| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2006 12:16 am Post subject: Mearsheimer/Walt & ADL's Foxman most watched C-SPAN segm |
| Mearsheimer/Walt & ADL's Foxman most watched C-SPAN segments:
The John Mearsheimer/Stephen Walt segment and the Abraham Foxman (of the ADL) 'counter' C-SPAN 'Washington Journal' segment are in the 'MOST WATCHED SEGMENTS' section of the following URL currently (the caller from London nailed Foxman hard):
http://www.c-span.org/homepage.asp?Cat=Series&Code=WJE&ShowVidNum=9&Rot_Cat_CD=WJ&Rot_HT=206&Rot_WD=&ShowVidDays=100&ShowVidDesc=&ArchiveDays=30
Here is a tiny URL for the above one:
http://tinyurl.com/ro2qa
Foxman says "Never Again," but it's the same old story :
http://pcapostate.blogspot.com/2006/07/foxman-says-never-again-but-its-same.html
Why aren't we discussing the Mearsheimer/Walt segment about how the pro-Israel led the charge for getting US into the Iraq quagmire as Mearsheimer and Walt had their first television interview on C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal' this morning (it should repeat on C-SPAN and/or C-SPAN 2 today):
http://www.c-span.org/videoarchives.asp?CatCodePairs=Series,WJE&ArchiveDays=30
Stephen Walt, Int'l Affairs Prof., & John Mearsheimer, Poltical Science Prof.
Stephen Walt, International Affairs Professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and, and John Mearsheimer, Poltical Science Professor at the University of Chicago, discuss lobbying for Israel.
1 hr.
The War over Israel’s Influence
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3501
The obvious Zionist Israel firsters blowing the anti-Semite smoke screen to cover the war for Israel agenda of the JINSA/PNAC Neocons sound just like the ADL's Abraham Foxman who was on C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal' yesterday - he immediately blew the anti-Semite smoke screen when the lady from London hammered him hard:
Abraham Foxman (of the ADL) was hammered hard by the caller (a lady with the Brit accent calling from London) on C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal' this morning as she mentioned the USS Liberty attack/cover-up (http://www.ussliberty.org) and Paul Findley's 'There Dare to Speak Out' book and Jim Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book as well (both the Mearsheimer/Walt and Abraham Foxman segments can be viewed online via the links at the following URL):
http://www.c-span.org/videoarchives.asp?CatCodePairs=Series,WJE&ArchiveDays=30
Here is the tiny URL for the above one:
http://tinyurl.com/dl5na
The following URL includes a transcript of the Abraham Foxman 'counter' segment on C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal' this past Sunday (June 25th, 2006):
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_news&Number=294727069&page=&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=21&part=&vc=1
Here is the tiny URL for the above URL:
http://tinyurl.com/oq6yo
Question about Mearsheimer/Walt posted in live discussion:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/06/21/question-about-mearsheimer-walt-posted-in-live-discussion.php
Scroll down to the 'Pro-Israel lobby under attack' UPI article at the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
Olbermann Disses Mearsheimer and Walt Critique :
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=412
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/stopcollection.htm#james_morris
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Jul 08, 2006 8:17 pm; edited 9 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: Re: Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? |
| Greg Palast is a known (Jewish) Israeli apologist who plays down the power of the pro-Israel lobby as Chomsky likes to do as well:
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:10:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Morris"
Subject: Re: Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? To: palast@gregpalast.com
Mr. Palast,
So what about the paper by Mearsheimer/Walt (about the pro-Israel lobby) which I gave you at the recent KPFK event in Los Angeles? I see that you are conveniently overlooking such with what you wrote in the article below.. The links for the Mearsheimer/Walt paper can be found via the following URL even though I already gave you that printed-out version from the London Review of Books which included the link for the full version currently showing at the Harvard Web site:
Scroll down to the 'Pro-Israel lobby under fire' UPI article at the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
“Hawkish Israeli Lobby Wants War with Iran!”
http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/12448/index.php
How about the recent appearance by Mearsheimer and Walt on C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal' this past Friday (with the 'counter' segment by Abraham Foxman of the ADL yesterday as the call for Foxman by the London viewer was most interesting as well):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/06/24/mearsheimer-walt-adl-s-foxman-most-watched-c-span-segm.php
Ewen0who@aol.com wrote:
A member of the audience asked, "Put it together Who's behind this war? Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and the Project for a New American Century and, and, why don't you talk about that, huh?"
http://www.gregpalast.com/was-the-invasion-of-iraq-a-jewish-conspiracy
Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?
Published by Greg Palast June 26th, 2006 in Articles
Tikkun Magazine JULY/AUGUST 2006
Did the Jews do it?
The US Congress will open hearings this week on the War in Iraq — a wee bit late one might think. But one question at the forefront of the minds of many on both the Left and the Right is sure not to be asked: Did the Jews do it? I mean, after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?
The question was first posed to me in 2004 when I was speaking at a meeting of Mobilization for Peace in San Jose. A member of the audience asked, “Put it together — Who’s behind this war? Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and the Project for a “Jew” American Century and, and, why don’t you talk about that, huh? And…”
But the questioner never had the full opportunity to complete his query because, flushed and red, he began to charge the stage. The peace activists attempted to detain the gentleman — whose confederates then grabbed some chairs to swing. As the Peace Center was taking on a somewhat warlike character, I chose to call in the authorities and slip out the back.
