Israel’s Willing Executioners:
AIPAC Invades Washington
James Petras, Robin Eastman Abaya, Mar 15 2012
From Mar 4-9 2012, 13,000 militant Israel-Firsters took over “political Washington”[1] and imposed a foreign regime’s (Israel) political agenda to the rousing applause and appreciation of their captive vassal US legislators and executives who crowded the halls and platforms groveling for the imperious nods of their visiting Israeli overlords[2]. The annual meeting of AIPAC is the most outrageous public display of Zionist-Jewish power as it shapes US foreign policy. The sole purpose of AIPAC is to ensure Israel’s unchallenged military and political power over a huge region from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Over three quarters of the US Congress members paraded themselves before AIPAC, as well as Obama, Biden and any high ranking Cabinet members in any way related to US foreign policy, Sec State Clinton and Sec Def Panetta included. They all loudly parroted the political agenda and military priorities that AIPAC has imposed on the US[3].
The AIPAC gathering is clearly not a meeting of “just another lobby”[4]: It is the launch pad used by Israel’s top political and military leaders to drag the US into another major war in the Middle East, this time against Iran[5]. Israel’s Pres Peres opened the conference, setting the militarist tone and political framework for Obama who followed, slavishly echoing the language and substance of the Israeli leader[6]. The following day, Netanyahu spoke, and forcefully laid out the line for a US war against Iran[7] with thousands of prominent and respectable Jewish USAians, Israel-Firsters, leaping to their feet dozens of times in fanatic support for a US war, a war in which few, if any, of them, their children, relatives or friends will suffer loss of life or limb[8]. This was the same Netanyahu who once opined that the 9-11 attack on the US benefited Israel because it linked the US closer to Israeli interests.
Not since the War of 1812, which saw the British occupation and burning of Washington, has the US capital been so utterly humiliated by a foreign power. Unlike the British crown, which then negotiated a peace settlement, allowing the US to regain its sovereignty and capital, the Israeli leaders and their rabid “fifth column” demand a military agreement, in which Israel dictates the terms under which the US goes to war with Iran. Israeli leaders have not secured the submission of the US because of Israel’s military, economic or political superiority: They have a puny economy, a fraction of the US nuclear weapons and have few allies and even less public approval in the international community. But they do have at least a half million fanatical, unconditional Zionist militants in the US, including thousands of loyal multi-millionaires and billionaires who fund the campaign of both Democrat and Republican parties[9]. AIPAC is the vanguard of Israel’s shock troops in the US. Highly disciplined and organized, AIPAC lobbyists invade the offices of every Congressperson armed with a legislative script carefully prepared by and for the State of Israel[10]. They have secured the full commitment of most members of Congress for Israel’s agenda waving both dollar signs and stars of David. As past history has amply demonstrated, Congressional staff or legislators who dare hesitate or ask for time to reflect, rapidly find themselves on the receiving end of AIPAC’s political bullying and threats, which usually secure acquiescence. Refusal to capitulate to AIPAC means the end of a political career in Washington.
The Israeli (and therefore AIPAC’s) agenda is to pursue an unprovoked war, either initiated by the US or as part of a US-backed Israeli sneak attack, against the sovereign Islamic Republic of Iran[11]. Iran is targeted today because the other opponents of Israel’s colonization of Palestine have been destroyed in previous Zionist-backed US wars, namely Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and the ongoing proxy war against the Assad regime in Syria[12]. Today Israeli leaders insist that Iran should be violently denied what over 120 other nations practice freely: the legal enrichment of uranium for medical, commercial and scientific purposes. Past Israeli propaganda, echoed by the CPMAJO, falsely claimed Iran possessed nuclear weapons or was in the process of manufacturing them and therefore posed an ‘existential’ threat to Israel. Even the mere ‘capacity’ to enrich uranium for medical purposes (many times below the level needed for a weapon) is presented as a major threat to the Jewish State. Meanwhile, the 27 US intelligence agencies (in their yearly ‘findings’) and even the IAEA have found no such evidence of an ongoing weapons program, thus the need for bizarre terms like ‘existential threat’. Israel’s high command has now come up with a new flimsy pretext for war. Iran’s potential (through its advanced scientific and technical manpower and research centers) for acquiring a ‘nuclear weapon capability’ may constitute a sufficient cause for war[13]. In other words, Israel has ordered its 13,000 AIPAC militants to demand every US Congress person vote for a war resolution on the basis of Iran’s current uranium enrichment program geared to medical uses and on its sophisticated scientific and intellectual potential. Meanwhile, the Mossad has launched a not-so-secret program of terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists in their homes, offices and universities, with nary a protest from the Zionized US press.
