843 Are the Clintons Israeli Agents? US facing its captivity by Neocons

Are the Clintons Israeli Agents? US facing its captivity by Neocons

Newsletter published on 30 August 2016

(1) Lobby panics that BDS is turning next generation of American leaders
against it
(2) Apartheid Dip? Campus Protests threaten the historical relationship
with Israel
(3) Are the Clintons Israeli Agents? - Philip Giraldi
(4) Israel’s conflict with the Arabs turned into a new Crusade
(5) US facing its captivity by Neocons, pro-Israel ideologues who want
endless war on Islam
(6) Jill Stein is Jewish, but No special treatment for Israel

(1) Lobby panics that BDS is turning next generation of American leaders
against it

http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/generation-american-leaders/

Israel lobby panics about ‘spoiled’ next generation of American leaders
turning against it

Philip Weiss on August 6, 2016

Last week the New York Times reported a shocking statement from the
former University of California chancellor on the importance of stopping
the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) on campus because
it threatens to poison the next generation of American leaders against
the special relationship between the United States and Israel.

Linda K. Wertheimer reported:

     [I]n December, Mark G. Yudof, former president of the University of
California system, helped create the Academic Engagement Network. The
group has some 275 members, mostly faculty, on about 110 campuses
working in opposition to the B.D.S. movement. "I don’t want to see
B.D.S. become stronger because, 20 years from now, these students will
be judges, heads of Congress," Mr. Yudof told me. "We have to respond
now to maintain the historical relationship with Israel."

Yudof is not alone in being panicked about the effect of college
politics on the future of the Israel lobby.

Last December, the leading US Jewish journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and the
Israeli politician Yitzhak Herzog expressed the same concern,
specifically about young Jews, in a conversation at the Saban Forum.

Goldberg noted that Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDS, is the
fastest-growing organization on his daughter’s college campus in the
northeast, then went on:

     This is not speculation on my part, that things are shifting
radically not only in non Jewish America but in Jewish America as it
concerns Israel and its reputation… What are you going to do about it?…
The reality among liberal American Jews and liberal Americas is that
they are turning, slowly sometimes, not so slowly other times, against
Israel….

Goldberg then expressed his own contempt for those young Jewish Americans:

     A lot of very mainstream Israelis ask, Why should we risk our lives
by taking positions that could in fact hurt us physically, so that a
group of spoiled children at Harvard and Yale and UCLA feel better about
the Jewish state? The Jewish state was not created so that 18 year olds
at Berkeley feel good.

Herzog responded that BDS is the latest manifestation of the "onslaught
against Zionism for generations;" but he said that he is worried about
it, for the same reason Yudof is:

     The problem that you’ve mentioned is the growing disparity between
the Jewish community in the United States, and the next generation who
are going to take the leadership, who are going to be government
officials, who are going to be opinion makers, who might be the next
Mark Zuckerbergs’– and Israel.

     And that’s definitely a strategic risk because part of our national
strength was derived from the  fact that the Jewish diaspora especially
in the United States was extremely close to us, extremely supportive,
and had major influence on the American policy overall. And what we will
see in the next generation  is if we hear and listen from our young
generations– is Israel hate. Without understanding the case, without
having a clue… about the vibrant, aggressive, impressive democracy that
we have got.

Both these items (from last week and last December) underscore a
profound truth that the Israel lobby has been denying for ten years: the
power of the Israel lobby in U.S. politics. That’s what Yudof is afraid
is being undermined; and Herzog is even more straightforward about it:
It’s Jewish power, the "major influence on the American policy" exerted
by older American Jews.

This is no casual matter; the loss of the lobby is a "strategic risk,"
Herzog said; and this is precisely why Jeffrey Goldberg and Alan
Dershowitz and Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller and Richard Haass and
others vehemently denied the allegations in the paper and book The
Israel Lobby, published 9 and 10 years ago, because identifying this
power openly was a threat to it.  To "Jewish enfranchisement," as
Goldberg stated on the stage of the Center for Jewish History.

Now ten years on, the Israel lobbyists face a greater threat than
academic critics of the Israel lobby: young Americans, who are awaking
to Palestinian conditions on college campuses, thanks to the efforts of
Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Black
Lives Matter. And, pace Herzog, young Jewish Americans, the very Jews
who are supposed to compose the leadership of the lobby– they’re
deciding that Zionism with its inherent ethnic discrimination is not an
ideology worth living for, yet alone dying for.

I would only comment that Yudof, Goldberg and Herzog are the real
threats to the Jewish future. They would happily swap out any real
intellectual and moral engagement with the world on the part of their
children for an attachment to Israel. They have thereby destroyed the
vaunted Jewish mind, which produced so many wonderful achievements in
the west over the last 100 years, and given us Jewish automatons.

Thankfully, many young Jews are thinking for themselves, and their
dependence in doing so on Palestinians and non-Jewish groups will
forever change the definition of the liberal American Jewish community.
And not a moment too soon.

(2) Apartheid Dip? Campus Protests threaten the historical relationship
with Israel

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/education/edlife/middle-east-conflict-on-campus-anti-semitism.html?_r=0

Students and the Middle East Conflict

By LINDA K. WERTHEIMER

AUG. 3, 2016

What some see as a celebration of culture through food, others see as a
political statement, and an offensive one at that. Just slip an Israeli
flag on a toothpick.

