to appreciate that they are only following the lead of AIPAC and the organized Jewish community.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 8, 2010 at 7:50 pm

      If there is any distraction here, it is by Maher and those of like mind to deflect Americans away from going after those who can be reached politically, both members of Congress and the Zionist establishment that "owns" them and who ultimately are responsible for the "worsening condition of the Palestinians" that, you claim, concerns you.

      Those who would have us believe that Israel has only been doing what a succession of administrations has wanted it to do, a claim easily negated by historical facts, are the ones doing the distracting and up to now they have succeeded, leaving the field of play in the US to the Zionists. That examining this is a "distraction" is curiously enough, the term used by Noam Chomsky who could be said to have been The Lobby's Pied Piper.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 8, 2010 at 12:46 pm

      In my comment above where I wrote that 'Egypt at the time presented no threat to Israeli hegemony" it should read "Egypt at the time presented no threat to US hegemony."

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 8, 2010 at 12:44 pm with 13 replies

      In the wake of AIPAC's triumphant annual convention and the subsequent backtracking of the Obama administration on its minimum demands upon the Netanyahu government, thanks to letters warning the president to "lay off" Israel signed by three-quarters of the members of both houses of Congress, the biggest question I have for Stephen Maher is WHY he wrote such an article which is no more than the regurgitation of previous pieces by Noam Chomsky and Stephen Zunes which have been as equally lacking in fact?

      For the moment, here are just two examples of what I am talking about:

      Maher writes: "One of the most important sources of US global power is its control of energy resources; a loss of this control would result in significant damage to US hegemony. Thus what happens in the Middle East has global implications for the US empire." No one would argue that this is not true, but when he then writes that, "The overwhelming firepower provided to Israel, which is aggressively used against any who challenge the established order, has played a central role in maintaining US control of the region, providing security for US-backed oil dictatorships as well as keeping a check on them," this is sheer fantasy of which he is unable to offer us a single example, unless he considers Hezbollah and the Palestinians a threat to the oil producing countries. Going back to 1967, as does Chomsky and Zunes, and pretending that Israel's defeat of Egypt was done as a service to the US doesn't stand up to historical scrutiny since Egypt at the time presented no threat to Israeli hegemony.

      Moreover, the US was forced to bail Israel out with a massive shipment of conventional weaponry when it was attacked by Egypt and Syria six years later when Israel threatened to use its nuclear weapons if its military situation worsened and such aid was not forthcoming.

      Here's another Maher fantasy caught my eye:

      He writes: "Freeman's assertions that the US has no bases or troop presence in Israel,' and that 'Israeli bases are not for US use' can be dismissed as irrelevant, since the main purpose of maintaining Israel as a client is precisely to avoid the need to use US forces directly." Excuse me, but in what theater of war is Maher referring to? Does he really believe that Lebanon, with or without Hezbollah, is a threat to US interests in the region and that Israel's wars on Lebanon have been on Washington's behalf? The one time that the US was concerned about developments in Lebanon that were perceived as threatening in the atmosphere of the Cold War was in 1958 and Eisenhower sent in the Marines, not the Israelis.

      "Instead," Maher writes, "planes provided by the US 'gratis,' as Freeman says, are flown by Israeli pilots, dropping US bombs and enforcing regional order and 'stability -- in other words, US control." Where, precisely, Stephen, is this happening? And what is your definition of stability?

      Maher continues, "Thus, contrary to the view of Freeman and other proponents of the Lobby thesis, the armaments, material support, and economic benefits supplied Israel by the United States guarantee it this regional primacy, and are a central part of its regional strategy." Having made a statement that is by itself erroneous, he then provides us, not surprisingly, with an equally erroneous conclusion.

      At the moment, the Obama administration and the Pentagon are doing their very best to persuade the Israelis from lauching an attack on Iran, one that is most certain to lead to a global catastrophe. At the same time they have to deal with the ENTIRE Zionist establishment, its organizations, its think tanks and its operatives in Congress and the media (what is usually but mistakenly referred to as the Israel Lobby) which are either openly calling for a US attack on Iran or for such punitive sanctions against Tehran that should they become law would be tantamount to an act of war.

      There is much more in Maher's position that can be as easily shredded, but the question for me, at this point, is what is his agenda?

      By avoiding dealing with and confronting the Zionist establishment AKA the Organized Jewish Community over the years because of the false belief that Israel's actions are simply those of a client state at the servant of its master, the Left and supporters of Palestinian rights, in general, have allowed the Zionist establishment to become a virtual leviathan.

      Maher complains that criticisms leveled at him by Idrees Ahmad violate "the whole purpose of intellectual engagement [which] should be to discuss and debate competing hypotheses, and promote the healthy discussion and debate that are surely a healthy part of any democracy."

      No one would dispute that were this not a subject that has so directly and so negatively affected so many people's lives who have had no chance to participate in the discussion and had Maher introduced anything new, not to mention, factual, into the debate. Again, the question is why did he do it and why did he do it now?

  • 'Special relationship' has only threatened the 'stable flow of oil'
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 2, 2010 at 4:16 pm

      It is intellectually dishonest to cite sources in which it is implied that the source agrees with the writer, in this instance, Chomsky, when the exact opposite is true. But since Chomsky has a long history of distorting US-Israel relations in order to portray Israel as a client state, America's "cop on the beat," which it never has been, such distortions as well as serious omissions are necessary. But not acceptable.

  • I can't place an old friend on Fifth Avenue
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 2, 2010 at 11:37 pm

      I found myself appreciating Philip's story because I know other Jews who have had similar dilemmas, most notably my parents who broke off long time friendships with most of their Jewish friends who had been with them in supporting the black civil rights struggle and before that rights for Latinos in Los Angeles, but who became like Afrikaners when the issue turned to the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

      It wasn't that my parents were as obsessed with the issue as I have been, it was that they just didn't keep a double set of books or maintain a double standard when it came to oppression and repression. They were well aware how Jews had been victimized in WW2 but they were not about to transfer the burden of that victimization to the backs of the Palestinians.

      My father, in fact, while supporting a bi-national state, had put on the largest fund raiser for Israel to that time in the Hollywood Bowl, something he later came to regret as he became aware of the issues and what Israel was truly about. This is what Philip has come to understand but it is something apparently beyond the grasp of the Rachels of this world.

  • More Arizona contradictions, this time from an Is-lobbyist
    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 2, 2010 at 11:51 pm

      I might add Barbara Lee of Berkeley some of the time to the latter list, but only when she's pushed.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort May 2, 2010 at 11:50 pm

      To get back on track with this subject from which my old email charmer Rachel led everyone astray, the reason that AIPAC's Peter Beinhart took the side of the Mexican-Americans in Arizona is not because they give a damn about whether their rights are respected or not but because the Zionist Establishment (ZE), led primarily by the American Jewish Committee, has been applying a full court love press to the Latino community because the ZE understands the necessity of bringing all those new voters and particularly their leaders inside the big Israeli tent in order to make sure they genuflect to the Jewish state like everyone else.

      At this point the ZE can be said to totally own the Hispanic Caucus and with the exception of Maxine Waters and Gwen Moore, the same can be said as well for the House Negro Caucus.

  • Emulating the perpetrators of terror
    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 11:28 pm with 55 replies

      Wondering Jew, tell me what Palestinian children see on TV that they haven't seen much worse happen right in front of their eyes. And what are all these Israel firsters, like yourself, who pretend to be looking for peaceful solutions doing on this blog rather than taking your comments to some of the ultra right zionist blogs that infest cyberspace? That's a question for you, Witty, Yonira and the rest. It's rhetorical, of course. I know the answer.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 11:20 pm

      Before there were any school bus explosions (and how many were there?), the Palestinians had been subjected to massacres and forcibly removed from their homes and villages and many not once but twice. I do not justify or support the bombing of schools or school busses but perhaps you should address your message not to this blog but to your Israeli comrades who are past masters at taking revenge. It wasn't a Palestinian who came up with the concept, "An eye for an eye."

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 11:15 pm

      Hey, Yonira. I've been to the West Bank. I've been to Gaza. And I've been to Lebanon where I had a chance to see the Israeli wehrmacht up close, even had one take a shot at me which creased my hair in Lebanon in '83. I've seen how they treat Arab people whatever their nationality, thanks to the racism young Israelis imbibe with their mother's milk to borrow a phrase from that old terrorist and would be collaborator with the Nazis, Yitzhak Shamir.

      Palestinians will stop hating Israelis when the Israelis take their feet off their necks, pack their bags and, at the very least, get their collective tuchuses back behind the Green Line. If the Palestinians demand more than that, they'll have my support for Israel has earned the contempt of all those who value justice.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 9:52 pm

      The key word that seems to have eluded your consideration, Witty, is justice. When Israel and its supporters like you, Yonira, WJ and the rest, use the term, "peace." what you and they really mean is "pacification," and no matter how many years the Israelis try to enforce it, there will be no peace until the Palestinians have justice.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 9:47 pm with 28 replies

      Wondering Jew, when a Palestinian child watches his father forced to get down on his knees and bark like a dog to please some teenage monster* in an Israel army uniform, he doesn't need to watch children's television to hate that Israeli and everything he represents. I can just imagine that child and others like him saying to themselves, "Never again!" or is that slogan reserved for the perpetrators?

      *a product of traditional zionist family upbringing.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 9:34 pm with 7 replies

      Where have you been, Yonira? The Palestinians have been robbed of their homeland at gunpoint with the blessings of the so-called civilized world, have watched territories to which they were forced to flee subjected to further occupation and dispossession and murderous attack and in the case of Lebanon, bombardment from the air, land, and sea.

      Add to that the daily humiliations to which three generations of Palestinians have been subjected by your sadistic lanzmen and there is no cartoon, no depiction of the Israeli enemy that I would consider over the line. Israel has made its bed and if it turns out to be one of nails, it has richly deserved it.

      Next question?

  • New Israeli military order on 'lawful permits' would seem to allow expulsion of all West Bank Palestinians
    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 11, 2010 at 2:39 pm with 6 replies

      Witty says he opposes forced removal which assumes other ways of removing Palestinians from occupied Palestine would be acceptable.

      There is a forced removal that I suspect much of the world would support and that is of every last Jewish settler from the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

      What the Israelis with their racist paranoia about demographics do not realize is that the presence of millions of Palestinians on both sides of the green line represents a life insurance policy. Should the Israelis make the entire area under their control "Arabrein," that is "clean of Arabs" they will be encouraging the likelihood that the land one day, not long thereafter, will become "Judenrein."

  • When Israel invaded Lebanon, Americans died
    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 3, 2010 at 11:44 pm with 3 replies

      Yonira, I was making the point that is irrefutable. That if Israel had not launched its criminal war on Lebanon, the US Marines, soldiers and sailors would not have been in Lebanon and would not, therefore, have been killed. I was proving that Dershowitz is a pathological liar which is inherent in the zionist genetic makeup.

      I recall when the US and Israeli officers exchanged words and I was hoping that the Marines would take it a bit further than that. I grew up in WW 2 loving the Marines and it had been a long time since I had supported anything they did. I was hoping to have a reason to back them again.

      The idea that the Israelis were aware of the upcoming attack on the marine barracks came from former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky but I don't believe that he would have had any direct knowledge of it. The Israeli intelligence HQ in Tyre/Sour was blown up 10 days later which seems to make Ostrovsky's opinion on that questionable.