Netanyahu’s newest criterion for war (Iranian capability) has the blind support of the major Jewish organizations in the US[14]. US Zionists are the willing executioners promoting an aggressive, unprovoked, military attack against the homeland (and homes) of 75 million Iranians. Let us be clear, there are naked genocidal impulses permeating some of the pronouncements of leading US Jewish religious leaders. The executive vice president of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of USAia, Rabbi Herring, suggested that Israel should consider “the use of tactical nuclear weapons in areas that aren’t so populated or in the open desert, to show the Iranians that their lives are on the line, that Israel won’t go quietly.”[15] The rabbi did not specify whether population centers of a quarter of a million inhabitants or less qualify under his definition of “not so populated” and therefore are suitable targets for this educational display of thermo-nuclear destruction, “just to show the Iranians.” Let us keep in mind that among the Zionist fundamentalists, “not a few organizational leaders wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons right now”[16].
When Netanyahu gave the command to the AIPAC delegates to invade the US Congress and secure a war commitment on the basis of Iran’s ‘capacity’ (for uranium enrichment), there was no debate and no dissention among the ‘shock troops’, only blind unanimous approval among Jewish USAian citizens for their foreign master. These respectable Jewish-USAians marched lock-step in platoons right up to the Congress members on their lists, canned arguments in one hand and Israeli-ghost-written legislation in the other. They boast of having rounded up a substantial majority of elected US representatives for war.
If Israel’s power in the US depends on AIPAC’s tight control over the US Congress, the lobby, for its part, depends on the power of the wider Zionist power configuration permeating strategic political and administrative offices, political party structures and the electoral process itself. This, in turn, depends on Zionist media influence linked back to economic and financial power. The democratic and representative process has been totally crushed under this narrow-focused juggernaut for war on behalf of Israel. While much has been made of the influence AIPAC exercises over the US Congress and Executive via ‘lobbying’, better termed intimidation and pressure tactics, a great part of its success is based on the larger Zionist matrix of power operating within the government, civil society and the economy.
When AIPAC lobbyists approach Congress members with Israeli-dictated foreign policy priorities in hand, they coordinate and are given a major platform by the forty-plus elected Zionist legislators who just happen to occupy strategic positions, such as the chairpersons of Congressional committees dealing with foreign policy, especially policy related to the Middle East. In other words, AIPAC’s conquest of Congress is ‘by invitation’. The relation is ‘reciprocal’. AIPAC and the CPMAJO and various fundraisers mobilize money and activists to help elect the reliable Zionists to office. Once in place, they openly collaborate in writing pro-Israel legislation and ensuring that ‘majorities’ vote the ‘right way’[17]. Mark Dubowitz, executive director of “Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” helped write the latest (Iran) sanctions bill (Financial Times, Mar 6 2012, pg. 9). The “Foundation” is better known as an unconditional and unquestioning promoter of Israel’s agenda. Dubowitz is one of many un-elected ‘legislators’ who write and promote laws at Israel’s behest. The legislation to impose sanctions on Iran, authored by Dubowitz, is designed to brutalize and starve 75 million Iranian citizens into submission to further Israel’s goal of unquestioned supremacy in the Middle East.