To the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, last fall’s
Taste of Israel was appropriation, pure and simple.

"I don’t think the Palestinian students on this campus would see it as
‘cultural’ if they were to walk in and see flags of Israel all over the
food their grandmother used to cook before she was evicted from her
village," said Nic Serhan, an S.J.P. member who is part Arab, part
African-American.

As students sampled pomegranate seeds, hummus, falafel and pita, Mr.
Serhan and fellow protesters strode into the event carrying signs
reading "Taste of Israeli Occupation," "Don’t dip into apartheid" and
"Fresh from stolen Palestinian land." Then they passed out chocolates
with anti-Israel sentiments on the wrappers and asked: "Do you want the
real truth about Israel?"

This was not the biggest or loudest such protest at Tufts, a private
university of some 12,000 students just outside of Boston. But it was
the last straw. Whenever Friends of Israel or Hillel staged a lecture or
event, it seemed, S.J.P. was there. There had been die-ins (students had
to step over bodies on red cloths signifying blood) and checkpoints
(mock Israeli soldiers conducted security checks around campus). Friends
of Israel had already requested campus security at programs, but after
the food festival they filed a complaint with Tufts’s judicial affairs
office.

"It’s bullying masquerading as social justice," Anna Linton,
co-president of the club, told me.

Mr. Serhan countered: "Protests are supposed to be disruptive in nature."

When it comes to the Middle East on campus, the environment is
increasingly uneasy and even hostile. Many universities are grappling
with how to balance students’ right to protest with Jewish students’
fears that their culture is under attack. Some students say they are
ostracized when they show support for Israel, while Palestinian
activists talk of being labeled "terrorists," and finding their photos
and names posted on canarymission, a website that tracks professors and
students who, it says, promote "hatred of the United States, Israel and
Jews." S.J.P. members insist they are anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic — a
debatable distinction to those who cannot separate the state of Israel
from their Jewish identity.

While a majority of Americans, 54 percent, say they side with Israel and
its struggles against terrorism, sympathy for the Palestinians’ cause
has been rising, according to a Pew Research Center study released in
May. The most significant increase is among millennials, to 27 percent
from 9 percent in 2006. Images of the separation barrier running through
the occupied West Bank, which_______________________ Palestinian suicide
bombings and shootings, have helped shift sentiments. Activists see
parallels with apartheid in South Africa.

S.J.P., founded in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, has
become the leading pro-Palestinian voice on campus. (Jewish Voice for
Peace is another student group critical of Israel.)

A national organization was established in 2010 to connect chapters’
work, including annual conferences and speaking tours. There are now
roughly 170 chapters, about 55 more than in 2014, according to
conference organizers and a report by the Anti-Defamation League. The
Tufts chapter, which has a core group of 25 members, is a significant
player in this movement. It hosted the 2014 conference, which drew more
than 500 attendees and sparked protests from Jewish alumni who objected
to the university’s allowing the conference on campus.

Jeffrey Summit, executive director of Tufts Hillel, has watched
sentiment against Israel rise during his 37 years on campus. "Our
country is so polarized," the rabbi said. "We’re trying to do something
different here."

That something is not to discourage protests, said Celene Ibrahim,
Tufts’s Muslim chaplain, but to encourage students to converse about the
complex arguments that divide them. But first they need to become
comfortable with each other. She and Rabbi Summit have been working to
bring both sides together in the same room.

After the Taste of Israel brouhaha, Rabbi Summit and students in Hillel
established the Visions of Peace initiative. Leaders from Hillel and the
Muslim Students Association teamed to organize a day in April that would
include attending each other’s religious services and a talk by a
Palestinian activist and a Jewish settler in the occupied West Bank. In
September, students would be able to meet families who had lost loved
ones in the conflict and are united on peace efforts. Chaplain Ibrahim
also is planning a Jewish-Muslim women’s retreat.

The chaplain is careful to note that the division on campus isn’t
necessarily a Muslim-Jewish one: Jews, Christians and Hindus as well as
Muslims are members of S.J.P. chapters. Tufts is roughly a quarter
Jewish, but there are only a few hundred Muslim students. Most come from
South Asia and may not have a stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Indeed, the Muslim Students Association has taken no stance on the
conflict or S.J.P. And some members of Friends of Israel actively lobby
against Israel’s policies toward the West Bank and Gaza.

"This is one of the stereotypes I’m trying to undo," Chaplain Ibrahim
said. "What does it mean to be pro-Israel? There’s a lot of nuance
around it."

Mr. Serhan, a rising senior, has participated in numerous S.J.P. actions
and marched in a Black Lives Matter protest on campus. He does not
identify with a particular religion. His parents are Christian. His
mother, from New Orleans, is black; his father was born in Kuwait. Mr.
Serhan began advocating for Palestinians while taking a freshman course
on peace and justice, when he heard an S.J.P. member speak about what
Palestinians lost when Israel became a state in 1948. He said he is
passionate about protesting any event or lecture celebrating Israel.

He reached into his backpack to pull out his kaffiyeh, draping the scarf
around his neck as he headed out of a cafe for a panel discussion on
cultures affected by colonization, part of national Israeli Apartheid
Week. As we walked across campus, he described how a Tufts student
called him and two other activists "terrorists" because they were
wearing kaffiyehs, the iconic symbol of Yasir Arafat, the Palestine
Liberation Organization leader.

