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AIPAC'S Power Base - America's Real Terrorists
By Ted Lang
Former Georgia Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, who was critical of the dominance Israel enjoyed controlling our government, was defeated in this way by Jewish contributions coming in from all over the United States. Those contributions had to be requested en masse, funneled to a finance manager, and then distributed to all the right places to both the opposing candidate and key media outlets to generate the necessary opposing campaign propaganda.
At the Republican Party’s highly expensive convention bash being orchestrated smack in the middle of New York City this week, FOXNews.com reports: "About 1,500 supporters of Israel attended the posh event hosted by United Jewish Communities, the Republican Jewish Coalition and the American-Israel Political Action Committee. The event, held at Pier 60 in Manhattan, was attended by dozens of congressional members, governors and administration officials, and featured Bloomberg, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman."
Posting on his website Informed Commentary, and carried on Antiwar.com’s as well, Professor Juan Cole, who teaches history at the University of Michigan, writes in his August 28, 2004 piece entitled, "AIPAC’s Overt and Covert Ops.": "The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a lobbying group that used to support whatever government was in power in Israel, and used to give money even-handedly inside the US. My perception is that during the past decade AIPAC has increasingly tilted to the Likud in Israel, and to the political Right in the United States. In the 1980s, AIPAC set up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as a pro-Israeli alternative to the Brookings Institution, which it perceived to be insufficiently supportive of Israel. WINEP has largely followed AIPAC into pro-Likud positions, even though its director, Dennis Ross, is more moderate. He is a figurehead, however, serving to disguise the far right character of most of the position papers produced by long-term WINEP staff and by extremist visitors and ‘associates’ (Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer are among the latter)."
Professor Cole continues: "WINEP, being a wing of AIPAC, is enormously influential in Washington. State Department and military personnel are actually detailed there to ‘learn’ about ‘the Middle East’! They would get a far more balanced ‘education’ about the region in any Israeli university, since most Israeli academics are professionals, whereas WINEP is a ‘think tank’ that hires by ideology."
There are many ways AIPAC magnifies its influence over American government, and targeting politicians during elections is only one of them. In this presidential election, reflect on how both Senator John Kerry and President George Bush are one in their support for Israel. Note also how former frontrunner Dr. Howard Dean became toast after he merely suggested a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was created and continues to be exacerbated by Israel’s imperialism and ethnocide.
Cole explains, "Note that over 80% of American Jews vote Democrat, that the majority of American Jews opposed the Iraq war (more were against it than in the general population), and that American Jews have been enormously important in securing civil liberties for all Americans. Moreover, Israel has been a faithful ally of the US and deserves our support in ensuring its security. The Likudniks like to pretend that they represent American Jewry, but they do not. And they like to suggest that objecting to their policies is tantamount to anti-Semitism, which is sort of like suggesting that if you don't like Chile's former dictator Pinochet, you are bigotted against Latinos."
This explanation is consistent with all that I have read on the subject. Jewish Zionists and their more numerically powerful and vocal Christian Zionists, will support any and all Israeli policies, and then smear opponents as being "anti-Semitic." Perhaps a better term to describe these war-mongering Jewish and Christian Zionists is to identify them as being "Likudniks," indicative of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s war-mongering and genocidal Likud Party. And it would be entirely safe to say that a majority of Jews living in Israel also oppose Sharon’s atrocities against the Palestinians, which is the ongoing basis for anti-Israeli terrorism there responsible for the horrible deaths and maiming of so many of Israel’s citizens.
AIPAC and the neoconservative Likudniks in the Pentagon and in the Bush administration today represent the greatest threat to world peace. They are plotting to ignite hostilities that could ratchet up to World War III. This would fit in nicely with martial law control over the American populace as General Tommy Franks envisioned, and could lead to US rule by a one government international New World Order seemingly so desired by both Bush and Kerry. And separate from a world engulfed in nuclear war, we have the constant threat of terrorism by Muslim militants looking to hurt the people of "The Great Satan" as protector of the most dangerous regime in the world: Sharon and his Likud Party.
