John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GILAD ATZMON IN UNZ REVIEW

“For the 0.5% Not the 99.5%”

“Our Labour leadership candidates have attended to whims uttered by a tiny privileged voice while ignoring at least 99.5% of the British public.

“Instead of returning to universal anti racist politics consistent with so-called ‘Labour values,’ the compromised contenders for party leadership bow to the demands made by the Board of Deputies…”

There is some important truth here.

Labour leadership candidates Emily Thornberry and Jess Phillips literally make your toes scrunch uncomfortably up inside your shoes when you read some of their squishy, self-serving pleas being passed off as principles.

But I regard their words and behavior more a matter of sheer political incompetence than anything else. Incompetence is to be found in politicians far more than is commonly realized.

As well, of course, we have corruption, as we saw with Tony Blair, who literally became wealthy in gratitude for his helping kill a million Iraqis to please Aerial Sharon. Tony’s “New Labour” meant a party dedicated to lobby funds and strongly pro-Israel policies. Tony helped lead the charge against Corbyn, too.

We saw no complaints about “anti-Semitism in Blair’s heyday. Somehow, after he left power, anti-Semitism just suddenly exploded inside the Labour Party the way Athena exploded from the forehead of Zeus. Extraordinary.

I long defended Corbyn as a decent and humane politician – qualities frequently missing in the profession – and I still believe that of him. The idea that he was ever “anti-Semitic” is bitterly laughable. And as a matter of fact, we have very little active anti-Semitism today in the West, and much of what self-serving Jewish fraternal organizations call anti-Semitism and enter as incidents in their computer records is just fair criticism of the barbaric policies of Israel, a heavily armed state abusing the powerless.

The whole campaign against Jeremy Corbyn was McCarthyism resuscitated in the service of a new cause. It should have been confronted exactly that way. Truth well-spoken can still be a powerful weapon. We have far too little of it in Western politics.

In the end, Corbyn did prove weak vis-a-vis the Israel lobby, but that’s easier to judge from the outside than when you are being libeled and insulted and pelted with eggs week after week.

The lobby uses an old established principle. Throw enough crap at the wall, and some it will stick. It is a standard principle of the advertising industry and has always been instinctively applied by groups like Germany’s 1930s Brownshirts.

The lobby and Israel do not want fairness and decency anywhere near the affairs of Israel. You are not allowed to be fair. You must be totally for Israel and against anyone Israel regards as undesirable.

That was Corbyn’s unforgivable sin, being fair. And he could not be allowed near power. And talk about external interference, several Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, got directly involved in British party politics over the period of Corbyn’s leadership.

Israel – like a major part of racist cowboy America, notably all of Trump’s crowd holding pick-up truck meets in Walmart parking lots – simply has no use for genuine liberals or progressives.

Why?

The essence of being a genuine liberal is deep regard for human and democratic rights. Obviously, Israel could not exist as it is today were liberal views to hold any sway.

And the same goes for America’s imperialism abroad and its defense of the Plantation System in many parts of the world, as we see repeatedly in Latin America.

There almost are no liberals in America or Israel.

You do not even have a country in fact when you have an empire. Empire and military and security concerns dominate and provide most of the attractive career paths for talented people, crowding out everything else. The privileged rule, and ideology replaces thought. Resources are dedicated to war and secret security.

And what is Israel but a privileged strategic colony of the American empire? One pretending to represent high principles when the truth is literally the opposite. Israel’s best friends in the region are tyrants – Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince or Egypt’s Generalissimo – who keep their people suppressed and bloodied. Israel calls democratic organizations like Hamas “terrorists” for the same reason people such as Corbyn are attacked.

Some democratic values. But we do live in a world where painting the roses red has become an accepted practice. We see that in every word and activity of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. And there are uncomfortable echoes today of what authoritarian states always busy themselves with doing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“The Israeli Lobby Is the Deep State”

 

There is definitely some truth in the title.

At the least, the Israel lobby is a component of the American Deep State, working closely, intimately, with its other components, including the Senate, the Pentagon, CIA, and the State Department.

The Neocons, for example, are entrenched in major Washington departments and agencies, very much including the State Department and the Defense Department, and they are influential in policy. In Trump’s government, Neocons fill several cabinet posts, important ones.

(For those who do not know the term “Neocon,” it is short for Neoconservative and represents a small but influential American political movement with one of its main articles of faith being that the United States should not be shy about using military might to get what it wants in the world. They have openly advocated for various wars. The movement’s connection to Israel is in the fact that that article of faith works to Israel’s advantage in getting what it wants and in the fact that most of the prominent members of the movement are American Jews who keep Israel high in their considerations.)

