Zionist Conspiracy

Chicago Sun-Times,

http://www.suntimes.com/news/huntley/546130,CST-EDT-hunt07.article

Unfair charge vs. Israeli lobby
September 7, 2007
STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley@suntimes.com
It's no secret that the Israeli lobby has a record of success. A number of
strongly motivated organizations advocate for Israel, a cause that enjoys
the favorable sentiment as well as financial support of American Jews and
others. The Israel lobby functions no differently from NARAL, AARP or
countless other lobbying groups that exercise the First Amendment
guarantee of the right to petition government.
Yet, no other interest group is so frequently singled out for harsh
scrutiny, as if somehow laboring on Israel's behalf turns out to be
working against America's best interests. The latest manifestation of this
attitude comes in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J.
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard,
that is an elaboration on an essay published in the London Review of Books
last year.
Mearsheimer and Walt concede Israel may have been a strategic asset during
the Cold War but argue that our continued support is detrimental to U.S.
standing in the Middle East and helps "inspire a generation of
anti-American extremists." That's their world view. Forget the dynamics of
radical Islamism, Arab resentment of the West and other complexities of
international affairs. Just change U.S. policy toward Israel and the world
will be a happier place for America. Two intellectuals at two of our best
universities have reduced international relations to that.
(For the record, their book describes the Sun-Times as one of the
prominent newspapers in America that "regularly runs editorials that read
as if they were written by the Israeli prime minister's office." I wrote
most of the editorials on Israeli-Palestinian issues.)
The two go to lengths to try to rebut any suggestion of anti-Semitism in
their criticism of the American Israeli Political Action Committee and
other pro-Israel groups. But you can't read The Israel Lobby without
realizing that whenever two interpretations exist for some action by
Israel or its supporters, Mearsheimer and Walt automatically default to
the darker view.
For instance, a section of their book titled "Camp David Myths" cites
numerous secondhand sources to disparage the Israeli peace initiative in
2000 while dismissing the account of Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton's
chief Middle East peace negotiator, who was at the center of the Camp
David effort and wrote the highly praised The Missing Peace: The Inside
Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.
But discrediting Camp David is central to advancing Israelphobia. The
record is clear that in a breath-taking gamble, Israel was willing to push
the envelope in offering the Palestinians the best deal they're ever
likely to get, but Yasser Arafat couldn't abandon terrorism for a
Palestinian state. That was a historically pivotal event that demonstrated
to any reasonable person the clear peace aspirations of Israel.
Reading this book reminded me of something that happened in the months
leading up to the Iraq war. In 2003 Mearsheimer was one of nearly 1,000
American academics signing a letter suggesting Israel would exploit the
U.S. invasion to expel millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and
Gaza Strip -- and maybe also Arab Israelis from Israel itself!
It was a preposterous notion then and looks even more ridiculous today.
Granted, the letter was adapted from one issued by some Israeli academics
-- proof of the adage about the ivory tower being out of touch with
society. But the view embraced by Mearsheimer displayed a profound
misunderstanding and ignorance not only of Israeli society but also of the
moral culture of American Jews. The notion that 5 million Jews in Israel
would carry out ethnic cleansing of more than 4 million Palestinians from
the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and that Americans Jews would sanction it
staggers the imagination.
To believe that requires a bias against Israel so deep seated that it
defies reality. Whether it spills over into anti-Semitism, I'll leave for
you to judge.

2. Unmasking the Israeli Left:
http://www.think-israel.org/klein.leftunmasked.html

3. All of the Israeli mainstream media is hysterical this week about a
tiny group of so-called "Neo-Nazis," non-Jews who had immigrated from the
old Soviet Union, in Petah Tikva. I strongly suspect that they are less
neo-Nazis than they are street punks and guttersnipes, sort of some other
Israeli adolescent slimeballs who kill cats and call themselves the "Cult
of Satan." In other words, they are obnoxious teenagers badly in need of
a spanking. See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3447377,00.html
But be that as it may, why the sudden concern for Neo-Nazis supposedly
running about Israel, but not a word about the Neo-Nazi tenured traitors
and post-Zionist academic extremists at Israeli universities, who are at
least as anti-Semitic as these street urchins.

4. New List of the Jews for a Second Holocaust can be found here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/debate/letters/article2409811.ece
Note how it includes some rabbi impersonators.