The "outbreak" of anti-Semitism all over the world is unmitigated pap and nonsensical propaganda. Muslims are not out to destroy US because of our wealth, or our freedom, or even because of our ties to, and origins as, a Judeo-Christian nation; they foment terrorism against US because of our military might as the world’s greatest super power enabling Israeli ethnocidal imperialism. It is Israel that is the trigger; we are the big gun.
Commenting further on the dominance of Israel’s Likud Party over American politics, Cole continues: "It should be admitted that the American Likud could not make US policy on its own. Its members had to make convincing arguments to Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush himself. But they were able to make those arguments, by distorting intelligence, channeling Ahmad Chalabi junk, and presenting Big Ideas to men above them that signally lacked such ideas. (Like the idea that the road to peace in Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. Ha!)"
Cole’s observations confirm the source of Muslim terrorism: "The Likud policies of reversing Oslo and stealing people’s land and making their lives hell has produced enormous amounts of terrorism against Israel, and the Likudniks have cleverly turned that to their political advantage. Aggression and annexation is necessary, they argue, because there is terrorism. Some of them now openly speak of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, using the same argument. But when the Oslo peace process looked like it would go somewhere, terrorism tapered off (it did not end, but then peace had not been achieved).
The drawback for the US in all this is that US government backing for Sharon's odious policies makes it hated in the Muslim world. (Note that Muslims who oppose Israeli aggression are often tagged as ‘terrorists’ by the US government, but rightwing Jews who go to Palestine to colonize it, walking around with Uzi machine guns and sometimes shooting down civilians, are not ‘terrorists.’) This lack of balance is one big reason that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri hit the US on September 11. [Emphasis added.] In fact, Bin Laden wanted to move up the operation to punish the US for supporting Sharon's crackdown on the Second Intifada."
The FBI investigation now rapidly disappearing from the American media’s radar screen seems as some kind of fluke. Considering the extensive control Israel maintains over virtually all branches of American government through AIPAC and their Pentagon and White House neocon plants, why would an espionage agenda even be necessary?
Again Cole: "So, passing a few confidential documents over is a minor affair. Pro-Likud intellectuals established networks linking Defense and the national security advisers of Vice President Dick Cheney, gaining enormous influence over policy by cherry-picking and distorting intelligence so as to make a case for war on Saddam Hussein. And their ulterior motive was to remove the most powerful Arab military from the scene, not because it was an active threat to Israel (it wasn't) but because it was a possible deterrent to Likud plans for aggressive expansion (at the least, they want half of the West Bank, permanently)."
Here’s why AIPAC is an extremely dangerous and subversive group as offered by Cole: "All this can happen because there is a vacuum in US political discourse. A handful of special interests in the United States virtually dictate congressional policy on some issues. With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a few allies have succeeded in imposing complete censorship on both houses of Congress. No senator or congress member dares make a speech on the floor of his or her institution critical of Israeli policy, even though the Israeli government often violates international law and UN Security Council resolutions (it would violate more such resolutions, except that the resolutions never got passed because only one NSC member, the US, routinely vetoes them on behalf of Tel Aviv.) As the Labor Party in Israel has been eclipsed by the Likud coalition, which includes many proto-fascist groups, this subservience has yoked Washington to foreign politicians who privately favor ethnic cleansing and/or agressive warfare for the purpose of annexing the territory of neighbors. On the rare occasion when a brave member of congress dares stand up to this unrelenting AIPAC tyranny, that person is targeted for unelection in the next congressional campaign, with big money directed by AIPAC and/or its analogues into the coffers of the senator or congressman's opponent. Over and over again, AIPAC has shaped the US congress in this way, so successfully that no one even dares speak out any more."
Cole points out that this is precisely the type of tyrannical takeover of America our Founding Fathers feared. This is precisely what President George Washington warned US about advising strongly to avoid entangling alliances. Our sinful alliance with tiny Israel, run by mass murderers and war-mongers, has infested virtually all levels of our own government. And they are a long way from being through with US, but we may be only a few short years away from becoming a brutal dictatorship forged from the terrorism created by tiny Israel’s Likud Party.
