Milton Viorst, October 4, 2007
About 30 or so years ago, when I first began to write of my concern that Israel was embarked on a course that would lead only to recurring wars, or perhaps worse, I received a letter from Abraham H. Foxman, then as now the voice of the Anti-Defamation League, admonishing me as a Jew not to wash our people”s dirty linen in public. I still have it in my files. His point, of course, was not whether the washing should be public or private; he did not offer an alternative laundry. His objective was – and remains – to squelch anyone who is critical of Israel”s policies.
In the ensuing years, Foxman and a legion of like-minded leaders, most but not all of them Jewish, have been remarkably successful in suppressing an open and frank debate on Israel”s course. In view of Israel”s impact on America”s place in the world, it is astonishing how little discussion its role has generated. As a practical matter, the subject has been taboo. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, professors of political science at the University of Chicago and Harvard”s John F. Kennedy School of Government, respectively, have challenged this taboo in their new book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Foxman, in an effort to discredit them, has written a rejoinder in his book “The Deadliest Lies: The Jewish Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.”
The controversy over Mearsheimer and Walt”s views has been going on since March of last year, when they first presented their argument in the London Review of Books. In their essay, they contended that support of the magnitude that the United States gives Israel might have been justified during the Cold War but is not defensible, “on either strategic or moral grounds,” under the conditions that currently prevail in the Middle East. America”s unconditional backing, they argued, is harmful to its own interests and possibly even to Israel”s, and it is made possible only by the influence of the Israel lobby over U.S. foreign policy. The article touched a sensitive chord among many of Israel”s defenders, generating a furor. Now Mearsheimer and Walt have written a book which, while more comprehensive at nearly 500 pages, recapitulates the original themes. Foxman acknowledges basing his book-length reply on the article, so impatient was he to proclaim its authors guilty of “distortions, omissions and errors.”
The late social critic Irving Howe, deeply committed to Israel himself, used to argue that Jewish leaders like Foxman depend for their status on ceaselessly trumpeting the dangers faced by the Jewish people, and particularly by Israel, from a hostile world. These leaders, Howe insisted, exploit the scars which inquisitions, pogroms and the Holocaust have left on the collective Jewish psyche, scars which distort Jewish political judgment. Foxman is no doubt sincere in agonizing over the dangers that Jews have historically faced. But Howe argued that these dangers had become a vested interest for the leaders of Jewish organizations, making an open and honest debate all but impossible in American Jewish circles and in America”s political culture generally.
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War profiteering
One of the most insidious acts of treachery in wartime is war profiteering. George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, could tell you that. Not that he considered such acts insidious. No, he just found them profitable. He was an ardent financial supporter of the Nazis until his assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942. The historian in you will remember that Hitler declared war on the US in 1941 (but that’s a story for another time).
War profiteers are lower than pond scum. They are the crap that pond scum scrapes off the bottom of its shoes. The shit that the crap scrapes off the bottom of its shoes? You need look no further than our Vice President’s old company (which still pays him, btw), Halliburton. Why are they “lower than low”? Because they are making excessive, fraudulent profits directly from the screwing of our soldiers. How, you ask? Submitted for your perusal, a veritable laundry list of despicable acts, brought to you by Halliburton, no-bid contractor and bosom buddy of the Bush administration. But be advised, Halliburton is not alone. They are just a “shining” example of how our president and vice-president “support” our soldiers.
http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new2.cfm?doc_name=inv2#halloverbill
Top Twenty Iraq Oversight Outrages Uncovered by the DPC
Republicans in Congress Refuse to Demand Accountability in Iraq;
Billions of Dollars Wasted, Our Mission Undermined
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