      The Israelis did try and kill US Ambassador to Lebanon John Gunther Dean because they were furious that he had advised the Lebanese Christians to cut their ties with Israel and pay more attention to the US. It didn't matter to the Izzies that Dean was Jewish. He wasn't by an stretch a Zionist. An attempt was made on his life through an attack on his armed limousine. The bullet casings were traced to a shipment from the US to Israel. 'Nuff said. I interviewed Dean in Paris where he lives several years ago and his opinion about the nefarious role played by the Zionist lobby in the US is identical to mine. Unlike that parade of Israeli Firsters that dominate Congress and the media, Dean is a patriotic American of the old school, the one that apparently no longer exists.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 3, 2010 at 5:52 pm with 1 replies

      Yonira recommended that we read a piece of self-serving pro-Israel propaganda that listed as its author, Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the Marine base commander at the time of the attack who should have been court-martialed because the guards at the entrance to the base, referred to by the Marines as the Beirut Hilton, carried unloaded weapons.
      Geraghty also does not mention that in the morning of the bombing the roads leading to the airport were empty and that the truck bomber had to pass two Lebanese army checkpoints at a time when the whole city was on the lookout for suicide bombers. Elsewhere I have read that the driver of the truck was identified as an Iranian whose strange accent, had he been stopped at a checkpoint, would have been easily detected.

      Without a shred of evidence, all the bombings against US, Israeli and Jewish targets in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina have been blamedby Israeli and US officials on the late Imad Fayez Mugniyeh who was assassinated a year ago in Damascus.

      A number of groups took claim for the barracks bombing, including one from a Druze village which had been shelled by the USS New Jersey and even the names of the bombers was released to the press but that story died a quick death. It was much more convenient to point the finger towards Syria and Iran.

      Also, Yonira, at the time of the Israeli invasion, the civil war gave way to one side, the Maronite majority aligning itself with Israel and the Sunnis and predominantly, the Shia with the resistance. One of the factors that contributed to Hezbollah's rise and its success was the failure of the largely secular leadership of Amal, notably the current parliament speaker and former Detroit car salesman, Nabi Berri, to take any action against the Israelis.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort April 3, 2010 at 11:29 am with 7 replies

      Jimby, Sabra and Shatila massaacre occurred a year and a month before the attack on the Marine barracks.

      I have not seen Robin Wright's book in which she wrote that Hizbollah claimed that it had carried out the US embassy bombing but without having seen her reference, I have my doubts about that. At the time of the embassy bombing, Hezbollah was in its relative infancy and the Shia insurgency did not really get off the ground until the month before, when at a celebration of the festival of Ashoura in Nabitiya, the "capitol" of southern Lebanon, two Israeli jeeps, ignoring the plea of the town's mayor, attempted to drive through a crowd of celebrating Shia. Both jeeps were burned and the resistance took off from there.

      In the first days of the invasion, the majority of the Shia actually welcomed the Israelis because they had grown tired of the PLO fighting its war against Israel from their soil, and suffering from Israel's retaliation but when it became apparent that Israel did not plan to leave and its soldiers began treating the Shia as sadistically as they did the Palestinians, e.g., pouring oil in their flour and vice-versa, shitting in their mosques, plus carrying out the types of humiliations that were commomplace in the West Bank and Gaza, the Shia were ready to pick up the gun. That event in Ashoura, which seems to have been overlooked by historians of the conflict, was apparently the turning point.

      The notion that Hezbollah functions as an Iranian proxy may be comforting for those in the West who imbibe Israeli and US propaganda but it is an insult to the Lebanese who have fought and will continue to fight to defend Lebanese soil from Israel or any other foreign invader.

  • Netanyahu 'humilated,' but the 'special relationship' is alive and well
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 26, 2010 at 9:56 pm with 1 replies

      The arms deal reported in Ha'aretz nis a new appropriation, just Israel beginning to order from the "All You Can Eat for the $3 Billion We Give You Take Out Menu" presented to is only diner by the US Congress as part of a 10-year$30 billion deal worked out by Olmert and George W in 2008 with Obama's approval.

      Obama, on his own later signed on in person when Congress expropriated the money from the pockets of US taxpayers.

      If there was a moment for Obama to show who's boss between him and Netanyahu when it comes to Washington, it would not be by leaving him alone when he went for dinner with Michelle and the kids but by handing him an "account closed" slip as he did it. Even had Obama wished to do that, and I think there is no question that he wished to insult Netanyahu--no one wants to be made a fool of on the international stage as Netanyahu has done several times to Obama already--he can't do it, not only because the Congress of the US has long ago defected to Israel, but the Democratic Party is little more than a subsidiary of the Zionist establishment, dependent on its US branch for most of its major funding.

  • Netanyahu misreads the moment, totally
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 23, 2010 at 1:03 am with 9 replies

      All Netanyahu thinks he needs to worry about is maintaining the support of the US Congress against its own president and there is yet to be any evidence that he doesn't still enjoy that.

      In his talk on Monday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, one of Israel's leading Congrressional lickspittles, promised that a bipartisan letter signed by most of the members of Congress wouldsoon be on the president's desk, reaffirming their unshakeable commitment to the Israel-US relationship.

      Hoyer also promised that in April the House and Senate would put together their sanctions bill targeting Israel's importation of refined petroleum, a bill that is opposed by Washington's Western allies and by the White House.

      What is so sinister about this gathering is that every direct or implied reference to the need to bomb Iran received round after round of applause and not a word of sympathy was heard for the people of Gaza except for Hillary Clinton's passing mention that their needs had to be "addressed."

      One would be hard put to find a more despicable gathering of the human species than what one sees every year at the AIPAC conference.

  • CODEPINK activists disrupt Netanyahu (and use the AIPAC director's table to do it)
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 23, 2010 at 1:26 am with 4 replies

      It is refreshing to note how Rae Abileah and Code Pink have no problem recognizing the power of AIPAC over US Middle East Policy, a sordid fact of American political life that has eluded most of what passes for the Left as well as such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein (yes, he too!) and Stephen Zunes. But then none of them, I suspect, have ever set foot in an AIPAC event let alone protested one.

      In fact, in all of Chomsky's writings about Israel and Palestine and US-Israel relations, I have never been able to find any mention of AIPAC. Indeed, he admitted that in a letter to a mutual friend a few years back. Wrote Chomsky, " I don't write about it, I don't talk about it."

      If there is Chomskyite out there who can find a reference to AIPAC that I missed, I would be happy to acknowledge it.

  • American street wants Obama to 'get tough' on settlements
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 23, 2010 at 1:43 am with 1 replies

      Poll numbers on this issue have proved to be essentially meaningless in terms of determining policy. After Bush Sr. blasted the lobby in a televised press conference in 1991 in denying Israel its request for loan guarantees, national polls showed that 85% of the public was with him and two months later less than 50% of the public supported US aid to Israel while more than 75% approved aid to the former Soviet Union and Poland. Thanks to AIPAC and Co, those poll numbers had no effect on US policy.

      Actually, if you carefully reads most national polls, you will see by the nature of the questions how thin American support for Israel really is. Whereas pollstesr used to ask Americans how they felt about aid to Israel and Israel in general, now they tend to ask easy ones, such as who people prefer between the Israelis and Palestinians. Given the preponderance of Zionist propaganda in every facet of our media, the answer to that one will be obvious.

      As for Jewish opinion, that's essentially meaningless, as well. The only Jews that count for the politicians are those who are dedicated to Israel and are free with their checkbooks. The Democratic Party assumes the rest will vote their way and they know few will change their minds over how the party stands on Israel

  • Plus-ca-change agent Obama to meet Netanyahu
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 21, 2010 at 4:12 pm with 2 replies

      For Yonira, if one believed what has been written in the Israeli press over the years, and I have many articles in my paper files going back years, that preceded the internet, the Israel-US relationship would be very different than what we see today, particular from 1991, after Bush Sr. blasted the "lobby" and Israel in his national press conference. One and all, left and right, in Israel, believed the sky was caving in on them. As we see, unfortunately, it didn't happen. One day, yes, but not then, and not now.

      Re, the bunker busters reportedly denied Israel. According to reliable news reports, not only does Israel not have any planes capable of carrying and delivering these bombs, the US bombers that would be capable have to be specially refitted in order to do so because of their size.

  • Obama could study Reagan and grow a pair
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 21, 2010 at 1:09 pm

      Shmuel,
      Granted that most secular Israeli Jews will have nothing to do with the Torah, when stretched for arguments, many will fall back on simplified biblical justification to justify Israel's ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians people. Be they secular or religious, you know as well as I do, that the feeling of Jewish superiority that is inculcated into the mindset of almost every Jewish child--I was spared but my friends weren't--leads to the same racist conclusions as of those subscribing to the Torah and whose pronouncements about Amalek and eliminating Israel's enemies, described in Old Testament terms, have become commonplace in Israel without causing any major uproar from the secular Zionists.

      It is also true today that the ultra religious percentage of the population including the volunteering of religious crazies into the "elite" units of the Israeli military is on the rise and as we have seen their rabbis are using OT terms to describe Israel's Arab enemies.

      While the holocaust has often been used as an excuse for support for the establishment of a Jewish state and did win over most Jewish non-zionists in its wake, Israel was already a state in waiting before the holocaust since the British had allowed the Jews in Palestine to build all the essentials of a modern state, something Israel patently refused to do when it came to the Palestinians.
      For the rest of the world, it took the arm twisting by the Zionist lobby at that time to get the partition vote approved and as now, it was domestic US politics, not its or any other country's geopolitical interests that got them to vote for partitioning Palestine and establishing a Jewish state.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 20, 2010 at 4:49 pm with 3 replies

      While Israel indeed a colonial settler state and has exhibited traits and committed actions that have been done by other such states, one has to be myopic not to see the direct links that those traits and actions have to the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, which has served as the guidebook for not only Israel's Orthodox who spend their lives ingesting its racist poisons, but for those in Israel's secular Jewish community who have used it opportunistically.

      Moreover, there has been no other settler colonial state, or any state of any kind that has been able to exercise the control over a nation's political class as has Israel, and that control extends in astonishing degree to the political class of every other Western country.

      Israel became a settler colonial state at a time when the world was moving in the opposite direction and if the settlers had been any other people or religion than Jews it not only never would have succeeded, it never would have been tolerated in the first place. That is has succeeded, if one wishes to call it that, and in so doing has disfigured much of what is left of our democracy has it roots, all of which must be honestly examined.

      This is what I wrote on this weekend's CounterPunch and tell me if any other settler colonial state has ever demonstrated such power:
      link to counterpunch.org

    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 20, 2010 at 1:55 pm

      Notice how Wandering Jew has diverted the discussion from whether a US president has the balls to confront Israel to a discussion about Hamas. This is not the first time this has happened on a thread and it is not likely a coincidence.

      As for the article about Hamas, it contains quite a bit of hearsay and one must wonder what was the intention behind it being published for the US mainstream?

      While it is true that Israel allowed Hamas to grow as a religious movement as opposed to the secular PLO, what is never mentioned is that the 1987 Intifada was a revolt not only against Israel but against the corrupt PLO which was headquartered in Tunis and the slogans of its communiques made that clear: "No Voice Above the Voice of the Uprising."

      From the beginning of that intifada to the signing of Oslo, Arafat did everything he could to undermine it, a history that is little known thanks to the Fatah dominated PA. That the article refers to the PLO as being Leftist is as accurate as calling Obama or the Democratic Party leftist.

      The UPI aricles has other distortions as well but I'll leave it at that.

      That being said, it is better to focus on the article on Mondoweiss which is usually important rather than allowing the Zionist blog responders to divert attention away from it.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 19, 2010 at 7:52 pm with 1 replies

      The recollection by Geoffrey Kemp about Reagan phoning Begin and immediately getting his way is one of those convenient distortions of history that makes both sides comfortable when they shouldn't be.

      Up to that time, Reagan had been publicly calling on Israel for restraint, without effect, and had told Shamir who was visiting in Washington that Israel should halt its attacks on Beirut which were also ignored, including an earlier message that Reagan had sent to Begin. As a result Reagan was being ridiculed in the mainstream media, particularly in the Christian Science Monitor, that was not as beholden to the Zionist establishment as it is today.