AIPAC picks, elects and stacks both houses of our Congress. AIPAC has eliminated the Democratic Party’s former frontrunner. AIPAC accomplishes this by targeting politicians, and magnifying their small numbers by enlisting the support of a much greater number of Americans: the Christian Zionists. Cole explains this magnification of power employing non-Jews: "AIPAC is not all that rich or powerful, but politics in the US is often evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Because many races are very close, any little extra support can help change the outcome. AIPAC can provide that little bit. Moreover, most Americans couldn't care less about the Middle East or its intractable problems, whereas the staffers at AIPAC are fanatics. [Emphasis added.]
If some congressman from southern Indiana knows he can pick up even a few thousand dollars and some good will from AIPAC, he may as well, since his constituents don't care anyway. That there is no countervailing force to AIPAC allows it to be effective. (That is one reason that pro-Likud American activists often express concern about the rise of the Muslim-American community and the possibility that it may develop an effective lobby.) Moreover, AIPAC leverages its power by an alliance with the Christian Right, which has adopted a bizarre ideology of "Christian Zionism." It holds that the sooner the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, the sooner Christ will come back. Without millions of these Christian Zionist allies, AIPAC would be much less influential and effective." [Emphasis added.]
The etremely dangerous power that AIPAC, a lobby of about 60,000, "representing" five to six million Jews in Israel, wields over the government and military of the United States, a nation of almost 300 million, can easily lead to a totally nuclear World War III. Terrorism is a tactic employed by the weak and oppressed. It is a tool that can be used to symbolically retaliate against a repressive government that is enslaving a people. But it can also be used to turn the people of a repressive nation against its own government. When the people of such a repressive nation realize that it is their own government that is responsible for generating such terrorism from external sources, the perpetrators hope that internal political pressure will lead to the abolition of that nation’s oppressive policies. This is the motivation of the PLO in conducting terroristic suicide bus and public place bombings against Israel.
The stubborn pigheadedness of the Bush administration and its Zionist PNAC cabal that engineered the war against Iraq in accordance with the "Clean Break" policy, is what must now be propped up and supported by a series of increasingly draconian Patriot Acts. Terrorism against the United States will grow, and will grow more seriously. During American expansionism characterized as "the wild West," the Colt "Peacemaker" revolver was termed "The Equalizer." In the "wild" Mid East, terrorism is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to oppressed Muslims and Palestinians. The new "equalizer" is nuclear weaponry. The threat to America is that nuclear devices will be employed shortly in terrorist acts against the United States.
This is precisely why we are becoming a police state. Bush had it right when he said that we couldn’t win a war against terrorism. But we can take a positive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can unauthorize AIPAC to lobby and take away its tax-exempt status. We can recognize that both of our major political parties are totally under the thumb of a serious foreign entanglement, and one that not only dictates down to US, but is also impervious to the death, harm and destruction that the weak and oppressed will use against US as the actions of our government blur the distinction between a just and honest people and our increasingly savage and corrupt government.
This is the major issue in this election. Either our government is with US, or with Israel. Which way is it Mr. Bush? Which way is it Mr. Kerry? Is there a third party that will step forward and save our nation? Obviously, saving US from World War III and nuclear attack aren’t of any importance to either major political party. We are, instead, focusing on another unjust war we lost thirty years ago. But just like the Germans after World War I, we cannot accept either that the war is over, or the fact that we lost it. The blessed opportunity of a "peaceful revolution" by a truly honest and open election is rapidly slipping away, and may well be replaced by a nuclear terrorist attack launching World War III. It will be the first major rebellion against "The Evil Empire," a rebellion against the Emperor of the Dark Side. Star Wars is US, and the great clock of history is about to strike the hour.
Ted Lang is a freelance writer and political analyst. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.
Ted Lang can be reached at: tlang1@optonline.net
We invite you to visit his website at: www.tedlang.com
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