The Most Pro-Palestinian Generation

What exactly does S.J.P. want? During its first national conference, in
2011 at Columbia, S.J.P. created a mission statement that called for the
boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israel and its products (causes
the B.D.S. movement is named for); for an end to Israel’s occupation of
the West Bank; and for dismantling the separation barrier. In answer to
charges that S.J.P. fosters anti-Semitism, members point to this mission
directive: Chapters must be vigilant against "homophobia, sexism,
racism, bigotry, classism, colonialism, and discrimination of any form."
It condemns terrorism.

"Criticism of Israel is a criticism of a state," said Amahl Bishara, a
Palestinian-American professor of anthropology at Tufts. "I don’t see
any blurred lines there."

To leaders of Jewish organizations, those lines are frequently blurred.
They equate supporting the B.D.S. movement to supporting Hamas and the
destruction of their homeland. They point to S.J.P.-sponsored speakers
who have compared Israelis to Nazis yet defend those who have committed
random attacks of violence against Israelis.

Leonard Saxe, director of the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for
Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, led a survey of 3,199
Jewish students and recent graduates from some 100 universities. A
quarter said they had been blamed for actions of Israel. Nearly
three-fourths had been exposed to at least one anti-Semitic statement in
the previous year.

Last year at the University of California, Davis, vandals spray-painted
swastikas on a Jewish fraternity house, and in March, protesters marched
to the front of a classroom and loudly chanted, "Israel is an apartheid
state." The guest speaker was an Israeli diplomat whose topic was the
art of diplomacy

Concerned about a swell in incidents, the Zionist Organization of
America in 2014 coordinated a letter to 2,500 college and university
presidents asking them to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism,
specifically from what it called S.J.P.’s "harassment and intimidation
tactics." And in December, Mark G. Yudof, former president of the
University of California system, helped create the Academic Engagement
Network. The group has some 275 members, mostly faculty, on about 110
campuses working in opposition to the B.D.S. movement. "I don’t want to
see B.D.S. become stronger because, 20 years from now, these students
will be judges, heads of Congress," Mr. Yudof told me. "We have to
respond now to maintain the historical relationship with Israel."

In March, the University of California adopted a statement condemning
anti-Semitism and "anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism." Stanford’s
student government later approved a similar resolution. Opponents object
to such resolutions as anti-Arab and attempts to curtail free speech.

"It is not the place of the president, the chancellor or the former
chancellor to tsk-tsk the students because they don’t like the style of
debate," said Liz Jackson, a lawyer with Palestine Legal, which formed
in 2012 to work with activists.

Lawyers who advise S.J.P. members facing disciplinary charges say that
First Amendment rights are routinely ignored when Israel is the subject,
and that universities are trying to intimidate members into silence.

Northeastern University’s chapter was suspended for the remainder of the
school year after its members slipped 600 strongly worded mock eviction
notices under dorm room doors to mirror the eviction of Palestinians.
The notices reminded some of the expulsion of Jews during the Holocaust.
And after various incidents at the City University of New York,
including the disruption of a faculty meeting at Brooklyn College,
several state lawmakers began an effort to get S.J.P. chapters expelled,
even though a broad coalition of activists had caused the disruption.
They did not succeed. But in February, the Zionist Organization of
America sent a letter to CUNY asking for a public condemnation of S.J.P.
for promoting anti-Semitism and creating a "hostile campus environment"
for Jewish students on at least four CUNY campuses.

Friends of Israel, in its complaint to Tufts administrators, said that
the Taste of Israel protest had victimized students and violated
university policy, including one called Working With One Another. They
wanted to meet with S.J.P. leaders and a mediator.

"They can push back on our belief and opinions of Israel, but they
actually have to hear us out first," Itamar Ben-Aharon, president of the
club, said after a meeting in which members discussed current events,
competed in a trivia quiz on Israel and boned up on how to counter
criticism during Israeli Apartheid Week.

S.J.P. declined mediation after a string of unproductive exchanges,
saying they had not intimidated students and saw no need for university
involvement, and besides, debate is encouraged at its events. Friends of
Israel, fearing an escalation in hostility, dropped its complaint this
past spring. The university would not comment on the incident. But Mary
Pat McMahon, a dean of student affairs, posited this challenge: "How do
we foster learning and students working together even when it’s unlikely
common ground will come any time soon?"

"How could it be for 33 years I lived in an area where there were nine
Palestinians for every Israeli and I never met a Palestinian?" Rabbi
Schlesinger asked, almost shouting the question, as if admonishing his
younger self. Some 40 years ago, he had left New York to live in a
Jewish settlement on the occupied West Bank. Settlers and Palestinians
spoke different languages, practiced different religions and lived under
different laws. "Under these circumstances," he said, "there will be
ignorance, stereotypes, and if you add in the violence, of course
there’s going to be fear and anger toward the other for killing us."

His fear faded after attending a dinner of Palestinians and Jewish
settlers organized by Roots, an effort based in the West Bank to achieve
peace with nonviolence. He grew to realize that "our triumph was their
tragedy," and went on to lead Roots with Ali Abu Awwad, who co-founded
the initiative in 2014.

Mr. Awwad took his turn on the stage. He told the audience in a soft,
impassioned voice that his father became a refugee when his village was
depopulated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. His mother was a P.L.O. leader
and beaten in front of him in their home. "I don’t think you need to
teach someone how to hate in that situation," he said.

