TEHRAN - Despite all ups and downs, Democrats finally brought impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump to the House of Representatives, a move which made Trump’s prediction come true.
The House of Representatives passed a resolution on Thursday to launch an impeachment inquiry into Trump, thereby making formal investigations against him possible. The resolution was approved by a vote of 232 to 196.
Accordingly, the House of Intelligence Committee carries out the investigations into the impeachment and reports its findings to the Judiciary Committee that comments on the process of impeachment.
Trump has said that the House will get enough votes to impeach him, but he is certain that the Senate will acquit him of charges.
Investigations into Trump’s impeachment began on September 24 following the official order of Speaker of U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.
The order came after reports about Trump’s telephone call with Ukrainian president for investigation into his possible rival Joe Biden.
During the conversation Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for a “favor”. He pressured Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, his possible Democratic rival for the 2020 presidential election, and his son Hunter Biden who was on the board of a Ukrainian oil and gas factory. At the time, Trump had suspended $400 million military aid to Ukraine as a quid pro quo.
Why Nancy Pelosi risks?
It should be noted that some Democrats have called for Trump’s impeachment since his first months of his presidency. The impeachment inquiry was popular among Democratic voters, with a recent poll showing that %73 of them favoring the impeachment.
But Republicans are strongly opposed to impeachment, and the country generally relies on Republicans. That is why Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats were first reluctant to officially begin an impeachment. Their calculations have so far revealed that impeachment against Trump will not have much effect on the opinion of Republicans and his supporters, a situation which will make it more difficult to remove him from the 2020 election.
Trump has described the impeachment as “fake”. Pelosi said that Trump has affirmed that he had asked the Ukrainian president to take actions in favor of his political position, claiming the measures of Trump’s administration were undermining U.S. national security.
“The release of the notes of the call by the White House confirms that the president engaged in behavior that undermines the integrity of our elections, the dignity of the office he holds and our national security,” Pelosi said in a statement.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff also said that the president should prioritize national interests rather than his personal interests. Schiff added that they will study whether Trump has exploited military aid to Ukraine to meet his demands.
Consequences of Trump’s impeachment
Experts argue that Trump’s impeachment and lack of a decisive leader will make the U.S. more vulnerable to other countries’ plots. As Robert W. Merry recently said in The National Interest magazine, “When the president is weakened at home, then America is weakened abroad.”
However, Washington’s friends and enemies consider U.S. foreign policy insignificant due to political infighting at home. Instead, the great power players are seeking to limit the influence of the country rather than cooperating with it.
The recent accusations against Trump can be easily stated as a national security issue, which needs to be reformed immediately. Theoretically, military aid will be provided only if U.S. officials become convinced that they can achieve main security objectives of Washington. Therefore refusing to provide aid because of political reasons is a serious wrongdoing, showing that the personal interests of the president is superior to U.S. national interests.
Will the impeachment inquiry get the necessary vote?
Now that the House has launched an impeachment inquiry into the president, the Senate will play an important role in the process. In this case, the Senate will act as a court that decides on Trump’s dismissal or survival.
To oust Trump, the votes of 67 members of the Senate is needed, which would be two-thirds of their population. Currently, there are 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats in the Senate. Therefore, Democrats need the support of 20 Republican senators.
Since the Republicans have not supported Trump's impeachment, it is highly unlikely that Trump's impeachment leads to his dismissal.
Impact of the impeachment on the 2020 presidential election
The impact of Trump’s impeachment on the presidential election depends on his defense and the credibility of accusations against him. Democrats are well aware that accusing Trump of corruption and incompetence will not affect American voters. Democrats probably knew that those allegations were not strong enough to undermine Trump, but on the contrary they would undermine their positions.
By stating an issue related to U.S. national security, Democrats took the risk of impeachment. To make the impeachment strategy successful, Democrats should prove that the president has endangered U.S. national security and he may do the same in future. This claim can go beyond party politics and put unbearable pressure on Trump, Republicans and uncertain voters.
There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media’s framing of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a “meltdown”. Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that “it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East”.
