Murdoch’s Support for Zionism Hasn’t Harmed Relations With Squalid Prince Walid ben Azziz There a number of academics and others who should know better, who argue that the support of the USA for Zionism and Israel is a result of the ‘Zionist Lobby’ or even the Jewish vote. The fact that there are more Muslims in the USA than Jews seems to have escaped these cognoscenti. Likewise the Zionist lobby. No one doubts that the main lobby group AIPAC (American Israel, Public Affairs Committee) is an obnoxious, racist organisation dedicated to furthering war by every means. Its commitment to Israel is second to none. But the question is why it is courted by senators, congressmen and presidential hopefuls. What is it that gives Aipac its apparent power? How do some 3-4 million Jews (America’s Jewish community is in decline anyway) have this power? How is it they are able to garner support for Israel but were unable to do so to rescue European Jewry in world war 2? The article below by John Spritzler hits the nail on the head. Contrary to Professors Mersheimer, Walt and Petras, the Israel lobby only seems powerful because its aims are in accordance with those of US capitalism. Far from deterring the Arab ruling class they provide it with support (in return for petro dollars). The US is the only friend that the corrupt Saudi ruling caste has. Likewise with the Gulf sheikhdoms.
But that is anathema to those who have little or nothing to say about the quisling Arab ruling class. Because of course the Arab countries are marked by unpopular rulers (despite the Arab spring) who preside over a hungry and discontented mass. The interests of these rulers lie with their countries exploiters not its people. That is how we have a powerful Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, direct descendant of the founder of the Saudi monarchy, and in control of the Kingdom Holding Company, is good friends of Rupert Murddoch and second largest shareholder in News International.
However, although Murdoch was forced to drop Glenn Beck because of his anti-Semitism, that didn't stop Beck getting a hero's welcome from Israel's Parliament - the Knesset. See Glenn Beck Israel Visit Warmly Received By Parliament
Tony Greenstein
The Israel Lobby's Power Comes from The American Ruling Class
The Saudi prince declared himself "a good friend" of Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch (probably the next executive to be charged by the police in the scandal).
He defended both men briskly, but in doing so drew attention to the fact that he is the second biggest shareholder in the Murdoch empire, and that the Murdochs were major shareholders in his own Rotana media empire in the Middle East. An unholy alliance, surely? Mr Murdoch is the co-owner, with Prince Walid, of Fox News - one of the most virulently anti-Muslim television stations in the world. The station gives a megaphone to the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin.
In the US, Fox's role was to throw gallons of petrol on the flames of Islamophobia which lead it to the burning of the Holy Quran by vigilantes. This fact does not fit into a popular (but wrong) paradigm that says the pro-Israel policy of the United States harms the U.S. ‘national interest’ by angering the oil-rich Arab rulers and making it hard for Big Oil to do business with them. Therefore, according to this “logic,” the only reason the U.S. has a pro-Israel foreign policy is because the Israel Lobby forces Big Oil and the rest of the American plutocracy to be pro-Israel, even though it is against their interest.
But here we see that a Saudi prince is great pals with the most pro-Israel media mogul in the world, and a co-owner with him of Fox News, the #1 pro-Israel network in the U.S.
The paradigm that this fact DOES fit into is the one that I describe in The Israel Lobby's Power Comes From the American Ruling Class .
One commonly believed explanation is that the "Israel Lobby"--consisting of organizations like AIPAC and a host of other pro-Israel Jewish organizations in the United States--has hijacked U.S. foreign policy by using its wealth and control of the mass media to buy or intimidate Congressmen. According to this view, the American government's pro-Israel foreign policy is harmful to the interests of the non-Jewish American corporate upper class, and were it not for the power of the Israel Lobby American foreign policy, reflecting as it does the interests of the American upper class, would not be as pro-Israel as it is today. I call this the "The Lobby Makes Them Do It" view. I think it is just plain factually wrong.
The alternative view that I hold is that the Israel Lobby's power comes from the (mostly non-Jewish) American ruling class. The leading advocate of the "The Lobby Makes Them Do It" view is James Petras. Petras asserts that the Israel Lobby prevailed over America's Big Oil elite to get the U.S. to invade Iraq for the benefit of Israel:
Regarding domestic control of the American population, the key strategy of elite social control has for many decades been to rely on Orwellian wars of social control. The particular "foreign enemy" has changed over time, from Teddy Roosevelt's Spain to Woodrow Wilson's "Huns" to FDR's Fascists to Truman's Communists to Bush's and Obama's Terrorists.
