Archive for April, 2006

5. A Few Thoughts Out of Season on James Petras’ 14 Theses

4th April 2006 · by billtempler

Posting 5. on The Jewish-Israeli Lobby, by Bill Templer <>

In 1906 in Chicago, Emma Goldman told a tale: “at the age of eight I used to dream of becoming a Judith and visioned myself in the act cutting off Holofernes’ head to avenge the wrongs of my people. But since I had become aware that social injustice is not confined to my own race, I had decided that there were too many heads for one Judith to cut off” [1]. Here then from an earliest age, Emma’s image of her own social-anarchist internationalism and, in the figure of Judith, her radical feminism, modeled on Jewish narrative. Her sense that there is no war but class war. Her vast working-class solidarity. And even as a small kid, seared by growing up with anti-Semitism in her native Kovno, burning with a rage for justice.

In 1906, a popular epithet in the plutocracy and among the bosses was ‘Jewish anarchist.’ Not just anarchist, but with the ethnic label. Across Europe and North America. Emma hated those ethnic labels then, and would today. On the right — or, a nekhtiger tog, as Emma might say, on the left.

The phrase ‘a nekhtiger tog’ (= ‘a day full of night’) occurred to me again and again reading Petras. In Yiddish it means something like an ‘outrageously unlikely proposition.’ I certainly can’t remember a time when anti-authoritarians and progressives of various stripes were ever more enamored of using an ethnic label (and the subtext of demonizing key Jewish analysts and entire ethnic group by innuendo) in pressing forward with the struggle for justice and truth across this planet.

HARD ANALYSIS NEEDED Surely the contradictions in analyzing the ‘Lobby’ and its ‘conspiracy’ (a word Petras avoids but certainly tacitly suggests in every paragraph) have to do with the divisions and contradictions in the American ruling classes — the internal segmentation and rivalry in an American political and corporate power elite which is scarcely ‘Jewish,’ the aporias of American Empire. But that is a separate big question never raised by Petras. AIPAC needs far more probing empirical study. Or the real influence of the ADL, rigorously substantiated by solid qualitative social research. Not diatribe and innuendo and insinuation and sedulous labeling. We need hard analysis.

A statement like “No less an authority as the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, boasted of the power of the pro-Israel lobby over US Middle East policy” partially vitiates Petras’ own credibility here as an analyst. And is somewhat typical of the approach. Substantiate, looking at a single case study in great depth, how this Lobby operated and operates inside American government, or Washington media. Without citing Sharon’s rhetoric as ‘evidence.’

Petras is probably uninformed about Jews in America, and signals this by inaccuracy on even the most elementary numbers. How 5.5 million (likely less, because it is an identity question) could be “5% of the electorate” is one question, but the statement: “practicing Jews number less than 2% of the population of which not all are ‘Israel Firsters’” is simply incorrect. Maybe all Jews, most not “practicing” and many totally secular, make up something less than 2 percent of our population. Nice to hear “not all” are “Israel Firsters.”

“OWN KIN AND KIND”? I guess the pith of James’ diatribe against Chomsky is here: “these analytical virtues are totally absent when it comes to discussing the formulation of US foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly the role of his own ethnic group, the Jewish Pro-Israel lobby and their Zionist supporters in the government. This political blindness is not unknown or uncommon. History is replete of intellectual critics of all imperialisms except their own, the abuses of power by others, but not of one’s own kin and kind.” Note “own ethnic group”, “own kin and kind,” “all imperialisms except their own.”

What does “conjoining with the US Zionist propaganda machine” (an accusation by Petras against Noam) possibly mean? To raise questions about Walt’s article in LRB is ‘conjoining with a propaganda machine’? I guess I’m guilty of that too. Must be the influence of my own “kin and kind.” Petras on Noam: “a case of ideologically driven intellectual amnesia…?” “ideologically driven”? Maybe he means to say “ethnically driven.” Why all this ad hominem?

“CLARITY ABOUT WHO WE ARE FIGHTING”? James concludes the theses talking about the need for “achieving clarity about who we are fighting and why.” I thought ‘no war but class war.’ I thought workers’ solidarity. Reading his analysis, I guess who we are fighting is all major Jewish organizations in North America and the ‘Zionists’ who have taken over power and policy. Or better the ‘ZionCons,’ a fine racist term. And their “army of lobbyists from all the major Jewish organizations (Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, etc.) and the nation-wide, regional and local Jewish federations which hew closely to the line of the ‘majors’ and are active in policy and local opinion on Israel.” What are we talking about here? American Jewry? Its leadership echelons? Jews on the block? “Certain” Jews on the block?