      That Reagan said that he didn't know he had such power was very unlikely because he had no evidence the Israeli shelling would stop the shelling and, in fact, it was only gradually reduced, but Reagan could not have known it at the time. I have a number of clippings from that month which tell quite a very different picture than we get from this article and Kemp's regained memory.

  • Gen'l Petraeus and the American street
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 18, 2010 at 5:37 pm with 2 replies

      Indeed, the dam, or at least one of the major ones, appears to have been broken. As important as were the statements by General Petraeus and their importance cannot be underestimated (and already have the neocons at JINSA spinning the story wildly (link to jinsa.org), that the distiguished historian, Andrew Bacevich has written in support of Petraeus's position on Salon is a major event in itself.

      Bacevich is a West Point graduate who served in Vietnam and who has lectured at West Point as well. He was an early opponent of the Iraq war even before losing a son there, and has inpeccable establishment credentials.

      AIPAC is clearly worried and will be pulling out all stops to make next's weeks conference their biggest yet.

      Also worried, I suspect. are Progfessors Noam Chomsky and Stephen Zunes who have been misleading progressive folks for years about how Israel serves the US as a strategic asset and that that is the basis for US supprt. For those who still hold on to that mistaken notion, I give you the words of Abba Eban, Israel's fabled foreign minister who was Israel's greatest PR peddler for many years. Here he is on P. 595 of "Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes":

      Responding to Menachem Begin's assertion "that the United States gained more from its alliance with Israel than Israel did Israel from its relationship with the United States. I suggested an intellectual exercise: Imagine that some natural disaster were to cut America and Israel off from contact with each other; there would be no telephones or postal services, no commerce or tourism, no monetary transactions between the two countries. Who would notice it first?"

  • Is Hillary's 'deeply negative signal' a deeply positive signal?
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 13, 2010 at 10:09 pm with 1 replies

      It is highly unlikely that an American official, be he or she the president, vice-president, or secretary of state would willingly submit to being publicly humiliated by anyone, including the prime minister of Israel. That includes Joe Biden, despite his professed love for the Jewish state. It also includes Obama who has been routinely humiliated by Israel to the point where it has earned him a reputation as someone who doesn't need to be taken seriously on the international stage.

      What we have seen is just the latest example of the powers that be in Israel letting the powers that be in the US know that in any confrontation, the US Congress will stand on the side of Israel. This is what forced George HW Bush to go before the American people and attack the Jewish lobby on 9/12/91 when it became clear that both houses of Congress would overrule his veto of Israel's request for $10 billion in loan guarantees.

      Despite the fact that 85% of the US public supported him in polls immediately afterward, that press conference of Bush Sr. sealed his fate as a one term president as members of his own party, in the pay of the "lobby" turned on him, as did friends in the press such as Bill Safire and George Will.

      Since the Democrats are arguably a virtually a subsidiary of the "lobby," dependent upon it for at least 60% of its major funding (not to mention that of the unions which are also in the "lobby's" pocket, the chance of a Democratic president seriously striking back are nil.

      That Hillary saw it necessary to make a phone call to Netanyahu was an attempt to clean the egg off Washington's face since, clearly, the worm in the White House was not about to do it. And what was Israel's response? To enforce a closure over the entire West Bank.

      Israel does not want or need any kind of talks because things are going according to plan and the Zionist International has apparently enough control over the major European powers, the UK, France, and Germany, to make sure that they keep their noses out of trying to pressure Israel to negotiate.

      As for the story contained on the link that MRW questions, it is most likely a fabrication. It seemed familiar when someone forwarded it to me yesterday and there was a good reason for it. The article, citing racist comments by Israeli professor Martin Van Crefeld, first appeared in 2003 (sic) and has reappeared a number of times since, the latest being in August of 2009.

      People need to be very careful not to believe and/or forward links to articles in which either a specific newspaper reference can not be found or a radio broadcast verified. Just because we want to believe what the article says is no reason not to check it out carefully before passing it on.

  • The David Project swarms an apartheid-week event, and pathos prevails over logos
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 6, 2010 at 11:30 am with 13 replies

      Qadir is correct in pointing out that many proponents of the Palestinian cause operate more from their heart and their gut than from a command of facts, but while Ali Abunimah is an excellent source as well as an example of one who does know what he's talking about, Chomsky and Finkelstein are rather poor examples, particularly Chomsky when it comes to describing the history of US-Israel relations which he habitually distorts with the intention of making the US, not Israel, primarily responsible for Israel's crimes (as opposed to the enabler) thanks to the pressure from the Zionist establishment/lobby whose power Chomsky, as well as Finkelstein, dismisses. Both, not coincidentally are opposed to the current BDS campaign as well as the Palestinian right of return and, needless to say, a single state solution.

      Here's Abunimah and myself responding to Chomsky in a virtual debate since Chomsky refuses to go one on one with any critic from the Left:
      link to vomena.org

  • How do you aim BDS at the Israel lobby?
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 5, 2010 at 12:09 pm

      There have been references to what I added to Mondoweiss about Waskow last year but by now it should have been clear before that,that Waskow's position on BDS is part of his primary agenda, i.e., providing "damage control" for Israel while pushing that great myth, "the two state solution."

      One of the ways that the Waskows of our world have done this is by keeping the issue of Palestine separated from other issues taken up by the anti-war and non-intervention movements and over the years they have been extremely successful. This was particularly true during the 1982 Lebanon war and the First Intifada in which that policy was also enforced by the remnants of the Communist Party, Workers World [now IAC] and the leading Trotskyist groups that took the lead in the protests of the time against US intervention in Central America and against So African apartheid and who had their own Waskows among them (and still do).

      But here is the classic Waskow, in the February 14, 2003 Forward, assuring the Jewish weekly that United for Peace and Justice, organizers of the February 15th anti-war rally in New York (with many old CP members involved) , “has done a great deal to make clear it is not involved in anti-Israel rhetoric. From the beginning there was nothing in United for Peace’s statements that dealt at all with the Israel-Palestine issue.”

  • 'This is New York. This is the moment' (IDF benefit dinner)
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 5, 2010 at 12:17 pm

      There were no protests of which I was aware or that were reported in the Jewish or mainstream media of the Beverly Hills events. Since most pro-Palestinian activists in California don't bother to read the Jewish press, unlike their Zionist mirror opposites who monitor everything everywhere that criticizes or even mentions Israel, they probably didn't even know it was happening, preferring useless protests at Israeli consulates.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 3, 2010 at 10:13 pm with 1 replies

      The New York Friends of the Israeli Wehrmacht will have to go some way to top the success of a similar dinner held in Beverly Hills last December in which $5.2 million was raised, all of which was tax-exempt.

      That more than doubled the take of a similar dinner held a week before Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in which only $2. 1 million had been raised. Obviously, by more than doubling the previous year's haul, LA's wealthy Jews wanted to send a message of support to Israel while extending their middle fingers to Judge Goldstone. Here's how Orit Arfa of the LA Jewish Journal reported on it:

      link to jewishjournal.com
      circuit/article/stars_shine_on_friends_of_idf_gala_fundraiser_20100105/

      The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) Western Region gala,
      held Dec. 17, 2009, at the Beverly Hilton, raised more than $5.2 million
      to benefit IDF soldiers through the various FIDF programs. Paul Guerin,
      president of the Western Region group, began the evening’s program with
      the announcement that he and his wife, Vera, would give $1 million, half
      of which will be dedicated to supporting FIDF’s IMPACT! scholarship
      program that provides college scholarships to former combat soldiers
      with limited financial means.

      At the sold-out gala, event chairs Cheryl and Haim Saban then said they would match the $1.6 million already raised, followed by two additional $500,000 pledges by Victoria and Ron Simms, and Erika Glazer.

      The ceremony opened with 29 IDF soldiers who had lost a sibling or
      parent to Israel’s wars saluting the American and Israeli flags, along
      with four U.S. Marines who had served in Iraq. Rabbi Isaac Jeret of
      Congregation Ner Tamid and FIDF Los Angeles Chapter Vice President led
      the 1,000 audience members in the blessings over the bread and gave an
      invocation comparing the lights of Chanukah to Israel’s military defenders.

      Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” fame volunteered his time to serve as
      emcee for a crowd consisting of the “who’s who” of local Israeli
      American and American Jewish philanthropic society. Gala co-chairs also
      included: Adele and Beny Alagem; Joyce and Avi Arad; Steve Bing; Joyce
      and Stanley Black; Ruth and Leo David; Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer and Mel
      Keefer; Erika Glazer; the Guerins; Sue and Larry J. Hochberg; Israeli
      Leadership Council; Jena and Michael King; Avi Lerner and Danny Dimbort;
      Nathalie and Maurice Marciano; Katherine Merage; Soraya and Younes
      Nazarian; Fela and David Shapell; Victoria and Ron Simms; Adi and Philip
      Werthman; and Lila and David Wiener.

      Other dignitaries, city officials and celebrities present included
      former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky; L.A. Consul
      General of Israel Jacob Dayan; Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca; and
      Sylvester Stallone. Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi sent
      his support via telecast.

      But those who received the real “star” treatment were Israel’s finest,
      who addressed the audience. They included Lt. Daniel Sahalo, an
      Ethiopian immigrant who received an IMPACT! scholarship upon completing
      his service as a paratrooper; an Israeli Air Force sergeant whose father
      had been killed in a terrorist attack; and a female Apache combat
      helicopter pilot who elicited the most cheers for her rare and coveted
      status.

      In his remarks, entertainment and media mogul Saban credited Israel’s
      economic achievements and technological innovations to the IDF, saying,
      “Israel’s many successes, including in the world of technology, [have
      their] roots in the military. These young men and women learn what
      teamwork, leadership, mission-oriented skills and experience really
      mean. If you mix these lessons they learn in the military with the
      abrasive individualism — or in other words, Israeli chutzpah — you would
      better understand why Israel, a tiny nation of immigrants torn by war,
      has in fact become the first technology nation in the world.”

      He concluded with a message to Israel’s would-be destroyers, saying,
      “You better find a different dream, because this one isn’t coming true.”

      The evening was capped with a performance by 12-year-old Shaheen
      Jafargholi, a finalist in “Britain’s Got Talent” who had performed at
      Michael Jackson’s televised public memorial service, and the Four Tops
      singing classics including “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’.”

      * © Copyright 2010 The Jewish Journal and JewishJournal.com
      All rights reserved.

  • 'NYT' Op-Ed congratulates Obama for laying off Israel 'cause solving I/P won't solve anything
    • Jeffrey Blankfort March 1, 2010 at 10:44 pm with 1 replies

      David Bloom informs me that Karsh is not a Brit but Israeli-born and bred. The question occurred to me, however, what does it matter since, in practice, there is no discernible line between Jewish advocates for Israel whatever their birthplace. That a number of Israeli columnists, most of them of the extreme right wing emigrated from the US or the UK while a number of their co-Zionist religionists remained in those countries to spread the same pro-Israel propaganda, seems to be more of a battle tactic on their part designed to give the appearance that their efforts have broader appeal than what is actually the case.

  • Do you have to be Jewish to report on Israel for the New York Times?
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 28, 2010 at 11:52 am

      Cole won last week's award as well in this blog post in which he suggested that the Israeli right wing is on the decline:
      link to juancole.com

      Cole never ceases to bewilder me, perhaps because I
      first saw him as some sort of a radical when he is basically a liberal
      reformist. That he doesn't realize that the Israeli right, far from being on

      the decline, is in the ascendency, that it is rapidly becoming a theofascist

      state, is astonishing, as his belief that J Street represents a mood swing
      in American Jewry. It doesn't matter, of course, what the majority of Jews
      think, only what that dedicated, well-heeled third or so who put Israel's interests first DO, and not only have they have shown no signs of change, their positions have hardened.

