A Crying Shame!

In my 61 years on this planet, I never imagined that I would come anywhere near agreeing with an article such as this. I doubt I would have finished the article before I discounted it as anti-Semitic drivel, until recently.

 I hate to say it. It makes me sick to my stomach to write these words, but the events of the last 8 years, on top of all the policies and behavior I have managed to ignore in the so-called holy land and surrounding areas as well as at home for the last 40 or so years, have caused me to question everything. I guess it took something like 9/11 to jar me out of habitual thinking drummed into me as a child.

I was raised under the cloud of the, then, recent horror of the Nazi crimes against humanity. My mother, in particular, was extremely impressed by the criminal cruelty to the Jewish people. By impressed, I mean it caused her to be very protective of the Jewish people. She would not countenance “Jew jokes” nor anything else she considered anti-Jewish. I grew up to be like her in that way. A friend of mine once said that she always thought of me when something “god-awful” happened in the place called Palestine by some and Israel by others. (”I know you’ll be looking for a Jew to protect.” LOL!)

I have, at times, been very outspoken in my defense of Jewish people everywhere.

Mother warned me often that I should never think that “it” can’t happen here. Of course, she was talking about the wholesale persecution, even unto death, of any hated minority. (I never knew if she had read C.S. Lewis or had merely come up with the warning on her own. ) It didn’t take much to convince me. I grew up in the deep south. I never doubted that “it” could happen.

Now, I must be equally outspoken in questioning my country’s knee jerk defense of Israel as if it is somehow exceptional in the same way that the Neocons see the U.S. as exceptional; entitled to do any damn thing they want to in the name of something I no longer understand as I once thought I did.

I have one Jewish friend where I live now. (Of course, I still I have others across the country in the many places where I have lived in the past.) Several years ago she said that she might move to Israel where she could feel safe. My jaw hit the floor. This woman is a highly educated professional. I stammered, asking her to listen to what she was saying. “You can’t possibly think that Israel is a safe place to be!”

Sometimes I cannot help but think that some of our fellow citizens are not always rational about the issue of Israel and Jewish Neocons are not alone in their crusade to defend Israel, no matter what it takes or who gets hurt in the process, even when Israeli policies are responsible for the misery, suffering and death of an untold number of Palestinians.

What’s worse, Neocons in both Israel and the U.S. have allied themselves with christian fundamentalist (end-timers, rapture Christians, Dominionists and others of the far-right religious fringe). In my mind, this is an unholy alliance if there ever was one. “Cynical” is the word that comes to mind and cynicism is a state of mind that should be avoided at all costs; it shows a pathological disintegration in the nation of Israel and in her supporters in the U.S..

The ghettos in which the Palestinians live are reminiscent of other ghettos filled with Europe’s Jewish population before and during the terror that was Nazi Germany.

Allow me to make clear that I am aghast at terrorist atrocities by Hamas or any other group or nation, no matter at whom it is directed. Nevertheless, the U.S. has lost all credibility as an honest broker of peace and, of course, social and economic justice that must accompany a lasting peace in a land made unholy by the blood of innocents and the theft of the land itself.

Who are the innocents? The people from all three Abrahamic traditions who can envision true peace, even in this historically war-torn area of the world; those yet too young to hate others simply because it is “tradition” to do so and those who refuse to live a hateful life.

The Allied powers of WWII made a mistake when they took land away from people who had lived in the land known as Palestine for as long as anyone can remember and by giving that land to Eastern and Western European Jews, among others.

What’s done is done in the modern land of Palestine/Israel. I doubt we can ever undo it, at least not in my lifetime. Nevertheless, it is time to find the best of the religious teachings of the three traditions to which this land is of such apparently great importance and apply those teachings to the conflict which has, in may ways, consumed the world for the last 60 some odd years, if not since the beginning of recorded history.