5.
September 10, 2007

COMMENTARY

'You Have Liberated a People'
By FOUAD AJAMI
September 10, 2007; Page A15
Iraq
"We liberated the Anbar, we defeated al Qaeda by denying it religious
cover," Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reisha said with a touch of pride and
impatience. This is the dashing tribal leader who has emerged as the face
of the new Sunni accommodation with American power. I had not been ready
for his youth (born in 1971), nor for his flamboyance. Sir David Lean, the
legendary director of "Lawrence of Arabia," would have savored
encountering this man. There is style, and an awareness of it, in Abu
Reisha: his brown abaya bordered with gold thread, a neat white dishdasha,
and a matching head-dress. "Our American friends had not understood us
when they came, they were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They
worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this
is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious
fakers."
We were in Baghdad, and the sheikh gave me his narrative. There was both
candor and evasion in the story he told. Al Qaeda and its Arab jihadists
had found sanctuary and support in the Anbar; they had recruited the
"criminal elements" and the "lowly," they had brought zeal and bigotry
unknown to the Iraqis. Initially welcomed, they began to impose their own
tyranny. They declared haram (impermissible) the normal range of social
life. They banned cigarettes, they married the daughters of decent
families without the permission of their elders. They violated the great
code of decent society by "shedding the blood of travelers on routine
voyages." The prayer leaders of mosques were bullied, then murdered.
Abu Reisha and a small group of like-minded men, he said, came together to
challenge al Qaeda. "We fought with our own weapons. I myself fought al
Qaeda with my own funds. The Americans were slow to understand our sahwa,
our awakening. But they have come around of late. The Americans are
innocent; they don't know Iraq. But all this is in the past, and now the
Americans have a wise and able military commander on the scene, and the
people of the Anbar have found their way. In the Anbar, they now know that
the menace comes from Iran, not from the Americans."
Abu Reisha spoke of the guile of the Iranians: They have schemes over the
holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, he said. He said the Anbar was in need
of money, that its infrastructure was shattered. He welcomed a grant of
$70 million given the Anbar by the government, and was sure that more was
on the way.
An Iraqi in the know, unsentimental about his country's ways, sought to
play down the cult of Abu Reisha. American soldiers, he said, won the war
for the Anbar, but it was better to put an Iraq kafiyyah than an American
helmet on the victory. He dismissed Abu Reisha. He was useful, he said,
but should not be romanticized. "No doubt he was shooting at Americans not
so long ago, but the tide has turned, and Abu Reisha knew how to reach an
accommodation with the real order of power. The truth is that the Sunnis
launched this war four years ago, and have been defeated. The tribes never
win wars, they only join the winners."
Four months ago, I had seen the Sunni despondency, their recognition of
the tragedy that had befallen them in Baghdad. That despondency had
deepened in the intervening period. No Arab cavalry had ridden to their
rescue, no brigades had turned up from the Arabian Peninsula or from
Jordan, and the Egyptians were far away. Reality in Iraq had not waited on
the Arabs. The Sunnis of Iraq must now fully grasp that they are on their
own. They had relied on the dictatorship, and on the Baath, and these are
now gone; there had, of course, been that brief bet on al Qaeda and on the
Arab regimes, and it had come to naught.
The one Baghdad politician with the authority, and the place in the
pecking order, who could pull the Sunnis back from the precipice is Vice
President Tariq Hashemi. There is a parlor game in the Green Zone, and
back in Washington, that focuses on Mr. Hashemi. He is at once in the
circle of power, and outside of it, simultaneously a man of authority and
of the opposition to this new order. He is a leader of the Islamic Party,
and a former colonel in the armed forces. He flirts with the government,
promising to stand by it, then steps back form it. His caution is
understandable: Three of his siblings have been lost to the terror. He is
a man of great polish, his English impeccable. There is an aristocratic
bearing to him.
He would not call the government sectarian, "I am a man of this
government," he said, when I called on him in a villa that reflected the
elegance of the man himself. He questioned the government's "performance"
and its skill. He pointed to the isolation of the government in the region
as evidence of its inability to rule. "I don't question the right of this
government to rule. I know I am in the minority in Parliament, I know that
they have the largest bloc in our legislature. But ability is an
altogether different matter. A more able government would reach an
accommodation with Syria, with the other Arab governments and with Turkey.
The Syrians may harbor fantasies about the return of the Baathists to
power in Baghdad, but they are eager for the benefits of trade and
commerce, and their enmity could be eased."
It is late in the hour for the Sunni Arabs, but the age of the
supremacists among them has passed. There is realism in Mr. Hashemi, and a
knowledge of the ways of the world. Baghdad's Sunnis need him, if only
because their crisis is deeper than that of the Sunnis of the Anbar.
The loss of Iraq to the Persians is a scarecrow. A great, historic
question has been raised by Iraq: Can the Shiite Arabs govern, or are they
born and eternal oppositionists? For a man at the center of this great
dispute, for the storm swirling around him and the endless predictions of
his imminent ouster from power, there is an unhurried quality about Nouri
al-Maliki. There is poise and deliberateness in him. The long years in
exile must account for the patience. He had waited long for the
deliverance of his people; the time in Syrian exile must have been dreary.
The Daawa Party had been the quintessential movement of the underground,
it had suffered grievously, and sons and brothers of "martyrs" fill its
ranks. The men arrayed around Mr. Maliki are resigned to their isolation
in the Arab constellation of power. They had been forged by a history of
disinheritance. Mr. Maliki is not "America's man in Iraq." He had not been
part of the American-sponsored opposition groups prior to the war of
liberation. He is a man of the Shiite heartland; his peers in the Shiite
political class are men of Baghdad, familiar with Western languages and
ways. He is through and through a man of his culture, his Arabic exquisite
and melodic. He takes in stride the sorts of things said about him by
American officials and legislators. He is keenly aware of the debt owed
America by his country -- and by his own community, to be exact.
"We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see
eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of
appreciation and gratitude," he said. " To them I say, you have liberated