      Some of Cole's comments during the second year of the Iraq war, on how the US
      could do a better job against "the insurgents" were really off the wall, as
      is much of this commentary, not the least of which is his placing much of the
      blame on the odious David Frum for the Iraq war. That Cole clearly gives
      his support to a Jewish state, and brags of working with Israeli academics,
      plus staying on a kibbutz, may be is way of kissing the behinds of those Jews in academia who blocked his getting a professorship in Yale.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 27, 2010 at 5:38 pm

      The Israeli historian referred to above was Tanya Reinhart.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 27, 2010 at 5:37 pm with 1 replies

      Several years ago, on her last trip to the United States, the Israeli historian told a dinner hosted by a Jewish Voice for Peace at a lavish San Francisco restaurant something the dinner guests did not want to hear, her view that what she saw at the time with the power of the Zionist lobby was 'the Protocols of the Elders of Zion' come to life. Several members of JVP's leadership group felt that they had to make their responsere, all of which were pathetic and unconvincing.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 27, 2010 at 5:30 pm

      In 1983, I took photos of the Israeli police breaking up a peaceful Palestinian protest in East Jerusalem and took them to the Associated Press office at the Israeli Press Center in Beit Agron with the hope of selling them for whatever they paid, but more important, tp get them out to the world.

      Much to my amazement (I was somewhat naive at the time), the two men working for AP were both Israeli and guess what, they weren't interested in the story or developing my film to see the photos.

      With not a single exception that I can think of, the mainstream US media is as much a part of the story of Israeli control over the US political system when it comes to the Israel-Palestine story as is AIPAC.

      For a follow-up on Cook's story, check out Alison Weir's excellent article, "Media Reporting in Israel, All in the Family" on CounterPunch yesterday:
      link to counterpunch.org

  • Turkey vows to launch Berlin airlift
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 21, 2010 at 8:36 pm with 1 replies

      I doubt very much that the Turkish charities would act without the green light from the Turkish government. At the moment Israeli-Turkish relations are at an all-time low and the move would be popular with the Turkish public which, unlike its American counterpart, has not been bamboozled with Zionist propaganda, just the opposite. Turkey has already shown its independence from the US by it friendly relations with both Iran and Syria and supporting this flotilla will only raise Turkey's status in the eyes of the Arab public whose governments have played nothing but lip service to the plight of the Palestinians. This will be a major embarrassment for them and my pressure them to raise their lip service up a notch or two.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 21, 2010 at 5:55 pm with 2 replies

      This step by Turkey, if it takes place, should not be dismissed. It is likely to be the most important new factor in the I-P conflict in decades. Turkey has not only been a wooed as key ally of Israel it has been what Israel is not, a major strategic asset for the US, and this prosposed boat-lift will happily present major problems for the Obamanation as well as Turkey's NATO partners.

  • Hasbara meets chutzpah: Daniel Schorr puts Dubai hit on Palestinians
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 21, 2010 at 9:20 pm with 1 replies

      It is not a question of whether or not the Palestinians could have pulled this off--and no, I don't believe they could have nor could the agents of many other countries-- but there is ample evidence, including a 27 minute video put together by the Dubai police compiled from footage on airport and hotel cameras, plus the matter of the use of genuine foreign passports, an old Mossad modus operandi, that stamps this as one of their jobs. Had there been no cameras, it would only have been guesswork. The folks captured on camera from their arrival to departure appear to be Europeans. Even the Israeli press is acknowledging it was a Mossad job and calls are being made for the head of Dagan to be fired.

      For those who haven't seen the full fascinating 27 minutes, it's here: link to intifada-palestine.com

  • Oslo made us strangers in our native land
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 17, 2010 at 7:07 pm with 3 replies

      All of the Fatah leadership did nor spend their earlier lives in the trenches. Has they done so, in fact, things would be different today. Ahmed is, unfortunately, correct in his conclusions and I say that from my experiences in Lebanon and Jordan in 1970, in Lebanon in 1983 and as an active participant in the Palestine solidarity movement for close to 40 years , that movement which remains an unindicted enabler in this sad scenario because its leaders and many of its members knew about Arafat and Fatah's corruption and yet remained silent or looked the other way.

      TheIsraeli and American Jewish "peace movements," such as they were, also promoted Arafat as the virtuous leader of the Palestinian people. no doubt pushed to do so by Zionist agents in their ranks.

      The late Edward Said always regretted that he, too, had remained silent after seeing in Lebanon what I had, the .massive corruption of the Fatah led PLO which had alienated the Shia population and made Israel's sweep through the country all the more easy in 1982. When Said did speak out, what was the result?

      Arafat banned his books from being sold in the West Bank and Gaza. Only a the book store on Saladin street in East Jerusalem, out of Arafat's reach, could you find them. Was there a word of protest from the solidarity movement? We know the answer. In the early 90s, maybe 93, an editorial appeared in the English language edition of Al-Fajr, Fatah's newspaper, asking for readers to report stories of PLO corruption, Arafat promptly closed the paper down and it never reappeared. Was there a word of protest from the movement? We know the answer.

      The first intifada was directed against Arafat and the PLO in Tunis almost as much as it was against Israel and he did everything he could to subvert it, finally succeeding with Oslo which was later compared by Shlomo Gazit, one of Israel's negotiators, with the Munich sell-out of the Czechs with the Israelis being the Germans.

      At the time of Oslo Arafat's standing within the West Bank and Gaza was so low that Israel became worried and one of it by-products if not direct intents, was to preserve him as head of the PLO since he was the only one who could get away with signing away the Palestinians' patrimony. A cartoon in the Jerusalem Post at the time summed up the situation perfectly. It showed Arafat sitting up on a stretcher giving the "V" sign. The stretcher beareres were Rabin and Peres.

      That Arafat is still honored by a sizeable segment of the Palestinian people is because they were never told the truth--by our side as well as theirs.

  • Let's cut out the middleman
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 15, 2010 at 3:14 pm

      I'd like to if there were links. At the moment they are just xeroxes of his editorials in my metal filing cabinet. The US News archives only go back to 2007 and if available elsewhere, they won't be free that far back. Here's one he wrote in 2007 chiding Bush just in case Dubya was getting cold feet:

      link to usnews.com

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 15, 2010 at 12:39 pm with 2 replies

      True, looking at US policy across the Middle East one could reasonably conclude that there is no need of the middleman by Israel and its American agents any more and that those who contributed to that victory may think it's time to share in even more of it spoils, so why not a US Senate seat? Zuckie already owns the US News and World Report and the NY Daily News and plenty of property (the Real Estate lobby, BTW, being another important wing of the Zionist lobby/hotel) but,it seems, that is not enough.

      If nothing else, a Zuckie run would provide an opportunity for those who, like myself, claimed that the Iraq war was launched primarily on Israel's behalf and pushed not just by the neocons, to dredge up the almost weekly editorials that Zuckie penned in his US News and World Report, calling for war on Iraq and the ouster of Saddam.

      In my own researches I have found no other media scribbler, at any level, who devoted more lines to that project. Bring 'em on!

  • 'Independent' chronicles 'new McCarthyism' in Israel
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 15, 2010 at 1:06 pm

      What is happening in Israel has been inevitable from its very inception, as a European settler colonial state in the predominantly Arab and Muslim Middle East. Had not those Europeans been Jews and had they not been backed financially and politically by the organized Jewish community in the US and to a less important degree those in Europe it not only never would have lasted, it would never have come into existence in the first place.

      That Israel would become a theofascist state was foreseen by Rabbi Meir Kahane more than two decades ago. Although he didn't use that term, it is an apt one for his prescriptions as to how Israel should treat Arabs and Jews who supported their rights, scoffing at the notion that Israel could be or should try to be both a Jewish state and democratic at the same time.

      That Kahane's philosophy is now determining the order of the day in Israel is something everyone who still believes there is something to salvage from Israel should consider. Counting on the tooth fairy is a safer bet.

  • 'Times' troika of Keller, Hoyt & Bronner were involved in earlier conflict-of-interest
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 12, 2010 at 5:28 pm with 1 replies

      This is a very important story, particularly, with reference to the NYT's decision to keep Bronner on the job. I would just add to the description of Zev Chafets who penned the profile of Leviev in the NYT. He was not only a spokesperson for the Israeli government, but he was also Menachem Begin's press secretary. Neither the NYT, or any other publication that has printed his articles in the US has ever mentioned this fact.

  • Yvette Clarke's retraction
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 5, 2010 at 9:40 pm

      To clarify things for "wondering Jew," I am indeed making analogy to the Nazis because long before and quite apart from the gas chambers there existed a similar mindset between those who have endorsed Israel's war crimes against both the Palestinians and Lebanese over the years and that of the Third Reich.

      One reads almost every week, a racist comment from some Hasidic or other orthodox Jewish rabbi in Israel (and in their weekly rag, the Jewish Press out of Brooklyn, opinions about non-Jews and Palestinians in particular that would not have been out of place in Der Sturmer, except they have substituted Arabs for Jews.

      I have seen them in Palestinian East Jerusalemm, after prayers on a Saturday night, marching four abreast by the hundreds, letting the Palestinians know who rules their land. For me in their mindset, again, they are no different from Nazis, and if the world would let them get away with it, they would do unto the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.

      That their US co-religionists demanded that Rep. Clarke recant is nothing less than obscene and to rationalize their actions or excuse them is equally obscene.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 5, 2010 at 1:17 pm with 8 replies

      As for whether or not the Jews with blacks hats, beards, and extended tummies truly represent Clarke's constituency, here's the demographic breakdown of Crown Heights from Wikepedia, using known references:

      "As of 1994, of the approximately 150,000 residents in Crown Heights, 90 percent were of African descent (70 percent from the Caribbean and 20 percent of American birth), 9 percent were Hasidic Jews, and less than 1 percent were Latino, Asian and other ethnic groups.

      Despite the history of the Hasidic Jews having large families, it is unlikely that there has been a significant change in these statistics. What they represent is even worse than the Jewish equivalent of what were called "good Germans," those members of the German population who went along with the Nazi agenda.

      Those men around the table are nothing less than active supporters of Israel's criminal behavior and engaged in suppressing criticism of that behavior. Thus, each and every one of them has blood on his hands. May that illuminating photo of their meeting with Clarke be distributed far and wide so their faces can be known.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 4, 2010 at 8:57 pm

      Clarke, it turns out, was one of the 36 who voted against HR 867 (opposing the censure of the Goldstone Report) and thus far, they don't seem to have forced her to recant on that. But she now knows her place and it is not sitting at the table but waiting on it.
      link to clarke.house.gov

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 4, 2010 at 7:44 pm with 2 replies

      If one wishes to read Rep. Clarke's letter, here it is on the Chabad/Lubavitcher web site in all its ugliness: link to chabad.info

      The sad reality is that the Jewish establishment, both secular and religious, thanks to its unlimited purse strings, keeps America's black leadership, such as it is under the circumstances, on what might be called an "invisible plantation."

    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 4, 2010 at 4:42 pm

      Those were not her constituents. They were her paymasters. And the paymasters of virtually every other black member of Congress which is why they kept silent over Israel's arms sales to South Africa during the apartheid period and why they keep silent today about Israel's ongoing atrocities in the Middle East. With the occasional exceptions of Keith Ellison, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, and John Conyers, the Congressional Black Caucus should be more appropriately named, in the spirit of Malcolm X, the House Negro Caucus, for that is what they have become, the Zionists' house Negroes. And that fact is known in the black community.

  • Neocon junket: 'live penetration raids in Arab territory'
    • Jeffrey Blankfort February 1, 2010 at 6:22 pm with 1 replies

      A spoof involving regimes in Argentina or Chile would probably not be as effective nor as applicable since there is no evidence that the majority of Argentinians or Chileans backed their governments in such numbers as did the Germans in Nazi Germany and for a far longer period the majority of Jews in Israel.

