US Jews Could Pay High Price for Iraq War
Ira Chernus | 01.12.2005 06:43
So, if you are reading this, and you are Jewish, please take to heart this warning. Israel, in using you to hide their crimes behind, has made a target of you in the inevitable backlash. Israel does not care if you get harmed or killed, indeed they will welcome it and gleefully wave your bloodied body around to serve their political interests.
The truth is that a strong majority of American Jews are firmly against the Fascists' Illegal War of Aggression against Iraq.
What is being cited here is the support of ORGANIZED Jewry, and that, sadly, has been hijacked by Zionists, with their own interests firmly entrenched.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-07.htm
US Jews Could Pay High Price for Iraq War
by Ira Chernus
Jews who support a U.S. war against Iraq should think again. If the war "goes bad," with too many U.S. casualties and not enough rapid victory, the finger of blame could well point at the U.S. Jewish community. That may be unfair, but fairness will hardly matter if it starts to happen.
It could spell the end of the Jewish community's free ride in this country. Smart Jews may want to think ahead.
In the past week, the issue of Jewish support for war has become a hot media issue. The immediate trigger was Virginia Congressman James Moran. He told a public forum that ``If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community
for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this.
The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going." Republicans immediately cried anti-semitism, ending the debate.
They saw it as Trent Lott payback time:
If my racist must go, so must yours.
Within a week, the nation's ranking liberal, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who recently shilled for Zionist front group AIPAC at their yearly conference, moved to end the controversy, or perhaps, the publicity. She forced Moran to quit his post as Democratic House whip for the mid-Atlantic region.
Moran's words were certainly inept. But there is no reason to believe they were anti-semitic.
Moran himself says he only put it that way because he was responding to a questioner who identified herself as Jewish. If the questioner had been Catholic, he says, he would have blamed Catholics.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe it's just trying to cover his behind.
In any event, Moran was offering a somewhat crude
political analysis, not a racial slur. His crude analysis is not terribly convincing.
If the Jewish community were neutral and relatively silent about Iraq, the Bush([search]) administration would surely still be pressing just as hard for war.
If the organized Jewish community took a very strong principled stand against war, it would surely strengthen the antiwar movement.
But most of the national church organizations have come out against the war, and it's not clear they've changed the direction of events.
Why do people think the Jews could?
The answer lies partly in an old fantasy that Jews control the banks, the government, and just about every big institution you can think of.
It was a common expression of anti-semitism among small, marginalized, disempowered people in this country in the early 20th century.
It has not vanished by any means.
But there is no way to know how much the current belief in Jewish power reflects anti-semitism. In the last 30 years or so, it has also become a sober reading of reality in one respect.
Jewish organizations now do have a disproportionate influence on the U.S. government,
when it comes to Middle East policy. The people who wield this power immediately shout "antisemitism", hoping this will end the debate altogether, and protect them from more critical discussions or analyses.
Last week the New York Times gave one of its writers a chunk of the op-ed page to deny that "we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel."
"The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think," Bill Keller wrote.
The idea rests on far more than vague awareness of the power of the "Israel lobby."
The smoking gun is a coterie of influential neo-conservatives (Fascists - www.newamericancentury.org) in the Bush administration, who have long histories of promoting right-wing leaders and policies in
Israel.
No one will ever know for sure whether these neo-cons (notably Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith) really promoted war with Iraq primarily to help Israel.
It is not very likely, as Keller say.
If a war in Iraq "goes bad," though, the truth will not matter.
(However, since the LIES these people told in order to start this war have been exposed, and American GI's have started returning from Iraq in body bags, the US support that was once allegedly there for the war has now all but disappeared. If you pay attention, you will see that it is the Israeli Right and organized US Zionism that is pushing not only for the continuance of the war in Iraq, but also the escalation of the current Covert Wars throughout Syria and Iran.)
Americans will look for scapegoats, and the organized Jewish community may be near the head of the line, even in the eyes of the Zionists beating the war drums the loudest.