Never once does Petras mention all the Christian organizations, some fundamentalist, others like the Mormons, extremely supportive — for Christian millennialist ideological reasons — of the Israeli political elite and its agendas of Occupation. How much ‘Christian’ money went into the ‘slush fund’ trying to defeat McKinny in Georgia? Can anyone know? Probably not.

A ZIONCON WAR? Only in one sentence does Petras try to support why ZionCons ‘engineered’ the war in Iraq: “Israel benefits, of course, because the war destroyed a major secular adversary and allowed it to tighten its stranglehold on the Occupied Territories.” No doubt Iraq was some kind of ‘adversary’ — but hardly a threat to Israeli control policy and the subjugation and suffocation of the Palestinians. When the Israeli political elite wanted to retaliate against the Scud attacks in 1991 Washington prevailed against that. Petras gives no evidence that the ongoing occupation of Iraq and its abominations has allowed Israel to “tighten its strangehold on the Occupied Territories.”

A whole complex policy is unfolding with the Wall and further land grabs and the ‘pullout’ from Gaza — but to say the war in Iraq is directly and demonstrably assisting this is something few Palestinians would, I think, accept even as plausible. “Israel’s quest for Middle East hegemony” needs greater analysis in this piece, especially how occupying Iraq is a clear strategy in that agenda. Maybe sitting on and colonizing parts of southern Lebanon and Syria (which Israel is doing even today) — but American soldiers as proxies of a ZionCon-controlled America in Iraq? The Pentagon secretly controlled by the ‘Zionists’? Perhaps SOCOM (not mentioned by Petras) is also under ‘Jewish’ infiltration and control ( http://www.socom.mil )? If you have any idea how many ‘Jews’ are in the higher ranks of the American military, that’s a real nekhtiger tog.

So why did the ‘Lobby’ (= American Jewish establishment?) engineer the war? Let Petras present 5 theses on that, with some evidence rather than discourse about ZionCons and their alleged influence. Again Petras raises the bogey of Zionist control of the US mass media, David Duke’s favorite vituperation. James mentions ONE journalist at the NYT.

“JEWISH IDEOLOGUES?” Francis Fukuyama is one of the major architects of neocon thinking, from which he has recently distanced himself in part [2]. But here we hear primarily of Perle, Wolfowitz, the “ultra Zionist Douglas Feith” and other ‘Jewish’ Machiavellians.

What are ‘Zionist academic colleagues’? To be candid, I don’t know what the label ‘Zionist’ means anymore when applied to specific individuals or to so-called ‘ideologues’ when transplanted as a ‘descriptor’ beyond the ruling corporate and military-political elite in Israel (what Ma’avak Sotsialisti has called the ‘15 families’ that basically control the show there). I guess Petras falls short of calling Noam a ‘Zionist.’ but that is his implication. Even in Israel: is Uri Avnery a ‘Zionist’? Probably, since he rejects a one-state path forward. Adam Keller of Gush Shalom? Ilan Pappe? Yehudith Harel and the signers of the Olga Document[ http://www.nimn.org/Perspectives/israeli_voices/000233.php?section=Israeli+Voices ]? Maybe post-Zionist Zionists? I’m in struggle against Zionism as an embodied policy inside Israel and under the Ihtilal (Suffocation = Occupation), but not against individuals labeled as ‘ists.’ I don’t even understand that.

INNUENDO AS METHOD This article’s method at many points (of course not all) is a extended tactic of ‘labeling.’ What does “worked for the Israeli state” mean? “[d]ozens of other key operatives in the government and ideologues in the mass media were life-long fanatical activists in favor of Israel, some of whom had lost security clearances in previous administrations for handing over documents to the Israeli government” is an incredibly strong allegation. Much is reported here as ‘fact’ that must be classified information or certainly hard to ever dig out. But these theses are not in the main based on scholarship, though they accuse Noam Chomsky of grave neglect precisely in that.

“CONSPIRACY?” The subtext to some of this argument is that the “enemy” is a sinister conspiracy almost totally ethnoreligious in origin — and that probably “practicing Jews” (whatever that could mean) are its major funders and advocates. I guess maybe the left should be considering how this scourge can be ‘eliminated.’ There is perhaps a “a virulent form of Zionist Neo-McCarthyism spreading throughout our academic, artistic and other public and private institutions,” and solid research may be able to establish that in case studies.