He was arrested twice during uprisings and would spend four years in
prison. In 2000, he was wounded in the knee in a drive-by shooting by an
Israeli settler. A few months later, his older brother was killed by an
Israeli soldier at a checkpoint. "How many Israelis have to die to bring
justice?" he asked. "The only justice I can think of is to have him
back, and that won’t happen."

Then, bereaved Jewish families came to offer solace to his family. "For
the first time, I saw an Israeli crying. You don’t see Jewish tears at
checkpoints. I couldn’t even imagine that Jewish people had tears."

Scanning the students in the room, Mr. Awwad criticized S.J.P. and
divestment supporters for refusing to enter into dialogue with Jewish
groups because they felt it legitimized Israel. Both sides lay claim to
the land. Both sides have been victimized. He implored the students not
to focus on which side was right. "I spent nights of my life hoping
Israel will disappear and explode," he said. Now he was in a different
place, working for peace.

After the talk, Rabbi Schlesinger said he was disappointed at how few
Muslims were in the room. All told, some 250 students showed up for at
least one of the day’s events; only about two dozen were Muslim, but
half of them took Hillel up on the invitation to attend the Jewish
prayer service. Some were entering Hillel’s center for the first time,
"and that’s the crossing of a threshold," said Chaplain Ibrahim.

Most S.J.P. members saw Visions of Peace as an attempt to mollify their
group and vowed to skip it. Leah Muskin-Pierret, who is Jewish, was the
sole S.J.P. attendee at the talk. Her voice rising and quickening, she
told me she found much of it infuriating. She was embarrassed by an
American Jewish settler wanting dialogue about Israel. She wished the
focus had been on the daily hardships faced by Palestinians under
Israeli occupation.

Mr. Ben-Aharon appreciated the frank talk but had doubts. Roots was
idealistic. Opposing sides would not suddenly work together. And every
time the campus experiences an uptick in tension, the answer is the
same: Start a new initiative.

Before the dinner, as part of interfaith storytelling in one of Hillel’s
prayer spaces, Nazifa Sarawat told a circle of fellow students and
clergy members how she had arrived in New York City as a toddler from
Bangladesh. She and her family had had little exposure to other
religions, so she saw non-Muslims as the "other."

One of the day’s organizers, she wanted more collaboration, and with
Hillel the key player, she worried about a power imbalance. Maybe
students at the grass-roots level should be in charge, she said. Maybe a
Mideast culture group should form and partner with Israeli clubs.

 From the clerics’ perspective, the day was a beginning. "Here, people
are listening to one another," Rabbi Summit said. "On so many college
campuses, opposing sides are just shouting."

At the dinner that closed the program, after students led the group in
blessings over the challah, Chaplain Ibrahim, wearing a hijab that
shimmered in the light, stood up and described the sensation she had
during the Sabbath service. She felt as if she were experiencing her own
faith of Islam because so much of the liturgy sounded familiar.

"It pains me," she said softly, "to see events in the world dividing
communities that are meant to be together."

Correction: August 7, 2016

An article on Page 10 this weekend about tensions on campus over the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict misstates part of the name of a group
critical of Israel. It is Jewish Voice for Peace (not Voices). The
article also refers incorrectly to the position of Open Hillel, a
national organization that is independent of Hillel. It says that it
seeks open discourse; that it is not critical of Israel.

Linda K. Wertheimer is author of "Faith Ed., Teaching About Religion in
an Age of Intolerance" and former education editor at The Boston Globe.

A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2016, on page
ED10 of Education Life with the headline: The Middle East Conflict on
Campus.

(3) Are the Clintons Israeli Agents? - Philip Giraldi

http://www.unz.com/article/are-the-clintons-israeli-agents/

Are the Clintons Israeli Agents?

Man who "ran the CIA" offers an entirely new perspective

Philip Giraldi

August 23, 2016

On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA,
pilloried GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he
was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled his New York
Times op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton,"
described the process whereby Trump had been so corrupted. According to
Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career intelligence officer, is
"trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit
them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin
played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities… In the intelligence business,
we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting
agent of the Russian Federation."

I have previously observed how incomprehensible the designation of
"unwitting agent" used in a sentence together with "recruited" is, but
perhaps I should add something more about Morell that might not be clear
to the casual reader. Morell was an Agency analyst, not a spy, who spent
nearly his entire career in and around Washington. The high point of his
CIA experience consisted of briefing George W. Bush on the President’s
Daily Brief (PDB).

Morell was not trained in the arduous CIA operational tradecraft course
which agent recruiters and handlers go through. This means that his
understanding of intelligence operations and agents is, to put it
politely, derivative. If he had gone through the course he would
understand that when you recruit an agent you control him and tell him
what to do. The agent might not know whom exactly he is really answering
to as in a false flag operation, but he cannot be unwitting.

Morell appears to have a tendency to make promises that others will have
to deliver on, but perhaps that’s what delegation by senior U.S.
government officials is all about. He was also not trained in CIA
paramilitary operations, which perhaps should be considered when he
drops comments about the desirability of "covertly" killing Russians and
Iranians to make a point that they should not oppose U.S. policies in
Syria, as he did in a softball interview with Charlie Rose on August 6th.