By ensuring that the American mass media refrain from telling Americans the true reason (Israel's ethnic cleansing) why Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims take up arms against Israel, the American ruling class ensures that Americans will believe the lie that Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims are hateful, irrational, anti-semitic terrorists who kill decent Israelis "just like us" and would likewise kill Americans if we fail to obey our upper class rulers who protect us from terrorism. Similarly, the oil-rich Middle East ruling classes, in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, use their people's anger at Israel to strengthen their power over them, as I discuss in some detail in How Israel Helps Saudi Arabia’s Rulers Control their Working Class and How Israel Helps the Islamic Republic of Iran Control the Iranian Working Class.
James Petras is naive to think that Big Oil's interests are prejudiced by the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy. If the Saudi royal family, for example, were really opposed to U.S. support for Israel, then it would use its vast wealth to support pro-Palestinian forces inside the United States, to counter the Israel Lobby; but it doesn't. By the same token, if any members of the American mostly non-Jewish ruling class, with billions of dollars to throw around (Buffet gave away $40 billion alone!), wanted to tell Americans the truth about Zionism (the movement to create and protect a Jewish state), they could do so. They could tell Americans how Zionism is all about ethnic cleansing, how Albert Einstein (whom the Israeli government asked to be the President of Israel, and declined) always opposed the Jewish state idea because it was morally wrong, and how the Zionists betrayed European Jews during World War II by opposing rescue efforts (so there would be more dead Jews to give them greater standing at the post-war negotiations over who would "get" Palestine)--they could do so; but they don't.
If they did, they could turn the American public against Zionism and against the Israel Lobby as quickly as they turn it against a politician soliciting sex in a toilet stall. So why don't they do it? It is not because Zionists control the mass media. Sure, pro-Zionists do control the mass media, but billionaires could create their own anti-Zionist media if they wanted to. After all, Rupert Murdoch owns a large enough media network to do the job and at the time of his divorce in 1998 his personal fortune was only 3.3 billion pounds (less than $5 billion I imagine.)
The American ruling class chooses not to oppose the Israel Lobby because they have no reason to. The Israel Lobby is an instrument ("useful idiots" as Juan Cole puts it) of the American ruling class. The Lobby spreads the lies that the pro-Israel foreign policy requires, and it keeps politicians in line who might otherwise stray from the path. The Lobby is powerful because it does the bidding of the powerful.
Very different organizing strategies against Zionism are appropriate, depending on whether one agrees with "The Lobby Makes Them Do It" view of James Petras or the view I advocate. If Petras is correct, then the natural strategy to turn U.S. foreign policy around would be to side with the likes of Big Oil against the Israel Lobby. But since Big Oil and the Israel Lobby are in fact on the same team, this is a ridiculous strategy. Instead, the strategy that makes sense is to mobilize the general public against the American ruling class around not only opposition to Israeli ethnic cleansing but also opposition to the entire anti-democratic, anti-equality agenda of the ruling class. This is a revolutionary pro-working class strategy, and only it can win.
John Spritzler is the author of The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda In World War II, and a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
And a good example of how anti-Semitism is combined with Zionism is the following article. By Dana Milbank,
On Friday, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.8 percent, as businesses added jobs for the 13th straight month. On Wednesday, Fox News announced that it was ending Glenn Beck’s daily cable-TV show. These are not unrelated events.
When Beck’s show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck’s angry broadcasts about the nation’s imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night — and tens of thousands answering his call to rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
But as the recession began to ease, Beck’s apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience began to drift away. Beck responded with a doubling-down that ultimately brought about his demise on Fox.
He pushed further into dark conspiracies, urging his viewers to hoard food in their homes and to buy freeze-dried meals for sustenance when civilization breaks down. He spun a conspiracy theory in which the American left was in cahoots with an emerging caliphate in the Middle East. And, most ominously, he began to traffic regularly in anti-Semitic themes.
This vile turn for Beck reached its logical extreme two weeks ago, when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what is happening in our world today.”
Griffin’s Web site dabbles in a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including his view that “present-day political Zionists are promoting the New World Order.”
A month earlier, Beck, on his radio program, had described Reform rabbis as “generally political in nature,” adding: “It’s almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way.”
A few months before that, he had attacked the Jewish billionaire George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a “puppet master” and read descriptions of him as an “unscrupulous profiteer” who “sucks the blood from people.” Beck falsely called Soros “a collaborator” with Nazis who “saw people into the gas chambers.”
Fox deserves credit for finally putting an end to this. Its joint statement with Beck’s production company, claiming that they will “work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects,” is almost certainly window-dressing; you can be confident Fox won’t have Beck reopening what his Fox News colleague Shepard Smith dubbed the “fear chamber.”
