I know he’s a wild man, but here’s James Traficant, the former Ohio congressman, fresh from a prison term for bribery, which he blames on the Israel lobby, talking to Greta van Susteren on Fox two days back, all about the Israel lobby. I love this stuff, because while I agree with half of the policy stuff Traficant is saying here (I don’t see the Afghanistan connection to the Israel lobby, and the "control" stuff is over the top), he’s letting it rip and we ought to have the debate. We never do. The debate just gets shut down, with pieties about the Israel lobby being just like the Cuba lobby. Then it’s all whispering among people who know it’s far more powerful. The central issue here, again, is: Where did weakminded George Bush get the terrible idea that the right response to Al Qaeda was to invade Iraq? A: The neocons, a "parochial" expression of the Jewish community.
Traficant [emphasis mine]:
TRAFICANT: I believe that Israel has a powerful stranglehold on the American government. They control both members of the House, the House and the Senate. They have us involved in wars in which we have little or no interest.
Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars. And if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don’t beat you at the poll, they’ll put you in prison.VAN SUSTEREN: All right, two quick things. One is the Israelis have released [John] Demjanjuk back to the United States, right?TRAFICANT: The Israeli supreme court. And I give them credit.VAN SUSTEREN: Give them credit for that.TRAFICANT: I give them credit, big-time.VAN SUSTEREN: All right. The second thing is, is Israel is a democracy and is our ally, right?TRAFICANT: Yes, they are.VAN SUSTEREN: So, you have no…TRAFICANT: And they should be our ally. They are our friends over in that troubled part of the world.VAN SUSTEREN: OK. So, explain to me what you see as — you know, why you target or why you have a grudge against the Israelis.TRAFICANT: The grudge is not necessarily a grudge. It’s an objective assessment that no one will have the courage to speak about.They’re controlling much of our foreign policy. They’re influencing much of our domestic policy.Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense manipulated President Bush number two back into Iraq. They’ve pushed definitely, definitely to try to get Bush before he left to move into Iran.We’re conducting the expansionist policy of Israel and everybody’s afraid to say it. They control much of the media, they control much of the commerce of the country, and they control powerfully both bodies of the Congress. They own the Congress.VAN SUSTEREN: Are you an anti-Semite?TRAFICANT: No, I’m not. And that’s exactly what they’re going to say. And I expect that.What I am is an American. You see, I think America comes first. And we have a one-sided foreign policy in the Mideast, and we’ve alienated Arabs who have no way of fighting.So, what they’ve done — and I predicted this on the House floor — is they would export violence to America. And they have. They have no other way to fight.I think President Obama knows this. I think he sees this. I think he wants to do something. I think his hands are tied, and I think he’s dancing between the raindrops, trying to figure how I can politically machinate some scenario to mitigate these problems.Greta, I’m saying this. America is in danger if America doesn’t take back their government without foreign influence, interference.
