topic by
eal watcher
7/10/2002 (8:02) |
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A strange kind of freedom
We all know about the perils of Islamic
fanaticism. But, says Robert Fisk, the biggest
threat to liberty in the US may come from
other kinds of fundamentalism: Jewish and
Christian
09 July 2002
Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian
audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host of
KPFA Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading
some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in
America. Each one left the people in the church – Muslims, Jews,
Christians – in a state of shock. 'You
mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the
wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish
shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will
cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!'
Bernstein's sin was to have covered the story of Israel's invasion of
Jenin in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated the
killings that took place there – including Phil Reeves and Justin Huggler
of The Independent – for his Flashpoint programme. Bernstein's
grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of international prominence
but neither his family history nor his origins spared him. 'Read this and
weep, you mother-fucker self-hating Jew boy!!!' another e-mail told
Bernstein. 'God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and
slash your kids' throats.' Yet another: 'I hope that you, Barbara Lubin
and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop
haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide
bombers in Israel.' Lubin is also Jewish, the executive director of the
Middle East Children's Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but now
one of Israel's fiercest critics. Her e-mails are even worse.
Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how brave this
small but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first to
acknowledge that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative
Christian fundamentalists have in effect censored all free discussion of
Israel and the Middle East out of the public domain in the US. 'Everyone
else is terrified,' Bernstein says. 'The only ones who begin to open their
mouths are the Jews in this country. You know, as a kid, I sent money to
plant trees in Israel. But now we are horrified by a government
representing a country that we grew up loving and cherishing. Israel's
defenders have a special vengeance for Jews who don't fall in line
behind Sharon's scorched-earth policy because they give the lie to the
charge that Israel's critics are simply anti-Semite.'
Adam Shapiro is among those who have paid a price for their beliefs.
He is a Jew engaged to an American-born Palestinian, a volunteer with
the International Solidarity Movement who was trapped in Yasser
Arafat's headquarters in the spring while administering medical aid.
After telling CNN that the Sharon government was acting like 'terrorists'
while receiving $3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and his family
were savaged in the New York Post. The paper slandered Shapiro as
the 'Jewish Taliban' and demeaned his family as 'traitors'. Israeli
supporters publicised his family's address and his parents were forced
to flee their Brooklyn home and seek police protection. Shapiro's father,
a New York public high-school teacher and a part-time Yeshiva (Jewish
day school) teacher, was fired from his job. His brother receives regular
death threats.
Israel's supporters have no qualms about their alliance with the
Christian right. Indeed, the fundamentalists can campaign on their own
in Israel's favour, as I discovered for myself at Stanford recently when I
was about to give a lecture on the media and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, part of a series of talks arranged largely by Jewish Americans. A
right-wing Christian 'Free Republic' outfit posted my name on its
website, and described me as a 'PLO butt-kisser' and asked its
supporters to 'freep' my lecture. A few demonstrators turned up outside
the First United Methodist Church in Sacramento where I was to speak,
waving American and Israeli flags. 'Jew haters!' they screamed at the
organisers, a dark irony since these were non-Jews shrieking their
abuse at Jews.
They were also handing out crudely printed flyers. 'Nothing to worry
about, Bob,' one of my Jewish hosts remarked. 'They can't even spell
your name right.' True. But also false. 'Stop the Lies!' the leaflet read.
'There was no massacre in Jenin. Fiske [sic] is paid big bucks to spin
[lie] for the Arabs...' But the real lie was in that last sentence. I never take
any payment for lectures – so that no one can ever claim that I'm paid to
give the views of others. But the truth didn't matter to these people. Nor
did the content of my talk – which began, by chance, with the words
'There was no massacre' – in which I described Arafat as a 'corrupt,
vain little despot' and suicide bombings as 'a fearful, evil weapon'.
None of this was relevant. The aim was to shut me up.
Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply: 'Any US journalist, columnist,
editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy
member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the
brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite.' In
fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks than pro-Israeli
groups initiated an extraordinary campaign against some of the most
pro-Israeli newspapers in America, all claiming that The New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle
were biased in their coverage of the Middle-East conflict. Just how The
New York Times – which boasts William Safire and Charles
Krauthammer, those giants of pro-Israeli bias, among its writers –
could be anti-Israeli is difficult to see, although it is just possible that,
amid its reports on Israel's destruction in the West Bank and Gaza,
some mildly critical comments found their way into print. The New York
Times, for example, did report that Israeli soldiers used civilians as
human shields – though only in the very last paragraph of a dispatch
from Jenin.