Hang on a minute! Let’s pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to do – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I’m not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn’t care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don’t have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, these haven’t so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called “Washington consensus” since 9/11.
The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population’s energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school’s Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled “colour revolution”.
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.”
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest public health services.
One can argue about the initial causes of the uprising against Assad that erupted in Syria in 2011. Did it start as a popular struggle for liberation from the Assad government’s authoritarianism? Or was it a sectarian insurgency by those who wished to replace Shia minority rule with Sunni majority rule? Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all these factors relevant to some degree?
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush’s campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
As Rove and Cheney played around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west’s chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump is now ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is closing a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place? They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has “no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East” is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. Its state-building rationale is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. It will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With the US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time risks sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds’ predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad’s protection to foil Turkish ambition. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army’s return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi’s purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump’s Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party’s only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare. They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.
What could it be if not the chill of the Autumn air and the thought of winter — some people love it of course with its winter sports even if only on TV. Whatever the reason, we have simultaneous challenges to legislatures on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the UK, with the thorny Brexit issue to be resolved, Boris Johnson offered a plan for the open border problem in Ireland: people could go through but goods would be subject to customs inspection. People drive through in cars and cars often have luggage. Mr. Johnson’s plan went over like a damp squib. Shortly thereafter, he asked MPs to consider a ‘no confidence’ vote, in fact staking his job. There aren’t many takers for his job right now.
Then there is Donald Trump, challenging Nancy Pelosi to hold an impeachment vote. Under pressure, she agreed to initiating an impeachment inquiry. An exercise in futility it is for even if the House did pass articles of impeachment, the Republican controlled Senate will most certainly quash their effort The grounds are so extraordinarily trivial that the voters are likely to teach them a lesson at the polls a little over a year hence. And there are plenty of vulnerable Democrats in marginal seats.
The voters are not interested in the parsing of constitutional legality as the Democrats are doing. From their point of view, he was merely asking the Ukraine president to dig for dirt on the Bidens. Papa Joe is Trump’s main rival so why not even if Ukraine is a foreign country.
Son Hunter Biden became an international consultant when his father was Vice President — one supposes a successful one for his operations also included China. Would you and I have had the same access to levers of power in those countries? So what exactly was he selling? Exactly what former legislators at Federal and State levels have to offer if they set up as consultants: access and the services of an advocate with contacts. It all depends on whether their actions pass the sniff test.
In Britain, Brexit looms (particularly the no-deal variety) with its gaping jaws ready to bite chunks of economic prosperity from Britain and Europe, but mostly from Britain. A study by Goldman Sachs estimates the economic effects to be five times greater for the UK than for the EU — for example, the auto industry would be seriously hurt. Plus a no-deal Brexit in particular would impact countries trading most with the UK, notably Ireland.
As I was writing this, it was announced that Boris Johnson will, after all, be asking the EU for a time extension if a deal has not been agreed to by October 19. He seems to have ended his defiance of Parliament, in words if not deeds, and his much threatened no-deal is off, at least for the time being — although he is clearly not a man to give up easily. If the high stakes game played by Boris has ended for the present not with a bang but a whimper, the Donald continues to push back defiantly.
He wants to run the country like his own business with complete dictatorial powers and screams twitter abuse at any who get in his way. The problem for him is the House, controlled by Democrats at least through 2020. It has the power of the purse and the authority to declare war, enshrined in the constitution.
For Trump, with his wheeler-dealer ways, it is all a profound pain in the proverbial …, as the not-so-elegant saying goes.
Dr Arshad M Khan (http://ofthisandthat.org/index.html) is a former Professor based in the U.S. whose comments over several decades have appeared in a wide-ranging array of print and internet media. His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in the Congressional Record.
