Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and The Sacred Cow
by Mark P. Green
Over a century ago, Mark Twain concluded, "the very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice". Indeed, every generation views history through its own tinted lens. And the 'received wisdom' of one era can appear antiquated--even morally unsound--to another. Penetrating the fog of history demands the test of time. But even this method can be compromised, since the war for ideological supremacy is often won, literally, on the battlefield. History is written by the victors.
For the bulk of humanity, political values and religious beliefs are an accident of birth. Is the modern, cosmopolitan mind really so different? Or is cultural indoctrination merely explained away as education? How fortunate, it is, that America enjoys an unfettered 'marketplace of ideas' and that our press is free. But as A.J. Liebling observed, "the press is free to those who own one".
Indeed, the past 20 years has seen an astounding consolidation of media franchise. Today, fewer than ten transnational media conglomerates effectively administer the information needs for the bulk of the English-speaking world, as the major institutions of political analysis fall into fewer and fewer hands. Big Media increasingly overlords political discourse.
Larger and fewer corporations hire and fire the elite class of pundits and editors who frame the international discussion. These gatekeepers define history, concoct its vital lessons, and disseminate meaning. Great narratives emerge, often with the help of great myths.
French philosopher Paul Valery reminds us however, "history justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and it gives examples of everything." Indeed, the lessons of history are often assertions by The Few, providing guidance for The Many.
Consider the bewilderment expressed by most European allies at America's mind-numbing inconsistencies. On the one hand, U.S. courts lead the world in upholding the rights of minorities, separating religious dogma from government decree, and in forging a secular, multicultural democracy with equal protection before the law for all. These legal principles will surely stand the test of time. With the global spread of democratic values and the rise of American political dominance on a similar scale, there is the growing expectation that our nation provide a kind of 'equal protection' to all its subjects; that the U.S. apply legal standards and political safeguards for all nations in equal measure. This hope however is being dashed in the Middle East. There, America has institutionalized political inequality.
The case in point is the 'special relationship' between the U.S. and the state of Israel, though 'relationship' fails to convey the magnitude of this extraordinary affair. Indeed, since Israel captured Arab territory in the 1967 Six Day War, the U.S. alliance with Israel has become a political phenomena without equal. For the past 30 years, there have been endless streams of Congressional delegations to Israel, U.S.-sponsored treaties and initiatives; along with even greater quantities of foreign aid, diplomatic arm twisting, and raw military power. All in service to a geographically tiny nation sitting thousands of miles from American soil.
Decades of unconditional aid to Israel have produced a burning resentment in the Arab world. Indeed, the U.S. punishes our Arab trading partners--both economically and militarily--for actions which Israel commits routinely. In the Middle East, it is Israel alone that maintains both a nuclear stockpile and lesser weapons of mass destruction. This salient fact breezes past most of the elite American authorities in their discussions about the origins of terror or how to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. The plain fact is that Israel's nuclear capabilities have fueled a regional arms race.
Even more destabilizing is Israel's unique, historical mission: to create a Jewish country in a territory already occupied by over a million non-Jews. The perception that Israel (with American complicity) formally and purposefully discriminates against these indigenous people is what has given us the suicide bomber. In Western parlance this phenomena of resistance is called 'terrorism'. Conventional wisdom explains that terrorists are motivated by a primitive rejection of Modernism. Often the syndrome is pigeonholed as "Islamo-fascism", and viewed as a kind of incurable, political virus. The recommended 'treatment' is quarantine, suppression or outright eradication. But world opinion is turning against this one-sided view.
Following 9/11, the familiar chime became, "Why do they hate us?" President Bush explained, "it's because of our freedoms...our way of life". But if that were so, then why don't these terrorists target other Western cities like Tokyo, Paris, Toronto or Rome? Subsequent speech writers have had President Bush allege that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, posed an imminent threat to the region and had significant links to Al Queda. All these allegations proved false.
Significantly, over the past thirty years, the (regional) enemies of (Zionist) Israel have become the global enemies of (secular) America. This may suit the long-term military needs of the Jewish State, but what about the damage done to America's economy, security and reputation? Is there no cost we should be unwilling to pay? In fact, the case can be made that the very hostilities between American and the Arab world is the byproduct of U.S.-subsidized political discrimination at the hands of Israel.
As the world's greatest consumers of oil, we Americans have vital and mutual economic ties with energy producers. These oil exporters, many of them Arab, are similarly dependent on U.S. consumption for their economic health. Herein lie the clear motives for sustained, mutual cooperation. But instead of symbiosis, we find enmity. The spoiler in this equation are the political aspirations and security demands of the Jewish state, which have trumped U.S. economic interests for more than a generation. Israel's advocates have successfully leveraged American power to wage war against the very nations which supply us with oil.