It won't be just the organizations who will
be blamed; it will be "the Jews."
That is certainly unfair.
The organizations and their leaders are more conservative (and Zionist) than the whole Jewish population, especially on Israel and the Middle East.
While nearly all the leaders support a war in Iraq, polls show that 40% or more of U.S. Jews are hesitant, at best, about war.
But the organizations and leaders always claim to speak for all American Jews. Why shouldn't most American non-Jews believe them and assume all Jews are to blame?
These Zionist organizations, masquerading as Jewish groups and leaders have struggled hard to gain their enormous influence on Middle East policy.
They have largely achieved their aim.
They, and the many Jews who do support them,
have had a free ride.
They wield great clout without any noticeable increase in anti-semitism. Here's the irony.
If we have the war they want, and it "goes bad,"
the Jewish community might pay a steep price in rising anti-semitism.
Are U.S. Jews really willing to take this risk?
Congressman Moran was probably wrong.
A major Jewish push against war, by itself, is not likely to stop war-especially since it would be
resisted by Jewish leaders and Bush administration neo-cons who are pro-war.
But Jews with common sense should make that push anyway. They should see that the price they might pay for this war is too high, especially when so little good is likely to come of it.
They should quickly put as much distance as they can between themselves and those Jews who support the war, and explain what Zionism is doing to their represenatation.
Jews with sensitive moral conscience will not stop to calculate their chances of success.
They will work against war because they know that thousands more Iraqis are sure to die.
They know that Israel's Jews will be directly at risk, too (though Israeli military intelligence
foresees less risk this time around than during the 1991 Gulf War, since Iraq's weaponry is far inferior now.)
They should also know that, under cover of war,
Israel may very well step up its actions against
Palestinians.
Imagine a Jewish community where that kind of moral concern, all by itself, would be enough
to turn all of us Jews against war.
Imagine an American community where moral concern turns all of us against war.
This season of debate about war gives us a golden opportunity to take a big step toward that kind of community.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious
Studies at the University of Colorado
at Boulder. cher... (at) colorado.edu
WHO IS SENDING YOUR CHILDREN OFF TO DIE IN WAR?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/offtowar.html
WHO IS THE US CONGRESS LISTENING TO?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/whoiscongresslisteningto.html
Democrats Forget Palestine, Again and Again...
Howard Dean’s Blunt Message
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Frank1130.htm
30 Nov 2005
A frightening "Strategy for Israel"
By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 30, 2005, 01:24
The other day I was handed the translation of a paper written by Israeli journalist Oded Yinon as far back as 1982. Ah! Old news, I thought. I'll get around to browsing through it one of these days. When later, the person who proffered the document, asked me about my conclusions, I grabbed my spectacles and sat down for what I thought would be a dull read. How wrong I was!
Yinon, who was attached to Israel's Foreign Ministry, published his paper, titled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," in Kivunim (Directions) a "journal for Judaism and Zionism," and if the Association of Arab-American University graduates hadn't widely distributed the article, it might have disappeared down the memory hole.
Unfortunately, as the document is 11 pages long, I can only give you the gist but it can be found in its entirety on the Internet.
The basic premises of the plan are these: In order to survive Israel must become an imperial regional power and must also ensure the break-up of all Arab countries so that the region may be carved up into small ineffectual states unequipped to stand up to Israeli military might.
Yinon described the Arab-Muslim world as "a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners and arbitrarily divided into states, all made up of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another."
He then goes on to predict that some of these states face ethnic social destruction from within "and in some a civil war is already raging."
The writer goes on to bemoan Israel's relinquishment of the Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David Peace Treaty due to that area's "oil, gas and other natural resources."
"Regaining the Sinai Peninsula is therefore a political priority which is obstructed by Camp David . . . , he writes . . ."and we will have to act in order to return the situation to the status quo which existed in Sinai prior to Sadat's visit and the mistaken peace agreement signed with him in March 1979."