My own sense is that there’s also a kind of “neo-McCarthyism” taking root in certain discourse on the American left, conjoining with David Duke and others, that stops just short of labeling a particular “ethnic group” as the internal American enemy: “Yesterday the major Zionist organizations told us who we may or may not criticize in the Middle East, today they tell us who we may criticize in the United States, tomorrow they will tell us to bend our heads and submit to their lies and deceptions in order to engage in new wars of conquest.” ‘Major’? Just substitute ‘Jewish’ here as a label and begin to wonder wither this talk is tending. ‘Zionists’ in the closet and under the bed? And most certainly down at the local synagogue.

DOCTORS MOSKVA ’53 I’m reminded of an article back in Jan. 1953 in Pravda about some doctors: “The majority of the participants of the terrorist group — Vovsi, B. Kogan, Feldman, Grinshtein, Etinger and others — were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ‘Joint’. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of kindness, is now completely revealed. [….] Unmasking the gang of poisoner-doctors struck a blow against the international Jewish Zionist organization.”

INIMICAL DR. DUKE And of David Duke’s recent article April 2006, where he says: “The interesting thing is that the overwhelming obviousness of the power of the ‘Jewish Lobby’ (politely called the Israeli lobby even though this lobby is the handiwork of the largest Jewish organizations in the United States) can’t be hidden even when somebody condemns the very notion of it. [….] For the record, I am not anti-Semitic. I simply don’t want people who have loyalty to a foreign nation to have powerful influence over the foreign policy of the United States. I don’t want 20,000 Americans to be maimed or killed for Israeli strategic objectives. I don’t want the economy-crushing trillion dollar eventual costs of this war for Israel. I don’t want America to engage in immoral wars at a huge cost of American and foreign innocent human life. I don’t want Americans to be lied to by a press dominated by Jewish supremacists. I don’t want Israeli control over American foreign policy to lead to hatred and acts of terrorism against the United States.” [ http://www.davidduke.com/?p=507#more-507, bold in original ]

It remains imperative to research the lobby proper and its real workings, to fight it with fact. Much of what James says about the work of the main organization may be accurate, despite its often speculative basis in any source material. But stop throwing these loose labels of ‘Zionist’ at your neighbors, and our fellows in this struggle. We don’t need a new mythology that by insinuation targets a sizable majority of American Jews, constructing for them an identity and ‘ism.’ Like Emma, let’s keep our eye on social injustice. Best to recall from her ‘New Declaration of Independence,’ July 1909:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians” [3].

Then as now, “ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, corrupt politicians.” “Repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse.” Not some ‘Jewish’ lobbies.

_____________________________________________

1. Emma Goldman, Living My Life I, chap. 28 [New York, 1931, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHIVES/goldman/living/living1_28.html

2. F. Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy, Yale UP 2006, and his candid interview on BBC World Service, 1 April 2006.

3. E. Goldman, “A New Declaration of Independence,” Mother Earth IV(5), July 1909.

Posted in The Jewish-Israeli Lobby | 1 Comment »

2. Movement of communities towards asserting local autonomy, from La Voz de Aztlan

3rd April 2006 · by George Salzman

posting 2. to On the Ground, from La Voz de Aztlan, posted by George Salzman

COACHELLA: Another Alta California city votes
to become an “Immigrant Sanctuary”

by Hector Carreon
La Voz de Aztlan
http://www.aztlan.net/coachella_immigrant_sanctuary.htm

Los Angeles, Alta California - March 24, 2006 - (ACN) Yet another city council in Alta California has voted to become an “Immigrant Sanctuary”. Coachella, a city 125 miles east of Los Angeles and with 30,957 residents, passed a resolution that states “the city will provide a safe, healthy and dignified place to live for its immigrant communities, regardless of immigration status.”

Coachella Mayor Jesse Villarreal said that the undocumented immigrants living in the city can rest easy knowing that the local police won’t act as border patrol and turn them in. The resolution will also protect US citizens of Mexican descent from being harassed by the police who could mistake them of being undocumented. . The city populations is 97% Latino.

The “Immigrant Sanctuary Movement” is rapidly expanding in Alta California with the cities of Maywood, Los Angeles, Huntington Park, Pomona and San Francisco having already passed similar measures. The city council resolutions are attempts to prevent local police from arresting the undocumented if the anti-immigrant legislation presently before the US Senate passes.

The Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act, before the U.S. Senate, authorizes local authorities to enforce federal immigration law, proposes building a $2 million fence along the border and criminalizes those who help the undocumented. It would also authorize police agencies to arrest undocumented immigrants.

The Coachella resolution passed by its city council is credited to the efforts of the Comite Latino that attended the Mexicano/Latino Leadership Immigration Summit in Riverside. At that summit meeting the Vice Mayor of the City of Maywood, Felipe Aguirre, gave a presentation on how his city became an “Immigrant Sanctuary”. His presentation was very inspirational and it gave birth to the immigrant sanctuary movement. The federal government has threaten to stop the funding for certain city programs but Vice Mayor Aguirre simply told the feds, “Keep your money!”

The “Immigrant Sanctuary Movement” within the various cities will most probably join up with efforts by the Catholic Church. Los Angeles Cardinal Rogelio Mahony has gone on record saying that if the “Sensenbrenner Legislation” passes, he will instructs his priests to disobey certain measures of the proposed law that makes it a criminal act to help undocumented people in need. We may be witnessing the beginning of massive civil disobedience by huge numbers of people, organizations and institutions.

The City of Coachella has a long history revolving around agriculture. Cesar Chavez once marched through the city in his struggle for farm worker rights and today the area’s agricultural industry still relies mostly on Mexican and Mexican-American workers.

Posted in On the Ground | 1 Comment »

4. James Petras, heavy hitter goes to bat, weighs in for the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis on The Lobby

3rd April 2006 · by George Salzman

Posting 4. on the Jewish-Israeli Lobby, posted by George Salzman

Oaxaca, Monday, April 3, 2006

Dear James Petras,

You may not remember me, but we had lunch together in Binghamton a few summers ago when I was there visiting my daughter Amy and her family and you were almost retired from SUNY, with a single graduate student finishing up a thesis. I read much of what you write, and am not always in agreement with your assessments of the lack of progress (as we would wish it to be) in South American countries, but this work calling Chomsky to task is a masterpiece with which I fully agree. I have been urging Jeffrey Blankfort <> for several years to focus on criticizing Chomsky’s arguments, i.e. treating him as a friend, which he is, instead of on trying to psychoanalyze him, so far without much success on my part. But I think you have done brilliantly what Blankfort has wanted to do for a long time, to both criticize Chomsky’s role in deflecting adequate exposure of the Jewish-Israel Lobby (Bruzonsky’s <> characterization of the nefarious assemblage) and to help nail and uncover the power of that Lobby. Even if it is not as all-powerful as you believe, it must be exposed, its role should not be neglected or down-played. If Noam wants to criticize the Mearsheimer-Walt hypothesis, he ought to accept your “assignment” and do it as the scholar we all know and admire and respect him for being, not with simple statements to sway what he rightly disdains as “the intellectual herd”. Many thanks for your devotion to justice, and for your tireless work. I wish I had your ability.

With all best wishes,
George

Subject: Petras [James Petras <>] on Chomsky [Noam Chomsky <>] on Lobby
From: James Herod <>
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 07:54:07 -0400
To: George Salzman <>

You said you’re still working on your reply to Blankfort, so I’ll send this latest posting on the issue. Couldn’t find the original url, but didn’t look hard. — jh

Noam Chomsky and the Pro-Israel Lobby:

Fourteen Erroneous Theses

by James Petras

“…Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defense of open debate and free enquiry shut down – at least among much of America’s political elite – once the subject turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby’s role in shaping US foreign policy…Moral blackmail – the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and US support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism – is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters…Nothing, moreover, is more damaging to US interests than the inability to have a proper debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…Bullying Americans into consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interests….”
Financial Times, Editorial, Saturday, April 01, 2006

Introduction

Noam Chomsky has been called the US leading intellectual by pundits and even some sectors of the mass media. He has a large audience throughout the world especially in academic circles, in large part because of his vocal criticism of US foreign policy and many of the injustices resulting from those policies. Chomsky has nonetheless been reviled by all of the major Jewish and pro-Israel organizations and media for his criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians even as he has defended the existence of the Zionist state of Israel. Despite his respected reputation for documenting, dissecting and exposing the hypocrisy of the US and European regimes and acutely analyzing the intellectual deceptions of imperial apologists, these analytical virtues are totally absent when it comes to discussing the formulation of US foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly the role of his own ethnic group, the Jewish Pro-Israel lobby and their Zionist supporters in the government. This political blindness is not unknown or uncommon. History is replete of intellectual critics of all imperialisms except their own, the abuses of power by others, but not of one’s own kin and kind. Chomsky’s long history denying the power and role of the pro-Israel lobby in decisively shaping US Middle East policy culminated in his recent conjoining with the US Zionist propaganda machine attacking a study critical of the Israeli lobby. I am referring to the essay published by the London Review of Books entitled “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” by Professor John Mearsheimer <> of the University of Chicago and Professor Stephen Walt <>, the purged Academic Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. (A complete version of the study was published by the Kennedy School of Government in March 2006.)