      Moreover, those persecuted in Argentina and Chile were their own fellow citizens, not the "subhuman other" who have been the Nazis' and Israel's victims.

  • Friedman Beat Goldstone to Gaza/Lebanon Comparison
    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 28, 2010 at 4:15 pm with 1 replies

      Back in 1982, when Friedman was a working journalist and not the fatuous apologist for Zionism and global capital as he has since become, he objected when the NY Times softened his accurate reporting of Israel's devastating bombing of Beirut during Israel's second war on Lebanon.

      In the article cited from January 2009, he refers to Hezbollah as having "launched" the 2006 war by its attack on an Israeli patrol along the Israeli-Lebanese border. If that is Friedman's minimum criteria for starting a war, then Israeli has been guilty of initiating scores of wars against Lebanon, unless murdering civilians from the air, or firing missiles into Lebanese villages from across the border are exempt from his calculations.

      There was a day, when the Times ran the columns of Anthony Lewis, when criticism of Israel was permissible by a Times' columnist and Lewis did it frequently. But that day is long past, as we see, with both it and the foreign desk, with that proud father of another Israeli soldier, Ethan Bronner, writing the lyrics, being actively part of Israel's hasbara team, not to mention the presence of neoconman David Brooks and that darling of the liberals on Sundays, Frank Rich.

  • Goldstone found that Israel's collective punishment policy in Lebanon served as a model for Gaza
    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 26, 2010 at 6:16 pm

      Israeli General Eisenkot was quoted as saying:

      "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. […] This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved."

      I was in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut a year after the bombardment when the Lebanese were in the process of rebuilding in what was exclusively an area typical of any city with high rise apartements and businesses at the street level. It was not used by Hezbollah as a military outpost by any stretch of the imagination and it was not from there that Hezbollah launched its rockets into Israel. True, it had modest offices there which was not surprising since the quarter is predominantly Shia.

      What the Israelis were doing but in a more dramatic and even more criminal fashion was not essentially different from what the Nazis did to those opposing them. When a German soldier was killed, anywhere from 10 to 40 civilians would be rounded up for each one and shot in cold blood. Israel chooses to exact its collective punishment from the air. There is no fundamenta ldifference between those who formulated the policies of the German Wehrmacht and those of Israel today. I am not sure of what the Nazis called their Dahiya Doctrine but I am sure they had a name for it.

      In truth, the Israelis have been humbled twice by Hezbollah and while their high command continues to talk tough about what they will do the next time (which will Israel's fourth war on Lebanon), I am sure there are few Israeli soldiers who served in the last encounter who are eager to meet Hezbollah once again on the battlefield.

  • Why Haiti is Poor (IV): the Aristide Failure
    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 26, 2010 at 6:47 pm

      I guess you and I know different Haitians, James, but those I do know disagree with the positions of your Haitian friends regarding Aristede. What I do know, as should you, is that the white European West in which I include the US, has never forgiven the Haitian slaves for overthrowing their French masters and the US, as well as the rest of Europe, including the French who demanded millions in reparations for their "lost" enterprises, have successfully kept the Haitians suppressed for more than two centuries. Fearful of their example spreading to the slaveholding South, the US blockaded its ports, then invaded and occupied the country from 1915 under that faux humanitarian but outfront racist, Woodrow Wilson to 1934 when FDR recalled the troops and ushered in two generations of Duvaliers. Aristede would be no more allowed by the US to succeed than any other leader in the Caribbean only doubly so. Cuba under Castro began under very different conditions and did not have another country on its border such as the Dominican Republic from which subversive attacks by armed terrorist groups could be carried out. Now, we see another US occupation under what may rightfully be called the Obamnation.

  • Will SCOTUS decision re campaign funding weaken lobby?
    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 26, 2010 at 12:41 pm

      Well before the internet became popular, the oil companies backed out of competing with the Zionists in providing dollars for the votes of US politicians, relying on the simple fact that oil is essential to virtually every element of the capitalist economy whereas Israel in a word or two, is not. Over the years I have seen references to oil companies having accepted the fact that most Americans consider their money to be tainted and, at least, overtly--where it can be traced--have not made reshaping a different Middle East a part of its agenda. As for Iran, I believe that the big oil companies would rather obtain and sell Iranian oil than see Iran bombed and run the very great risk of destabilizing the entire oil producing region, but the Zionist lobby will not let them to do that, as for example, having successfully pressured Washington to force Conoco to cancel a major contract with Iran in 1995.

      One way of tarnishing those in the State Department and Foreign Service who have been considered too friendly with the oil companies has been by labeling them "Arabists" which is a nice way of accusing them of being "anti-Semites."

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 25, 2010 at 8:16 pm with 1 replies

      First of all, it should be realized that corporate (in which Israel should be seen as a corporate entity) as well union money already had polluted our election process well before the latest court decision. It just made legalized bribery, what no doubt makes the US unique in the world, that much easier (which means less money for the lawyers who had been paid to figure out ways around the obstacles up to now). I mean, can Haim Saban give even more to the Democrats than $12.3 million her gave in 2002? Or Goldman-Sucks, more than the $27 million it contributed to Obama's inauguration party? (Don't ask what G-S got for its investment. Beyond the White House, not much.)

      The decision court was, however, effectively the final coffin in nail in the delusion that passed itself off as American democracy. The fact that there is no organized outrage over the decision compounds the effect.

      Will it hurt The Lobby? As much as finding a pot of gold on its doorstep!

      What this decision means is that Jewish corporate biggies will compete even more to prove their support for Israel without having bothered to hide it. Universal health care, of course, is even deader than it is at the moment. As for the oil companies, forget about it. Their money is considered tainted by most American, not they that it doesn't deserve to be, but the oil companies gave up fighting the Jewish establishment long ago when the Lobby made it an issue. This decision will not change that. The arms manufacturers don't need to spend more money. They already get what they want at the present levels. What they have going for them is that they provide manufacturing jobs so they don't need to contribute that much to get their way.

      Since support for Israel is largely a negative for the US, any way you look at it, it and its supporters are the ones who will benefit the most.

  • Chomsky/Abunimah (the left and Zionism)
    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 20, 2010 at 7:55 pm

      I would ordinarily with Emmett that the key to liberation lies with the oppressed but the Israel-Palestine conflict is an exception. Never has a liberation movement been engaged in a struggle where a whole critical element of its enemy is parked outside of the arena of struggle and therfore out of its reach. And not only is it, and by it I refer to the Amercican Jewish Establishment, out of its reach but it's key role in the conflict is ignored or dismissed by most of those who pretend to be in support of Palestinian rights.

      Twenty years ago, during the first intifada, everything was moving the Palestinians' way and the supporting coverage though both editorials and cartoons in the US press would be unimaginable today. What they were not able to conquer of even penetrate, of course, was the US Congress which then, as now, was totally in thrall to Israel, which, thanks to Chomsky and the Chomskyites throughout the movement, went unnoticed and untouched as a target of the kind of political action that should have been obligatory. The lesson is this: Until and unless, those who claim to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people are ready to take on Israel's supporters in Congress and the Jewish organizations and individuals that are responsible for that support, there will be no justice for Palestine. This should not be a subject for internet debate since what we are talking about is not an academic exercise but a people's struggle for liberation. It's long past time to separate those who are serious in their support for Palestinian rights and those who, whatever their motivations, have been actively subverting it.

      As for linking that struggle with finding the truth about 9-11, as much as I question the official narrative, I also question adding that subject to that of the Palestinians which is already difficult enough. As with the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, RFK, and MLK Jr., (which may have been the most significant of all), we can never expect to learn the truth. The Palestinians have no such option.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 19, 2010 at 3:17 am with 1 replies

      One might think that I am the only one or one among an inconsequential number of individuals who question Chomsky's interpretation of history. For those who have not read my article (which Chomsky refuses to do,or so he says) , I will share you some of the comments of our late mutual friend, Prof.Israel Shahak that he wrote to me in a letter in 1991 in response to a letter in which I complained how Chomsky had dismissed The Lobby's role in pushing the US into the first Gulf War and which appeared in my article:
      link to leftcurve.org

      (excerpt)
      "Much of what Chomsky tells us is "not controversial," invariably proves to be very much so and particularly when it comes to the relations between Israel and the White House. The late revered Israeli scholar and human rights activist, Professor Israel Shahak pointed out that Chomsky’s analysis suffers from his 'undoubted tendency of demonizing the American presidency and the Executive in general, while ignoring the Legislature, but also from his very mistaken, in my [Shahak's] opinion, tendency of assuming that not only the principles but literally everything concerning the American imperialism was laid in detail long ago, in 1944 or about that time, and from then on the policy is, so to say, a follow-up of instructions from a computer.'

      'This ignores not only the human factor in the US itself but also the completely different nature of the foes and the victims of the US during the last decades. There can be no doubt, in my own opinion, that the actual policies of the US are complex even when they are evil, influenced, as in the case of all other states, by many factors of which AIPAC is one and human stupidity (for which he never allows) is another.'

      "And finally, this very insightful paragraph":

      'But such simplistic theories, backed by his memory and ability to pick isolated examples (sometimes from a long time ago like his stock example of Eisenhower in the case of Israel while ignoring everything else from 1967 on) can appeal to [the] young who look for certainty and also for those who don't want to [be] engaged in actual work and so find substitute for it in crude and useless display of emotion. " ]......

      'I had the same, only greater, differences of opinion with Noam Chomsky, who is my personal friend for quite a time, on the subject of AIPAC and the influence of the Jewish lobby in general as you have. What is more, a number of mutual friends of Chomsky and me have also tried to influence him, in vain, on that point.

      'I am afraid that he is, with all his wonderful qualities and the work he does, quite dogmatic on many things. I have no doubt that his grievous mistake about the lack of importance of AIPAC, which he repeats quite often, helps the Zionists very much as you so graphically described. '

      That's from Israel Shahak, 19 years ago and Chomsky is still at it. I'll rest my case, at least on this thread.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 19, 2010 at 2:44 am with 1 replies

      Seth wrote:

      "1. Thanks for the history, none of which bears on the point I made about Israel, the US, and what Chomsky refers to as “the international consensus” that he supports as the framework for a solution. He is referring to votes such as this, which Finkelstein also highlights:

      link to normanfinkelstein.com

      in which as usual the US and Israel stand virtually alone in opposing a two-state solution. "
      If you read what they were voting against, Seth, you would have seen that it was for something more than a two-state solution. It called for the Palestinian right of return and for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders, both of which the US opposes. To claim that this vote was against the two-state solution while leaving out the rest is disingenuous but typical of Chomsky himself.

      Since Finkelstein happens to look on Chomsky as his mentor, he tends to take identical positions, even when he is not familiar with the subject such as the Israel Lobby.

      Seth wrote: "2. The quote does not support the characterization you made of Chomsky’s views. In addition, as you must be aware, Chomsky has written quite a bit on the difference between a “unitary democratic secular state” and a binational state. But nowhere have I seen him reference fears about Jews “would eventually become a minority” in a single state of some sort and that’s why he’s against it."

      That's your interpretation. It clearly implies that Chomsky rejects the notion that Jews would would have only civil rights in an Arab dominated state and that he rejects that. In the same section ("Towards a New Cold War," p. 230) he equates Israeli and Palestinian claims, that is those of the dispossessor with the those of the dispossessed, those of the ethnic cleanser with those of the ethnically cleansed ."Those who urge the demands of one or the other partner in this deadly dance," he writes, "deaf to conflicting pleas, merely help to pave the way to an eventual catastrophe."