Morell appears to be oblivious to the possibility that going around
assassinating foreigners might be regarded as state sponsored terrorism
and could well ignite World War 3. And, as is characteristic of
chickenhawks, it is highly unlikely that he was intending that either he
or his immediate family should go out and cut the throats or blow the
heads off of those foreign devils who seek to derail the Pax Americana.
Nor would he expect to be in the firing line when the relatives of those
victims seek revenge. Someone else with the proper training would be
found to do all that messy stuff and take the consequences.

Be that as it may, Morell was a very senior officer and perhaps we
should accept that he might know something that the rest of us have
missed, so let’s just assume that he kind of misspoke and give him a
pass on the "recruited unwitting agent" expression. Instead let’s look
for other American political figures who just might be either
deliberately or inadvertently serving the interests of a foreign
government, which is presumably actually what Michael Morell meant to
convey regarding Trump. To be sure a well-run McCarthy-esque ferreting
out of individuals who just might be disloyal provides an excellent
opportunity to undertake a purge of those who either by thought, word or
deed might be guilty of unacceptable levels of coziness with foreign
interests.

So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead
of those of the United States? I know there are advocates for any number
of foreign states running around loose in Washington but the friends of
Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely
because there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and
they are both extremely well-funded and very successful. Now deceased
former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were,
respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from
Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben
Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch,
Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name
only a few in the Congress. All are major recipients of Israel related
PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter what
Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.

And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill’s
one-sided pro-Israeli diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the
game was played. And then there was the widely condemned January 2001
last minute pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a
major contributor to the Clintons, to realize that there was always a
deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The
only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell’s formulation,
might more reasonably be described as witting agents of Israel rather
than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have been doing
and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to
U.S. interests since they first emerged from the primordial political
swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely cynical it might be possible
to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering to
Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major
component in their rise to political prominence. It certainly has worked
out that way.

Trump’s crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States
because he is not sufficiently hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which
somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever Russian. Trump
has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to
accomplish, among other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is
otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of Syria alone while also
being disinclined to get involved in any additional military
interventions in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes
him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign policy promoted by Morell.

In comparison with the deeply and profoundly corrupt Clintons, Trump’s
alleged foreign policy perfidy makes him appear to be pretty much a boy
scout. To understand the Clintons one might consider the hundreds of
millions of dollars, much of it from foreign sources, that have flowed
into the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State. And
there is the clear email evidence that Hillary exploited her government
position to favor both foreign and domestic financial supporters.

The leading individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between
1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk, who "directed between $10
and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use his
private jet, attended Bill’s Hollywood 65th birthday celebration and
hosted daughter Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is
a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter of notoriously corrupt former
Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel, a
supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously
donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was
Secretary of State and promoting a similar agenda as part of her $5
billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen
meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk.

Hillary and Bill’s predilection for all things Israeli and her promise
to do even more in the future is a matter of public record. The Israeli
newspaper Haaretz asserted that of all the political candidates in the
primaries "Clinton had the longest public record of engagement with
Israel, and has spent decades diligently defending the Jewish state." In
a speech to AIPAC in March she promised to take the "U.S.-Israel
alliance to the next level." Hillary’s current principal financial
supporter in her presidential run is Haim Saban, an Israeli who has
described himself as a "one issue" guy and that issue is Israel.

Hillary Clinton boasts of having "stood with Israel my entire career."
Her website promises to maintain "Israel’s qualitative military edge to
ensure the IDF is equipped to deter and defeat aggression from the full
spectrum of threats," "stand up against the boycott, divestment and
sanctions movement (BDS)," and "cut off efforts to unilaterally
recognize Palestinian statehood outside of the context of negotiations
with Israel." In a letter to Haim Saban, Hillary declared that "we need
to make countering BDS a priority," which means she is prepared to
support laws limiting First Amendment rights in the U.S. in defense of
perceived Israeli interests.

As part of the Obama Administration Hillary Clinton at first supported
his attempts to pressure Israel over its illegal settlements but has now
backed off from that position, only rarely criticizing them as a
"problem" but never advocating any steps to persuade Netanyahu to
reverse his policy. Notably, she has repeatedly decried terroristic
attacks on Israelis but has never acknowledged the brutality of the
Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank in spite of the fact that
ten Palestinians are killed for each Jewish victim of the ongoing violence.

Clinton supported Israel’s actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed
more than 500 children, describing them as an appropriate response to a
situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign trail recently
husband Bill disingenuously defended Hillary’s position on Gaza, saying
that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel they
insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools…" placing all the
blame for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians,
not on the Israelis. When the media began to report on the plight of the
civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian
catastrophe, saying "They’re trapped by their leadership, unfortunately."

Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel’s building
of the separation barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a
pro-Israel rally that praised Israel’s 2006 devastation of Lebanon and
Gaza. She nonsensically characterized and justified the bombing campaign
as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the
Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and
freedom…" More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and
when a vote came up subsequently in Congress to stop the supply of
cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted
against the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators.

Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu, writing
in November, "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the
White House in my first month in office." She has worked diligently to
"reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel – and Benjamin Netanyahu."
She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in
aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and
takes credit for repeatedly using America’s Security Council veto to
defend it in the United Nations.