Chomsky’s speeches and writing on the Lobby emphasizes several dubious propositions.

1) The pro-Israel Lobby is just like any other lobby; it has no special influence or place in US politics.

2) The power of the groups backing the Israel lobby are no more powerful than other influential pressure groups

3) The Lobby’s agenda succeeds because it coincides with the interests of the dominant powers and interests of the US State.

4) The Lobby’s weakness is demonstrated by the fact that Israel is ‘merely a tool’ of US empire building to be used when needed and otherwise marginalized.

5) The major forces shaping US Middle East policy are “big oil” and the “military-industrial complex”, neither of which is connected to the pro-Israel lobby.

6) The interests of the US generally coincide with the interests of Israel

7) The Iraq War, the threats to Syria and Iran are primarily a product of “oil interests” and the “military-industrial complex” and not the role of the pro-Israel lobby or its collaborators in the Pentagon and other government agencies.

While in general Chomsky has deliberately refrained from specifically discussing the pro-Israel lobby in his speeches, interviews and publications analyzing US policy toward the Middle East, but when he does, he follows the above-mentioned repertory.

The problem of war and peace in the Middle East and the role of the Israel lobby is too serious to be marginalized as an after-thought. Even more important, the increasing censoring of free speech and erosion of our civil liberties, academic freedom by an aggressive lobby, with powerful legislative and White House backers, is a threat to our already limited democracy.

It is incumbent therefore to examine the fourteen erroneous theses of the highly respected Professor Chomsky in order to move ahead and confront the Lobby’s threats to peace abroad and civil liberties at home.

Fourteen Theses

1) Chomsky claims that the Lobby is just another lobby in Washington. Yet he fails to observe that the lobby has secured the biggest Congressional majorities in favor of allocating three times the annual foreign aid designated to all of Africa, Asia and Latin America to Israel (over 100 billion dollars over the past 40 years). The Lobby has 150 full time functionaries working for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), accompanied by an army of lobbyists from all the major Jewish organizations (Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, etc.) and the nation-wide, regional and local Jewish federations which hew closely to the line of the “majors” and are active in policy and local opinion on Israel and promote and finance legislative candidates on the basis of their adherence to the Lobby’s party line. No other lobby combines the wealth, grass roots networks, media access, legislative muscle and single-minded purpose of the pro-Israel lobby.

2) Chomsky fails to analyze the near unanimous congressional majorities which yearly support all the pro-Israel military, economic, immigration privileges and aid promoted by the Lobby. He fails to examine the list of over 100 successful legislative initiatives publicized yearly by AIPAC even in years of budgetary crisis, disintegrating domestic health services and war induced military losses.

3) Chomsky’s cliché-ridden attribution of war aims to “Big Oil” is totally unsubstantiated. In fact the US-Middle East wars prejudice the oil interests in several strategic senses. The wars generate generalized hostility to oil companies with long-term relations with Arab countries. The wars result in undermining new contracts opening in Arab countries for US oil investments. US oil companies have been much friendlier to peacefully resolving conflicts than Israel and especially its Lobbyists as any reading of the specialized oil industry journals and spokespeople emphasize. Chomsky chooses to totally ignore the pro-war activities and propaganda of the leading Jewish pro-Israel organizations and the absence of pro-war proposals in Big Oil’s media, and their beleaguered attempt to continue linkages with Arab regimes opposed to Israel’s belligerent hegemonic ambitions. Contrary to Chomsky, by going to war in the Middle East, the US sacrifices the vital interests of the oil companies in favor of Israel’s quest for Middle East hegemony at the call and behest of the pro-Israel lobby. In the lobbying contest there is absolutely no contest between the pro-Israel power bloc and the oil companies when it comes to favoring Israeli interests over oil interests, whether the issue is war or oil contracts. Chomsky never examines the comparative strength of the two lobbies regarding US policy toward the Middle East. In general this usually busy researcher devoted to uncovering obscure documentation is particularly lax when it come to uncovering readily available documents, which shred his assertions about Big Oil and the Israel Lobby.