In banishing Beck, about whom I wrote a critical book last year, Fox has made an important distinction: It’s one thing to promote partisan journalism, but it’s entirely different to engage in race baiting and fringe conspiracy claims. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity may have their excesses, but their mainstream conservatism is in an entirely different category from Beck.
Fox has rightly, if belatedly, declared that there is no place for Beck’s messages on its airwaves, and Beck will return to the fringes, where such ideas have always existed. Because his end-of-the-world themes will no longer be broadcast by a mainstream outlet, there will be less of a chance for him to inspire off-balance characters to violence.
There are, happily, signs that the influences that undermined Beck are doing the same to other purveyors of fear. The March Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Sarah Palin’s favorability rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents had dropped to 58 percent from 70 percent in October and 88 percent in 2008. Her negative ratings among Republicans are higher than those of other prospective Republican presidential candidates.
In another indication of abating anger, a CNN poll released last week found that the percentage of the public viewing the Tea Party unfavorably had increased to 47 percent, from 26 percent in January 2010. Thirty-two percent have a favorable view.
Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive “the money changers from the temple” became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced.
It is a sign of the nation’s health and resilience that Beck, after 27 months at Fox, is meeting a similar end.
danamilbank@washpost.com
But that is anathema to those who have little or nothing to say about the quisling Arab ruling class. Because of course the Arab countries are marked by unpopular rulers (despite the Arab spring) who preside over a hungry and discontented mass. The interests of these rulers lie with their countries exploiters not its people. That is how we have a powerful Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, direct descendant of the founder of the Saudi monarchy, and in control of the Kingdom Holding Company, is good friends of Rupert Murddoch and second largest shareholder in News International.
However, although Murdoch was forced to drop Glenn Beck because of his anti-Semitism, that didn't stop Beck getting a hero's welcome from Israel's Parliament - the Knesset. See Glenn Beck Israel Visit Warmly Received By Parliament
Tony Greenstein
The Israel Lobby's Power Comes from The American Ruling Class
John Spritzler
Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al-Saud, the second biggest shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch, recently gave an interview, on his yacht, to the BBC flagship programme Newsnight.The Saudi prince declared himself "a good friend" of Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch (probably the next executive to be charged by the police in the scandal).
He defended both men briskly, but in doing so drew attention to the fact that he is the second biggest shareholder in the Murdoch empire, and that the Murdochs were major shareholders in his own Rotana media empire in the Middle East. An unholy alliance, surely? Mr Murdoch is the co-owner, with Prince Walid, of Fox News - one of the most virulently anti-Muslim television stations in the world. The station gives a megaphone to the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin.
In the US, Fox's role was to throw gallons of petrol on the flames of Islamophobia which lead it to the burning of the Holy Quran by vigilantes. This fact does not fit into a popular (but wrong) paradigm that says the pro-Israel policy of the United States harms the U.S. ‘national interest’ by angering the oil-rich Arab rulers and making it hard for Big Oil to do business with them. Therefore, according to this “logic,” the only reason the U.S. has a pro-Israel foreign policy is because the Israel Lobby forces Big Oil and the rest of the American plutocracy to be pro-Israel, even though it is against their interest.
But here we see that a Saudi prince is great pals with the most pro-Israel media mogul in the world, and a co-owner with him of Fox News, the #1 pro-Israel network in the U.S.
The paradigm that this fact DOES fit into is the one that I describe in The Israel Lobby's Power Comes From the American Ruling Class .
by John Spritzler
February 23, 2009 [newdemocracyworld.org]
Among those who, like myself, oppose Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, there is an important debate about a fundamental question. The debate is about how to explain the fact that the American government supports Israel virtually unconditionally with more economic, military and diplomatic aid than it gives to any other country. One commonly believed explanation is that the "Israel Lobby"--consisting of organizations like AIPAC and a host of other pro-Israel Jewish organizations in the United States--has hijacked U.S. foreign policy by using its wealth and control of the mass media to buy or intimidate Congressmen. According to this view, the American government's pro-Israel foreign policy is harmful to the interests of the non-Jewish American corporate upper class, and were it not for the power of the Israel Lobby American foreign policy, reflecting as it does the interests of the American upper class, would not be as pro-Israel as it is today. I call this the "The Lobby Makes Them Do It" view. I think it is just plain factually wrong.
