The Anti-Semitic Con
By Paul Edwards
Counterpunch.org
Monday, April 8, 2019
With the Putin/Russia Collusion Fairytale debunked, the undeniable
cancer of real foreign interference in our government demands an
honest airing.
Since American politics is mortally corrupt, one might wonder
why bother to expose one prime cause of its ethical degeneracy.
If the beast is dead, what use is determining what killed it?
Well, it isn’t quite dead and we have to live with it.
If the public knew one country has done more to subvert our
government than all others combined it might raise enough
hell to stop it.
In terms of influence, there can be no serious denial that Israel
exerts by far the most powerful suasion of any foreign power on
America.
Influence exerted by a foreign power’s registered lobby
is legitimate per our toothless protocol.
Israel’s is not so registered, but… details, details.
So, when Republicans invite Bibi to smarmily insult a sitting
President in a joint session of Congress, that’s influence,
not interference.
When, besides financing most Senators and Representatives
elections, Israel takes them on cushy, free PR junkets to Tel Aviv,
that’s influence, not interference.
Conversely, when Clintonista subversion of the Sanders campaign
appears on Wikileaks and is instantly imputed to Russia and Putin
–without proof and against expert technical evidence–that’s not
influence, it’s Russki interference.
More absurdly, when–again, without proof–the same Dem CFOs
howl that Putin Trolls bought chump change worth of dingy ads
on Facebook that swung the election to Trump that’s… but you
get the picture.
What is obvious and has long been so–and has been emphasized by
two years of fraud and insanity regarding imagined Russian collusion
is that influence is what your friends have; interference is what
your enemies do.
Why when it is so blatantly obvious as to be a source of outspoken
pride for them, is the fact that Israel’s right-wing ruling clique
brazenly and continually interferes in American government in
the most aggressive and offensive way, universally denied?
You want flagrant foreign collusion with high officials
in U.S. government?
Open your eyes. And your mind…
The reason it’s officially denied is that Israel’s Congressional
whores know that not to do so violates their deal.
Not to back Israel unquestioningly terminates it, and the loss
of that money means loss of office… to say nothing of the beating
they’d take in the press and on their reputations.
The great mass of Americans won’t admit what many can’t help
but know because they, too, fear being attacked for such bold
honesty.
They are equally vulnerable to rough handling from the same
source: the massively powerful Israel Lobby, a unified phalanx
of militant American Zionists.
To be clear: Zionism has always insisted that Israel exists for
Jews only.
The Israel Lobby–financed by vast American Zionist wealth–potent
as it is, could not leverage our politics if its tactics were exposed,
and it knows it.
History gives it the key that makes rational assessment of Israel’s
policies impossible: the Holocaust and the true anti-Semitism that
was its cause.
Evocation of that horror allows any critique of Israeli government
to be sleazily labelled Anti-Semitism, and so to effectively nullify
argument.
The dishonest and cynical Israel Lobby uses this tactic shamelessly
to blunt and derail sound criticism or even plain examination of
Israeli state behavior.
What then is Anti-Semitism?
By definition it is antipathy or hatred of the Jewish people
as a whole.
An Anti-Semite espouses that categorical prejudice and
Anti-Semitism in word or deed pertains to Jews in toto.
In contrast, behavior that is ugly, hateful, or injurious but
not directed at Jews as a whole, though execrable, is not
Anti-Semitic, just as it’s possible to hate a Catholic, or
Muslim, without hating their religion or their people.
It follows then, that criticism, even vicious, hateful criticism of
the Israeli State, is not inherently Anti-Semitic, and the claim is
false on its face.
To attack the Israeli State is not to attack Jews as a people since
Israel is not home to most of Jewry and its polity by no means
defines or represents Jews in all their broad, complex range of
beliefs, practices, and principles.
To say that criticizing the brutal, repressive apartheid Israeli
government’s actions is Anti-Semitic is no more legitimate
than to say that condemnation of the American State’s vicious
imperialist wars makes one anti-American.
This disingenuous con needs to named and refuted
around the world.
Is there criticism of Israel that is clearly Anti-Semitic?
Of course, there is! Plenty of it.
Anti-Semitism is no less real and evil because it does not apply
to all critiques of Israel or all insults to Jews or Jewish entities.
Precisely because Anti-Semitism is so vile and toxic a disease,
and because it will continue to live in its odious carriers, it is
critically important not to vitiate the ubiquitous contempt it
arouses by cynically muddling its meaning.
The dishonest and defensive crying of wolf that the government
of Israel and the Israel Lobby deploy against any criticism of their
history and policy is, in addition to being morally contemptible,
deeply counterproductive in terms of Israel’s standing in world
opinion.
Mounting a transparently false, blanket, all-purpose lament as
a cover for their most obvious and glaring crimes and cruelties
cannot prevent the world from seeing them for the corrupt and
unjust power they are and fiercely, adamantly opposing them.
Beyond the damage Israel’s cowardly dishonesty does to itself,
a more critical concern for Americans concerns what it has done
and is doing to exacerbate the rolling debacle of our misruled
and floundering country.
The Israel Lobby, Zionism’s American voice, wielding the bogus trope
of Anti-Semitism as a club, infects and pollutes through its agents
and activists every niche of our government from the Presidency
and Congress, to Federal Departments and Bureaus, to State and
local offices.
Without Zionist acceptance Trump would not have been President,
but neither would Obama.
Through the Lobby’s diligence we have made our country hated
by carrying Israel’s dirty water in the Middle East, crippled and
hamstrung enlightened policy at home, and been afflicted with
such creatures of nightmare as the Harpy, Nikki Haley, bughouse
pseudo-Christian loon, Mike Pompeo, and murderous psychopath,
John Bolton.
Nothing suggests the death grip Israel and its Lobby have on our
fate can be broken.
So long as the Anti-Semitic Con is viable, even our security is in
jeopardy with its blind, sick, demented chosen monsters in charge.
The fable of the eagle and scorpion comes painfully to mind.
When the bird, stung and bearing them both down to death,
asks how the scorpion could sting it after swearing not to do
so, it replies, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.”
It was all too clear what Israel was in 1947.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/05/the-anti-semitic-con