Still, his question intrigued me. As an investigative reporter, “Who’s behind this war?” seemed like a reasonable challenge — and if it were a plot of Christ-killers and Illuminati, so be it. I just report the facts, ma’am.
And frankly, at first, it seemed like the gent had a point, twisted though his spin might be. There was Paul Wolfowitz, before Congress in March 2003, offering Americans the bargain of the century: a free Iraq — not “free” as in “freedom and democracy” but free in the sense of this won’t cost us a penny. Wolfowitz testified: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money.”
A “Free” Iraq
And where would these billions come from? Wolfowitz told us: “It starts with the assets of the Iraqi people… The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the next two or three years.”
This was no small matter. The vulpine Deputy Defense Secretary knew that the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to cost us?”
However, Wolfowitz left something out of his testimony: the truth. I hunted for weeks for the source of the Pentagon’s oil revenue projections — and found them. They were wildly different from the Wolfowitz testimony. But this was not perjury. Ever since the conviction of Elliott Abrams for perjury before Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings, neither Wolfowitz nor the other Bush factotums swear an oath before testifying. If you don’t raise your hand and promise to tell the truth, “so help me, God,” you’re off the hook with federal prosecutors.
How the Lord will judge that little ploy, we cannot say.
But Wolfowitz’s little numbers game can hardly count as a Great Zionist conspiracy. That seemed to come, at first glance, in the form of a confidential 101-page document slipped to our team at BBC’s Newsnight. It detailed the economic “recovery” of Iraq’s post-conquest economy. This blueprint for occupation, we learned, was first devised in secret in late 2001.
Notably, this program for Iraq’s recovery wasn’t written by Iraqis; rather, it was promoted by the neo-conservatives of the Defense Department, home of Abrams, Wolfowitz, Harold Rhode and other desktop Napoleons unafraid of moving toy tanks around the Pentagon war room.
Nose-Twist’s Hidden Hand
The neo-cons’ 101-page confidential document, which came to me in a brown envelope in February 2003, just before the tanks rolled, goes boldly where no U.S. invasion plan had gone before: the complete rewrite of the conquered state’s “policies, law and regulations.” A cap on the income taxes of Iraq’s wealthiest was included as a matter of course. And this was undoubtedly history’s first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s copyright laws. Once the 82nd Airborne liberated Iraq, never again would the Ba’athist dictatorship threaten America with bootleg dubs of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time.”
It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. It didn’t strike me as the work of a Kosher Cabal for an Imperial Israel. In fact, it smelled of pork — Pig Heaven for corporate America looking for a slice of Iraq, and I suspected its porcine source. I gave it a big sniff and, sure enough, I smelled Grover Norquist.
Norquist is the capo di capi of right-wing, big-money influence peddlers in Washington. Those jealous of his inside track to the White House call him “Gopher Nose-Twist.”
A devout Christian, Norquist channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition to fight the devil’s tool, legalized gambling. He didn’t tell the Coalition that the loot came from an Indian tribe represented by Norquist’s associate, Jack Abramoff. (The tribe didn’t want competition for its own casino operations.)
I took a chance and dropped in on Norquist’s L Street office, and under a poster of his idol [’NIXON — NOW MORE THAN EVER”], Norquist took a look at the “recovery” plan for Iraq and practically jumped over my desk to sign it, filled with pride at seeing his baby. Yes, he promoted the privatizations, the tax limit for the rich, and the change in copyright law, all concerns close to the hearts and wallets of his clients.
“The Oil” on Page 73
The very un-Jewish Norquist may have framed much of the U.S. occupation grabfest, but there was, without doubt, one notable item in the 101-page plan for Iraq which clearly had the mark of Zion on it. On page seventy-three the plan called for the “privatization… [of] the oil and supporting industries,” the sell-off of every ounce of Iraq’s oil fields and reserves. Its mastermind, I learned, was Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation.
For the neo-cons, this was The Big One. Behind it, no less a goal than to bring down the lynchpin of Arab power, Saudi Arabia.
It would work like this: the Saudi’s power rests on control of OPEC, the oil cartel which, as any good monopoly, withholds oil from the market, kicking up prices. Sell-off Iraq’s oil fields and private companies will pump oil in their little Iraqi patches to the max. Iraq, the neo-cons hoped, would crank out six million barrels of oil a day, bust its OPEC quota, flood the world market, demolish OPEC and, as the price of oil fell off a cliff, Saudi Arabia would
fall to its knees.
“It’s a no-brainer,” Cohen told me, at his office at Heritage. It was a dim little cubby, in which, in our hour or two together, the phone rang only once. For a guy who was supposed to be The Godfather of a globe-spanning Zionist scheme to destroy the Arab oil monopoly, he seemed kind of, well… pathetic.
And he failed. While the Norquist-promoted sell-offs, flat taxes and copyright laws were dictated into Iraqi law by occupation chief Paul Bremer, the Cohen neo-con oil privatization died an unhappy death. What happened, Ari?
“Arab economists,” he hissed, “hired by the State Department… the witches brew of the Saudi Royal family and Soviet Ostblock.”