a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear
and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world,
and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us.
We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam's endless wars,
and we have now come into the light. A teacher used to work for $2 a
month, now there is a living wage, and indeed in some sectors of our
economy, we are suffering from labor shortages."
Though Mr. Maliki had come to power with the support of Moqtada al-Sadr's
bloc of deputies in the parliament, he has given a green light for major
operations against the Mahdi Army. He walks a fine, thin line between the
American military and civilian authorities, and the broad Shiite coalition
that sustains him. There is stoicism in him about the dysfunctional
cabinet over which he presides; its membership was dictated by the
political parties that had picked the ministers. Three groups of ministers
had suspended their participation in the work of the government. He would
not be bullied, he said, he had lists of highly qualified technocrats
eager to take part in a new cabinet; he would stick it out.
"I don't believe that there is a military solution for our conflicts; we
have to rehabilitate the troublemakers. We don't arrest Baathists solely
because they are Baathists, and the same must hold for those who belong to
the Mahdi Army," Mr. Maliki said.
He had courted the notables of the Anbar, he didn't say, but I had been
told that heavy subsidies had been made by his government to the Anbar
tribal leaders; he had gone to the Anbar with substantial sums that had
been paid to the sheikhs. But he looks with a jaundiced eye on arming
Sunni "volunteers." He dreads this, and says that this would be a
disaster: "We will have come out of a hole only to descend into a deep
well." National reconciliation -- the sword of Damocles held over his head
by his American detractors -- is not easy in a country "without a history
of dialogue and give-and-take. This may require two or three years. Grant
us time, and you will be proud of what you have helped bring forth here."
The historical dilemma of his country was there for everyone to see: "For
the Kurds, this is the time of taking, for the Shiite, this is the time of
restitution, for the Sunnis this is the time of loss. But ours is one
country, and it will have to be shared."
Mr. Maliki recoils from the charge that his is a sectarian government; he
notes with satisfaction that Gen. David Petraeus had exonerated the
government of that charge. The Mahdi Army had won the war for Baghdad.
This has had the paradoxical and beneficial outcome of making that militia
unneeded and parasitical. It has given this government a measure of
independence from the Sadrists.
"Historically we are winning." The words were those of Vice President Adel
Abdul Mahdi. This is a scion of Baghdad Shiite aristocracy, at ease with
French and English, a man whose odyssey had taken him from Marxism to the
Baath, then finally to the Islamism of the Supreme Islamic Council. "We
came from under the ashes, and now the new order, this new Iraq, is taking
hold. If we were losing, why would the insurgents be joining us?" He had
nothing but praise for the effort that had secured the peace of Baghdad:
"Petraeus can defend the surge," he said. "He can show the 'red zones' of
conflict receding, and the spread of the 'blue zones' of peace. Six months
ago, you could not venture into the Anbar, now you can walk its streets in
peace. There is a Sunni problem in the country which requires a Shiite
initiative. The Sunni problem is power, plain and simple. Sunni society
grew addicted to power, and now it has to make this painful adjustment."
Mr. Mahdi was not apologetic about what Iraq offers the United States by
way of justification for the blood and treasure and the sacrifice: "Little
more than two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and
the Lebanon War of 1982, the American position in this region was exposed
and endangered. Look around you today: Everyone seeks American protection
and patronage. The line was held in Iraq; perhaps America was overly
sanguine about the course of things in Iraq. But that initial optimism now
behind us, the war has been an American victory. All in the region are
romancing the Americans, even Syria and Iran in their own way."
For the Sunni-ruled states in the region, he counseled an acceptance of
the new Iraq. He looked with pride on his country, and on his city. He saw
beyond Baghdad's daily grief. "Baghdad is the heart of the Arab world,
this was the hothouse of Arab philosophy and science and literature."
Peace has not come to Iraq, the feuds have not fully burned out, but the
center holds. The best of Iraq's technocrats, deputy prime minister Barham
Saleh, spoke of the new economic vitality of the provinces, of the
recovery of regions once lost to darkness and terror. I brought back with
me from Iraq a reminder that life renews in that land.
I attended the judicial tribunal that is investigating the crimes of
Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better know as Chemical Ali,
and 14 other defendants being tried for deeds they committed back in 1991,
in the aftermath of the first American war against Saddam Hussein.
Chemical Ali had been one of the most dreaded "roosters" of the regime, a
haughty killer. His attire was either Western suits or military uniforms.
On the afternoon I went to watch his trial, he had shuffled in, leaning on
a cane, all dressed in the traditional Arab way. The courtroom setting was
one of immense decorum: a five-member panel of judges in their robes, the
defense team on one side, the prosecutors on the other.
A lone witness, his face hidden from view behind a simple curtain, told of
the cruelty he had seen a generation ago. He told of Chemical Ali
executing people point-blank, after three Baathist women singled them out;
he told of the burial of the victims on the grounds of a vocational
school. He stood firm, the simple witness, when Chemical Ali tried to
bully and ridicule him. He had no doubt about the memory of that day. He
recalled Chemical Ali, he said, in his olive military uniform, and he
correctly identified the rank of Chemical Ali. A policeman distributed
bottled water to the defendants who once literally owned and disposed of
the fate of this country. They were now being given the justice denied
their victims.
In our fashion, we have our very American "metrics" and "benchmarks" with
which we judge this war and the order in Iraq we had midwifed. For the
war's critics, there can be no redemption of this war, and no faith that
Iraq's soil could bring forth anything decent or humane. Today two men of
extraordinary talent and devotion, our military commander and our
ambassador, will tell of the country they know so well. Doubtless, they
will tell of accomplishments and heartbreak. We should grant them -- and
that distant country -- the hearing they deserve.
Mr. Ajami teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of "The
Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," and
is the recipient of the Bradley Prize.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118938716117822176.html