The alternative view that I hold is that the Israel Lobby's power comes from the (mostly non-Jewish) American ruling class. The leading advocate of the "The Lobby Makes Them Do It" view is James Petras. Petras asserts that the Israel Lobby prevailed over America's Big Oil elite to get the U.S. to invade Iraq for the benefit of Israel:
"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...Just on the facts, Petras is wrong. Far from opposing the Israel Lobby, Big Oil uses that lobby. As Juan Cole writes:
"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. "
"Neoconservative Jews in the US like Richard Perle, Frederick Kagan and Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute who vocally support the Iraq War (and have gotten rich off it) are a minority of a minority, and even are at odds with the Israeli security establishment! Moreover, the American Enterprise Institute, which crafted the Iraq War, gets funding from Exxon Mobil, and last I checked it was run by white Protestants. The vice chair of AEI is Lee Raymond, former CEO of Exxon Mobil and surely Dick Cheney's old golf partner in the Dallas years. That is, the Kagans and the Rubins, who identify with the Revisionist Zionist movement on the Israeli Right, are useful idiots for Big Oil, not movers and shakers in their own right."The American corporate upper class, the American ruling class, is pro-Israel because they (or at least their sophisticated advisors, like Henry Kissinger, Condoleeza Rice, General James Jones, etc.) know that Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians performs a strategically crucial service for the American ruling class. The ethnic cleansing polarizes the Middle East along non-class lines, fomenting an ethnic war pitting Jews against non-Jews. The American ruling class uses this ethnic war to strengthen its domestic control over ordinary Americans, and to strengthen the control of Middle Eastern ruling elites (kings, mullahs, dictators) over ordinary people in their respective nations. These are the most important strategic objectives of the American ruling class: social control to prevent the spread of pro-democratic, pro-working class, pro-solidarity movements from overthrowing elite rule anywhere in the world.
Regarding domestic control of the American population, the key strategy of elite social control has for many decades been to rely on Orwellian wars of social control. The particular "foreign enemy" has changed over time, from Teddy Roosevelt's Spain to Woodrow Wilson's "Huns" to FDR's Fascists to Truman's Communists to Bush's and Obama's Terrorists.
By ensuring that the American mass media refrain from telling Americans the true reason (Israel's ethnic cleansing) why Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims take up arms against Israel, the American ruling class ensures that Americans will believe the lie that Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims are hateful, irrational, anti-semitic terrorists who kill decent Israelis "just like us" and would likewise kill Americans if we fail to obey our upper class rulers who protect us from terrorism. Similarly, the oil-rich Middle East ruling classes, in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, use their people's anger at Israel to strengthen their power over them, as I discuss in some detail in How Israel Helps Saudi Arabia’s Rulers Control their Working Class and How Israel Helps the Islamic Republic of Iran Control the Iranian Working Class.
James Petras is naive to think that Big Oil's interests are prejudiced by the pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy. If the Saudi royal family, for example, were really opposed to U.S. support for Israel, then it would use its vast wealth to support pro-Palestinian forces inside the United States, to counter the Israel Lobby; but it doesn't. By the same token, if any members of the American mostly non-Jewish ruling class, with billions of dollars to throw around (Buffet gave away $40 billion alone!), wanted to tell Americans the truth about Zionism (the movement to create and protect a Jewish state), they could do so. They could tell Americans how Zionism is all about ethnic cleansing, how Albert Einstein (whom the Israeli government asked to be the President of Israel, and declined) always opposed the Jewish state idea because it was morally wrong, and how the Zionists betrayed European Jews during World War II by opposing rescue efforts (so there would be more dead Jews to give them greater standing at the post-war negotiations over who would "get" Palestine)--they could do so; but they don't.
If they did, they could turn the American public against Zionism and against the Israel Lobby as quickly as they turn it against a politician soliciting sex in a toilet stall. So why don't they do it? It is not because Zionists control the mass media. Sure, pro-Zionists do control the mass media, but billionaires could create their own anti-Zionist media if they wanted to. After all, Rupert Murdoch owns a large enough media network to do the job and at the time of his divorce in 1998 his personal fortune was only 3.3 billion pounds (less than $5 billion I imagine.)
The American ruling class chooses not to oppose the Israel Lobby because they have no reason to. The Israel Lobby is an instrument ("useful idiots" as Juan Cole puts it) of the American ruling class. The Lobby spreads the lies that the pro-Israel foreign policy requires, and it keeps politicians in line who might otherwise stray from the path. The Lobby is powerful because it does the bidding of the powerful.
Very different organizing strategies against Zionism are appropriate, depending on whether one agrees with "The Lobby Makes Them Do It" view of James Petras or the view I advocate. If Petras is correct, then the natural strategy to turn U.S. foreign policy around would be to side with the likes of Big Oil against the Israel Lobby. But since Big Oil and the Israel Lobby are in fact on the same team, this is a ridiculous strategy. Instead, the strategy that makes sense is to mobilize the general public against the American ruling class around not only opposition to Israeli ethnic cleansing but also opposition to the entire anti-democratic, anti-equality agenda of the ruling class. This is a revolutionary pro-working class strategy, and only it can win.
