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Because the United States is a nation of immigrants it has created a great number of interest groups who obviously work for their own ethnic good. Cuban Americans have lobbied to maintain the embargo on Castro’s regime, for example. The Israel lobby works the same way. There’s nothing strange about that.
However, the Israel lobby has convinced many Americans and people world wide that American interests and Israeli interests are identical. They surely are not. Just by making an open debate impossible (you’re immediately labelled the Jew Hater and the evil Anti-Semite, whenever you try to discuss these subjects (the amount of anonymous emails I’ve recieved since I started this blog is pretty interesting…)) Israel and the Zionist idea encourages anti-Semitism – and with that comes the anti-American vibe. Hence, their policy is simply contraproductive. Anyone should be able to see that, really.
So the strange thing here is the very special relationship between Israel and the United States.

So what is the Israel lobby? It is ”a loose coalition of individuals and groups – not a single, unified movement with a central leadership – that seeks to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel”, as defined by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
And the political power of the Israel lobby is p.o.w.e.r.f.u.l. as hell, I kid you not.
Any politician in the United States who challenges Israel policy stands little chance of becoming president. That’s plain fact. Democrats and Republicans alike fear the lobby, which is totally obvious. The presidential candidates may argue and disagree on whatever important issue facing the United States, but they all agree firmly on one specific subject: their deep personal commitment to one foreign country – Israel. The candidates are all too willing to criticize many of the things that other countries do, but they never criticize Israel.
Click here for President Obama’s AIPAC speech, just to pick a recent example.

Why does Israel, and no other country in the world, recieve such consistent support from America’s leading politicians? No matter what Israel does, the level of support remains unchanged. Almost every country in the world criticized Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon 2006 (and in Gaza 2008/2009) – but the United States did not. Instead they endorsed the war.
This is all thanks to the political power of the Israel lobby.
If you think this is a conspiracy theory, the conspiratory fool is definitely you.

So why the constant bitching about anti-Semitism? Because the lobby’s arguments are so terribly weak. That’s why their only choice is to marginalize serious discussion. That’s why they always play the Holocaust card. In fact, there’s a huge gap between what the broader public thinks about the Israeli/American relationship and how governing elites in Washington conduct American policy. If the American public and the world could be involved in serious debates about Israel they would be even more aware of the lobby’s huge influence and how it destroys American interests – and in the long run, Israeli interests as well. And in an even longer run – which is not that far away – the slow and painful annihilation of the Earth. However, open debate is non-existent.
The main reason for this gap is – yes, you guessed it – the political power of the Israel lobby. We all know how the mass media work. Noam Chomsky influenced me to spit it out like this, and he’s a Jew, you know:
(Correction: he’s a self-hating Jew, according to the Israel lobby…)

Fucked by the mainstream – Part 1
Fucked by the mainstream – Part 2
Fucked by the mainstream – Part 3
Fucked by the mainstream – Part 4

And here are the photos they don’t want you to see:
Gaza massacre 2008/2009
This is what the Nobel Peace Prize is all about.

To be continued in Part Two where we deal with America’s economic aid to the Holy Land.

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I’m planning on writing some articles about The Israel Lobby mostly based on the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Until then, please make room for 50 minutes of your precious TV-time and watch this program.

Related posts:
Zionism, Jews and conspiracy theories (with lots of additional links to earlier posts)
Gilad Atzmon – Taking Elder Peres apart
McCain or Obama – Does it really matter?
The war on/in Iraq
The Clash of Civilizations – Part 1
The Clash of Civilizations – Part 2
Ahmadinejad posts

>Sunday is a good day for blasphemy, because that’s when the Lord of Lies, Christ, hateful master, is asleep…
One of the most blasphemic scholars out there is without a doubt Norman Finkelstein. Of course, he is one of my heroes (check his webpage here). I admire him for his rational and logical thinking, his straight-forward approach, courage and honesty regarding the Holocaust industry, and his amazing accuracy when it comes to dissecting his opponents arguments. For he has many, many opponents. Israel imposed a 10-year ban on him, just to pick an example.