Well, the Soviet Ostblock does not exist, but the Arab economists do. I spoke with them in Riyadh, in London, in California, in wry accents mixing desert and Oxford drawls. They speak with confidence, knowing Saudi Arabia’s political authority is protected by the royal families — of Houston petroleum.
“Enhance OPEC”
After two mad years of hunting, I discovered the real plan for Iraq’s oil, the one that keeps our troops in Fallujah. Some 323 pages long and deeply confidential, it was drafted at the James A. Baker III Institute in Houston, Texas, under the strict guidance of Big Oil’s minions. It was the culmination of a series of planning groups that began in December 2000 with key players from the Baker Institute and Council on Foreign Relations (including one Ken Lay of Enron). This was followed by a State Department invasion-planning session in Walnut Creek, California, in February 2001, only weeks after Bush and Cheney took office. Its concepts received official blessing after a March 2001 gathering of oil chiefs (and Lay) with Dick Cheney where the group reviewed with the Vice-President the map of Iraq’s oil fields.
Once I discovered the Big Oil plan, several of the players agreed to speak with me (not, to the chagrin of some, realizing that I rarely hold such conversions without secretly recording them). Most forthright was Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who was flown into Baghdad on a C-17 to make sure there would be no neo-con monkey business in America’s newest oil fields.
It had been a very good war for Big Oil, with tripled oil prices meaning tripled profits. In Houston, I asked Carroll, a commanding, steel-straight chief executive, about Ari Cohen’s oil privatization plan, the anti-Saudi “no-brainer.”
“I would agree with that statement” Caroll told me, “privatization is a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain.”
Bush world is divided in two: neo-cons on one side, and the Establishment (which includes the oil companies and the Saudis) on the other. The plan the Establishment created, crafted by Houston oil men, called for locking up Iraq’s oil with agreements between a new state oil company under “profit-sharing agreements” with “IOCs” (International Oil Companies). The combine could “enhance the [Iraq’s] government’s relationship with OPEC,” it read, by holding the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices.
Wolfowitz Dammerung: Twilight Of The Neo-Con Gods
So there you have it. Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique — bookish, foolish, vainglorious — had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis.
Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn’t much of a contest. The end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Babylon. And to make certain the arriviste neo-cons got the point, public punishment was exacted, from exile to demotion to banishment. In January 2005, neo-con pointman Douglas Feith resigned from the Defense Department; his assistant
Larry Franklin later was busted for passing documents to pro-Israel lobbyists.
The State Department’s knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con orthodoxies, John Bolton, was booted from Washington to New York to the powerless post of U.N. Ambassador.
Finally, on March 16, 2005, second anniversary of the invasion, neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz was cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank, moving from the testosterone-powered, war-making decision center to the lending office for Bangladeshi chicken farmers.
“The realists,” crowed the triumphant editor of the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, “have defeated the fantasists!”
So much for the Big Zionist Conspiracy that supposedly directed this war. A half- dozen confused Jews, wandering in the policy desert a long distance from mainstream Jewish views, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates with a combined throw weight of half a trillion barrels of oil.
**********
Investigative Reporter Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats,
Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War to be released next week in United Kingdom and Ireland by Penguin UK, from which this essay is adapted. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2006 7:59 pm Post subject: |
| To: "readers" <shamireaders@yahoogroups.com>
CC: "John Spritzler" <spritzler@comcast.net>
From: "Israel Shamir" <adam@israelshamir.net>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 06:57:21 +0200
Subject: [shamireaders] all about Palast
Greg Palast, a "Chomsky for Dummies" and "a slim Michael Moore", emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs.
Greg Palast, the left wing of the Lobby
By Israel Shamir
I always had a problem with Greg Palast. Apparently this critic of Bush and Blair, an opponent of the war in Iraq, who wrote for the Guardian and the Observer is a man on our side, a good left-wing guy. He is apparently against the corporations, against the neoliberal setup; some of his ideas are surely good. He is considered “Chomsky for Dummies” [“more accessible than Chomsky”, a newspaper wrote in a polite way] and he has a good class attitude, for instance: “The world’s three hundred richest people are worth more than the world’s poorest three billion. The market’s up, but who is the market? The Gilded One Percent own 4/5th of the nation’s stocks and bonds.” His philippics against Bush (“an evil sonovabitch”) are as fiery as those of a preacher in a mosque in my neighbourhood, and this is not a fault in my eyes. He is equally outspoken against the war in Iraq. What else could one ask from a guy?
But at the second sight, there were small alarums. He was against Bush and passionately – for Gore and Kerry. As if Gore and Kerry would keep the US troops out of Iraq. As if Gore and Kerry would pass the spoils of three hundred richest men to the poorest three billion. He claimed that Bush administration covered up… “Saudi financing of terror”. This smacked of a familiar claim - that the US made a mistake to attack Iraq - instead of Saudi Arabia, or Iran. He disliked America, his native land, with too strong a passion. “Antisemite is one who dislikes Jews too much”, quipped Yael Lotan, an Israeli writer. The same goes about America: it’s quite all right to dislike the superpower, but do not dislike it too much, it’s bad for your karma.
Palast wrote: “The United States is ugly. [It is] a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald’s up to and leaning over the Canyon wall.” In my view, this is too much. Even if your mother – and one’s native land should be as important as your mother – is ugly, you do not say it, not even think it.