      Seth writes: 3. Do you even read the Chomsky quotes you put forward as your evidence? He is against “divestment from Israel”, but “it makes good sense to press for not sending attack helicopters to Israel, for example…and then to stop sending military weapons that are being used for repression” . And this is evidence that “he has never advocated in his talks anything that activists could actually do to stop Israeli occupation and change the situation such as ending arm sales to Israel”? Read it again. And your criticism is that he makes “no suggestion that his audience contact their Congressional representatives or senators regarding their support for aid to Israel.” ? Take your analogy to the contras seriously. Find a Chomsky speech from the 80s about Central America that ends with a rousing call to his audience to contact Congress to cut off aid to the contras. You probably won’t find that either."

      It doesn't matter how many times one reads it, while criticizing the sale of these weapons to Israel he does not suggest that a campaign be initiated against it but, rather, suggests that his listeners try to get an article in their local newspaper about it. Perhaps, he might explain why the papers do not generally report such weapons transfers. As to the campaign against the Contras, it did not need him to raise the issue of aid, the activist groups were already doing that themselves. That it had not been done and has generally not been done in the case of Israel can not be laid completely at Chomsky's front door but at those within the movement who might be described as crypto-zionists and who have seen to it that the demands never go beyond that useless slogan, "End the Occupation!," the meaning of which the majority of Americans haven't the slightest clue.

      You mention my exchange with Chomsky in the old National Guardian. With regard for not telling his adoring fans to do anything, while blaming all the sins of the world on the elites in charge of US imperialism, I wrote that he "makes us spectators when history demands that we be participants."

      Seth wrote: "Since I watched him sign the petition and speak out in support of the University of Pennsylvania to take action in divesting from firms supporting Israeli repression, together with his consistent statements on this topic, I find it very difficult to take your characterization of his views seriously."

      Can you read English, Seth? Divesting from firms supporting Israeli repression is qualitatively different from divesting from Israel itself and that Chomsky opposes. Full stop, as they say.

      Seth wrote: "According to you, Chomsky has done a valuable service with his “detailed descriptions of the injustices that had been heaped upon the Palestinians by the Israelis”, but that he “is providing cover for the pro-Israel lobby” because he still has “one foot still in Zion”. There is an obvious question here that you don’t address. If he still has such a “determination to protect Israel”, why would he have spent so much of his life documenting and publicizing the “injustices that had been heaped upon the Palestinians”? It seems to me it would have been much simpler to have simply not done that to begin with. "

      The answer is quite simple. His documenting “injustices that had been heaped upon the Palestinians” at the hands of Israel gave him the necessary credibility that enabled him to gain the confidence of most of those who support the Palestinian cause, including mine at one point, and make them susceptible to his distortions of the history of US-Israel relations and to accepting his theory that the pro-Israel lobby is, as he once described it, "a paper tiger."

      I should note that after our competing articles were published in the National Guardian in 1991 and he and I were still on amicable terms and he was subscribing to the Middle East Labor Bulletin which I edited, a NY activist proposed to Chomsky that he and I have a debate on the issue of the Israel Lobby at the next Socialist Scholar's Conference. Chomsky politely declined, writing that "it wouldn't be useful." To whom, is the question.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 18, 2010 at 9:25 pm with 5 replies

      David, you've terminally overdosed on Chomsky's Kool-Aid. What you have produced in this post is simply a regurgitation of what Chomsky himself has written without supplying an iota of proof, and having read all of Chomsky's books (which turned out to nothing but repetitions of his previous works) I was unable to find a single knowledgeable source for the notion that Israel is either "central" to our ensuring our access to Middle Eastern oil or America's "stationery aircraft carrier."

      Quite the contrary, it was considered essential that it stay on the sidelines in both Gulf wars. Instead of exposing his and your academic limits, perhaps you can find us ONE good reference. I have many, from former State Dept. officials and CIA analysts who say quite the opposite and some you will find in my article. And please, don't tell me that either Ronald Reagan or George Shultz qualified as experts in that field.

      Regarding Israel going beyond its "limits," as it did with certain sales to China, those were done behind The Lobby's back and proved an embarrassment to its members until the story was shoved under the rug. Indeed, the views of Israelis, whose leaders by and large look at their American supporters with contempt, and those of the Jewish establishment differ.

      Whereas the latter is solidly anti-communist and pro-capitalist (and views China with Cold War eyes), the Israelis will sell to virtually everyone except Iran and Syria. Even neoconman Doug Fieth felt blindsided and became unhinged when the report of Israel selling the Phalcon warning system to China was reported.

      As for Jonathan Pollard, it is more than likely that he would have been released if he had kept his mouth shut and didn't make accusations against the Labor government which made him to this day the darling of the extreme Israeli nutcases. Their fear, and that is within Washington and Israel, is that should he ever be released, he will go on a speaking tour and expose those who he claimed betrayed him. Meanwhile spies for Israel, right and left, are arrested and then "disappeared" from the mainstream press which also, unlike the Israeli media, reported on the Mossad agents who were arrested after a New Jersey woman watched these Middle East appearing me taking videos of the burning WTC on 9-11 while appearing to be celebrating. The story was in the Forward 3/15/02, with their names identifying them as Mossad agents and that they worked for a moving country that was a Mossad front. Since 9-11, at least three other pairs of so-called movers have been arrested in different parts of the country, New Mexico, Illinois and Maryland and turned over by local police to the FBI. The stories made the local papers but somehow not the national press and they too were "disappeared" as has been Stewart Nozzete, a high ranking space scientist with a top secret clearance who had been giving technical information to the Israel aviation industry for ten years. He was busted in an FBI sting by an agent pretending to be a Mossad spy. Nozette's answer was "I thought I was already working for you guys." (Yes, there are folks in Washington in the intelligence agencies who are wise to Israeli spy operations but their legit efforts to bust them have been thwarted by higher-ups or the US courts.

      BTW, have you seen any story in the US press that the company in charge of security at the Amsterdam airport and which allowed the boxer shorts bomber to get on the plane was Israel, ICTS, and that it was responsible for security at all the airports involved on 9-11 and at Charles DeGaulle from which Richard Reid enplaned? No, you haven't, but if you read Ha'aretz, which ran a critical article about it, you would have known. Do you think Chomsky would think that fact important? Seriously, quite apart from his positions on Israel-Palestine he has become infamous as the government's "Gatekeeper" for 9-11, having subscribed wholeheartedly to the "official narrative" from the very beginning and having dismissed every effort to provide an alternative scenario.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 18, 2010 at 6:56 pm with 1 replies

      There was part of David Green's comment that I can not let go unchecked. He writes:
      "I know its open season on Chomsky, and there’s some ageism involved here. In fact, his combativeness in this interview is reminiscent of his younger days."

      I am five years younger than Chomsky and happily, unlike him, I did not grow up a Zionist and/or get brainwashed on a kibbutz. His combativeness has nothing to do with age. What you heard was a typical Chomsky reaction when someone on the left has the temerity to question him. His usual response, from my personal experience, is to accuse his critics of doing harm to the Palestinian cause while he claims to be its champion.

      Green writes: "He made this interviewer look like a obsessive fool."

      Wrong. Chomsky's attitude was nasty, patronizing, and condescending, and if I didn't know that he displays the same attitude toward all his left critics, I would add, racist, as well. The questions he was asked by Khalil Bendib were legitimate. Chomsky's problem is that when asked difficult questions he refuses to give straight answers.

      Green writes, "Worst of all is the assertion of “ethnic loyalty” or “dual loyalty.” It’s just ridiculous to think that neocons would endanger their status in the American system. Nobody who has experienced debates about Israel locally and first hand could possibly see “dual loyalty.” These people just think that U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same–and for their own purposes, they are.

      Green may suffer from the same problem, to judge from his post. Certainly, even Chomsky owned up to his sentiments for Israel in his early writings.
      Here's Chomsky in "Peace and the Middle East," written in 1975 which I cite in my article:

      'At the time of the Six Day War in June 1967, I personally believed that the threat of genocide was real and reacted with virtually uncritical support for Israel at what appeared to be a desperate moment. In retrospect it seems that this assessment of the facts was dubious at best."' (P. 124)

      "It was an honest expressions of his affection for Israel and a rare admission by Chomsky that he had erred. It was apparently his last. Given this background, some other questionable statements of Chomsky in that South African interview become comprehensible. When asked to explain the differences between Israel before and after statehood, he responded":

      'The post-1967 period is different. The concept of settler-colonialism would apply to the pre-1948 period. It is plainly an outside population coming in and basically dispossessing an indigenous population.: ... Without going into it, by 1948, that argument is over. There was a state there, right or wrong. And that state should have the rights of any state in the international system, no more, no less. After 1967, there is a quite different situation. That's military conquest.' (Safundi, Znet, May 10, 2004)

      "What Chomsky seems to be saying here to the Palestinians after 1948, is 'Get over it.' Is that a misinterpretation? Could not the apartheid state of South Africa been defended on the same basis? And what was Israel’s war in 1948, if not military conquest?" (From Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict)

      Anyone who knows anything about the neocons and their connections to Israel, both through their politics and family members who live there, know that beyond their personal egos, their loyalty is not to the US but to Israel. They should not be considered separately from the pro-Israel Lobby and the Jewish establishment. They are not only part and parcel of it, they are among its key members.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 18, 2010 at 5:59 pm with 4 replies

      Answers to Seth and David Green's questions and comments can be found in my article, "Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict."
      link to leftcurve.org from which most of what I write below was taken:

      First, to respond to Seth,

      (1) US policy since the days of Nixon , Chomsky's opinion to the contrary not withstanding, has been to find a way to end the Israeli occupation of the land it captured in 1967, not for the benefit of those countries whose land Israel occupied or for the Palestinians but because a regional settlement would produce stability in a area that is crucial to what is perceived in Washington to be in the best interests of the United States.

      The evidence for this, not only in the national media but in declassified White House and State Departments documents available in the National Archives, is overwhelming as it is for the successful actions of the pro-Israel Lobby over the years in trying to prevent any such settlement.

      As Uri Avnery asked, rhetorically, in Ha'aretz in 1991, ""What happened to all those nice plans? Israel's governments have mobilized the collective power of US Jewry - which dominates Congress and the media to a large degree - against them. Faced by this vigorous opposition, all the presidents, great and small, football players and movie stars - folded one after another."

      Not wishing to expend political capital challenging the Jewish establishment, Nixon withdrew support from the first ot those proposed by Secretary of State William Rogers, with his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger contributing to the sabotage.

      Every single president since then who has tried to get Israel to withdraw has been publicly humiliated at the hands of whoever happened to be prime minister and Obama is but the latest and he has experienced it almost every week. Yet Chomsky would have us believe, offering not a shred of evidence, that the US really supports Israeli settlements and its continuing occupation of the West Bank.

      Does anyone, not terminally addicted to his brand of Kool-Aid (Chomsky's not Obama's) actually believe that one US president after another would allow themselves to be publicly humiliated in such a manner in order to cover their secret report for Israel's expansionist policy? Obviously not, yet Chomsky persists in peddling the line that it is the US, not Israel, that is the most responsible party in blocking a "peace agreement," irrespective of its contents.

      That being said, that Chomsky cites the "international consensus" to validate his support of the "two-state solution" is as valid as citing an earlier international consensus that led to and justifed the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

      (2) In 1975, Chomsky considered the possibility of "a unitary democratic secular state in Mandatory Palestine... an exercise in futility. It is curious that this goal is advocated in some form by the most extreme antagonists: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and expansionist elements within Israel. But the documents of the former indicate that what they have in mind is an Arab state that will grant civil rights to Jews, and the pronouncements of the advocates of a Greater Israel leave little doubt that their thoughts run along parallel lines, interchanging "Jew" and "Arab" (Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, Pantheon, New York, 1982, p. 231)

      (3) Re Chomsky and US weapons to Israel, I will quote from my article in Left Curve:

      "After speaking at the First Annual Maryse Mikhail Lecture at the University of Toledo, on March 4, 2001, Chomsky was asked:

      'Do you think it's is a good idea to push the idea of divestment from Israel the same way that we used to push for it in white South Africa?