So I think it is pretty clear who is the presidential candidate
promoting the interests of a foreign country and it ain’t Trump. Hillary
would no doubt argue that Israel is a friend and Russia is not, an
interesting point of view as Israel is not in fact an ally and has spied
on us and copied our military technology to re-export to countries like
China. Indeed, the most damaging spy in U.S. history Jonathan Pollard
worked for Israel. In spite of all that Israel continues to tap our
treasury for billions of dollars a year while still ignoring Washington
when requests are made to moderate policies that damage American
interests. Against that, what exactly has Moscow done to harm us since
the Cold War ended? And who is advocating even more pressure on Russia
and increasing the rewards for Israel, presumably in the completely
illogical belief that to do so will somehow bring some benefit to the
American people? Hillary Clinton.

(4) Israel’s conflict with the Arabs turned into a new Crusade

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/04/05/israelization-of-the-united-states/
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/15/us-war-crimes-or-normalized-deviance/

  APRIL 5, 2003

Israelization of the United States

  by  M. SHAHID ALAM

The images of the American armada plowing through the deserts of Iraq,
bombing military and civilian targets, laying siege to Iraqi cities,
targeting Iraqi leaders, shooting civilians, blinded by sandstorms,
stalled, ambushed, shocked by the Iraqi resistance, facing suicide
attacks, suggests an eerie but inescapable comparison. Is this America’s
West Bank? Is this the Israelization of United States–heading to its
logical conclusion?

Most Americans have been taught by their captive media to interpret what
happens today in the Middle East in terms of what happened yesterday.
The clock of history in this region always starts with the most recent
"suicide" attack mounted by Palestinians against "peaceful," "innocent"
Israeli "civilians." If, somehow, these Americans could be persuaded to
take the long view, they might begin to understand that the war against
Iraq is perhaps the culmination of a process that had been long in the
making: the Israelization of United States. [...]

The end of the Cold War in 1990 stripped the special relationship of its
old rationale. Israel would now have to invent a new one to continue to
sell itself as a strategic asset. It would now market itself as the
barrier, the break-water, against the rising tide of Islamic
fundamentalism. For many years, the chief opposition to the corrupt and
repressive regimes in the Arab world, whether dictatorships or
monarchies, had taken Islamist forms. Pro-Israeli apologists in the
media and academia–mostly Jewish neoconservatives and Middle East
experts–argued that the West now faced a new Islamic threat, global in
its scope, which hated the freedoms, secular values and prosperity of
the West. Bernard Lewis, the "doyen" of Middle East experts and a
passionate Zionist, solemnly intoned in 1993 that this was nothing less
than a "clash of civilizations." This was a clever move, but also a
necessary one, to convert Israel’s conflict with the Arabs into a new
Crusade, the war of the West (read: United States) against Islam. It was
clever move also because it had support from Christian fundamentalists,
who were now a strong force in the Republican party.

The new Crusaders worked in tandem with Islamic extremists in the
al-Qaida camp who also wanted to provoke a war between Islam and the US.
Every time Osama’s men struck at American targets, it was exploited by
the pro-Israeli lobby to promote the Clash thesis. When the nineteen
hijackers struck on September 11, 2001, they could not have chosen a
better time. The man at America’s helm was a born-again Christian, an
isolationist, elected by right-wing Christians, with a cabinet that took
its advice on foreign policy mostly from Jewish neoconservatives. The
neoconservative’s plan for a new Crusade had been ready long before
9-11. They had the President’s ears after 9-11, and the President bought
into their plan.

In no time, George Bush had been converted into a new Crusader. He
described Ariel Sharon as a "man of peace," after embracing every one of
his extremist positions on the Palestinians: reoccupation of West Bank,
repudiation of Oslo, removal of Arafat, and dismantling of the
Palestinian authority. He laid out his binary doctrine–you are with us
or against-us–and prepared for pre-emptive wars against the "axis of evil."

The new Crusade is now underway. The world’s only superpower, commanding
one-third of the world’s output, and nearly one-half its military
expenditure, has entered Iraq to effect "regime-change," to bring
democracy to a people it has emasculated with bombs and sanctions for
twelve years. In its new Crusade, United States stands at the head of a
numerous "coalition of the willing," now including forty-five countries.
But Israel is missing from this long list, even though a team of
colonial administrators, handpicked by Paul Wolfowtz, has already
arrived in Kuwait City to take over Baghdad. That is a trick no magician
could imitate. The Israelization of United States is complete.

M. SHAHID ALAM is an economist, essayist, political satirist, and poet.
He teaches economics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. His recent
book, Poverty from the Wealth of Nations, was published by Palgrave
(2000). He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu.

(5) US facing its captivity by Neocons, pro-Israel ideologues who want
endless war on Islam
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/facing-neocon-captivity/

The U.S. is at last facing the neocon captivity

Philip Weiss on May 19, 2015

The best thing about this political moment in the U.S. (if not for the
good people of Iraq) is that the rise of ISIS and the Republican
candidates’ embrace of the Iraq war is posing that deep and permanent
question to the American public, Why did we invade Iraq?

Last night Chris Matthews asked that question again and David Corn said
it was about the neoconservative desire to protect Israel. Both men
deserve kudos for courage. Here’s part of the exchange:

     Matthews: Why were the people in the administration like [Paul]
Wolfowitz and the others talking about going into Iraq from the very
beginning, when they got into the white house long before there was a
911 long before there was WMD. It seemed like there was a deeper reason.
I don’t get it. It seemed like WMD was a cover story.