Yinon then predicts that if Egypt is divided and torn apart some other Arab countries will cease to exist in their present form and a Christian Coptic state would be founded in Upper Egypt. (I always wondered why Egypt was referred to as 'the prize' in a 2002 Rand presentation to the Pentagon at the behest of chief neo-conservative and friend of Israel Richard Perle)
Now how about this?
"The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target," he writes.
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets," says Yinon. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel."
"Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon. In Iraq, three or more states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul."
Remember that Yinon's paper was penned in 1982.
But the writer also makes grave mistakes of judgment. For instance, he felt certain that both Jordan and Egypt would revert to Nasser-style Pan-Arab philosophies and break their treaties with Israel, which was what Yinon hoped they would do. But it didn't happen.
Yinon further predicted "there is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time and Israel's policy both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan."
This was because Yinon wanted to see the transfer of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank into Jordan. "It is not possible to go on living in this country in the present situation without separating the two nations, the Arabs to Jordan and the Jews to the areas west of the river," he says.
Was Yinon's paper the precursor of the 1996 "Clean Break: A new strategy for securing the realm" document authored by current and former Bush([search]) administration leading lights, such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith as well as David and Meyrav Wurmser on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu?
"Clean Break" advised the Israeli government to "publicly question Syria's legitimacy," contain Syria and strike selected targets, and "reject" the land for peace concept related to the Golan Heights.
It was also proposed that Syria should be isolated and surrounded by a friendly regime in Iraq, while Arab states should be challenged as "police([search]) states" lacking legitimacy. Isn't this exactly what is happening today as part of Bush's democratization policy?
Richard Perle -- who journalist and film-maker John Pilger describes as one of George W. Bush's thinkers -- later pops up again in the 2000 Project for the New American Century document, which lays out the neocon vision for US domination of the land, seas, skies and space.
Pilger writes in December 2002: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about 'total war', I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror'. 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there.
"'All this talk we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now'."
Those children that survive, maybe, but I'll bet that Perle and gang are far more likely to go down in the annals of history alongside mankind's most brutal, ruthless and self-serving.
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines (at) yahoo.co.uk.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_280.shtml
What is being cited here is the support of ORGANIZED Jewry, and that, sadly, has been hijacked by Zionists, with their own interests firmly entrenched.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-07.htm US Jews Could Pay High Price for Iraq War
by Ira Chernus
Jews who support a U.S. war against Iraq should think again. If the war "goes bad," with too many U.S. casualties and not enough rapid victory, the finger of blame could well point at the U.S. Jewish community. That may be unfair, but fairness will hardly matter if it starts to happen.
It could spell the end of the Jewish community's free ride in this country. Smart Jews may want to think ahead.
In the past week, the issue of Jewish support for war has become a hot media issue. The immediate trigger was Virginia Congressman James Moran. He told a public forum that ``If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community
for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this.
The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going." Republicans immediately cried anti-semitism, ending the debate.
They saw it as Trent Lott payback time:
If my racist must go, so must yours.
Within a week, the nation's ranking liberal, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who recently shilled for Zionist front group AIPAC at their yearly conference, moved to end the controversy, or perhaps, the publicity. She forced Moran to quit his post as Democratic House whip for the mid-Atlantic region.
Moran's words were certainly inept. But there is no reason to believe they were anti-semitic.
Moran himself says he only put it that way because he was responding to a questioner who identified herself as Jewish. If the questioner had been Catholic, he says, he would have blamed Catholics.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe it's just trying to cover his behind.
In any event, Moran was offering a somewhat crude
political analysis, not a racial slur. His crude analysis is not terribly convincing.
If the Jewish community were neutral and relatively silent about Iraq, the Bush([search]) administration would surely still be pressing just as hard for war.
If the organized Jewish community took a very strong principled stand against war, it would surely strengthen the antiwar movement.
But most of the national church organizations have come out against the war, and it's not clear they've changed the direction of events.