      Chomsky replied:

      ' I regard the United States as the primary guilty party here, for the past 30 years. And for us to push for divestment from the United States doesn't really mean anything. What we ought to do is push for changes in US policy. Now it makes good sense to press for not sending attack helicopters to Israel, for example. In fact it makes very good sense to try to get some newspaper in the United States to report the fact that it's happening. That would be a start. And then to stop sending military weapons that are being used for repression. And you can take steps like that. But I don't think divestment from Israel would make much sense, even if such a policy were imaginable (and it's not).

      'Our primary concern, I think, should be change in fundamental US policy, which has been driving this thing for decades. And that should be within our range. That's what we're supposed to be able to do: change US policy. '

      "Let us examine the response he gave at this event. Having stated forthrightly his opposition to pressuring Israel through divestment, he made no suggestion that his audience contact their Congressional representatives or senators regarding their support for aid to Israel. Mass appeals to Congress to stop funding, whether it was in opposition to the war in Vietnam or the Contras in Nicaragua, have been a basic element in every other nation-wide struggle against US global policy. Why not in this case? If Chomsky has ever called for any actions involving Congress, I could find no record of it. "

      That was what I wrote in 2004. Does anyone think getting a newspaper to publish an article about US weapons constitutes any call to action. If anyone could find Chomsky telling his audiences that they need to mobilize to stop weapons "sales" to Israel I would appreciate receiving such evidence, but since he almost never mentions Congress which would be the target of such a campaign I do not expect to find my email box filled with any such evidence.

      Now, as for David Green, his statement that there are other issues in which the Democrats and Republicans march in the same lockstep as they do when it comes to Israel is not born out by the evidence. Whereas as Congress has taken votes supporting various war appropriations over the years, their respective counts do not begin to match those supporting Israel, and moreover, as the wars become unpopular the votes against them have risen.

      As for Obama's call for a settlement freeze, what your Chomsky never mentions was that after he did so, as I mentioned on that interview, 76 senators and 329 members of the House sent letters, circulated for signatures and probably written by AIPAC, to Obama, advising him not to pressure Netanyahu when they met, and as you recall Obama postponed their first meeting.

      Then, as I mentiond in that interview but which Chomsky noticeably does not, is that during the Congressional recess, 55 members of Congress, 25 Republicans and 30 Democrats led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer went to Jerusalem and held press conferences that were unreported in the Zionist dominated mainstream media in which they openly took the side of Netanyahu against Obama and particularly when it came to East Jerusalem. So what Chomsky fails to mention, and I will, add, deliberately so, is that Obama was left with a US Congress backing Israel and not him.
      This is why I believe that what Chomsky has been doing for past three or more decades is providing damage control for Israel and its US supporters and one result of that is a US solidarity movement that is even afraid to talk about the subject, apart from this web site. If one wonders why the movement has been nothing less than ab utter failure in its efforts on behalf of the Palestinians he or she should begin by examining who are its "spokespersons."

      As an example of the depth of this problem, when Mearsheimer and Walt came out with their groundbreaking book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Democracy Now's otherwise excellent Amy Goodman chose not to interview either one but instead brought on, you guessed it, Chomsky to refute them.

      I will close my reponse with another segment from my article, citing someone who knew quite a bit more about the Israel-Palestine conflict than Prof. Chomskym the late Prof. Edward Said:

      "In his contribution to The New Intifada, entitled, appropriately, "America’s Last Taboo," he wrote:

      'What explains this [present] state of affairs? The answer lies in the power of Zionist organizations in American politics, whose role throughout the "peace process" has never been sufficiently addressed—a neglect that is absolutely astonishing, given the policy of the PLO has been in essence to throw our fate as a people into the lap of the United States, without any strategic awareness of how American policy is dominated by a small minority whose views about the Middle East are in some ways more extreme than those of Likud itself. '

      "And on the subject AIPAC, Said wrote:

      ' [T]he American Israel Public Affairs Committee—AIPAC—has for years been the most powerful single lobby in Washington. Drawing on a well-organized, well-connected, highly visible and wealthy Jewish population, AIPAC inspires an awed fear and respect across the political spectrum. Who is going to stand up to this Moloch in behalf of the Palestinians, when they can offer nothing, and AIPAC can destroy a professional career at the drop of a checkbook? In the past, one or two members of Congress did resist AIPAC openly, but the many political action committees controlled by AIPAC made sure they were never re-elected... If such is the material of the legislature, what can be expected of the executive? '"

      Again, I invite those who want to see the real Chomsky to check out my article:
      link to leftcurve.org

      PS. Thanks Seth and David for providing the opportunity to get a little more of the truth out there for people to read it.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 17, 2010 at 7:12 pm

      I am not as familiar with the struggle for Kurdish independence as I am with that of the Palestinians but clearly, they should have had an independent state following WW1 but they lacked the clout of the Zionists and the opposition was formidable. They may yet get one although it might invite intervention by Turkey which has large Kurdish population which is considered by the US and the West as the "bad Kurds" as opposed that those that are in bed with Israel and the US who are considered, on this side of the water, if not in Arab Iraq, as "the good Kurds."

      But their struggle and those of others that you mention are qualitatively different from that of the Palestinians who were uniquely subjected to ethnic cleansing at the hands of a predominantly European born, Western-armed settler colonial settler population, an ethnic cleansing that continues against succeeding generations of Palestinians to this day.

      Moreover, since this ethnic cleansing and the accompanying crimes of Israel, the state that was formed by and which required that operation, have been supported financially, militarily, and, of equal if not more importance, politically by the United States, all American citizens, regardless of their background, have an obligation to correct the injustices that have been made possible by their tax dollars and by their elected representatives. I don't believe Baruch Rosen or any of Israel's defenders can make that claim about any other political struggle and certainly not the ones he referred to.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 16, 2010 at 7:01 pm

      Thanks MRW and Cliff, I do appreciate your comments and am glad that Phil has this site which has become one of the most important in enlightening people on issues relating to Israel/Palestine and opening their minds.

      One of these days I'll have a web site and put up some other earlier articles that I've written but at the moment I am working on a book. You all can easily guess the subject.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 16, 2010 at 5:16 pm with 5 replies

      Sixty years ago, or maybe it was 61 I was watching my mother clean up the bathroom after Israel's UN Ambassador Reuven Dafni, who had been staying at our house,had made a mess of it. "Never again," she said, would he be welcome there. Moshe Sneh, the head of the Haganah, who had also been a house guest was a little more civilized, but as my father learned, he talked out of both sides of his mouth.

      By 1956 my father was one of the few in the LA Jewish community to publicly oppose Israel's invasion of Egypt and his first reaction to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was to tell me on the phone, "they're just like Nazis. Go back and read Deuteronomy." I did and recommend it to all who wish to understand the Zionist mindset and that of Julian, as well, I suspect.

      Oh, yeah, I am not as old as Chomsky but, unlike the Old[er] Man, I am enjoying a second childhood.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort January 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm with 1 replies

      Jan--gdyn makes a very good point that Chomsky has the cause and effect relationship backwards and that mistake would naturally flow from his refusal to acknowledge that not only has The Lobby/Jewish Establishment been responsible for Israel receiving ultra-VIP treatment at the hands of both the government and the media, but it has made it safe for US firms to invest there.

  • Does Keillor's crack at Larry Summers suggest smoldering anti-Israel feeling in the heartland?
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 20, 2009 at 9:55 pm

      They make it known ONLY to their Jewish voters with separate mailing pieces professing their loyalty to Israel and how many times they have been there and frequently show a photo of them with some high ranking Israeli official.

      Not only to members of Congress, Jewish and non-Jewish, with the exception of a district or two in NY, never mention their support for Israel in general mailings to their constituents, but you would be very hard pressed to ever find any mention of their voting for a pro-Israel, AIPAC sponsored bill on their websites.

      Now, one would think that if Israel was so popular with the public as we have been repeatedly told, they would be proud to demonstrate their pro-Israel credentials. What can we conclude from their failure to do so? That the public's strong support for Israel is nothing but a myth.

  • Lustick: Attack on Iran would end any prayer of Israel being accepted in region
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 19, 2009 at 6:03 pm with 3 replies

      A similar sanctions bill that was approved in committee has yet to be scheduled for a floor vote by Sen. Harry Reid who is not so openly in AIPAC's employ as is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and the White House and State Department will do everything they can to keep Reid from doing so since passage of the legislation would create major problems in dealing with its European allies as well as China, Russia,Turkey and India, all of which have major contracts with Iran. Despite being aware of this Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh, and Arizona Republican John Kyl, both with a long track record as AIPAC lickspittles, have said they are determined to push the senate bill forward at the beginning of the new year. It will be a fight that will bear watching and to win it Obama may have to cut some kind of deal with Netanyahu to get the lobby off his back.

  • EU's foreign minister says E. Jerusalem is occupied territory
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 17, 2009 at 9:52 pm with 8 replies

      potsherd (shouldn't that be potshard?), the UK is not the US. The British Parliament is not, happily, the US Congress which is composed almost entirely of lickspittles and, unlike the latter, a respectable segment is neither in debt nor in thrall to the British Zionist lobby. What Baroness (!) Ashton represents are those of her countrymen and women, who no doubt watched the Gaza assault on Al-Jazeera, many of whom have a personal memory of having resisted the Nazis. Keeping a stiff upper and all that.

  • A Brief Thought on the Gaza Freedom March
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 16, 2009 at 1:17 pm

      Richard, I have seen the whole apartment blocks in Beirut in 1983 and again in 2007, that had been destroyed by the Israeli Luftwaffe, acts of sheer terror and mass murder committed by Israeli flyboys who were in as much risk of being hit as if they were out on a turkey shoot. I watched on Al-Jazeera as the white phosphorous lit up the Gaza sky last January.

      As terrible as were the actions (as well as politically self-defeating) of those Palestinian suicide bombers, one can at least make rationalizations for what they were driven to do after more than 30 years of a sadistic dehumanizing occupation. One cannot say the same for the Israeli airmen who having fired their missiles, having committed murder, flew back to Israel for a nice warm dinner.

      My single state would have them facing war crimes tribunals along with the officers and elected officials who sent them and face imprisonment. My single state would have a de-zionization process and those whose crimes were of a sufficiently criminal nature and who were born elsewhere, such as Brooklyn or Kiev.

      Of course, I am dreaming. It will be another generation that will realize that dream.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 15, 2009 at 9:03 pm with 8 replies

      Witty, are you speaking of "gruesome and intimate terror" applied by Israel against the Palestinians which far exceeded anything done by their fellow apartheiders in South Africa?

      What is a curious twist of history, that official apartheid in both countries, that is Israel and South Africa, was born in the same year, 1948.

      Until 1966, that is 18 years after the Jewish state's establishment, the Palestinians who remained in Palestine (now occupied and renamed Israel by the victors), lived in an apartheid situation under military rule, a not indignicant piece of history that the Zionists have tried to bury.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 15, 2009 at 8:56 pm with 1 replies

      Dealing with the lobby depends on where one lives and who is his or her member of Congress. In some instances, if a member of Congress is totally in Israel's camp and there is a small Jewish constituency, it is likely that that congressperson does not let the voters know how he or she bows or scrapes for the lobby, so it is possible to make a local campaign, publishing his or her pro-Israel votes and put out a flier that asks why the member never communicates this to the public on his or her website. If the member of Congress has taken pro-Israel money that should be publicized as well. Particularly when people are hurting for jobs and schools are cutting back, the notion that aid for Israel is an untouchable will rub people the wrong way. Letters to the editor and calling in on local talk shows at the same time will enhance the campaign.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 15, 2009 at 4:02 pm with 15 replies

      James North presents a critical difference between the situation of black South Africans under apartheid and Palestinians under Israel's updated version; the South Africans knew that the world was with them and the Palestinians see that the powers that be in the world stand with Israel. The main reason for this is that the South African apartheid regime did not have the benefit of a powerful lobby working on its behalf.