     Corn: I can explain that. For years. Paul Wolfowitz and other
members of the neocon movement had talked about getting rid of Iraq and
there would be democracy throughout the region that would help Israel
and they came to believe actually a very bizarre conspiracy theory that
al Qaeda didn’t matter, that Saddam Hussein was behind all the acts of
violence…

     Matthews: The reason I go back to that is there’s a consistent
pattern: the people who wanted that war in the worst ways, neocons so
called, Wolfowitz, certainly Cheney.. it’s the same crowd of people that
want us to overthrow Bashar Assad, .. it’s the same group of people that
don’t want to negotiate at all with the Iranians, don’t want any kind of
rapprochement with the Iranians, they want to fight that war. They’re
willing to go in there and bomb. They have a consistent impulsive desire
to make war on Arab and Islamic states in a neverending campaign, almost
like an Orwellian campaign they will never outlive, that’s why I have a
problem with that thinking. … we’ve got to get to the bottom of it. Why
did they take us to Iraq, because that’s the same reason they want to
take us into Damascus and why they want to have permanent war with Iran.

What a great exchange. And it shows up Paul Krugman, who mystifies this
very issue in the New York Times. ("Errors and Lies," which poses the
same question that Matthews does but concludes that Bush and Cheney
"wanted a war," which is just a lie masquerading as a tautology.)

Here are my two cents. We invaded Iraq because a powerful group of
pro-Israel ideologues — the neoconservatives — who had mustered forces
in Washington over the previous two decades and at last had come into
the White House were able to sell a vision of transforming the Middle
East that was pure wishful hokum but that they believed: that if Arab
countries were converted by force into democracies, the people would
embrace the change and would also accept Israel as a great neighbor.
It’s a variation on a neocolonialist theory that pro-Israel ideologues
have believed going back to the 1940s: that Palestinians would accept a
Jewish state if you got rid of their corrupt leadership and allowed the
people to share in Israel’s modern economic miracle.

The evidence for this causation is at every hand.

It is in the Clean Break plan written for Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu in 1996 by leading neocons Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and
David Wurmser — all of whom would go into the Bush administration —
calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the export of the
Palestinian political problem to Jordan.

It is in the Project for a New American Century letters written to
Clinton in 1998 telling him that Saddam’s WMD were a threat to Israel.
(A letter surely regretted by Francis Fukuyama, who later accused the
neocons of seeing everything through a pro-Israel lens.)

It is in the PNAC letter written to George W. Bush early in 2002 urging
him to "accelerate plans for removign Saddam Hussein from power" for the
sake of Israel.

     the United States and Israel share a common enemy. We are both
targets of what you have correctly called an "Axis of Evil." Israel is
targeted in part because it is our friend, and in part because it is an
island of liberal, democratic principles — American principles — in a
sea of tyranny, intolerance, and hatred.

It is in Netanyahu testifying to Congress in 2002 that he promised there
would be "enormous positive reverberations" throughout the region if we
only removed Saddam.

It is in Wolfowitz saying that the road to peace in the Middle East runs
through Baghdad. (Possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever said in
the history of the world, including Douglas Feith.)

It is in all the neocon tracts, from Perle and Frum’s An End to Evil, to
Kristol and Kaplan’s The War Over Saddam, to Berman’s Terror and
Liberalism, saying that Saddam’s support for suicide bombers in Israel
was a reason for the U.S. to topple him.

It is in war-supporter Tom Friedman saying that we needed to invade Iraq
because of suicide bombers in Tel Aviv— and the importance of conveying
to Arabs they couldn’t get away with that.

It is in the head of the 9/11 Commission, former Bush aide Philip
Zelikow, saying Israel was the reason to take on Iraq back in 2002 even
though Iraq was no threat to us:

     "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?
I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been
since 1990 – it’s the threat against Israel," Zelikow told a crowd at
the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002. "And this is the threat
that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply
about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government
doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a
popular sell."

It is in Friedman saying that "elite" neoconservatives created the war
in this interview with Ari Shavit back in 2003:

     It’s the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It’s the
war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when
September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this
is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite.
Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom
are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if
you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq
war would not have happened.

It is in Tony Judt’s statement about the Israel interest in the war back
in 2003:

     For many in the current US administration, a major strategic
consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the
Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel.

And yes this goes back to rightwing Zionism. It goes back to Norman
Podhoretz and Irving Kristol launching neoconservatism in the 1970s
because they said that the dovish policies of the Democratic Party were
a direct threat to Israel– an analysis continued in this day by Norman
Braman, Marco Rubio’s leading supporter, who says that the U.S. must be
a military and economic power in order to "sustain" Israel.

An Economist blogger wrote several years ago that if you leave out the
Zionism you won’t understand the Iraq war:

     Yes, it would be ridiculous, and anti-semitic, to cast the Iraq war
as a conspiracy monocausally driven by a cabal of Jewish neocons and the
Israeli government. But it’s entirely accurate to count neoconservative
policy analyses as among the important causes of the war, to point out
that the pro-Israeli sympathies of Jewish neoconservatives played a role
in these analyses, and to note the support of the Israeli government and
public for the invasion. In fact any analysis of the war’s causes that
didn’t take these into account would be deficient.