Palast’s unequivocal support for unlimited immigration was not inspired by his compassion to les miserables of the Third World (also an erroneous position, in my view, but still comprehensible), but by his profound disdain of the ordinary local indigenous native. Characteristically, in his Best Democracy Money Can Buy Palast argues with a London cockney cabby, whether England should accept millions of refugees and asylum seekers. The cabby was horrified by his multiculturalist attitude, by his indifference to local culture and tradition. But Palast pooh-poohed “the cabby’s fear of losing his English identity. Face it, Shakespeare’s dead. England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans, Princess Di knickknacks and Hugh Grant.” Face it, Palast, “England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans” because England’s cultural imports were limited to Greg Palast and others of your ilk. A new Shakespeare may be alive in England, as well as a new Melville in the US, but you won’t recognise him for he won’t fit your ideas. For you, ordinary people are “brown-shirted antiforeign electoral mobs”, for us – the sovereign people.
Palast is obsessed with money, as evident from his title Best Democracy Money Can Buy. He is not even aware of other motives, whether noble or vile. For him, “the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to cost us?”
I have no idea of Palast’s ethnic background, but ideologically, nobody can be more Judaic than this man, who worships money, despises the native and wishes to bomb some place in the Middle East. These are classic Judaic attitudes, so I was not surprised when Palast emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs. In his Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? essay published in the Jewish ‘progressive’ magazine Tikkun, Pallast pulls usual ropes; for him, whoever thinks that the Jewish establishment pushed for the war on Iraq (including Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently) must adhere to the Elders of Zion and Christ-killers paradigm. He writes: “after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?” Not surprisingly, he finds the Jews “not guilty”. The bad guys are “a devout Christian, Norquist [who] channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition”, and “the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis”. The Jews? Forget it: “Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique— bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly […] A half-dozen confused Jews, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates.”
This is not the place to repeat the discussion of the Jewish Lobby. This was done by many people, including Mearsheimer and Walt (their recent response to Lobby’s attacks is on http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3506 ), by Philip Weiss (whose blog http://mondoweiss.observer.com makes more and more sense – actually, this man grew a lot since his triumphalist pieces of 2001, and I read him with great interest), by our friend Jeff Blankfort, whose emailing list jblankfort@earthlink.net scans much of American and British media, and even by my humble self.
The conclusions we reached are only fortified by the massive apology for the Lobby coming from various Trots, from Socialist Viewpoint, from Greg Palast and others. The Jewish Lobby is like a Stealth jet, and these guys provide it with invisibility. Palast will have to live many more years if he wants to see us weeping over the “neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz being cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank”. We know of worse fate. And he will have to live as long as Methuselah to see us feeling sorry for General Jay Garner, the first Gauleiter of occupied Iraq sacked by his superiors –see item 4.
In short, we went part of the way with Mr. Palast, but what’s enough, enough. Let him prefer General Jay Garner to Paul Bremer III, Kerry to Bush, Jews to Texans and Saudi Arabia to Iraq as a good place to bomb. Coprophagi may choose between various kinds of excrements, but we are free from this worry.
2. Here is a response of Jeff Blankfort:
This is an interesting article by investigative journalist Greg Palast who has, in the past, has avoided any mention of Israel or the Israel lobby even in his book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," when, if he really wanted to know who the biggest buyers were, he could have readily found them in the internet among the Mother Jones 400, and the big donors from the Communications and Finance industries on the Center for Public Integrity site, and they are not oil men. Of the 400 top donors to the 2000 election cycle, 7 of the top 10, 12 of the top 20 and at least 125 of the top 250 were Jewish. Haim Saban, an Israeli-American, and a big backer of AIPAC, gave to the Democrats in 2002, $12.3 million, which is two million more than Ken Lay and Exxon gave to the Republicans over a 10 year period but strangely, it didn't get the same media attention.
On the other hand, this article of his bears out what I have been saying for the three years, that the neo-con notion to take over and privatize Iraqi oil was nonsense and flied in the face of how the oil industry operates, that the neo-cons were no longer running the show, but what Palast doesn't deal with is the initial opposition to the war on the part of Bush Sr., as well as James Baker, and oil company executives including Phillip Carroll of Shell, nor does he, once again, mention that not only were the neo-cons the main tub thumpers for the war, it was also supported by the major organizations of the Israel lobby, led by AIPAC and the parade of pro-Israel Jewish columnists who are nationally syndicated and led by Tom Freedman, William Safire (since replaced by David Brooks), Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and all the publications of Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman. The war was also called for by the major principals of both Likud and Labor in Israel, Sharon, Netanyahu and Peres, as well as Chef of Staff Shall Mofaz who said that after taking care of Iraq, the US should do the same with Syria and Iran.
If Palast was not so intent on shielding Israel and its American supporters from scrutiny, he would have acknowledged that the reason that the Democrats joined the Bush administration in supporting the war was that the majority of their funding comes from pro-Israel lobbyists which makes the Party, as Prof. Francis Boyle recently said, "a front for AIPAC." Now that the war has taken out Saddam and literally destroyed the country, the Democrats are allowed to criticize the conduct of the war, but not so directly the war itself, and will be ready to serve the lobby's call when it comes to taking on Iran. They have already overwhelmingly approved the Iran Freedom Act, the latest AIPAC war-mongering effort.