Why do people think the Jews could?
The answer lies partly in an old fantasy that Jews control the banks, the government, and just about every big institution you can think of.
It was a common expression of anti-semitism among small, marginalized, disempowered people in this country in the early 20th century.
It has not vanished by any means.
But there is no way to know how much the current belief in Jewish power reflects anti-semitism. In the last 30 years or so, it has also become a sober reading of reality in one respect.
Jewish organizations now do have a disproportionate influence on the U.S. government,
when it comes to Middle East policy. The people who wield this power immediately shout "antisemitism", hoping this will end the debate altogether, and protect them from more critical discussions or analyses.
Last week the New York Times gave one of its writers a chunk of the op-ed page to deny that "we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel."
"The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think," Bill Keller wrote.
The idea rests on far more than vague awareness of the power of the "Israel lobby."
The smoking gun is a coterie of influential neo-conservatives (Fascists - www.newamericancentury.org) in the Bush administration, who have long histories of promoting right-wing leaders and policies in
Israel.
No one will ever know for sure whether these neo-cons (notably Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith) really promoted war with Iraq primarily to help Israel.
It is not very likely, as Keller say.
If a war in Iraq "goes bad," though, the truth will not matter.
(However, since the LIES these people told in order to start this war have been exposed, and American GI's have started returning from Iraq in body bags, the US support that was once allegedly there for the war has now all but disappeared. If you pay attention, you will see that it is the Israeli Right and organized US Zionism that is pushing not only for the continuance of the war in Iraq, but also the escalation of the current Covert Wars throughout Syria and Iran.)
Americans will look for scapegoats, and the organized Jewish community may be near the head of the line, even in the eyes of the Zionists beating the war drums the loudest.
It won't be just the organizations who will
be blamed; it will be "the Jews."
That is certainly unfair.
The organizations and their leaders are more conservative (and Zionist) than the whole Jewish population, especially on Israel and the Middle East.
While nearly all the leaders support a war in Iraq, polls show that 40% or more of U.S. Jews are hesitant, at best, about war.
But the organizations and leaders always claim to speak for all American Jews. Why shouldn't most American non-Jews believe them and assume all Jews are to blame?
These Zionist organizations, masquerading as Jewish groups and leaders have struggled hard to gain their enormous influence on Middle East policy.
They have largely achieved their aim.
They, and the many Jews who do support them,
have had a free ride.
They wield great clout without any noticeable increase in anti-semitism. Here's the irony.
If we have the war they want, and it "goes bad,"
the Jewish community might pay a steep price in rising anti-semitism.
Are U.S. Jews really willing to take this risk?
Congressman Moran was probably wrong.
A major Jewish push against war, by itself, is not likely to stop war-especially since it would be
resisted by Jewish leaders and Bush administration neo-cons who are pro-war.
But Jews with common sense should make that push anyway. They should see that the price they might pay for this war is too high, especially when so little good is likely to come of it.
They should quickly put as much distance as they can between themselves and those Jews who support the war, and explain what Zionism is doing to their represenatation.
Jews with sensitive moral conscience will not stop to calculate their chances of success.
They will work against war because they know that thousands more Iraqis are sure to die.
They know that Israel's Jews will be directly at risk, too (though Israeli military intelligence
foresees less risk this time around than during the 1991 Gulf War, since Iraq's weaponry is far inferior now.)
They should also know that, under cover of war,
Israel may very well step up its actions against
Palestinians.
Imagine a Jewish community where that kind of moral concern, all by itself, would be enough
to turn all of us Jews against war.
Imagine an American community where moral concern turns all of us against war.
This season of debate about war gives us a golden opportunity to take a big step toward that kind of community.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious
Studies at the University of Colorado
at Boulder. cher... (at) colorado.edu
WHO IS SENDING YOUR CHILDREN OFF TO DIE IN WAR?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/offtowar.html WHO IS THE US CONGRESS LISTENING TO?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/whoiscongresslisteningto.html Democrats Forget Palestine, Again and Again...