AIPAC’s operations are not confined to Congress or to the electoral process. From Reagan to Obama, AIPAC has supplied committed Zionists to key positions in the Treasury, State Dept, National Security Council and the President’s inner circle of advisors on the Middle East[18]. AIPAC pressure ensures the appointment of Zionists to the executive branch and has led to the creation of special administrative posts designed specifically to pursue Israel’s agenda. A good example of AIPAC’s success is the post of Under-Sec of Treasury for Terrorism and Intelligence. The position was first held by Stuart Levey, a Zionist zealot whose whole purpose was to design and implement US (and later EU) sanctions against Iran. His replacement, David Cohen, a clone also from AIPAC, is the author of legislation pushing for punitive sanctions against Syria[19]. Dennis Ross, widely known as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ and a former AIPAC leader, was appointed senior adviser to Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, was the architect of US support for Israel’s starvation blockade and criminal bombing of Gaza (1999), the murderous invasion of Lebanon (2006). He has provided ‘cover’ for Netanyahu’s massive building of Jews only settlements on occupied Palestinian lands and his cynical ‘peace negotiations’ ploy[20]. Jeffrey Feltman, the current AIPAC front man in the State Dept, is the key official in charge of Middle East affairs, especially Lebanon, Syria and Iran[21]. Obama’s own inner circle of advisers is dominated by unconditional Israel supporters, including David Axelrod as chief confidant and the former Presidential Chief of Staff, dual US-Israeli citizen and current Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel[22].
What is striking is the constant cycle from leadership and activity in Zionist (Israeli-front) organizations, entry into powerful government post, return to one or another pro-Israel think tank, ‘civic organizations’, electoral office or lucrative private practice, all promoting the interests of Tel Aviv. AIPAC’s power in Washington depends on the activism of hundreds of thousands of US Zionists affiliated with organizations under the CPMAJO. While there is considerable overlap of membership, CPMAJO leaders openly serve as a transmission belt for Israel, transmitting the political line from Tel Aviv to their membership, including activist doctors, dentists and stock brokers in New York, Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco and all points north, south, east and west. When AIPAC has ‘trouble’ securing an elected representative’s sign-on to legislation for sanctions against whichever country is currently targeted by Israel, the reluctant legislator becomes a prime target for local Zionist notables and ‘fund raisers’ who pay them a ‘visit’ to persuade, if possible, threaten retaliation, if necessary. If a legislator still refuses to hew to Israel’s line, or considers service to a foreign power to be harmful to US, he/she will soon find that AIPAC has raised millions of dollars to fund a campaign of slander and electoral defeat[23]. Along with these upper middle class ‘grass roots’ activists there are the numerous highly politicized Zionist mega-millionaires and billionaires, like Adelson, Saban and scores of others, who make no bones about being fanatical Israel-Firsters and donate millions to Congresspeople willing to subordinate US interests to Israel’s quest for Middle East supremacy[24].
Besides this legal corruption of the political process, there is the issue of illegal espionage and thuggery on AIPAC’s part, most recently evidenced by the ongoing law-suit by one of two former top AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen caught spying for Israel (passing classified documents on US military policy towards Iran). Rosen, who was acquitted in a highly manipulated ‘trial’, maintains that AIPAC routinely encouraged its officials to secure confidential US government documents for Israel[25]. And then there are the prominent free-lance Zionists, who engage in vicious, highly publicized, political thuggery, physical assaults and blackmail against critics of Israel[26]. The most prominent defamers, like Abraham Foxman of the ADL, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, manipulate legions of respectable and wealthy thugs to pressure schools, universities and other employers to censor and fire critics of Israel. These Zionist organizations far exceed the reach and effective blacklisting of an earlier generation of witch hunters, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who were rank amateurs in comparison. The recent antics of Israel-Firster Andrew Adler, editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, whose call for the Israeli Mossad to assassinate Obama[27] led merely to his resignation as editor after several weeks of nervous outrage (but no federal investigation or charges). What is striking here is that while most respectable Zionists dissociate themselves from AIPAC spies and verbal assassins, the power of the Israel-Firsters ensures that such goons and thugs are rarely charged for their crimes and have never gone to jail[28].
The wider impact of Zionist influence and thuggery is evident in the timorous self-censorship of the majority of USAians who privately express fear and loathing at the confrontational, strident and abusive Zionist-USAians pushing a foreign agenda.[29] The mass media is a key political resource, which the pro-Israel power configuration exploits to the full. Not a single major print, television, film or radio outlet is willing to provide a balanced account of the Israel-Palestine conflict[30]. Israel’s dispossession of thousands of Arab families from their homes and the daily terrorist Zionist settler and military assaults against Palestinians protesting land seizures go unreported[31]. The hundreds of nuclear weapons in Israel’s arsenal are never mentioned while the Jewish State’s hysterical claims that non-nuclear Iran represents an existential threat are repeated and magnified, ad nauseam. The leaders of the CPMAJO know their Goebbels: a lie repeated often enough becomes an accepted truth.