As America wages war on Iraq, neoconservative strategists are planning to 'reform' the entire Arab world, largely to make the region safe for an expanding Jewish state, since Israel seems determined to hold onto, if not increase, the Arab land it captured in 1967. The blunt surgical instrument is military force. Follow up procedures will include American money, weponry, investment, media spin and diplomatic pressure. The 'end game' is to crush Arab resistance to Zionist and American hegemony. In the meantime, the U.S. is playing a pivotal role in a military campaign that's producing a political and humanitarian nightmare.
In the Palestinian Territories, Israel leads the democratic world in extra-judicial assassinations, collective punishment and state-sponsored, ethnic discrimination. Living conditions and political freedoms have plummeted there while unemployment, injury and disease have skyrocketed. Home demolitions are routine, leaving thousands of Palestinians homeless. Though contrary to international law and the Geneva Convention, this policy has been upheld by Israeli courts. Notwithstanding the Arab 'suicide bomber', the kill-ratio favors Jews over Palestinians by a ration exceeding three-to-one.
Latest reports indicate that some 22% of Palestinian children are (now) malnourished and that the average Palestinian family survives on approximately $2 per day. While these economic circumstances are no worse than Bangladesh or many drought-stricken regions in sub-Saharan Africa, there's a key difference. Palestine's three-fold increase in measurable deprivations has been 'achieved' not by drought, flood or bad economic planning, but by Israeli design. The relative serenity of pre-Zionist Palestine has been replaced by living conditions resembling a food-starved, open-air prison, complete with checkpoints and curfews. To be Palestinian under Israeli occupation is to know the meaning of terror.
How did we get here? U.S. policies have granted special favor to the Jewish state for over a generation. The peculiar uniqueness of the 'special relationship' between American and Israel first burst on the scene during Israel's 1967 'Six Day War'. On June 8th, Israeli plans strafed and bombed the American ship, USS Liberty, in international waters, killing 34 U.S. servicemen and wounding 171. No Israeli has ever been held accountable for this act of war. Both American and Israeli governments continue to maintain a shroud of secrecy over the incident. So began the special relationship.
In the aftermath of Israel's victorious 1973 'Yom Kippur War' (where Arab armies attacked Isreal) former Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AK) said flatly, "Israel controls the (U.S.) senate". For that sin of indiscretion, the former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee soon found himself out of office. His remarks have since been airbrushed from political memory.
By 1975, President Ford was threatening to "reappraise" U.S. relations with the Zionist state. But the pro-Israel lobby rose to the occasion, lining up 71 U.S. senators who signed a letter formally demanding The President to back off, which he did. Ford later lost his bid for re-election. Similarly, the first President George Bush, who was also viewed as 'unreliable' by pro-Israel partisans, failed in his bid for re-election. In the intervening years, countless other voices have have been expunged from public life for violating Israeli-related taboos. This has not gone unnoticed by America's ruling class. And today, with the triumph of neoconservative dogma and the rise of Christian Zionism, the friends of Israel have secured an even greater presence in Washington.
Consequently, over the past generation, the Jewish state has received more U.S. assistance than all of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America combined. Official figures put the transfer of American money to Israel at about 100 billion, but one analyst calculates that additional, indirect costs associated with the special relationship have cost the U.S. a whopping 1.6 trillion. That, according to Washington, D.C. economic analyst, Thomas Stauffer who, in the Christian Science Monitor (12/10/02), concluded that America's defense of Israel has cost the U.S. twice what we spent on the Viet Nam war. Though widely reported on the internet, Big Media shunned this meticulous, though provocative, analysis.
Let it be said the next largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid is Egypt (an Arab country). But this autocratic state only began receiving its annual, multi-billion dollar stipend after signing the 1979 Camp David Accords; a deal which established a formal 'peace' between Egypt and Israel, but left the Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and Palestinians out in the cold. The 'Arab Street', including most Egyptians, view this historic treaty with disdain.
Clearly, if not for U.S. diplomatic cover, Israel would be isolated, and its international status downgraded. Incredibly (and typically), mainstream media makes little mention of the fact that this 'rogue democracy' stands in defiance of 68 UN resolutions, a world record. Iraq, by contrast, has spurned a total of 16 resolutions.
Indeed, Israel's very status as a 'democracy' is increasingly under fire, since the Jewish state's commitment to ethnic and religious segregation, as well as laws which discriminate against non-Jews, leaves it isolated in an increasingly pluralistic and integrated world. The mainstream media's omission of these compelling facts belie their significance. Indeed, the influence of this ethnic lobby permeates America's intellectual culture. Even the vast majority of best-selling commentators are not immune. Conservative firebrands like like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly--the very people who detect "media bias" under every rock--carefully avoid criticizing Israel's unique status. In similar fashion, the left wing anti-war movement of the 60's and early 70's never made a peep about the Jewish state's pre-emptive strike against the Arabs in the 1967 Six Day War, or America's decisive intervention on behalf of Israel in it's 1973 war. That, despite the ensuing Arab oil embargo which sent our nation into recession, costing our economy untold billions.
True to form, America recently spared the Jewish state from formal UN censure when their plan to kill Palestinian President Yassir Arafat became known. Israel's controversial 'security fence' (a wall twice as high and four times longer than the Berlin Wall) is also being protected in the UN by American wrangling, as was Israel's recent bombing mission in Syria. U.S. decrees excusing Israel often stand alone. Is the problem global anti-Semitism, or American acquiescence before Israeli resolve?
To much of the world, Israel's sweetheart deal with the American taxpayer is evidence that Democracy is no barrier to corruption. Millions view the U.S.-Israeli 'special relationship' as a manipulative euphemism for 'preferential treatment'. Empire America has assigned Arabs an inferior status on the world stage.
As the lone, global superpower, America now enjoys unique privileges. We've become a kind of roving 'super-judiciary', enforcing and ignoring international laws at will. In the case of the U.S.-lead war on Iraq, most of the UN Security Council and virtually all the member nations of that world body opposed our pre-emptive strike. But the Bush Administration moved forward anyway, with impunity. The checks and balances designed to inhibit government excess here at home do not readily protect the peoples outside our borders. As such, America is increasingly viewed as a 'loose canon', if not an arrogant bully.
U.S. saber-rattling has put the entire Arab world on notice. Many leftists cling to the idea that U.S. bellicosity is centered around oil and, presumably, secret plans to expropriate it. If that were so, the U.S. would surely behave most fiercely towards Saudi Arabia, holder of the world's greatest oil reserves. But instead, the U.S. is applying greater pressure to Iran and Arab states which border Israel, like Syria, Lebanon and, to a lesser extent, Jordan, none of which produce any oil at all. In fact, the much-ballyhooed "No Blood for Oil" theory was advanced and tested in the 1991 Gulf War. What happened? America lead international forces into Iraq, pulverized Hussein's overrated army, liberated Kuwait for the sheiks, and left all the oil behind. The big winner was Israel, who had American forces lead an international brigade against its chief rival in the Arab world.
Were contemporary America a rational, self-interested democracy, all foreign entanglements--even traditional alliances--would be on the table well before experiencing decades of political failure. But certain U.S. options in the Middle East remain 'non-starters'. Why is this? In Oct., 2001, an Israeli radio station reported that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a moment of pique towards his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, bellowed, "Don't worry about American pressure (on Israel). We (the Jewish People) control America, and Americans know it". Hyperbole aside, the Prime Minister revealed that even the darkest suspicions about the U.S.-Israeli alliance are not without some merit. That this outrageous remark failed to see the light of day anywhere outside of Israel or on the internet is of great concern to those devoted to free speech, national sovereignty and intellectual freedom.
If that alleged quote sounds unbelievable, please recall another humiliating spectacle which was widely observed. In April, 2002, when the (Israeli-Palestinian) "Road Map to Peace" still had a pulse, President Bush ordered the Israeli Prime Minister to get (Israelis) "out of the West Bank...without delay". Sharon responded by neither removing the settlers, making excuses, or offering to compromise. Settlement building continued and U.S. aid never slacked. Is there a word for this? Soon thereafter there was yet another suicide bombing in Israel, and Sharon ordered the invasion of the Palestinian city of Jenin. The assault there left scores of Palestinians dead and thousands homeless. President Bush followed up by denouncing Palestinian terrorism and calling the Israeli leader a "man of peace". This head-spinning scenario underscores the sad political fact that every American administration is duty-bound to line up behind every Israeli administration. End of story.
Indeed, the contrived romance between secular, multicultural America and Jewish Israel has taken on the aura of an 'arranged marriage', with divorce not being an option. But there are additional ironies, too. If the special relationship between our countries is indeed genuine, why are we Americans hammered daily about anti-Semitism, The Holocaust (as if there are no others) and ubiquitous images of Jewish suffering? Here we enter the realm of myth and manipulation.
Author, scholar and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, says that anti-Semitism is an "irrational disease" that remains just as "virulent" and resilient as it was in previous centuries. In a keynote speech before the Anti-Defamation League's Conference on Global Anti-Semitism in 2002, the famous Holocaust survivor explained that, "hatred is very strange because it has a face, and it has a setting, and it is not limited to frontiers. It has no culture or boundaries," he said. "It is more than one country. The anti-Semite hates people who have not been born yet, which means that anti-Semitism is not linked to something a person has done or will do. It is a sickness. There is mental sickness and there is moral sickness, and an anti-Semite is morally sick. He is sick because he lives in a delusion."