One of the most important books of present time has got to be The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. In part because of its content, obviously, but also because the controversy following its release (the Israel lobby in full effect). Here’s an interview with the man. The host is a dick, almost ruining the interview ranting about irrelevant crap, but these clips are well worth watching anyway.

And to make things even more blasphemous, here’s Finkelstein honouring the Hezbollah.

In his other book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, he talks about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He claims the controversy surrounding the conflict is due to people wanting to divert attention from, and sow confusion about, the documentary record.
The mainstream version, put forth by Israeli officials and written about in scholarly literature, was that Palestinians left during the 1948 war after Arab leaders, primarily via radio broadcasts, ordered them to clear the field for invading Arab armies. However, this was proven false in the late 1980’s (also see the post The New Historians).
Today most of the scholars agree that the Palestinians suffered an ethnic cleansing in 1948, although there are ongoing debates every day about whether or not this ethnic cleansing was systematically planned (the Holocaust Part 2…).
In the book he also shows how U.S. Media tend to attach greater credibility to information from representatives of the Israeli state than from Human Rights Watch, an independent nongovernmental organization. Israel’s real human rights record is virtually nonexistent… Why do media block out reality? You digest that for a second.
See also the posts about media here, here, here and here.

Finkelstein also talks about how Israel plays The Holocaust and New Anti-Semitism cards to sow confusion about the real historical record and to discredit criticism of Israeli policy. Each new Arab/Muslim leader threatening Israel is Hitler reincarnate, and the threat is routinely compared to The Holocaust… At the same time the Holocaust industry intones that The Holocaust was unique and any comparison between it and other crimes is a form if Holocaust denial… Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians in a diplomatic way, there will for sure be an extensive campaign saying that the world is facing a new anti-Semitism. The perpetrators are turned into the victims, putting the spotlight on the suffering Jews today, rather than on the suffering Palestinians…
It should be obvious that if the hostility to Jews has increased it has everything to do with Israel’s ruthless policies, and the best remedy would be for Israel to end the occupation.
The racist Zionist Apartheid regime must be abolished.

Related posts:
American Radical – A documentary about Norman Finkelstein
Zionism, Jews and conspiracy theories

Click here for an interview with Finkelstein in an Amnesty blog

>Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, as well as co-author of The New Color Line and The Tyranny of Good Intentions. I haven’t read any of his books, but his article Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran – Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections, published by Counterpunch, is worth considering.

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Full article here.

>Earlier on, when I’ve written about Ahmadinejad, I’ve discussed his honest and straight-forward questions to George W. Bush (read his letter to the man here), his thoughts about the Holocaust and his relationship with the United States. I’ve never written about Ahmadinejad and his relationship to his people. It it obvious that he is an asshole opposed by many, and that the election was a fraud (or was it, really?). But he’s also worshipped by many.
However, when seeing what’s going on in Iran right now I hope that people will understand the need of civil rights and use their right to vote. I also hope that people will understand the importance of honest media.

Still, that doesn’t change my opinion about Ahmadinejad regarding what I’ve written earlier, because that’s a whole different ball game.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranian supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi demonstrate in Tehran on Monday, June 15, 2009.

Supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wave Iranian and religious flags during a victory celebration in central Tehran June 14, 2009.

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009.

The best way to get photos and updates seems to be Twitter:
#iranelection
#Tehran
etc…
Nima Dervish updates regularly in Swedish here.

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You’ve all been reading about President Obama trying to block previously unpublished photos from Abu Ghraib (Why? Because the pictures would “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan). Well, Obomba, this is the age of the Internet where you cannot silence the opposition anylonger.
Here are some of the 60 unpublished photos of US troops abusing prisoners in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. There are loads more photos, still unpublished, and there are thousands of documents regarding torture yet to be released. We haven’t seen the worst yet.