If Trump survives an impeachment vote because his backers in the Senate refuse to abandon him, he may go on to lose at the pollsbecauseof the impeachment process.
by
Sonali Kolhatkar
If any president is deserving of impeachment, it is Trump. (Photo: YouTube screen shot)
The impeachment inquiry aimed at Donald Trump has elicited a near-palpable sigh of relief among many Americans deeply anxious about the damage he has done to the presidency and country. Each new poll suggests rising support among the electorate to terminate Trump’s presidency. Given how Trump has devastated constitutional protections, human rights and ethical boundaries over the past two and a half years, causing untold damage to the nation, impeachment ought to be welcome news across the political spectrum. But many on both the right and the left are calling the process into question—for different reasons, of course.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into Trump over a whistleblower complaint against how he seemingly used his office for personal gain has been met with predictable backlash from the president’s most ardent supporters. Right-leaning media outlets, which have provided oxygen to Trump’s base, have doubled down on the ongoing theme of “fake news” to explain away the pesky facts. “Everything you’re seeing is deception,” says rabid right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh, echoing what Trump has told his supporters in the past.
Meanwhile, those Republicans who continue to tie their political fortunes to Trump’s have fixated on how his shenanigans came to light rather than the content of the whistleblower’s complaint—an echo of Trump’s own approach. They have vainly attempted to refocus attention onto former Vice President Joe Biden and the supposed corruption around his son Hunter that Trump was seemingly asking Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new president, to investigate. But they have refused to address the illicit way Trump went about with his “investigation” into Biden.
‘Exhibit A’ is Chris Wallace’s recent interview with White House adviser Stephen Miller on Fox News. Wallace had revealed that Trump had engaged two private lawyers in addition to his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to dig up dirt on Biden and demanded to know why Trump didn’t use the American intelligence agencies at his disposal instead of private lawyers. Miller repeatedly obfuscated; ultimately, he had no answer. Indeed, none of Trump’s backers has a valid answer to his abuse of power.
Republican lawmakers, in attempting to avoid facing the clearly documented misconduct of their president, claimed they had not yet had time to read the whistleblower’s report. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly lambasted her colleagues on Twitter, saying, “There is almost no excuse for a member of Congress to have not read the whistleblower report by now. It’s a few pages. This is literally our jobs. If you don’t have the commitment to be here and do the work, cut your fancy fundraisers & make the time, or quit.” Ocasio-Cortez had earlier admonished her own party over its inaction. As the Ukraine story was breaking, she tweeted: “At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior—it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it.”
Some have dismissed the pursuit of impeachment as folly, arguing that it distracts from the much-needed legislative work for which Americans elected their representatives. In fact, Trump’s press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, trotted out this argument after Pelosi’s impeachment announcement, saying it “destroyed any chances of legislative progress for the people of this country by continuing to focus all their energy on partisan political attacks.”
Pursuing impeachment does not prevent the practice of left-wing politics. On the contrary, it furthers it by helping to expose and publicize the illegitimacy of a rabidly right-wing president and his tactics, which so many of the nation’s conservatives have bought into since 2015.
Grisham failed to mention that House Democrats have passed a number of bills addressing corruption, gun control and many other critical issues. However, that legislative agenda has been entirely stymied by one of Trump’s most effective allies, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has singlehandedly imposed a bottleneck on bills in the Senate. In fact, Democrats have pursued impeachment-related investigations through at least half a dozen committees while also debating and passing bills in the House, proving that it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Some have suggested that backing impeachment based on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report or the Ukraine whistleblower complaint legitimizes intelligence agencies like the FBI and the CIA, whose pasts are replete with repressive tactics. It is absolutely true that both agencies are known for spying on progressive movements, overthrowing democratic governments and generally obstructing freedom, democracy and progress. There is also a legitimate critique of how the CIA whistleblower in the Ukraine story is being lionized versus how whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, who exposed the mass crimes of the U.S. government, have been demonized. Still, none of that negates the whistleblower’s documentation of Trump’s abuse of power.
There are those who suggest it is better to beat Trump at the polls than through impeachment, as though the two are mutually exclusive. Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara last week tweeted an article he had written in The Guardian in April titled, “Impeachment is the wrong way to beat Trump.” In it, he argued that “The way to defeat a rightwing political coalition is through leftwing politics, not political theater.” But one can argue that using the levers of government and exercising the congressional check on the president is a legitimate use of existing political power. Indeed, it is the most principled path for elected representatives during a time when a single individual—Trump—has laid waste to laws and ethics.