      To illustrate the difference, here is something that I wrote for Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "City Lights Review," in 1990:

      If South Africa had a lobby as powerful as the Israeli lobby...

      * Nelson Mandela would not be free.
      * There would be no sanctions against South Africa.
      * South Africa would be the largest recipient of US aid.
      * The African National Congress would still be outlawed.
      * Congress would have endorsed the idea that apartheid is not racism.
      * Pro-apartheid forces cloaked as peace-makers would try to control the
      anti-apartheid movement.
      * Public television would require "balanced" reporting to
      counteranti-apartheid programs.
      * Journalists. academics and others who criticized apartheid would be
      targets of character assassinations.
      * The struggle of the Boers against the British for control of South
      Africa would be considered a "national liberation struggle."
      * South Africa would ultimately be defended as the only "democracy" in
      Africa.
      *__________________________________________________________________
      (Fill in whatever we forgot and send to your local congressperson)

      (First of a series of Public Service Advisories)

  • Does Lieberman have an Israel angle on healthcare roadblock?
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 15, 2009 at 9:12 pm with 1 replies

      If you want someone to blame for Lieberman you need to look no further than the White House since it was Barack Obama who gave him the thumbs up sign after the last election and approved his being appointed to the chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. That, combined with his position on "health care" seems to guarantee him a spot on Sunday's network talk shows every week.
      It helps, of course, when all of those shows are on station's whose owners and news directors have, if I may say, a pro-Israel bent.

      It also helps, as both Politico and HuffPost reported, to have Rahm Emanuel pay a visit to Senate leader Harry Reid and tell him to give Slimeball Joe what he wants.
      Maybe it's time for the people to grab their pitchforks and torches and march on Washington.

  • Join Howard Zinn, Richard Falk and others in helping to save Flashpoints
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 15, 2009 at 12:55 pm

      Those who live in the Bay Area need to bombard the station's GM with phone calls @ 510-848-6767 and those who don't need to keep up a barrage of emails. In addition, pressure must be brought on other programmers, such as the hosts of the Mourning (sic) Show and the Public Affairs program at noon, when they open the phones to listeners calls @ 510-848-4425 and raise the Flashpoints issue no matter what subject is being discussed, maybe by asking the guest what they think about is happening to Flashpoints. Since KPFA is streamed live @ http://www.kpfa.org people can do that from out of town. Since the hosts of those programs have a long history of being management's lickspittles, don't be concerned about embarrassing them.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 14, 2009 at 6:40 pm with 1 replies

      KPFA and Pacifica Radio have a sordid history when it comes to discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the 80s, KPFA GM David Salniker (who later moved up to be the head of Pacifica) banned any mention or discussion of Zionism on its airwaves. He also stopped broadcasting critical reports on the Israeli political scene by an anti-Zionist Israeli, Amos Wollin, because of complaints from New Jewish Agenda (!), a precursor to J Street, that he was "anti-Israel."

      One look at the names on the wall in the entrance way to KPFA's Berkeley headquarters honoring its big contributors will give the answer to those who wonder how a station claiming to be "the voice of the voiceless," can move against a program as valuable as Flashpoints. I'll just mention one that I recall, the Walter Haas Foundation, founded with profits from Levi's jeans and a big supporter of Jewish and Zionist causes.

      When I helped to expose the ADL spying operation in the Bay Area in 1993, Dennis's Flashpoints was the only program on KPFA where I was allowed to talk about it, (and the only program that has allowed any discussion of "the lobby.) ". Both subjects were and remain too hot for the Zionist-lite news department and the morning show which elected to bring in an outsider who had once worked with the ADL , Chip Berlet, to talk about it. When I went on the Morning Show with Hatem Bazian, at the time a Palestinian student leader and now a UC professor, to promote an event in which we were both to speak against the Oslo agreement, when I entered the studio, the first thing I was told was not to say a word on the air about the ADL case . That was 1993 and the same news directors and morning show hosts are still there, although one now has a noon show.

      That's the milieu in which the Flashpoints crew, Dennis, Nora Barrows Friedman and Miguel Molina have had to courageously continue their commitment to the truth. They must be defended.

  • No oil for blood!
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 16, 2009 at 1:18 am

      It is an illusion on the part of much of the Left that the US is in constant need of a war to justify its massive arms industry. Not so. Since there is no popular movement against arms spending there is generally no debate except over which particular item should have a priority, e.g., most recently, the F-22 fighter vs the F-35.

      While the Zionist lobby and its media component are strong supporters of the arms industry, except when its sales are directed to the Saudis, that is not sufficient a reason for the unconditional support that Israel gets from Congress since, as I explained significant opposition to the arms budget is non-existent.

      The War on Terror was, however, invented in Jerusalem about 1979, and has been useful providing a justification, albeit a fraudulent one, for maintaining the fiction that Israel was a strategic asset against Soviet penetration of the Middle East which dissipated with the end of the Cold War. The record shows that it has been viewed as largely a liability by most administrations that had to be coddled because it was and is backed by the political and economic power of the American Jewish establishment.

  • Bil'in leader arrested as part of ongoing Israeli crackdown on nonviolent Palestinian protest
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 10, 2009 at 4:13 pm with 1 replies

      The question that needs to be raised is, "Where is the Palestinian Authority militia when the Israeli occupiers make their nightly raids (or daily ones) for that matter?
      They are no better than the Jewish kapos who collaborated with the Nazis in the concerntration camps, if not worse, because they armed. What I am unable to understand why this has not become an issue and why these vende patrias are not publicly condemned..

  • 2/3 of members of Council on Foreign Relations say U.S. policy favors Israel too much
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 8, 2009 at 10:31 pm with 2 replies

      Rehmat, the CFR is NOT a think tank, it is a membership organization of the establishment elite that has within it a small think tank which is decidedly Zionist with such neoconmen as Eliot Abrams and Dan Senor in leadership roles. . What is apparent from this poll is that the Zionist element does not represent the majority of its members who when privately polled were willing to express opinions critical of US foreign policy with regard to Israel and that is what is important. The CFR think tank is not as influential as WINEP and the American Enterprise Inst. but with the Hudson Inst. and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Foreign Policy Initiative (the successor to PNAC), they have a corner on Washington and on the Sunday talk shows.

  • Rupert's neocon rag blasts Obama for 'meddling' with Israeli expansion
    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 8, 2009 at 11:46 am

      Most of the Black media are independent in name only, relying, yes again, on contributions from local Jewish patrons to stay afloat (and that goes ditto for Black churches). A rare example of an independent Black publication that doesn't genuflect to the Zionists is the San Francisco Bayview link to sfbayview.com

      It competes with the longer running Sun-Reporter which even in the heyday of Israel's arms trading with South Africa was afraid to run a story about a protest that I was organizing against that for fear of losing its wealthy Jewish patrons who could be counted on to buy whole tables at the paper's annual dinner. The sad part about this is that the very old editor who told me this had been one of the organizers of the Pullman porters and back in 1934, he had worked with the ILWU in promoting the famous General Strike in San Francisco.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 8, 2009 at 1:29 am with 4 replies

      There was a time when what should now be called the House Negro Caucus had some brave members, that is, those that were willing to speak out against Israeli arms trading with South Africa and on behalf of the Palestinians. They were never the majority and dependent as they were on the lobby's money, they would fold time and again when it came to voting aid for Israel. One by one, the good ones got nailed by AIPAC while the so-called progressive movement looked the other way. John Conyers was once a stalwart in the Palestinians' corner but eventually he, too, saw the handwriting on the wall and learned how to bend his knee to AIPAC while keeping his mouth shut. Maxine Waters has lately taken some anti-AIPAC votes which is maybe why she is being investigated for an ethics violation and Barbara Lee in Berkeley has piped up a bit after being criticized in the local paper for bending over for Israel.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 8, 2009 at 1:21 am

      It's not laziness in Zunes's case. He doesn't like me to say it (and told me so) but I believe it has something to do with what one might call career enhancement. In Nov, 1989, he wrote one of the first and best articles about "the lobby" for the Progressive, entitled,"Israel's Blank Check," but for someone trying to get a professorial position in American academia, speaking about the lobby was not the wisest thing to do.

      I have debated Zunes twice on this issue and he has become almost hysterical in denying the lobby's power. On the other hand, he has referred to Israel as "an example of global affirmative action," and has said that he "will be a Zionist until there is no more anti-semitism."

      Here's a link to the first debate: link to radio4all.net

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 8, 2009 at 1:14 am

      Sorry wondering but you're ill informed. Graham praised Israel publicly because it was politically necessary to do so. When he said to Nixon that when he was elected to a second term, "you have to break the Jewish stranglehold on the media," (to which Nixon who also privately disliked Jews agreed), Graham was not referring to liberal Jews, he was referring to who actually owned or dominated the media who just happened, by a coincidence, to be Jewish. Brando's crime was calling on Jews in Hollywood to do something about the racism which some of them were injecting into their pictures. Hollywood, of course, played a major role in creating and perpetuating the racist stereotypes that still persist today.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 7, 2009 at 7:56 pm with 12 replies

      True. What passes for the "Left" and the solidarity movement, such as it is, pay little attention to what is going on in Washington so those who have the courage to take on Israel or AIPAC find they have no one watching their back. In fact, quite the opposite. When someone who has clearly been targeted for defeat by the Zionists countrywide such as was the case with Cynthia McKinney in Georgia and Earl Hilliard in Alabama in 2002, you find certain "friends" of the Palestinians such as Prof. Stephen Zunes looking for every excuse to prove that it was not "the lobby" that did them in while most of the rest remain silent.

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 7, 2009 at 5:14 pm with 4 replies

      I missed that and while encouraging I expect that if the past is prologue he will end up like Billy Graham, like Marlon Brando, and like Strobe Talbott, doing a tearful mea culpa while on bended knee before the reigning supreme power. When Talbott was appointed to the position of Deputy Secretary of State by Bill Clinton in 1994, he was reminded by the AIPAC-alerted Senate committee that in 1981, while an editor at TIME, he had written a scathing attack on the notion of Israel as a 'strategic asset," and cast it for what it really was and always has been, "an outright liability." With Joe Biden at his side as his spiritual advisor, Talbott recanted. It was probably one of the more disgusting episodes in the Senate's fairly disgusting history but it seems to have served as a lesson to the political pundits who have arrived on the scene since.
      link to nytimes.com.

      His original article: link to time.com

    • Jeffrey Blankfort December 7, 2009 at 2:38 pm

      Murdoch is a regular attendee at major Jewish functions in New York and has been, at least twice, the recipient of "humanitarian of the year" award and last March was the recipient of the American Jewish Committee's "Human Relations Award" Coming as it did, a month after the conclusion of Israel's Gaza onslaught, Murdoch made it clear where he stood on the issue:

      "My friends," he said, " I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this
      evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if
      we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight.

      "In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are:
      cold-blooded killers who reject peace, who reject freedom and who rule
      by the suicide vest, the car bomb and the human shield.

      "Against such an enemy, I will not second-guess the decisions of a free
      Israel defending her citizens. And I would ask all those who support
      peace and freedom to do the same."

      That Murdoch supports Israel and that its supporters embrace him in turn needs to be seen for what it is, the recognition by both parties of the considerable power that each of them wields. Even Murdoch, with his overriding concern for the bottom line, would hesitate before taking on Israel and the Jewish establishment, in the US, in the UK, or his native Australia, and the latter, in turn, would have cause to worry, if Murdoch would allow his reporters and editorial writers to tell the truth about Israel.

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