In doing so, we must not ignore the deeply corrupting effects of corporatism, sometimes quite obvious and at other times hidden just beneath the excuse of religion.

And by “we,” I mean the concerned people of the world; those who are sick and tired of the carnage over a city named peace.

Kristol Clear: The Source of America’s Wars

by Maidhc Ó Cathail / December 18th, 2009

One reason neocons have been able to sow so much mischief is that they feed into deeply embedded American beliefs about democratism and ‘chosenness.’
– Paul Gottfried¹

Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.”² It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars.


For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.”³

 
But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s
armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?”



Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool.

In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.”

“Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States … American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”⁴

American Greatness

Following his father’s advice, William Kristol has been a fervent supporter of massive U.S. military spending. In 1996, he co-authored with Robert Kagan an influential neocon manifesto titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It recommended that “America should pursue a vision of benevolent hegemony as bold as Reagan’s in the 1980s and wield its authority unabashedly.


“The defense budget should be increased dramatically, citizens should be educated to appreciate the military’s vital work abroad, and moral clarity should direct a foreign policy that puts the heat on dictators and
 authoritarian regimes.”


In response, another influential opinion-maker, Charles Krauthammer, hailed Kristol and Kagan as “the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school.” It is hardly a coincidence, however, that all three advocates of “American greatness” care passionately about what Irving Kristol euphemistically referred to as “the survival of the state of Israel.” Or that many of those “dictators and authoritarian regimes” just happened to stand in the way of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.


The following year, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group which sought to advance their “neo-Reaganite” vision. In the late 1990s, they did this mainly by writing letters to Bill Clinton, urging him to oust Saddam Hussein.


In September 2000, PNAC published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which they famously acknowledged that “the process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”


One year later, they got their wished for “new Pearl Harbor” on September 11. The mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans was, as Benjamin Netanyahu indelicately put it, “very good” for Israel.⁵


Kristol’s War


Immediately, Kristol’s Weekly Standard began linking Iraq to the attacks. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott McConnell explained the strategy: “Their rhetoric – which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months – was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers.”⁶


The “Saddam must go” campaign, begun in a Kristol and Kagan editorial as far back as 1997, became so relentless that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed it “Kristol’s War.”⁷
The Iraq War has, of course, also been called “Wolfowitz’s War.” But it could just as aptly have been named after Perle, Feith, Libby, Zelikow, Lieberman, or any of the other pro-Israeli insiders who took America to war by way of deception.⁸


In “Irving Kristol, RIP,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo described Kristol’s legacy as “war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see.”⁹


Unless Americans soon realize that they’ve been deceived by those for whom “American greatness” is merely a means to advance “the survival of the state of Israel,” that legacy promises to be an enduring one.

1.  Paul Gottfried, “The Transparent Cabal,” Taki’s Magazine, September 17, 2008. [↩]
2. Frederick W. Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” AEI Online, January 5, 2007. [↩]
3. William Kristol, “A War President,” Washington Post, December 1, 2009. [↩]
4. Philip Weiss, “30 Years Ago, Neocons Were More Candid About Their Israel-Centered Views,” Mondoweiss, May 23, 2007. [↩]
5. James Bennet, “Spilled Blood Is Seen as Bond That Draws 2 Nations Closer,” New York Times, September 12, 2001. [↩]
6. Scott McConnell, “The Weekly Standard’s War,” American Conservative, November 21, 2005. [↩]
7. Richard H. Curtiss, “Rupert Murdoch and William Kristol: Using the Press to Advance Israel’s Interests,” Washington Report, June 2003. [↩]
8. Jeff Gates, Guilt By Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, 2008. [↩]
9. Justin Raimondo, “Irving Kristol, RIP,” Antiwar.com, September 21, 2009. [↩]

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer. His work has been published by Al Jazeera Magazine, Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, Khaleej Times, Palestine Chronicle and many other publications. Read other articles by Maidhc.

This article was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under General, Israel/Palestine.



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