Pursuing impeachment does not prevent the practice of left-wing politics. On the contrary, it furthers it by helping to expose and publicize the illegitimacy of a rabidly right-wing president and his tactics, which so many of the nation’s conservatives have bought into since 2015.
Some on the left have also argued that an impeachment vote will strengthen Trump’s hand, enabling him to play the martyr, survive a Senate vote (which is likely but not guaranteed), and go on to win reelection because of impeachment, not in spite of it. However, if history is any indicator, an impeachment process will shine greater light on Trump’s misdeeds.
Just as support for President Richard Nixon’s impeachment started at a meager level and grew as the process played itself out, if Trump survives an impeachment vote because his backers in the Senate refuse to abandon him, he may go on to lose at the polls because of the impeachment process.
It took Democrats more than two years to begin an impeachment inquiry, holding back because they were terrified of losing House seats in swing districts. Democrats had put their party’s political power over their duty to uphold the Constitution and check a rogue president. Still, their move is better late than never, and if impeachment is to mean anything it ought to apply to a president like Trump for any one of hundreds of offenses, from brutal violations of the rights of immigrant children to blatant profiteering off the presidency.
If any president is deserving of impeachment, it is Trump.
Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. She is the former founder, host and producer of KPFK Pacifica’s popular morning drive-time program “Uprising." She is also the co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a U.S.-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the social, political, and humanitarian projects of RAWA. She is the author, with James Ingalls, of "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence" (2006).
AIPAC gathering is full of lies and liars PHILIP GIRALDI
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual summit in Washington. It claims that 18,000 supporters attended the event, which concluded with a day of lobbying Congress by the attendees. Numerous American politicians addressed the gathering and it is completely reasonable to observe that the meeting constituted the most powerful gathering of people dedicated to promoting the interests of a foreign nation ever witnessed in any country in the history of the world.
There are a number of things that one should understand about the Jewish state of Israel and its powerful American domestic lobby. First of all, the charge that the actions of The Lobby (referred to with capital letters because of its uniqueness and power) inevitably involves dual or even singular allegiance based on religion or tribe to a country where the lobbyist does not actually reside is completely correct by definition of what AIPAC is and why it exists. It claims to work to “ensure that the Jewish state is safe, strong and secure” through “foreign aid, government partnerships, [and] joint anti-terrorism efforts…,” all of which involve the U.S. as the donor and Israel as the recipient.
Being a citizen of a country is not just an accident of birth. It requires loyalty to the interests of that country and to one’s fellow citizens. No two countries have identical interests, something that is particularly true when one is considering Israel, an ethno-religious autocracy, and the United States, where The Lobby works assiduously to compel American government at all levels to adopt positions that are beneficial to Israel and almost invariably harmful to U.S. interests. Asserting that the two nations have nearly identical interests is little more than a fraud.
Second, there is the claim that Israel benefits American security. That is also a lie. Washington’s relationship with Israel, which is now more subservient than it ever has been, is a major liability that is and always has been damaging to both American regional and global interests. The recent decisions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights were ill-conceived and have been condemned by the world community, including by nearly all of America’s genuine close allies.
The harm done by the Israeli connection to policy formulation in Washington and to U.S. troops based in the Middle East has been noted both by Admiral Thomas Moorer and General David Petraeus, with Moorer decrying how “If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don’t have any idea what goes on.” Petraeus complained to a Senate Committee that U.S. favoritism towards Israel puts American soldiers based in the Middle East at risk. He was quickly forced to recant, however.
Former CIA Deputy Director Admiral Bobby Inman has also rejected the claim that Israel is a security asset by observing that “Israeli spies have done more harm and have damaged the United States more than the intelligence agents of all other countries on earth combined… They are the gravest threat to our national security.” Inman was referring to American Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole for Israel an entire roomful of the most highly classified defense information. Israeli spies, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan, also participated in the systematic theft of weapons grade uranium and nuclear triggers in the 1960s so Israel could secretly create a nuclear weapons arsenal. The FBI, for its part, in its annual counterintelligence report, consistently identifies Israel as the “friendly” country that spies most persistently against the U.S. FBI Agents have testified that there are very few prosecutions of the swarms of Israeli spies due to “political pressure.”