What is crucial in understanding the Zionist Power Configuration’s stranglehold over our government is how it leverages power. For example, a tiny minority falsely claims to speak for all US Jews, who represent about 3% of the US population. However, based on this claim, they mobilize and raise funds to elect the committed Zionists who hold about 10% of the seats in the US Congress and Senate. These representatives, in turn, enjoy the support of a tiny cadre of super rich Zionists, whose promotion allows them to gain control over key committees dealing with Middle East policy and security. Domestic security has been deeply influenced by the Zionist-Israeli agenda. Former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Homeland Security Tzar Michael Chertoff have been among the most prominent officials orienting US domestic security to focus on critics of Israel and the entrapment of Muslim citizens in bizarre webs of phony terrorist plots, while real domestic security has suffered and civil rights have been shredded. The over-representation of Zionists on the US Supreme Court (3 out of 9) and the careful selection of recent justices, like Justice Sotomayor, underscore the profound nature of the process as it extends to the judiciary.[32]
The Zionist Power Configuration controls the Mid-East policies of both Democratic and Republican Party and their Presidential nominees through their Congressional and political party power bases. The US president, in turn, is leveraged, in order to secure key policy appointments for Zionists in the State Dept, Treasury and Pentagon. Their leverage in the foreign policy establishment allows Zionist officials to put pressure on allies and clients in the UN and EU to support policies such as Israel’s boycott and punishment of the elected Hamas government in Gaza and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Leverage is how Israel, an infinitely small and insignificant state with less than 1% of world GNP, exports and market shares and occupying .001% of the world’s territory, can play such a disproportionate role in the reconfiguration of power in the Middle East. Through its US Zionist influentials, Israel has manipulated the US into a quagmire of wars in the Middle East, costing the world’s consumers of oil untold billions of dollars and pushing the world economy into recession. During the first 3 months of 2012, the price of oil rose 15% (over 30% since the summer 2011) largely due to Israel’s warmongering and threats to launch an offensive war against Iran. Netanyahu, Peres and Lieberman have all repeatedly demanded the US bomb Iran, or failing that, they warn, Israel would launch its own offensive war against the Iranian people and drag the US into another war. Almost all oil experts and political analysts agree that the spike in oil prices is a result of Israel’s warmongering, as major international oil speculators bet that an Israeli assault on Iran will provoke a major disruption in production and transportation of petroleum in the Middle East and provoke a global shortfall[33].
The CPMAJO has added to the war hysteria by echoing and embellishing on Israel’s claims of an Iranian nuclear threat (or Iran’s “growing capacity” to threaten Israel in the future)[34]. During the first three months of this year alone, the increased price of gasoline, or more accurately Israel’s war tax on US consumers and drivers, costs an additional 60 cents a gallon, or $9 dollars more to fill a 15 gallon tank. This represents the tribute the Zionist power configuration has imposed on US consumers in their push for a new war on Israel’s behalf. No US politician would dare discuss this issue, let alone speak up and tell the Zionist chattering classes and their “beloved leaders” to stop pimping for war or else risk the cutting off of Israel’s $3b/yr handout from the US taxpayers. Leading economists have stated that the price hike in petroleum (caused by a bellicose Israel) is stunting growth and pushing the US and EU back into recession, costing millions more job losses[35]. If we add the consumer losses caused by high gas prices to the losses in world economic output, the mere war chants of Netanyahu, Lieberman, Peres and AIPAC will cost the global economy hundreds of billions over the course of the year. Any mention of Israel’s gas tax on the US family’s budget will elicit outraged accusations of anti-Semitism from respectable Zionists and ugly threats from their thug accomplices. When Obama performed his infamous annual belly crawl to pleasure the AIPAC delegates and their Israeli guests, in the midst of cheers over his re-affirmation of USAia’s unconditional loyalty to the state of Israel, he also quietly asked Israel to lower the war cries at least until after the November elections because of its effects on the price of gasoline on the US voter[36]. The high price of oil is damaging Obama’s chances for re-election. The US electorate may not understand the real cost of Obama’s submission to Israel and may not be aware of Israel’s gas tax, but they are holding their putative president responsible for their pain at the pump. There is only one thing that Obama cherishes more than Zionist support, and that is the votes of an economically squeezed US electorate, who are turning against him in droves as the price of gasoline soars.