5. The seditious New Israel Fund gets some new megabucks from teh Ford
Foundation to help undermine Israel's existence:

Ford Foundation gives NIF $20 million
mail E-mail News Brief
mail Tell the Editors

Published: 09/07/2007

The Ford Foundation gave its second $20 million grant to the New Israel
Fund.

Ford announced the grant to the Israeli civil rights group on Thursday.
The New Israel Fund has spent some $200 million dollars over the past 28
years to fund organizations that promote democracy and human equality in
Israel. Its primary causes in recent years have been rights for Israeli
Arabs, women and the poor.

This Ford Foundation gave another $20 million grant to the Fund in 2003,
creating the Ford Israel Fund. The Ford fund has three stated goals,
according to the NIF Web site: Promoting civil and human rights in Israel,
promoting equality for the Palestinian minority in Israel and promoting a
peacful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has financed 40
organizations.

.The New Israel Fund is intensely gratified by the renewal of our
partnership with the Ford Foundation,. said Peter Edelman, the NIF
chairman. .Our combined expertise and shared commitment to the values of
social justice has had a tremendous impact on Israeli civil society..

(One can only imagine how many millions it will take to undo the NIF's
damage!)

6. It's all Israel's fault of course......UK MP: Israel to Blame for
Global Warming
http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/2007/09/uk-mp-israel-to.html

7. The Global Warming Hustle
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman
August 29, 2007

This item is available on the Jewish Media Resources website, at

http://www.jewishmediaresources.org/article/1123

8. This clown is a regular on all the "anarchist" web sites. Wanna give
him a hand?
http://freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=6411437

9. The ZOA's Middle East report is at

http://wustradio.francelink.com:8080/ramgen/wust/wed_phi1201.ra

# posted by Steven Plaut : 1:24 AM