It is all hard to sort out because Israel’s situation is complex and ambiguous, deliberately so. It is indeed a de facto Middle East colony of the United States, a very special kind of colony, one permitted the appearance and most of the activity of an independent state.

And Israel’s lobby is multifaceted. It certainly includes far more than just AIPAC, which is the main formal avenue for influencing political leaders and distributing campaign funds. There are a number of wealthy individuals, multi-billionaires, who make Israel a chief concern and make extremely large campaign donations as well as providing other services. There are literally lists of private organizations and foundations who work to influence opinions. And there are the chief members of America’s press and broadcasting, all of whom are dedicated to Israel’s welfare and never challenge its excesses.

Hollywood, too, does a lot of work to shape public opinion, even sometimes working directly for Israel, as with its annual big bash dinner to collect millions of dollars for the Israeli Army. It did a lot to support the White Helmets of Syria, who function, under the cover of being an NGO, as a propaganda film-making and advocacy group for Western bombing there. Recently, the luxurious gift bags given to all nominees at the Oscar Awards included a free five-star trip to Israel.

The entire Israel lobby in the United States is literally a kind of multi-corporate venture, quite a large one. It is able to bring pressures from many directions. President Truman, when he was being lobbied to recognize self-declared Israel in 1948, felt under the most intense, almost headache-inducing pressure. He told us so in his writing. Well, since then, the Israel lobby has done nothing but grow in sophistication and size. Now, after each national election, for example, there is a program of paid trips to Israel for all freshmen Congressmen, ostensibly friendly holidays but actually carefully planned information and influence and assessment sessions. Woe betide the new Congressman who turns down the invite or asks the wrong questions on the trip.

America defends even Israel’s worst bloody work because America’s establishment is literally embedded with Israel’s interests.

I admire young Omar’s courage, and I note she usually has a sweet smile on her face.

This is a sincere and kindly critic, but a critic indeed.

And that’s something you are not allowed to be in modern America. If you take the position of critic, you will pay a price, as Representative Ilhan Omar very much is being made to pay.

Her future sources of campaign funding will be hurt, as the Israel Lobby will go after any significant ones she has with suggestions of economic consequences for their businesses. Her mainline press coverage will be very unfriendly. She will be called “anti-Semitic” constantly. And any future opponent in her district will get some seriously focused support, not just in funds but in technical and expert support and in good press.

That is just the way it works. No lobby is better organized or more determined to get at its opponents. We’ve had various cases in the past of critical Congressmen being literally bulldozed. So, I hope her constituency connections are strong and resistant to pressure.

After all, America just fought a good fifteen years of the destructive Neocon Wars, mainly to remake the face of the Middle East for Israel’s benefit. It spent countless billions in a vast effort trying to turn Israel’s blood-soaked neighborhood into something resembling a smiling Ozzie and Harriet suburb of the 1950s.

About two million people have been killed in this “crusade” and millions of hopeless refugees created, refugees afterwards ignored and disparaged in America.

Week after week, Washington just ignores Israeli soldiers cowardly kneeling behind a fence while ambushing civilians, shooting children, women, journalists, and medics as well as others just demonstrating for some rights.

It ignores, too, what is clearly the world’s largest existing concentration camp, a place called Gaza, where people have deliberately been kept in misery for over half a century.

And Washington, that intense defender of private property everywhere, just ignores the vicious thefts and attacks of “settlers” and Israel’s own government in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Just imagine the reaction were a poor and deprived group of American blacks to behave the same way in the suburbs of a city, say, Chicago or Detroit?

The National Guard would be sent in immediately to shoot those taking or destroying property, something they have indeed done a number of times in the past during racial riots.

And Washington, which regards itself as a great defender of democracy, at least in its speeches, simply ignores, decade after decade, the fact that Israel’s government holds millions under its control who do not want to be under its control. It holds them without rights of any kind, without votes, and without enjoying the basic Western principle of rule of law.

It’s all beyond appalling, and then American officials go on and on with charges and accusations against a decent leader like President Maduro of Venezuela.

_____________________

Response to a comment saying almost half the bills passed in Congress this year mention Israel:

How about a State of the Union speech featuring Israeli interests? Bizarre.

George Washington, who started the practice of the State of the Union Speech, in his Farewell Address to the Nation, warned against “foreign entanglements,” and Israel is about as great an entanglement as you could come up with.

Trump has been Israel’s greatest willing helper.

Willing, that is, in return for the kind of support Omar will not receive, for the kind of support she is being harshly criticized for openly discussing. He literally can expect tens of millions of dollars for his 2020 campaign in return for such lawless acts as moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem.