“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right…Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”-Thomas Paine
“Imagine there’s no countries…Nothing to kill or die for. Imagine all the people; living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…Imagine all the people sharing all the world…Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends…I believe that as soon as people want peace in the world they can have it. The only trouble is they are not aware they can get it.”-John Lennon
Too many of We the People of this Democratic Republic do not READ books and so this member of the New Fourth Estate [activist reporter] who has become a Citizen of Conscience for U.S. House of Representatives for 2012, is offering a series of book reviews because “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official.”-Theodore Roosevelt
In 2007, I published my second book calling for The THIRD INTIFADA
Also in 2007, another patriot and author, Grant F. Smith, Director for the Institute of Research Middle East Policy published another must read for every member of Congress; “Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal.”
Smith explained how America’s Middle East policy has been formulated and thrives due to the dearth of relevant reporting on AIPAC’s activities- essentially because the old Fourth Estate has acted more like sayanim [VOLUNTEERS] for Zionism than muckrakers meaning investigative journalists!
Before the worn out canard of being an ‘Anti-Semite’ is hurled at me –again- I explain:
TRUE Antisemitism is a prejudice against or hostility towards the Jewish people and it is rooted in fear that breed’s hatred and it must be denounced and confronted!
Case In Point: In my first book, KEEP HOPE ALIVE I wrote regarding the ‘Christian’ Crusades and the Jewish Holocaust:
“Those barbarians tortured and burned people at the stake! What kind of Christian could rationalize that? So much hypocrisy! I will not give my soul over to another. No institution is going to control me…I think Christians can be real cowards, or else they were sleeping while Hitler was gaining power. I hate to think it, but maybe it was because they were anti-Semitic?”
According to Webster’s Dictionary a SEMITE is “a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs or a descendant of these peoples” thus Palestinians are as much a Semite as any Jew!
So let us move on by going back to the days when Senator Fulbright asked questions regarding Jewish-Agency-funded US foreign agents who did not register with the Justice Department or disclose their true financing, funding flows or covert activities.
In his book, Smith exposes how AIPAC/American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates “within a murky nexus regulated by four important but seldom enforced US laws.” [1]
The lax enforcement of The Logan Act, The Foreign Agents Registration Act/FARA, the 1917 Espionage Act, Thompson Memorandum guidelines for prosecuting corporate crime coupled with the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic and a media who have failed at their commission to seek and report the truth have all colluded to exert an undue influence over Congress and thus; we the people of America to be “under the de facto influence of a powerful foreign interest.” [2]
Smith documents how AIPAC-a constellation of individuals and organizations that make up the “Israel lobby” –which I define as a Zionist Lobby-continues to actively steer USA foreign policy in a militant and pro-Israel only direction.
I am all for the people of the State of Israel to feel SECURE, and as I comprehend that the only way that can ever be reality is when JUSTICE is done unto Palestinians which equates to Ending the Military Occupation and honoring Equal Human Rights for All the people of the so called holy land-which began to be carved up when ‘civilized’ men in the United Nations partitioned it in 1947 after the British Mandate ended- I have risen up which is INTIFADA in Arabic!
“On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.” – May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel
IF only Israel had only honored that promise, it would be a wonderful world!
Senator Fulbright expressed great concern over the activities of unregistered foreign agents who worked to influence public opinion and policy which resulted in the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings which investigated and uncovered a “conduit” operation run by the American Zionist Council, which in 1959 was renamed AIPAC.
Within eight years, the American Zionist Council had received over a half a million “from the Jewish Agency to create a favorable opinion in this country for Israeli government policies. The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on…[and] by 1998, “US aid to Israel exceeded $3 billion a year, the highest amount of US aid given to any country.” [3]
“AIPAC’s illegal tactics harm America…[and] corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined…Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer estimated the total cost of [the] prolonged conflict in the Middle East at $3 trillion [in 2002 USA dollars and he] lays a good deal of the blame for this at the doorstep of AIPAC.” [4]
On May 28, 1993 Ariel Sharon explained:
“The terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.”
In another must read for Congress, “An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel” Jeff Halper, American Israeli and co-founder and coordinator of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and Professor of Anthropology, explained:
“An ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises when one particular group-the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa, the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran, the Malay in Malaysia and, if they had their way, the white Christian fundamentalists in the US-seize control of the government and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society. Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one’s ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a county actually ‘belongs.’”-Page 74.
On George Washington’s birth date, his Farewell Address has been read aloud in Congress ever since 1896.
However, his warning has not yet seeped into the consciousness of our elected officials:
“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate justification.”
