supermarok
26-05-2006, 23:56
The Challenge of Jewish-Zionist Power in an Era of Global Struggle An address by Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, delivered at an IHR meeting in New York City on July 16, 2005. (A report on the meeting is posted at http://www.ihr.org/news/071605NYIHRMeeting.html) During World War II, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, coined the term “The American Century” to refer to the twentieth century. And in the years since then the term has been used many times. In the decades since the end of World War II, the United States has indeed been the world’s foremost military, economic and financial power, and the most important cultural factor. But that title is not the only one that’s been given to that century. A few months ago Princeton University Press issued a remarkable book by a Jewish scholar, Yuri Slezkine, that explains why the Twentieth Century is, or has been, the century of preeminent Jewish influence and power. In fact, the book is entitled The Jewish Century. In that spirit, the prominent French Jewish writer Alain Finkielkraut was moved to write in 1998, in an essay published in the prestigious Paris daily Le Monde: “Ah, how sweet it is to be Jewish at the end of this 20th century! We are no longer History’s accused, but its darlings. The spirit of the times loves, honors, and defends us, watches over our interests; it even needs our imprimatur. Journalists draw up ruthless indict*ments against all that Europe still has in the way of Nazi collaborators or those nostalgic for the Nazi era. Churches repent, states do penance...” / 1 But that was then, and this is now. There are good reasons to believe that both American power and Jewish power have crested. The twentieth century – what has been called “the American Century” and “the Jewish century” – is passing, both literally and figuratively, into history. Although the US is still the world’s most important military and economic factor, its relative military and economic power in the world has been declining over the past 20-30 years, and will continue to decline in the years ahead. In the Middle East, Israel is still the foremost military power in the region. It is the only state in the area with a nuclear arsenal, for example. All the same, Israel's stature in the world, and – more generally – Jewish-Zionist power, are declining from the high point of the 1980s and 1990s. Tony Judt, another Jewish writer, put it well in an essay published last year in The Nation. He wrote: / 2 "Following the invasion of Lebanon, and with gathering inten*sity since the first intifada of the late 1980s, the public impression of Israel has steadily darkened. Today it presents a ghastly image: a place where sneering 18-year-olds with M-16s taunt helpless old men ("security measures"); where bull*dozers regularly flatten whole apartment blocks ("rooting out terrorists"); where helicopters fire rockets into residential streets ("targeted killings"); where subsidized settlers frolic in grass-fringed swimming pools, oblivious of Arab children a few meters away who fester and rot in the worst slums on the planet; and where retired generals and Cabinet ministers speak openly of bottling up the Palestinians "like drugged roaches in a bottle" (former Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan) and cleansing the land of its Arab cancer (former Housing Minister Effi Eitam). " Israel is utterly dependent on the United States for money, arms and diplomatic support. One or two states share common enemies with Israel; a handful of countries buy its weapons; a few others are its de facto accomplices in ignoring inter*national treaties and secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons. But outside Washington, Israel has no friends -- at the United Nations it cannot even count on the support of America's staunchest allies. Despite the political and diplomatic in*competence of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]... ; despite the manifest shortcomings of the Arab world at large... ; despite Israel's own sophisticated efforts to publicize its case, the Jewish state today is widely regarded as a -- the -- lead*ing threat to world peace. After thirty-seven years of mili*tary occupation, Israel has gained nothing in security. It has lost everything in domestic civility and international re*spectability, and it has forfeited the moral high ground for*ever." What is emerging is a new bi-polar world, with the United States and Israel on one side, and the rest of the world on the other. This new alignment of forces, this shift in power relationships in the world, is strikingly reflected in the United Nations, where, time and time again, votes on issues in both the General As*sembly and the Security Council pit the United States and Israel on one side, and virtually the entire rest of the world on the other. On October 21, 2003, for example, there was a vote in the UN General Assembly on a resolution condemning Israel’s so-called “security barrier,” a grotesque thing, parts of it larger and more formidable than the Berlin Wall, that Israel has built on occupied Palestinian territory. Supporting the resolution were 144 countries, representing nearly the entire world’s population. Twelve countries abstained. Just four countries opposed the resolution. They were: Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia. The latter two member states, small island countries in the Pacific ocean with a combined population of 180,000, are utterly dependent on the US. And on December 9, 2003, the members of the UN General Assem*bly considered a resolution re-affirming the principle of Pal*estinian sovereignty. It received the backing of 142 states, including all the nations of Europe and South America. In this case as well, just four countries voted against the resolution: Israel, the US, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia. This reminds me of a story. A senior citizen whose brain didn’t work as well or as quickly as it once did, was driving on the freeway when his cell phone rang. He answered it, and heard his wife urgently warning him, “Charles, I just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on the freeway. Please be careful!" Charles immediately replied: “Honey, it's not just one car. It's hundreds of them!" Well, like Charles, President Bush and Israeli premier Aerial Sharon insist that everyone else is recklessly going the wrong way. And as the United States and Israel increasingly regard the rest of the world as "out of step," most of humanity views the US and Israel with mounting distrust, hostility and fear. United States support for Israel did not come about because Americans are markedly more intelligent, humane or enlightened than, say, Norwegians, Japanese or Irish. No, the US-Israel alliance is, rather, a consequence, a result, of the Jewish-Zionist grip on American political and cultural life. Awareness of this fact is growing everyone. And along with that, ever more people understand the crucial factor behind the US invasion of Iraq was concern for Israel and its interests. Jewish-Zionist plans to overthrow the Iraqi regime by force were already in place well before George W. Bush became president. A group – a cabal -- of high-level, pro-Israel "neoconservative" Jews in the Bush administration -- including Paul Wolfowitz, Dep*uty Secretary of Defense; Richard Perle of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; David Wurmser in the State Department; and Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy – played a decisive role in prodding the United States into war in Iraq. / 3 This is so widely understood by Washington insiders that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved last year to declare that Iraq was invaded, as he put it, to “secure Israel,” and that “everybody” – his word -- knows it. Referring to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to openly acknowledge this real*ity, Hollings said that “nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on.” With few exceptions, members of Congress uncritically support Israel and its policies due to what Hollings called, “the pressures that we get politically.”