Many writers, including Joe Klein, Jacob Heilbrunn, and Alan Dershowitz,
have said the obvious, that neoconservatism came out of the Jewish
community. And I have long written that the Jewish community needs to
come to terms with the degree to which it has harbored warmongering
neoconservatives, for our own sake.

But America needs to come to terms with the extent to which it allowed
rightwing Zionists to dominate discussions of going to war. This matter
is now at the heart of the Republican embrace of the war on Iran. There
is simply no other constituency in our country for that war besides
rightwing Zionists. They should be called out for this role, so that we
don’t make that terrible mistake again. And yes: this issue is going to
play out frankly in the 2016 campaign, thanks in good measure to Matthews.

(6) Jill Stein is Jewish, but No special treatment for Israel

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/no-special-treatment-israel-jill-stein-says

No special treatment for Israel, Jill Stein says

Rania Khalek Activism and BDS Beat 18 August 2016

Americans who tuned into CNN’s Green Party town hall last night were
exposed to political ideas and analyses that are rarely given airtime on
mainstream news networks.

Moderated by CNN host Chris Cuomo, the town hall allowed people in the
audience to ask questions of Green Party presidential candidate Jill
Stein and her running mate Ajamu Baraka.

An audience member identifying herself as a US army veteran expressed
dismay at Stein’s support for the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to hold Israel accountable for
ongoing human rights abuses against Palestinians.

"Why do you single out Israel being that they are a democratic ally to
us?" she asked, reciting a standard pro-Israel talking point. "Why don’t
you do the same for other Middle Eastern States, many of which are
committing horrific crimes and abuse of people?"

Stein pushed back, noting that she emphatically supports ending US aid
to human rights abusers across the board.

"What we’re saying is our foreign policy will be based on international
law and human rights," said Stein. "So when we say to Israel that we
will not continue to give you $8 million a day when the Israeli army is
occupying territory in Palestine, conducting home demolitions and
assassinations and things of that sort that are recognized by the UN,
we’re not going to do it for the Saudis either."

Stein added that the same would apply to Egypt which continues to
receive major US subsidies despite "incredible human rights violations."

Israel is the largest recipient of US military aid, accounting for 55
percent of the total, to the tune of about $3 billion a year.

President Barack Obama is currently negotiating a new deal that his
administration vows will be the biggest military aid package to any
country in history.

Egypt is in second place, receiving $1.5 billion in US military aid
annually, an estimated 20 percent of the total.

"Have you advocated to boycott Saudi Arabia?" Garcia asked.

"Yes, absolutely," Stein replied. Arms to Saudi Arabia

While Saudi Arabia receives little direct military aid from the US, it
does rely on US technology and has been the top purchaser of US arms
every year since 2011.

Despite the mounting civilian death toll and famine-like conditions that
have resulted from the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen, the Obama
administration recently approved another $1.15 billion weapons deal with
the Saudis.

"The international community must go ‘all in’ on a peace agreement,"
Scott Paul, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam America, told Foreign
Policy. "A sale of major arms to Saudi Arabia signals the opposite —
that the US is instead all-in on a senseless war that has created one of
the world’s largest humanitarian emergencies."

Saudi Arabia’s wanton destruction of Yemen is so severe that the
editorial boards at both The New York Times and The Guardian are calling
on the US to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Of course neither newspaper has applies this logic to American
sponsorship of Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians as
Stein has done. Singling Israel out?

As though playing the role of Israel’s lawyer, CNN’s Chris Cuomo argued
that Israel "occupies a special alliance with the United States and,
supporters would argue, faces an existential threat that others do not."

In other words, Israel should be singled out, but for special treatment
rather than boycott.

Cuomo’s brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, is a strong believer in
giving Israel special treatment.

In what has been slammed by civil liberties groups as a McCarthyite
violation of constitutionally protected speech, Governor Cuomo signed an
executive order in June that requires state agencies to divest from
companies and institutions that back efforts to boycott Israel.

"I happen to be of Jewish origin," Stein responded, noting she has
relatives living in Israel. And because of that, "I don’t think we are
doing Israel a favor by condoning a policy that makes Israel very
insecure, that makes Israel the target of hostility from its neighbors,"
she said.

Ignoring Stein’s response, Cuomo repeated his question: "Do you believe
that as a state Israel has a preference as an ally … do you believe
they’re a special ally, yes or no?"

Stein refused to play into his narrative, saying, "I believe all our
allies are special allies."

She added: "I think we have responsibilities to everyone to create a
world that works for all of us. And by sponsoring a very hostile
military policy that violates international law, that doesn’t do us any
favors."

Stein hopes to persuade disaffected supporters of former Democratic
presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to vote for the Green Party
instead of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in November.

While Sanders raised the issue of Palestinian human rights during the
primary, he never went as far as supporting BDS and largely refrained
from talking about foreign policy more generally.

With Stein polling around 4 percent, she has no realistic chance of
winning. And it’s unlikely she’ll meet the 15 percent polling threshold
to be included in the presidential debates.

But with the majority of Americans heavily dissatisfied with both of the
major party candidates, there is more interest than ever in learning
about third parties.

Stein’s message about boycotting Israel and ending military support for
it and Saudi Arabia are rarely given air time.

And as the CNN town hall demonstrated, mainstream journalists have no
counterargument against such a reasonable and universally applied demand.