4) Chomsky refuses to analyze the diplomatic disadvantages that accrue to the US in vetoing Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s systematic violations of human rights. Neither the military-industrial complex nor Big Oil has a stranglehold on US voting behavior in the UN. The pro-Israel lobbies are the only major lobby pressuring for the vetoes against the US’ closest allies, world public opinion and at the cost of whatever role the US could play as a ‘mediator’ between the Arabic-Islamic world and Israel.

5) Chomsky fails to discuss the role of the Lobby in electing Congress-people, their funding of pro-Israel candidates and the over fifty-million dollars they spend on the Parties, candidates and propaganda campaigns. The result is a 90% congressional vote on high priority items pushed by the Lobby and affiliated local and regional pro-Israel federations.

6) Nor does he undertake to analyze the cases of candidates defeated by the Lobby, the abject apologies extracted from Congress-people who have dared to question the policies and tactics of the Lobby, and the intimidation effect of its ‘exemplary punishments’ on the rest of Congress. The “snowball” effect of punishment and payoffs is one reason for the unprecedented majorities in favor of all of AIPAC’s initiatives. Chomsky’s feeble attempts to equate the AIPAC’s pro-Israel initiatives with broader US policy interests is patently absurd to anyone who studies the alignment of policy groups associated with designing, pressuring, backing and co-sponsoring the AIPAC’s measures: The reach of the Jewish lobby far exceeds its electoral constituency – as the one million dollar slush fund to defeat incumbent Georgia Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinny, demonstrates. That she was subsequently re-elected on the basis of low keying her criticism of Israel reveals the Lobby’s impact even on consequential Democrats.

7) Chomsky ignores the unmatchable power of elite convocation which the Lobby has. The AIPAC annual meeting draws all the major leaders in Congress, key members of the Cabinet, over half of all members of Congress who pledge unconditional support for Israel and even identify Israel’s interests as US interests. No other lobby can secure this degree of attendance of the political elite, this degree of abject servility, for so many years, among both major parties. What is particularly important is the “Jewish electorate” is less than 5% of the total electorate, while practicing Jews number less than 2% of the population of which not all are ‘Israel Firsters’. None of the major lobbies like the NRA, AARP, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Chamber of Commerce can convoke such a vast array of political leaders, let alone secure their unconditional support for favorable pro-Israel legislation and Executive orders. No less an authority as the Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, boasted of the power of the pro-Israel lobby over US Middle East policy. Chomsky merely asserts that the Pro-Israel lobby is just like any other lobby, without any serious effort to compare their relative influence, power of convocation and bi-partisan support, or effectiveness in securing high priority legislation.

8) In his analysis of the run-up to the US-Iraq War, Chomsky’s otherwise meticulous review of foreign policy documents, analysis of political linkages between policymakers and power centers is totally abandoned in favor of impressionistic commentaries completely devoid of any empirical basis. The principal governmental architects of the war, the intellectual promoters of the war, their publicly enunciated published strategies for the war were all deeply attached to the Israel lobby and worked for the Israeli state. Wolfowitz, number 2 in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, number 3 in the Pentagon, Richard Perle, head of the Defense Board, Elliot Abrams in charge of Middle East affairs for the National Security Council, and dozens of other key operatives in the government and ideologues in the mass media were life-long fanatical activists in favor of Israel, some of whom had lost security clearances in previous administrations for handing over documents to the Israeli government. Chomsky ignores the key strategy documents written by Perle, Feith and other ZionCons in 1996 demanding bellicose action against Iraq, Iran and Syria, which they subsequently implemented when they took power with Bush’s election. Chomsky totally ignores the disinformation office set up in the Pentagon by ultra Zionist Douglas Feith – the so-called ‘Office of Special Plans’ – run by fellow ZionCon Abram Shumsky - to channel bogus “data” to the White House – bypassing and discrediting CIA and military intelligence which contradicted their disinformation. Non-Zionist specialist in the Pentagon’s Middle East office, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, described in great detail the easy and constant flow of Mossad and Israeli military officers in and out of Feith’s office while critical US experts were virtually barred. None of these key policymakers promoting the war had any direct connection to the military-industrial complex or Big Oil, but all were deeply and actively tied to the State of Israel and backed by the Lobby. Astonishingly Chomsky, famous for his criticism of intellectuals enamored with imperial power and uncritical academics, pursues a similar path when it concerns pro-Israel intellectuals in power and their Zionist academic colleagues. The problem is not only the “lobby” pressuring from outside, but their counterparts within the State.