It has been written that the root of all evil is the love of money, and most nefarious are the consequences of nearly two-trillion American tax dollars which have reaped “special trade advantages, and preferential contracts. U.S. aid to Israel cost some 275,000 American jobs each year…Additional known items include loan guarantees-which the U.S. most probably will be forced to cover-special contracts for Israeli firms, legal and illegal transfers of marketable U.S. military technology, de facto exemption from U.S. trade protection provisions, and discounted sales or free transfers of U.S. military equipment…net purchases by U.S. parties of Israel Bonds, adds at least $40 billion to the total…U.S. jobs and exports have been affected, adding to costs and losses…As U.S. relations with Mid East countries deteriorated, trade was lost. Worsening political relations resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs…thanks to the Israel lobby.” [5]
Smith’s book is a work of public service to US for he illuminates how money laundering of over 50 billion US dollars to “charitable” organizations and massive covert activities has enabled the ongoing building of the illegal and apartheid Israeli settlements which have expropriated legally owned Palestinian land. Today a quarter of a million Jewish settlers/colonists-most all of which have no historical tie to the Holy Land, have created ‘facts on the ground’ to disable a viable contiguous Palestinian state.
On November 21, 2005, top U.S. law enforcement officials attended a briefing organized by the Council for the National Interest regarding how charities “such as B’nai B’rith and Hadassah were in direct control of the World Zionist Organization and directly linked to a massive money-laundering operation…[and the settlements are] an indirect generator of terrorism against the United States…[also] Israel never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty [which prohibits] U.S. assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment’s equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.” [6]
The World is well aware of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons development, stockpile, and launch capabilities, but due to the influence of AIPAC “it is business as usual in Washington: criminal wrongdoing continues to corrupt America’s core values, rule of law, and Middle East policy, as the Israel lobby’s crosshairs shift almost completely to Iran.” [7]
On July 3, 2008, the Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul stated, “I hear members of Congress saying ‘if we could only nuke them’ and that the atmosphere in Congress indicates that a military strike on Iran has already been condoned.” [8]
Referring to House Congressional Resolution 362 Paul called the ‘Virtual Iran War Resolution’, “an absolute blockade of the entire country of Iran, [that will] punish any country or any business group around the world if they trade with Iran.” [9]
In 2006, Virginia Tilley, Professor of political science explained:
“In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word ‘map’ or the term ‘wiped off.’ According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was ‘this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.’
“In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s-a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then.
“Mr. Ahmadinejad had just reminded his audience that the Shah’s regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable, yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third now languished in prison.
“So, too, the ‘occupying regime’ in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His message was, in essence: ‘This too shall pass.’”
What has yet to pass are international atomic agency inspectors into Israel’s WMD facility!
In 1976, the Symington Amendment was adopted to fortify and extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It prohibited US assistance to any country trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.
The world learned about Israel’s secret underground nuclear weapons facility in 1986 due to Mordechai Vanunu’s photographic evidence, but Obama blew Helen Thomas off when she dared ask about Middle East Nukes by stating he “didn’t want to speculate.”
The American government has ignored this elephant in the world and its collusion in Israel’s Nuclear Deceptions and Israel’s negation of international law, UN resolutions, and denial of equal human rights for Palestinians have all contributed to the instability in the Middle East!
Beginning in the 1990′s and even more so after 9/11, US politicians blind allegiance to Israel has been furthered by the claim that both states are threatened by Arab terrorist groups and rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but the US has more than enough to blow up this one small planet and America is also the only state to have targeted and murdered innocent ones via a Nuclear Holocaust!
Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran as a mutual enemy, but “We have seen the enemy and he is US!”-Pogo
The “war on terror” has become a tactic to infuse fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in response to Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, the concrete wall/electrified fence that has been built on legally owned Palestinian property which is “financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.” [10]
William Fulbright warned, “The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership….a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures.”
Yet, America’s ‘leaders’ continue to cower and pander to an “illegal foreign lobby that has long flouted US law and suborned the national interest as a foreign agent.” [11]
As this Citizen of Conscience for US House of Representatives has been gifted with COMMON SENSE and as “It’s not my revolution unless I can dance” [Emma Goldman] I am on my way to D.C. to report on AIPAC’s 2011 Conference with hope to engage my fellow Americans so that YES WE CAN begin the world again!
“Soon after I had published the pamphlet “Common Sense” [on Feb. 14, 1776] in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion…The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”-Thomas Paine
But “Christ, you know it ain’t easy! You know how hard it can be and the way things are going They’re gonna crucify me.”-John Lennon
But as this American dissident is so seeking to put some starch in the spines of Congress so that they will put America first and honor the promises that these United States were founded upon and so that we indeed would observe good faith and justice towards all nations and cultivate peace and harmony with all;
“You can stand me up at the gates of hell and I won’t back down.”
1. Grant F. Smith, “Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal” Page 15. Published 2007 by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington D.C.
2. IBID
3. Page 20, 22
4. Page 149-150
5. Page 150-151
6. Page 158
7. Page 155
8. http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=62812§ionid=351020104
9. IBID
10. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 43, Jan/Feb. 2007
11. Grant F. Smith, Page 168