COMMENT ON A PIECE BY DANIEL HALPER IN THE WEEKLY STANDARD

John Chuckman

 

It really does not get more uninformed and deliberately provocative than “U.S. Threatens Sanctions Against Israel, Makes Excuses for Iran.”

This stuff reads like an official news release from the old Politburo.

There is no need for excuses for Iran. It has done absolutely nothing requiring excuses.

It hasn’t attacked anyone in its modern history, is a member of the international treaty on nuclear weapons permitting inspections, and every intelligence service, including Israel’s, knows it has not been trying to build a bomb.

The genuine madman running Israel, on the other hand, has yelled for years that Iran is building a bomb, going against his own intelligence service. The madman just won re-election by promising no state for the Palestinians, so presumably five million people will be kept without any rights or votes forever? Or perhaps expelled in a future massive ethnic cleansing?

Without outside pressure on Israel, clearly nothing will happen to correct this shameful, longstanding, and potentially deadly situation.

Israel, in contrast to Iran, has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once. The madman himself killed 2,200 people only recently in a senselessly brutal assault. The madman’s yelling about Iran is about nothing other than wanting complete dominance of the region and as a distraction against the very bad economic conditions in Israel for ordinary people and against the tremendous tensions he has created in Jerusalem with his regular theft of property and mistreatment of ancient residents.

Israel, again in contrast to Iran, does not belong to the international nuclear arms treaty and does not allow inspections of nuclear facilities, and it does have a stockpile of thermonuclear bombs. Moreover, it participated in a deadly serious secret proliferation of nuclear arms with the former apartheid South Africa, then a good friend and trading partner.

Does it feel good to go to bed each night knowing you’re making every effort as a writer to promote war with a peaceful country, Iran, and continued mass slavery in Israel?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL BELL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The American campaign-finance system keeps the Congress tied up in knots by special interests.

No special interest has a better organized and intensely systematic approach to Congress than America’s apologists for Israel’s excesses.

Your views as a Congressperson are tracked and tested.

If your views are considered not sufficiently in Israel’s interests, your opponent receives contributions and help.

If your views are acceptable, you receive contributions and help.

It is all extremely focused, and it is all extremely effective.

Favored Congresspeople even receive goodies like deluxe vacations in Israel under the guise of studying aspects of society there.

The terrible problem is that the only power which can push Israel to a fair and decent settlement is, unfortunately, the United States.

And it is incapable of exercising its strength for good precisely because of the effects of the campaign-finance system.

Obama started by seeming determined to a fresh start. He was encouraging for those wanting to see fairness done, but The Lobby has already worn him down to an ineffectual voice on this great issue of our time.