It is a shame that Palast has not employed his excellent investigative skills to examine this aspect of American society and instead has allowed them to play second fiddle to his attachment to Israel. Otherwise, he would not also be trying to convince us that both Bolton and Wolfowitz have important roles still to play for the Bush regime.
I have sent a copy of this to Greg Palast, with whom I have had two superb interviews on my radio program, but not on this subject. I am hoping that he will reply and, if so I will forward it to my list.
3. Frankly speaking, Greg Palast is a slim version of Michael Moore. Here is a very relevant piece:
Wendy Campbell vs. Michael Moore
http://www.marwenmedia.com/articles_images/campbellvsmoore.html
4. Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?
BY GREG PALAST Tikkun Magazine JULY/AUGUST 2006
Did the Jews do it?
The US Congress will open hearings this week on the War in Iraq -- a wee bit late one might think. But one question at the forefront of the minds of many on both the Left and the Right is sure not to be asked: Did the Jews do it? I mean, after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?
The question was first posed to me in 2004 when I was speaking at a meeting of Mobilization for Peace in San Jose. A member of the audience asked, "Put it together- Who's behind this war? Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and the Project for a "Jew" American Century and, and, why don't you talk about that, huh? And ...."
But the questioner never had the full opportunity to complete his query because, flushed and red, he began to charge the stage. The peace activists attempted to detain the gentleman-whose confederates then grabbed some chairs to swing. As the Peace Center was taking on a somewhat warlike character, I chose to call in the authorities and slip out the back.
Still, his question intrigued me. As an investigative reporter, "Who's behind this war?" seemed like a reasonable challenge-and if it were a plot of Christ-killers and Illuminati, so be it. I just report the facts, ma'am.
…It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. It didn't strike me as the work of a Kosher Cabal for an Imperial Israel. In fact, it smelled of pork-Pig Heaven for corporate America looking for a slice of Iraq, and I suspected its porcine source. I gave it a big sniff and, sure enough, I smelled Grover Norquist.
Norquist is the capo di capi of right-wing, big-money influence peddlers in Washington. Those jealous of his inside track to the White House call him "Gopher Nose-Twist."
A devout Christian, Norquist channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition to fight the devil's tool, legalized gambling. He didn't tell the Coalition that the loot came from an Indian tribe represented by Norquist's associate, Jack Abramoff. (The tribe didn't want competition for its own casino operations.)
I took a chance and dropped in on Norquist's L Street office, and under a poster of his idol ["NIXON- NOW MORE THAN EVER"], Norquist took a look at the "recovery" plan for Iraq and practically jumped over my desk to sign it, filled with pride at seeing his baby. … The very un-Jewish Norquist may have framed much of the U.S. occupation grabfest, but there was, without doubt, one notable item in the 101-page plan for Iraq which clearly had the mark of Zion on it. On page seventy-three the plan called for the "privatization....[of] the oil and supporting industries," the sell-off of every ounce of Iraq's oil fields and reserves. Its mastermind, I learned, was Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation.
…"It's a no-brainer," Cohen told me, at his office at Heritage. It was a dim little cubby, in which, in our hour or two together, the phone rang only once. For a guy who was supposed to be The Godfather of a globe-spanning Zionist scheme to destroy the Arab oil monopoly, he seemed kind of, well...pathetic.
And he failed. While the Norquist-promoted sell-offs, flat taxes and copyright laws were dictated into Iraqi law by occupation chief Paul Bremer, the Cohen neo-con oil privatization died an unhappy death. What happened, Ari?
"Arab economists," he hissed, "hired by the State Department -- the witches brew of the Saudi Royal family and Soviet Ostblock."
Well, the Soviet Ostblock does not exist, but the Arab economists do. I spoke with them in Riyadh, in London, in California, in wry accents mixing desert and Oxford drawls. They speak with confidence, knowing Saudi Arabia's political authority is protected by the royal families -- of Houston petroleum.
WOLFOWITZ DAMMERUNG: TWILIGHT OF THE NEO-CON GODS
So there you have it. Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique- bookish, foolish, vainglorious-had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis.
Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn't much of a contest. The end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Babylon. …The State Department's knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con orthodoxies, John Bolton, was booted from Washington to New York to the powerless post of U.N. Ambassador. Finally, on March 16, 2005, second anniversary of the invasion, neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz was cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank, moving from the testosterone-powered, war-making decision center to the lending office for Bangladeshi chicken farmers.
"The realists," crowed the triumphant editor of the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, "have defeated the fantasists!"
So much for the Big Zionist Conspiracy that supposedly directed this war. A half- dozen confused Jews, wandering in the policy desert a long distance from mainstream Jewish views, armed only with Leo Strauss' silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates with a combined throw weight of half a trillion barrels of oil.
5. Palast’s apology for Gauleiter Garner:
Greg Palast, author of Armed Madhouse, noticed: why Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fired General Jay Garner on 21 April 2003. Garner, appointed by Bush, made the mistake of "taking the US president at his word". He thought that his job was to keep the peace and bring democracy. Then he was given a plan. It was a 101- page document to guide the long-term future of Iraq. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule of selling off "all of Iraq's state assets," "especially" said the plan, "the oil and supporting industries."
The plan, according to Garner, included the sale of Iraq's banks and, curiously, changing copyright laws; "items that made the plan look less like a programme for getting Iraq on its feet than a programme for corporate looting of the nation's assets."
Garner did not think much of the plan. He had other priorities like food distribution and preventing famine. "Seizing title and ownership of Iraq's oil fields was not on Garner's must-do list. He let it be known to Washington that 'what we need to do is set an Iraqi freely elected government represent the will of the people. It is their country, their oil.'"
Apparently, Rumsfeld disagreed. "Worse," writes Palast, "Garner was brokering a truce between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. They were to begin what he called 'big tent' meetings to hammer out the details and set a date for elections. But quick elections would mean the end of the state-asset sell-off plan. An Iraqi-controlled government would never go along with it. Garner had spent years in Iraq in charge of the Northern Kurdish zone and knew the Iraqis well. He was certain that an asset-and-oil-grab, 'privatisations', would cause a sensitive population to take up the gun. 'That's just one fight you don't want to take on right now.'"
But that's just the fight the neo-cons wanted. Palast continues: "And in Rumsfeld's replacement for Garner, they had a man itching for the fight. Paul Bremer III had no experience on the ground in Iraq, but he had one unbeatable credential that Garner lacked: Bremer had served as managing director of Kissinger and Associates." General Garner, watching the insurgency unfold from the occupation authority's provocations told Palast: "I am a believer that you don't want to end the day with more enemies than you started with." Such words seem from a different era to ours. As Palast concludes, "You can't have a war president without a war. And you can't have a war without enemies. "Bring 'em on," our commander-in- chief said. And Zarqawi answered the call"
http://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/iac-discussion/2006-06/msg00105.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 7:31 pm Post subject: |
| Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 08:34:51 EDT
Subject: Fwd: [shamireaders] Greg Palast Updated
Forwarded Message
To: "readers" <shamireaders@yahoogroups.com>
CC: "Jeffrey Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net>, "John Spritzler" <spritzler@comcast.net>
From: "Israel Shamir"
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:16:04 +0200
Subject: [shamireaders] Greg Palast Updated
Greg Palast, a "Chomsky for Dummies" and "a slim Michael Moore", emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs.
Greg Palast, the left wing of the Lobby
By Israel Shamir
I always had a problem with Greg Palast. Apparently this critic of Bush and Blair, an opponent of the war in Iraq, who wrote for the Guardian and the Observer is a man on our side, a good left-wing guy. He is apparently against the corporations, against the neoliberal setup; some of his ideas are surely good. He is considered “Chomsky for Dummies” [“more accessible than Chomsky”, his publisher-suggested quote from a newspaper] and he has a good class attitude, for instance: “The world’s three hundred richest people are worth more than the world’s poorest three billion. The market’s up, but who is the market? The Gilded One Percent own 4/5th of the nation’s stocks and bonds.” His philippics against Bush (“an evil sonovabitch”) are as fiery as those of a preacher in a mosque in my neighbourhood, and this is not a fault in my eyes. He is equally outspoken against the war in Iraq. What else could one ask from a guy?
But at the second sight, there were small alarums. He was against Bush and passionately – for Gore and Kerry. As if Gore and Kerry would keep the US troops out of Iraq. As if Gore and Kerry would pass the spoils of three hundred richest men to the poorest three billion. He claimed that Bush administration covered up… “Saudi financing of terror”. This smacked of a familiar claim - that the US made a mistake to attack Iraq - instead of Saudi Arabia, or Iran. He disliked America, his native land, with too strong a passion. “Antisemite is one who dislikes Jews too much”, quipped Yael Lotan, an Israeli writer. The same goes about America: it’s quite all right to dislike the superpower, but do not dislike it too much, it’s bad for your karma.
Palast wrote: “The United States is ugly. [It is] a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald’s up to and leaning over the Canyon wall.” In my view, this is too much. Even if your mother – and one’s native land should be as important as your mother – is ugly, you do not say it, not even think it.
Palast’s unequivocal support for unlimited immigration was not inspired by his compassion to les miserables of the Third World (also an erroneous position, in my view, but still comprehensible), but by his profound disdain of the ordinary local indigenous native. Characteristically, in his Best Democracy Money Can Buy Palast argues with a London cockney cabby, whether England should accept millions of refugees and asylum seekers. The cabby was horrified by his multiculturalist attitude, by his indifference to local culture and tradition. But Palast pooh-poohed “the cabby’s fear of losing his English identity. Face it, Shakespeare’s dead. England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans, Princess Di knickknacks and Hugh Grant.” Face it, Palast, “England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans” because England’s cultural imports were limited to Greg Palast and others of your ilk. A new Shakespeare may be alive in England, as well as a new Melville in the US, but you won’t recognise him for he won’t fit your ideas. For you, ordinary people are “brown-shirted antiforeign electoral mobs”, for us – the sovereign people.
Palast is obsessed with money, as evident from his title Best Democracy Money Can Buy. He is not even aware of other motives, whether noble or vile. For him, “the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to cost us?”