Third, there is the myth that the United States and Israel have “shared values,” which is meant to imply that both are liberal democracies where freedom and human rights prevail, beacons of light offering enlightened leadership in a world where tyranny threatens at every turn. This was stressed in the opening remarks last weekend by AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, who described Israel as “A nation always striving to be better, more just and true to the message of its founders, a nation dedicated to freedom of religion for people of all faiths. We do our work for all to see. What unites our pro-Israel movement is the passion for bringing American and Israel closer for the benefit of both and the benefit of all. We look like America because we are America.”
Kohr is, of course, preaching to an audience that wants desperately to believe what he says in spite of what they have been able to see with their own eyes in the media when it dares to publish a story criticizing Israel. Jewish hypocrisy about one standard for Israel and Jews plus another standard for everyone else operates pretty much out in the open if one knows where to look. Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein, who once tweeted regarding a “filthy Arab,” was interviewed by journalist Nathan Thrall and asked why he believed it was “utterly racist and despicable” to support a “white nationalist” ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do the same. He responded “Israel is a unique situation. This is really a Jewish state given to us by God. God did not create a state for white people or for black people.” Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, who calls himself the Senate’s “shomer” or guardian for American Jews, had a slightly different take on it: “Of course, we say it’s our land, the Torah says it, but they don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace.”
But Kohr, Klein and Schumer all know as well as anyone that Israeli Jews, fortified by their conceit of being a “Chosen people,” are not interchangeable with contemporary Americans, or at least not “like” the Americans who still care about their country. There are hundreds of mostly Jewish pro-Israel organizations in America, having a combined endowment of $16 billion, that are actively propagandizing and promoting Israeli interests by ignoring or lying about the downside of the relationship. The University of Michigan affiliate of the Hillel International campus organization alone has a multistory headquarters supported by a budget of $2 million and a staff of 15. It hosts an emissary of the Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli government supported promotional enterprise.
So, what is the meaning of the “American” in AIPAC? Requiring a religious-ethnic litmus test for full citizenship and rights is Israeli, not American. Having local government admissions committees that can bar Israeli-Palestinian citizens based on “social suitability” would not be acceptable to most Americans. Demanding a unique Israeli right to exist while denying it to Israel’s neighbors; demolishing homes while poisoning Palestinian livestock and destroying orchards; shooting children for throwing stones; and inflicting death, terror and deprivation upon the imprisoned people of Gaza are all everyday common practice for the Israeli government.
Israel and AIPAC have relentlessly pursued their agenda while also corrupting the Congress of the United States to support the Israeli government with money and political cover. Israel and friends like Kohr routinely make baseless charges of anti-Semitism against critics while also legislating against free-speech to eliminate any and all criticism. This drive to make Israel uniquely free from any critique has become the norm in the United States, but it is a norm driven by Israeli interests and Israel’s friends, most of whom are Jewish billionaires or Jewish organizations that meet regularly and discuss what they might do to benefit the Jewish state.
And the fourth big lie is that the American people support Israel on religious as well as cultural grounds, not because mostly Jewish money has corrupted our political system and media. Indeed, many Christian fundamentalists have various takes on what Israel means, but their influence is limited. The Israel-thing is Jewish in all ways that matter and its sanitized Exodus-version that has been sold to the public is essentially a complete fraud nurtured by the media, also Jewish controlled, by Hollywood, and by the Establishment.
“This weekend the New York Timesbreaks one of the biggest taboos, describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party’s slavish support for Israel. Nathan Thrall’s groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we’ve reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins, as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism– that’s the nut.” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to ex-President Barack Obama recounted in the article how “a more assertive policy toward Israel” never evolved “The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the [Jewish] donor class.”
And the support for Israel goes beyond money. The Times article included an October 2018
“Survey of 800 American voters who identify as Jewish, conducted by the Mellman Group on behalf of the Jewish Electoral Institute, 92 percent said that they are ‘generally pro-Israel.’ In the same poll — conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut humanitarian aid to Palestinians — roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump’s handling of relations with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a November 2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel. According to a 2013 Pew survey, 44 percent of Americans and 40 percent of American Jews believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, [a] fact that Jews believe they have rights in historic Palestine that non-Jews do not.”
And one only has to listen to the AIPAC speeches made by leading members of the U.S. government establishment to appreciate the essential hypocrisy over the U.S. wag-the-dog relationship with the Jewish state of Israel. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer led the parade of Democrats on the first evening of AIPAC, thundering “When someone accuses American supporters of Israel of dual loyalty, I say: Accuse me, I am part of a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting Israel—an overwhelming majority of the United States Congress. I tell Israel’s accusers and detractors: Accuse me.”
Well, Steny there is a certain irony in your request and to be sure you should be accused over betrayal of your oath to uphold the constitution against all enemies “domestic and foreign.” Hoyer is a product of the heavily Jewish Maryland Democratic Party machine that has also produced Pelosi and Senator Ben Cardin. Pelosi told the AIPAC audience about her father in Baltimore, a so-called Shabbos goy who would perform services for Jews on the sabbath and who would also speak Yiddish while at home with his Italian family. Cardin meanwhile has been the sponsor of legislation to make criticism or boycotting of Israel illegal, up to and including heavy fines and prison time.
Hoyer, widely regarded as one of the most pro-Israel non-Jewish congressman, also boasted to AIPAC about the 15 official trips to Israel he’s made in forty years in Congress, accompanied by more than 150 fellow Democrats. “This August, I will travel with what I expect will be our largest delegation ever—probably more than 30 Democratic members of Congress, including many freshmen.”
Steny Hoyer will be on an AIPAC affiliate sponsored trip in which any contact with Palestinians will be both incidental and carefully managed. He also clearly has no problem in spending the taxpayer’s dime to go to Israel on additional “codels” to get further propagandized. He is flat out wrong about Israel in general, but don’t expect him to be convinced otherwise, which may be somehow related to the $317,525 in pro-Israel PAC contributions he has received.
There was much more at the AIPAC Summit. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced “the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, fresh from selling out U.S. interests on a visit to Israel, declared that“We live in dangerous times. We have to speak the truth. Anti-Semitism should and must be rejected by all decent people. Anti-Semitism – anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and any nation that espouses anti-Zionism, like Iran, must be confronted. We must defend the rightful homeland of the Jewish people.”
Vice President Mike Pence, like Pompeo an evangelical Christian, piled on in his Monday prime time speech, declaring that “Anyone who aspires to the highest office of the land should not be afraid to stand with the strongest supporters of Israel in America. It is wrong to boycott Israel. It is wrong to boycott AIPAC. Anti-Semitism has no place in the Congress of the United States of America. Anyone who slanders this historic alliance between the United States and Israel should never have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Clearly, there is considerable evidence to support the theory that one has to be completely ignorant to hold high office in the United States. Rejecting Zionism and/or questioning Israeli policies is not anti-Semitism and the Jewish state is in fact no actual ally of the United States. Nor is there any mandate to defend it in its questionable “rightful homeland.” Furthermore, dual-loyalty is what the relationship with Israel is all about and it is Jewish money and political power that makes the whole thing work to Israel’s benefit.
But the good news is that all the lying blather from the likes of Steny Hoyer and Howard Kohr reveals their desperation. They are running scared because “the times they are a changing.” Sure, Congressmen will continue to be bought and sold and Jewish money and the access to power that it buys will be able to prevail in the short term in a conspiratorial fashion. But, in the long run, everyone knows deep down that loyalty to Israel is not loyalty to the United States. And what Israel is doing is evil, as is becoming increasingly clear. It is trying to convince Washington to make war on Iran, a country that does not threaten the U.S., while the willingness of the American people to continue to look the other way as Benjamin Netanyahu uses army snipers to shoot down unarmed demonstrators who are starving will not continue indefinitely. It must not continue and we Americans should do whatever it takes to stop it.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