9) Chomsky frequently derides the half-hearted criticism by liberals of US foreign policy, yet he nowhere raises a single peep about the absolute silence of Jewish progressives about the major role of the Lobby in promoting the invasion of Iraq. At no point does he engage in debate or criticism of the scores of Israel First academic supporters of war with Iraq, Iran or Syria. Instead his criticism of the war revolves around the role of Party leaders, the Bush Administration etc… without any attempt to understand the organized basis and ideological mentors of the militarists.

10) Chomsky fails to analyze the impact of the concerted and uninterrupted campaign organized by all major US pro-Israel lobbies and personalities to silence criticism of Israel and the Lobby’s support for the war. Chomsky’s refusal to criticize the Lobby’s abuse of anti-Semitism to destroy our civil liberties, hound academics out of the universities and other positions for criticizing Israel and the Lobby is most evident in the recent smear campaign of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. While the Lobby successfully pressured Harvard to disclaim Professor Walt and eventually force his resignation from the Deanship at the Kennedy School at Harvard, Chomsky joined the Lobby in condemning their extensive critical scholarship and meticulous analysis. At no point does Chomsky deal with the central facts of their analysis about the Lobby’s contemporary power over US Middle East policy. The irony is Chomsky himself an occasional victim of academic Zionist hatchet jobs; this time he is on the givers’ end.

11) Chomsky fails to assess the power of the Lobby in comparison with other institutional forces. For example top US Generals have frequently complained that Israeli armed forces receive new high tech military hardware before it has become operational in the US. Thanks to the Lobby, their complaints are rarely heeded. US defense industries (some of whom have joint production contracts with Israeli military industries) have bitterly complained of Israel’s unfair competition, violation of trade agreements and the illegal sale of high tech weaponry to China. Under threat of losing all their lucrative ties with the Pentagon, Israel cancelled sales to China, while the Lobby looked on… During the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, many active and retired military officials and CIA analysts opposed the War, questioned the assumptions and projections of the pro-Israel ideologues in the Pentagon like Wolfwitz, Feith, Perle and in the National Security Council, the State Department and the Vice President’s office (Irving ‘ZionCon’ Libby). They were over-ruled, their advice dismissed by the ZionCons and belittled by their ideological backers writing in the major print media. The position of the ZionCons in the government successfully overcame their institutional critics in large part because their opinion and policies toward the war were uncritically accepted by the mass media and particularly by the New York Times whose primary war propagandist, Judith Miller, has close links with the Lobby. These are well known historical linkages and debates which a close reader of the mass media like Chomsky was aware of , but deliberately chose to omit and deny, substituting more ’selective’ criticism of the Iraq war based on the exclusion of vital facts.

12) In what passes for Chomsky’s “refutation” of the power of the Lobby is a superficial historical review of US-Israel relations citing the occasional conflict of interests in which, even more occasionally, the pro-Israel lobby failed to get its way. Chomsky’s historical arguments resemble a lawyer’s brief more than a comprehensive review of the power of the Lobby. For example, while in 1956 the US objected to the joint French-British-Israeli attack on Egypt, over the next 50 years the US financed and supplied the Israeli war machine to the tune of $70 billion dollars, thanks largely to the pressure of the Lobby. In 1967, the Israeli air force bombed the US intelligence gathering ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters and strafed to US Naval personnel killing or wounding over 200 sailors and officers. The Johnson Administration, in a historically unprecedented move, refused to retaliate and silenced the survivors of the unprovoked attack with threats of ‘court-martial’. No subsequent administration has ever raised the issue, let alone conducted an official Congressional investigation, even as they escalated aid to Israel and prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Israel when it seem to be losing the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The US defense of Israel led to the very costly Arab oil boycott, which brought on a massive increase in the price of oil and the animosity of former Arab allies threatening global monetary stability. In other words, in this as in many other cases, the pro-Israel lobby was more influential than the US armed forces in shaping US response to an Israeli act of aggression against American service men operating in international waters. In recent years, the power of the Lobby has seriously inhibited the FBI’s prosecution of the scores of Israeli spies who entered the US in 2001. The most that was done was their quiet deportation. The recent arrest of two AIPAC officials for handing confidential government documents over to Israeli embassy officials has led the pro-Israel lobby to mobilize a massive media campaign in their defense, converting an act of espionage against the US into an ‘exercise of free speech’. Editorials and op-ed articles in favor of dismissal of the charges have appeared in most of the leading newspapers in what must be the most unprecedented campaign in favor of agents of a foreign government in US history. The power of the propaganda reach of the Lobby far exceeds any countervailing power, even though the case against the AIPAC officials is very strong, including the testimony of the key Pentagon official convicted of handing them the documents.