Wiesel's overview of anti-Semitism however may itself be itself a kind of delusion, given its self-serving simplicity. He has reduced the complex, cryptic interplay of centuries-long, inter-group competition to one, all-encompassing idea. Is there no 'yin and yang' to this story?
The message to Americans is clear. Resist 'bad' thoughts about Israel. Don't speak out. And do not draw, or act upon, conclusions which could imperil the sanctity of the Israeli-American alliance. When public opinion goes the other way, experts are summoned to reverse the presumably irrational "rise in anti-Semitism", treating it as if it were disease. Assuming a tone and employing jargon normally reserved for physicians, designated political authorities 'diagnose treatment' for combating these "virulent strains" (of public opinion) which "have no proper place" in American society. Discussion over.
The ever-present ghoul in this scenario is the genocidal, fire-breathing demon commonly identified as The Anti-Semite. As the human embodiment of pure evil, this archetype serves to remind the world of the ever-present, terrible tendencies found within the gentile soul. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) provides the false, ironic summary: "The intrinsic bond between the American and Israeli people has never been more evident".
The 'post-Holocaust' milieu enables the allegation of anti-Semitism to de-legitimize resistance to Zionism. This is no accident. Widespread media imagery has succeeded in linking harsh criticism of Israel to racial intolerance. 'Anti-Semitism's' fuzzy definition provides the unique underpinnings. Decades of news spin and propaganda planted in entertainment media have created a particular moral tapestry. Merge this with continuous images of Hitler, concentration camps, Klan rallies and the like, and you have a subconscious morality play running in the minds of television viewers everywhere.
Once this mindset is formed, a political dispute involving 'something Jewish' can be maneuvered away from the point of contention to the (dark, hidden) motives of those in opposition. Anti-Semitism has become the Scarlet Letter of American politics. Careers in public life can be ruined by the very accusation. No other ethnic group enjoys comparable protection. The final irony is that within Israel, Zionist doctrine inherently condones discrimination against all non-Jews.
Adding to these layers of subterfuge is the misapplication of the very term itself, since 'anti-Semitism' is a kind of misnomer. Granted, anti-Semites may hate Jews (and are similarly hated by them) but the 'Semite-ness' of the Jews (their ethnic, 'Semitic' profile) is often incidental to the conflict. Many identified anti-Semites are more Semitic than the Jews they allegedly despise! The complaints of these vilified outcasts invariably concern Jewish ethnocentrism and Jewish abuse of power. Contrary to popular belief, many anti-Semites feel themselves victimized and oppressed by Jews. Just ask the Semitic people of Palestine.
In truth, most 'anti-Semitic' operatives simply oppose international Zionism and its multifaceted permutations. So why not properly label anti-Semites as 'anti-Zionist' or 'anti-Jewish'--which more accurately describes their motivating animus? The reason is simple. A different term might add an unwanted layer of complexity to the Official Narrative. The greatest myth of 'anti-Semitism' is that it has nothing to do with Jewish conduct. Indeed, when Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, recently alleged that "Jews run the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them", his now-infamous assertion was either ignored, or immediately denounced and dismissed. Without elaboration, Pres. Bush scornfully called the Prime Minister's remarks "divisive and wrong". True to form, the President didn't explain why. All that was clear was that the Malaysian Prime Minister committed the modern sin of 'anti-Semitism'.
It doesn't matter, apparently, that Prime Minister Mohamad was offering an informed political analysis. It doesn't matter that he received a standing ovation for his remarks, that he speaks for, and understands the viewpoint of, tens of millions of Muslims worldwide. All that mattered was that his remarks offended Jews.
Can we talk? No.
Instead of confronting and dealing with the points of his argument, the usual experts bombarded the Prime Minister with ad hominem mud. Following that, the issues he raised were shelved. The question became instead: does he or does he not have an unacceptably 'bad attitude' about Israel? Case closed.
Here in the Land of the Free, tales of inter-group conflict involving the Chosen People are to be described in moral shades of black and white; thus, the allegation of 'anti-Semitism' is designed for one purpose: to separate the bad actors from the good, and to bring a quick, simple close to complex disputes. This is not to imply that anti-Semitism (so-called) is contrived. No doubt, Jews have been sporadically victimized and persecuted for centuries, with horrific results. But the story is more complicated and the moral dimensions are surely more nuanced than found within the Official Story.
The rising tension between historic myth and political excess are producing cracks in the facade of international order. America's moral posture has been co-opted, and with that, our national sovereignty. In an effort to further the imperial interests of a foreign power, Israel's gifted advocates have bypassed America's customary checks and balances. This endangers America and the entire world.
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Mark Green is the host of FLASHPOINT on CMAC-TV (Cable Ch17) in Santa Barbara. He can be reached at: markgreen@flashpoint-tv.net |