Howard Dean’s Blunt Message
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Frank1130.htm 30 Nov 2005
A frightening "Strategy for Israel"
By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 30, 2005, 01:24
The other day I was handed the translation of a paper written by Israeli journalist Oded Yinon as far back as 1982. Ah! Old news, I thought. I'll get around to browsing through it one of these days. When later, the person who proffered the document, asked me about my conclusions, I grabbed my spectacles and sat down for what I thought would be a dull read. How wrong I was!
Yinon, who was attached to Israel's Foreign Ministry, published his paper, titled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," in Kivunim (Directions) a "journal for Judaism and Zionism," and if the Association of Arab-American University graduates hadn't widely distributed the article, it might have disappeared down the memory hole.
Unfortunately, as the document is 11 pages long, I can only give you the gist but it can be found in its entirety on the Internet.
The basic premises of the plan are these: In order to survive Israel must become an imperial regional power and must also ensure the break-up of all Arab countries so that the region may be carved up into small ineffectual states unequipped to stand up to Israeli military might.
Yinon described the Arab-Muslim world as "a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners and arbitrarily divided into states, all made up of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another."
He then goes on to predict that some of these states face ethnic social destruction from within "and in some a civil war is already raging."
The writer goes on to bemoan Israel's relinquishment of the Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David Peace Treaty due to that area's "oil, gas and other natural resources."
"Regaining the Sinai Peninsula is therefore a political priority which is obstructed by Camp David . . . , he writes . . ."and we will have to act in order to return the situation to the status quo which existed in Sinai prior to Sadat's visit and the mistaken peace agreement signed with him in March 1979."
Yinon then predicts that if Egypt is divided and torn apart some other Arab countries will cease to exist in their present form and a Christian Coptic state would be founded in Upper Egypt. (I always wondered why Egypt was referred to as 'the prize' in a 2002 Rand presentation to the Pentagon at the behest of chief neo-conservative and friend of Israel Richard Perle)
Now how about this?
"The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target," he writes.
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets," says Yinon. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel."
"Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon. In Iraq, three or more states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul."
Remember that Yinon's paper was penned in 1982.
But the writer also makes grave mistakes of judgment. For instance, he felt certain that both Jordan and Egypt would revert to Nasser-style Pan-Arab philosophies and break their treaties with Israel, which was what Yinon hoped they would do. But it didn't happen.
Yinon further predicted "there is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time and Israel's policy both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan."
This was because Yinon wanted to see the transfer of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank into Jordan. "It is not possible to go on living in this country in the present situation without separating the two nations, the Arabs to Jordan and the Jews to the areas west of the river," he says.
Was Yinon's paper the precursor of the 1996 "Clean Break: A new strategy for securing the realm" document authored by current and former Bush([search]) administration leading lights, such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith as well as David and Meyrav Wurmser on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu?
"Clean Break" advised the Israeli government to "publicly question Syria's legitimacy," contain Syria and strike selected targets, and "reject" the land for peace concept related to the Golan Heights.
It was also proposed that Syria should be isolated and surrounded by a friendly regime in Iraq, while Arab states should be challenged as "police([search]) states" lacking legitimacy. Isn't this exactly what is happening today as part of Bush's democratization policy?
Richard Perle -- who journalist and film-maker John Pilger describes as one of George W. Bush's thinkers -- later pops up again in the 2000 Project for the New American Century document, which lays out the neocon vision for US domination of the land, seas, skies and space.
Pilger writes in December 2002: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about 'total war', I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror'. 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there.
"'All this talk we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now'."
Those children that survive, maybe, but I'll bet that Perle and gang are far more likely to go down in the annals of history alongside mankind's most brutal, ruthless and self-serving.
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines (at) yahoo.co.uk.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_280.shtml
Ira Chernus
Comments
Display the following 15 comments