The week of Mar 4-11 2012 will go down in history as a week of national humiliation; a time when legions of fanatical USAian Zionists took over Washington; when the entire Cabinet, led by Obama, groveled before the officials of a foreign state in the heart of Washington DC. When the president and prime minister of Israel directed their foreign legionaires to march on the US Congress and shove their flimsy pretexts for war with Iran into the faces of cringing legislators, the simplistic and idiotic message was: Bomb Iran because it may soon have a nuclear ‘capacity’. If asked what constitutes capacity, they quote their beloved leaders in Tel Aviv, including the semi-literate former nightclub bouncer Foreign Minister Lieberman, the morally corrupt Netanyahu and the quietly diabolic Peres that Iranians can ‘enrich uranium’, a capacity long held by 125 other countries. It is with supreme arrogance that the followers of AIPAC and the CPMAJO penetrate the US government in order to serve a foreign government. None bother to hide their past, present or future affiliations with the state of Israel. They are backed by prestigious Zionist academics, whose tendentious justifications for war have already sent tens of thousands of US soldiers to an early grave or to the wards of military and veteran hospitals and clinics across the country: They have sold us the argument that by serving the interests of the State of Israel we serve the US. From this, it only follows that to break the law and act as an unregistered agent for a foreign power, to transfer highly classified government documents to Mossad agents at the Israeli embassy and to threaten USAians who criticize or oppose Israel is a patriotic act[37]. Naval analyst Jonathan Pollard, the convicted US master-spy for Israel, is widely celebrated in Israel as an honorary Colonel in the IDF and a hero; the leaders of the major Zionist organizations are again pressuring Obama to release this traitor.
The documented performance of the leading Zionists in public office in the US over the past two decades has been an unmitigated disaster. The self-proclaimed best and brightest have led the country into the worst economic and military catastrophes in a century. It was Alan Greenspan, as head of the Federal Reserve, who de-regulated the financial sector and optimized conditions for the mega-swindles and speculative frenzy bringing down the entire financial system. It was his replacement, Ben Bernacke, who pushed for trillions of US tax-payer dollars in bail-out funds to save his cronies on Wall Street and set them back on course, in the last 2 years, to repeat their speculative orgy and allow such tribal compatriots as Stephen Schwartzman to reap $213m in earnings in 2011[38]. It was Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Libby, Abrams and Ross, as well as their less prominent lieutenants, who pushed the US into wars on Israel’s behalf in Afghanistan and Iraq, all the while confidently predicting ‘low cost, quick victories’ (even slam-dunks). Never has such a cohort of Ivy League mediocrities collectively produced so many disastrous policies in such a brief historical time while never being held in any way, shape or form responsible or accountable for their performance. It is obvious that these policy disasters did not result from faulty intellect or lack of an elite education. Their apparent ignorance of historical, political, economic and military realities was a result of their blinding Zionist loyalties to the Israeli state whose real interests they embraced. This lack of accountability guarantees that this process will continue until the US, as a republic, is destroyed for the masses of its misled citizens. In order to justify a war against Israel’s regional adversaries, these blind mediocrities have distorted the realities of Arab nationalism. It was with supreme tribal arrogance and racism that they assured themselves that Arabs could never sustain prolonged resistance to their imperial juggernaut. They believed precisely what their tribal religion/ideology told them: They were a chosen people (genetic studies aside). They were the most financially successful investors or speculators. They attended and taught at the most prestigious universities. When, on occasion, a leading Zionist philanthropist like Bernard Madoff fell afoul, and actually went to jail, it was because, like his fellow tribalists, Milken, Boesky and Pollard, he didn’t buy his one way ticket to Israel soon enough. When a country like the US is in decline, it is not because of external competition: Declining competitiveness is only a symptom. It is because of internal rot. Decline results when a nation is betrayed by craven leaders who crawl and humiliate themselves before a minority of thuggish mediocrities pledged to a foreign state without scruples or moral integrity.