John Spritzler is the author of The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda In World War II, and a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
And a good example of how anti-Semitism is combined with Zionism is the following article. By Dana Milbank,
On Friday, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.8 percent, as businesses added jobs for the 13th straight month. On Wednesday, Fox News announced that it was ending Glenn Beck’s daily cable-TV show. These are not unrelated events.
When Beck’s show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck’s angry broadcasts about the nation’s imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night — and tens of thousands answering his call to rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
But as the recession began to ease, Beck’s apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience began to drift away. Beck responded with a doubling-down that ultimately brought about his demise on Fox.
He pushed further into dark conspiracies, urging his viewers to hoard food in their homes and to buy freeze-dried meals for sustenance when civilization breaks down. He spun a conspiracy theory in which the American left was in cahoots with an emerging caliphate in the Middle East. And, most ominously, he began to traffic regularly in anti-Semitic themes.
This vile turn for Beck reached its logical extreme two weeks ago, when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what is happening in our world today.”
Griffin’s Web site dabbles in a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including his view that “present-day political Zionists are promoting the New World Order.”
A month earlier, Beck, on his radio program, had described Reform rabbis as “generally political in nature,” adding: “It’s almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way.”
A few months before that, he had attacked the Jewish billionaire George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a “puppet master” and read descriptions of him as an “unscrupulous profiteer” who “sucks the blood from people.” Beck falsely called Soros “a collaborator” with Nazis who “saw people into the gas chambers.”
Fox deserves credit for finally putting an end to this. Its joint statement with Beck’s production company, claiming that they will “work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects,” is almost certainly window-dressing; you can be confident Fox won’t have Beck reopening what his Fox News colleague Shepard Smith dubbed the “fear chamber.”
In banishing Beck, about whom I wrote a critical book last year, Fox has made an important distinction: It’s one thing to promote partisan journalism, but it’s entirely different to engage in race baiting and fringe conspiracy claims. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity may have their excesses, but their mainstream conservatism is in an entirely different category from Beck.
Fox has rightly, if belatedly, declared that there is no place for Beck’s messages on its airwaves, and Beck will return to the fringes, where such ideas have always existed. Because his end-of-the-world themes will no longer be broadcast by a mainstream outlet, there will be less of a chance for him to inspire off-balance characters to violence.
There are, happily, signs that the influences that undermined Beck are doing the same to other purveyors of fear. The March Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Sarah Palin’s favorability rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents had dropped to 58 percent from 70 percent in October and 88 percent in 2008. Her negative ratings among Republicans are higher than those of other prospective Republican presidential candidates.
In another indication of abating anger, a CNN poll released last week found that the percentage of the public viewing the Tea Party unfavorably had increased to 47 percent, from 26 percent in January 2010. Thirty-two percent have a favorable view.
Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive “the money changers from the temple” became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced.
It is a sign of the nation’s health and resilience that Beck, after 27 months at Fox, is meeting a similar end.
danamilbank@washpost.com
the power of the pro-Israel/ Jewish lobby in the USA is for all to see whatever the explanations for it . (see below)
ReplyDeleteI just wonder how Spritzer would count for the immense power of the pro-Israel lobby in the EU and Britain where his theory of converging interests of the power-holding ruling -class elite (US) , and the oil lobby hardly could explain the unaccountable rising power, if not control, of the pro-Israel/Jewish lobby - or is all just a bad dream?
"The United States has backed Israel no matter what it did because AIPAC and the other groups in the lobby have enormous influence inside the Beltway and use that political muscle to defend Israel whenever its government's policies clash with America's interests. But the problem they face now is that almost everyone can see what they are doing and people like Friedman understand that the policies the lobby is promoting are a disaster for the United States and Israel alike. At this point, only hardcore individuals and groups in the lobby and opportunistic fellow-travelers try to kick up dust by blaming our failed Middle East policy on "public opinion" or on the supposed influence of Christian evangelicals. Right: like they were the ones who told Obama to stop pressing Netanyahu if he wanted to get his health care bill passed, and they were the ones holding one-sided Congressional hearings and threatening to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if it goes to the UN to get statehood.
The elephant has been in the room for a long time, but now it has the spotlights.....
Stephen walt 18 september 2011.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/category/one_time_tags/obama_and_the_israel_lobby