13) Chomsky, a highly reputable critic of the bias of the mass media, attributes corporate ties to their anti-workers news reports. However when it comes to the overwhelming pro-Israel bias he has never analyzed the influence of the Israel lobby, the link between the pro-Israel media elite and the pro-Israel bias. Merely a blind spot or a case of ideologically driven intellectual amnesia…?

14) Chomsky cites Israel’s importance for US imperial strategy in weakening Arab nationalism, its role in providing military aid and military advisers to totalitarian terrorist regimes (Guatemala, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, and so on) when the US Congress imposes restrictions to direct US involvement. There is little doubt that Israel serves US imperial purposes, especially in situations where bloody politics are involved. But Israel did so because it benefited from doing so – it increased military revenues, gained backers favoring Israel’s colonial policies, provided markets for Israeli arms dealers etc. However, a more comprehensive analysis of US interests demonstrates that the costs of supporting Israel far exceed the occasional benefit, whether we consider advantages to US imperial goals or even more so from the vantage point of a democratic foreign policy. With regard to the costly and destructive wars against Iraq, following Israel’s lead and its lobbies, the pro-Israel policy has severely undermined US military capacity to defend the empire, has led to a loss of prestige and discredited US claims to be a champion of freedom and democracy. From the viewpoint of democratic foreign policy it has strengthened the militarist wing of the government and undermined democratic freedoms at home. Israel benefits, of course, because the war destroyed a major secular adversary and allowed it to tighten its stranglehold on the Occupied Territories.

The unconditional commitment to the Israeli colonial state has eroded US relations with the richest and most populous states in the Arab and Islamic world. In market terms the difference is between hundreds of billions of dollars in sales versus defending a receiver of massive US aid handouts. The economic losses far outweigh any small-scale questionable military benefits. The Arab states are net buyers of US military hardware. The Israeli arms industry is a stiff competitor.

US oil and gas companies are net losers in terms of investments, profits and markets because of the US ties to Israel which, because of its small market, has little to offer in each of the above categories.

Finally Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the Lobby’s effective campaign to secure US vetoes against international resolutions puts the US on the side of widespread, legalized torture, legalized extrajudicial executions and illegal massive population displacement. The end result is the weakening of international law and increased volatility in an area of great strategic importance. Chomsky takes no account of the geo-strategic and energy costs, the losses in our domestic freedoms resulting directly from the Middle East wars for Israel, and even less of the rise of a virulent form of Zionist Neo-McCarthyism spreading throughout our academic, artistic and other public and private institutions. If anything demonstrates the Zionists’ growing power and authoritarian reach, the brutal and successful campaign against Professors Mearsheimer and Walt confirm it, in spades.

Conclusion

In normal times one would give little attention to academic polemics unless they have important political consequences. In this case, however, Noam Chomsky is an icon for the US anti-war movements and what stands for intellectual dissent. That he has chosen to absolve the pro-Israel lobby and its affiliated groups and media auxiliaries is an important political event, especially when questions of war and peace hang in the balance, when the majority of Americans oppose the war. Giving a ‘free ride’ to the principle authors, architects and lobbyists in favor of the war is a positive obstacle to achieving clarity about who we are fighting and why. To ignore the pro-Israel lobby is to allow it a free hand in pushing for the invasion of Iran and Syria. Worse, to distract from their responsibility by pointing to bogus enemies is to weaken our understanding not only of the war, but also of the enemies of freedom in this country. Most of all, it allows a foreign government a privileged position in dictating our Middle East policy, while proposing police state methods and legislation to inhibit debate and dissent. Let me conclude by saying that the peace and justice movements, at home and abroad, are bigger than any individual or intellectual – no matter what their past credentials.

Yesterday the major Zionist organizations told us who we may or may not criticize in the Middle East, today they tell us who we may criticize in the United States, tomorrow they will tell us to bend our heads and submit to their lies and deceptions in order to engage in new wars of conquest at the service of a morally repugnant colonial regime.