I have no idea of Palast’s ethnic background, but ideologically, nobody can be more Judaic than this man, who worships money, despises the native and wishes to bomb some place in the Middle East. These are classic Judaic attitudes, so I was not surprised when Palast emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs. In his Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? essay published in the Jewish ‘progressive’ magazine Tikkun, Pallast pulls usual ropes; for him, whoever thinks that the Jewish establishment pushed for the war on Iraq (including Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently) must adhere to the Elders of Zion and Christ-killers paradigm. He writes: “after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?” Not surprisingly, he finds the Jews “not guilty”. The bad guys are “a devout Christian, Norquist [who] channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition”, and “the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis”. The Jews? Forget it: “Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique— bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly […] A half-dozen confused Jews, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates.”
This is not the place to repeat the discussion of the Jewish Lobby. This was done by many people, including Mearsheimer and Walt (their recent response to Lobby’s attacks is on http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3506 ), by Philip Weiss (whose blog http://mondoweiss.observer.com makes more and more sense – actually, this man grew a lot since his triumphalist pieces of 2001, and I read him with great interest), by our friend Jeff Blankfort, whose emailing list jblankfort@earthlink.net scans much of American and British media, and even by my humble self.
The conclusions we reached are only fortified by the massive apology for the Lobby coming from various Trots, from Socialist Viewpoint, from Greg Palast and others. The Jewish Lobby is like a Stealth jet, and these guys provide it with invisibility. Palast will have to live many more years if he wants to see us weeping over the “neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz being cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank”. We know of worse fate. And he will have to live as long as Methuselah to see us feeling sorry for General Jay Garner, the first Gauleiter of occupied Iraq sacked by his superiors –see item 4.
In short, we went part of the way with Mr. Palast, but what’s enough, enough. Let him prefer General Jay Garner to Paul Bremer III, Kerry to Bush, Jews to Texans and Saudi Arabia to Iraq as a good place to bomb. Coprophagi may choose between various kinds of excrements, but we are free from this worry.
P.S. After the first publication of the article, our friend Ian Buckley wrote: According to this, Greg Palast is indeed 'a Jewish leftie' : http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.08.15/faces.html . He is often funny and has an agreeable habit of getting up the noses of some of the powerful, but the above article illustrates his deficiencies..
The article in the Jewish newspaper Forward makes it clear: “His fans are too conspiracy-theory-minded. Too anti-American. Too antisemitic. "A large part of my European readership I wouldn't urinate on," Palast told the Forward. Some Europeans aren't so wild about him, either. Unlike some of his fellow Jewish lefties, Palast is not ready to dismiss antisemitism when he sees it. "The members of the Jewish left — and I certainly am one of them — are very glib about antisemitism and the dangers out there," he said. "The British left is infused with the worst elements of antisemitism."
He even sees antisemitism in the pages of his own newspaper.
"When the Hebrew teachers in Tehran, in Iran, were put on trial as spies for Israel — which was beyond unlikely — my paper had an editorial by some fool saying, well, we shouldn't attack Iran — there's very good evidence, and we shouldn't vilify everyone George Bush says is our enemy," he said. "They want Israel to release people who are admitted child killers, but the Hebrew teachers should rightly be in jail."
Never one to compromise his opinions, when the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera offered Palast a job, he turned it down cold; he refers to the station as TNN, Terrorist News Network.”
Thus an opinion of Mr Palast about the Lobby is as valid as that of Abe Foxman and Daniel Pipes.
P.P.S. To my great regret, our wonderful Cynthia McKinney accepted Greg Palast's help in her electoral campaign, and she wrote:
From: "Cynthia McKinney"
Subject: Free!! Blog with Greg Palast and me 7:00 this evening!
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:12:47 -0400
To: "Cynthia McKinney"
If you'd like to blog directly with Greg Palast and me, please join us by following the directions sent to me below by Christy in Palast's office. It's free and hopefully, will be loads of fun!
Go Here to register on DFA, If you left a comment here that would be great too. DFA Link UP http://www.dfalink.com/group.php?id=1132
Probably we shall witness erosion of her position vs. Israel very soon. She is not to be blamed: no politician in the US can do without a pipeline to the Lobby.
2. Here is a response of Jeff Blankfort:
This is an interesting article by investigative journalist Greg Palast who has, in the past, has avoided any mention of Israel or the Israel lobby even in his book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," when, if he really wanted to know who the biggest buyers were, he could have readily found them in the internet among the Mother Jones 400, and the big donors from the Communications and Finance industries on the Center for Public Integrity site, and they are not oil men. Of the 400 top donors to the 2000 election cycle, 7 of the top 10, 12 of the top 20 and at least 125 of the top 250 were Jewish. Haim Saban, an Israeli-American, and a big backer of AIPAC, gave to the Democrats in 2002, $12.3 million, which is two million more than Ken Lay and Exxon gave to the Republicans over a 10 year period but strangely, it didn't get the same media attention.
On the other hand, this article of his bears out what I have been saying for the three years, that the neo-con notion to take over and privatize Iraqi oil was nonsense and flied in the face of how the oil industry operates, that the neo-cons were no longer running the show, but what Palast doesn't deal with is the initial opposition to the war on the part of Bush Sr., as well as James Baker, and oil company executives including Phillip Carroll of Shell, nor does he, once again, mention that not only were the neo-cons the main tub thumpers for the war, it was also supported by the major organizations of the Israel lobby, led by AIPAC and the parade of pro-Israel Jewish columnists who are nationally syndicated and led by Tom Freedman, William Safire (since replaced by David Brooks), Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and all the publications of Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman. The war was also called for by the major principals of both Likud and Labor in Israel, Sharon, Netanyahu and Peres, as well as Chef of Staff Shall Mofaz who said that after taking care of Iraq, the US should do the same with Syria and Iran.
If Palast was not so intent on shielding Israel and its American supporters from scrutiny, he would have acknowledged that the reason that the Democrats joined the Bush administration in supporting the war was that the majority of their funding comes from pro-Israel lobbyists which makes the Party, as Prof. Francis Boyle recently said, "a front for AIPAC." Now that the war has taken out Saddam and literally destroyed the country, the Democrats are allowed to criticize the conduct of the war, but not so directly the war itself, and will be ready to serve the lobby's call when it comes to taking on Iran. They have already overwhelmingly approved the Iran Freedom Act, the latest AIPAC war-mongering effort.
It is a shame that Palast has not employed his excellent investigative skills to examine this aspect of American society and instead has allowed them to play second fiddle to his attachment to Israel. Otherwise, he would not also be trying to convince us that both Bolton and Wolfowitz have important roles still to play for the Bush regime.
3. Greg Palast is a slimmed-down version of Michael Moore. Here is a relevant piece:
Wendy Campbell vs. Michael Moore
6. From Laura Lewis
You're much harder core on Palast than I was with my simple statement of disappointment that he showed the blindspot so many seem to have where Israel is concerned. I must admit, his piece disappointed me, especially his need to set the tone with the classic anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Christ killers and Elder's comments. Those pretty much discredited the rest of the piece from the get go for those of us in the know. Problem is, due to pieces like Palast's, most of us aren't in the know and this article in Tikkun shows he's part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. We have to many problem parts. We need more solution parts.
From Jim Dean
The Jewish Lobby shills are fairly easy to spot in the media. All you have to do is read about any major problem or controversy where certain Jewish interests are obviously entwined, and these normally intelligent and insightful journalists become instantly blind to it. No other issue makes them instantly braindead.
For the goyim journalist fear is a major component as they work in a ghetto type environment when it comes to discussing Israel. And then of course there is ignorance...no shortage of that around. And last, of course...prejudice. But there is also the intelligence aspect of it.
Intelligence agency infiltration of the media is an old old game but you don't read hardly a word about it in investigative journalism. Our CIA, and others, have done this for years and so has our wonderfully ally Israel right here in the land of free speech.
I am not saying that their shills are graduates of Mossad. That would be more expensive. They are recruited like most are recruited, some for money (career assistance) and some purely for ideological reasons, most often a combination of the two. They got their hooks into the early teleevangelist the same way. They were in a position to greatly assist in building them up...as long as they had a good understanding about a few things. There is one that we have who flew around on an Israeli Gov. Leat jet for a couple of years.
It's the perfect infiltration set up. You have protection of sources. And you are somewhat protected yourself from FBI investigations. Once your career is 'advanced' high enough (Judith Miller?) you can be a source for leaks, and you can even reveal your sources to your Israeli handler if you want to. They do require some payback for the career help they offer.
They have a separate program for retiring US generals and flag officers They screen them prior to retirement to determine who is likely to remain in the public eye. They are approached about their retirement plans and if they are subservient enough are offered help getting some 'board directorships' or nice consulting positions 'for such a good friend of Israel'. This is topped off with a five star deluxe trip to Israel where they are wined and dined.
There is a lot of beneath the surface revulsion to this going on by those below that level of rank. Our top officers are being seduced into the Jewish Lobby propaganda machine in what many tell me is a classic Intel infiltration operation. Our own Intel people (the ones who are not Israel-phobes) are just aghast at the proto dual citizenship compromising that goes on. God only knows what they turn over to the Israelis, the doors they open.
One result of this is nary a critical word from our veteran organizations regarding the most obvious Israeli security excesses, the biggest being the massive Israeli Intel operations that have been running here for decades. I hardly ever meet an military Intel person who is not aware of this, and most all of them are completely complacent about it. 'Above my pay grade'...and 'that's really a political issue' are the most common dodges that are trotted out about it. They won't even discuss the USS Liberty. They just hang their heads in shame.
I have no specific information on Mr. Palast, but he is what we would call in the Intel business 'a person of interest'. Now Judith Miller on the other hand, she may be on their payroll. After all, she was able to wiggle her way into the actual interrogations of some of Saddam top Lts. while she went around with the Army WMD units in Iraq. My sources told me this was unprecedented, having a journalist present in such situations. Her DoD NeoCon buddies got her right in there. They were there for each other and it wasn't a freak accident.
And what other country do you think might have had an interest in knowing what she learned in those interrogations...and quickly? Does anyone think that her NeoCon buddies who got her on the inside were not getting detailed reports of everything that she learned?
This is called 'front door' espionage. No break ins are necessary. You just make an appointment. The media refuses to cover this, and for very good reason. They are involved. But when you think of how many Israeli spy networks that US Intel broke up in the US last year...and the year before that...and on and on...you can see how the midlevel people could have a jaded attitude about the whole mess.
It's a national disgrace.
Jim Dean
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