None the less, the campaign of boycotts and e-mails got under way.
More than 1,000 readers suspended their subscriptions to the Los
Angeles Times, while a blizzard of e-mails told pro-Israeli readers to
cancel their subscription to The New York Times for a day. On the East
Coast, at least one local radio station has lost $1m from a Jewish
philanthropist while other stations attempting to cover the Middle East
with some degree of fairness are said to have lost even more. When the
San Francisco Chronicle published a four-page guide to the conflict, its
editors had to meet a 14-member delegation of local Jewish groups to
discuss their grievances.
According to Michael Futterman, who chairs the Middle East strategy
committee of 80 Bay Area synagogues, Jewish anger hit 'boiling point'
when the Chronicle failed to cover a pro-Israeli rally in San Francisco.
Needless to say, the Chronicle's 'Readers' Representative', Dick
Rogers, published a grovelling, self-flagellating apology. 'The paper
didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally,' he wrote. 'This wasn't fair and
balanced coverage.' Another objection came from a Jewish reader who
objected to the word 'terror' being placed within inverted commas in a
Chronicle headline that read 'Sharon says 'terror' justifies assault'.
The reader's point? The Chronicle's reporting 'harmonises well with
Palestinian propaganda, which tries to divert attention from the terrorist
campaign against Israel (which enjoys almost unanimous support
among Palestinians, all the way from Yasser Arafat to the 10-year-old
who dreams of blowing himself up one day) and instead describes
Israel's military moves as groundless, evil bullying tactics.'
And so it goes on. On a radio show with me in Berkeley, the
Chronicle's foreign editor, Andrew Ross, tried to laugh off the influence
of the pro-Israeli lobby – 'the famous lobby', he called it with that
deference that is half way between acknowledgement and fear – but the
Israeli Consul General Yossi Amrani had no hesitation in campaigning
against the Chronicle, describing a paper largely docile in its reporting
of the Middle East as 'a professionally and politically biased,
pro-Palestinian newspaper'.
The Chronicle's four-page pull-out on the Middle East was, in fact, a
soft sell. Its headline – 'The Current Strife Between The Israelis And
The Palestinians Is A Battle For Control Of Land' – missed the obvious
point: that one of the two groups that were 'battling for control of the
land' – the Palestinians – had been occupied by Israel for 35 years.
The most astonishing – and least covered – story is in fact the alliance
of Israeli lobbyists and Christian Zionist fundamentalists, a coalition
that began in 1978 with the publication of a Likud plan to encourage
fundamentalist churches to give their support to Israel. By 1980, there
was an 'International Christian Embassy' in Jerusalem; and in 1985, a
Christian Zionist lobby emerged at a 'National Prayer Breakfast for
Israel' whose principal speaker was Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to
become Israeli prime minister. 'A sense of history, poetry and morality
imbued the Christian Zionists who, more than a century ago, began to
write, plan and organise for Israel's restoration,' Netanyahu told his
audience. The so-called National Unity Coalition for Israel became a
lobbying arm of Christian Zionism with contacts in Congress and
neo-conservative think-tanks in Washington.
In May this year, the Israeli embassy in Washington, no less, arranged a
prayer breakfast for Christian Zionists. Present were Alonzo Short, a
member of the board of 'Promise Keepers', and Michael Little who is
president of the 'Christian Broadcasting Network'. Event hosts were
listed as including those dour old Christian conservatives Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson, who once financed a rogue television station in
southern Lebanon which threatened Muslim villagers and broadcast
tirades by Major Saad Haddad, Israel's stooge militia leader in
Lebanon. In Tennessee, Jewish officials invited hundreds of Christians
to join Jewish crowds at a pro-Israel solidarity rally in Memphis.
On the face of it, this coalition seems natural. The Jewish
Anti-Defamation League felt able to run an ad that included an article by
a former Christian coalition executive director Ralph Reed, headlined
'We People of Faith Stand Firmly With Israel'. Christians, Reed claimed,
supported Israel because of 'their humanitarian impulse to help and
protect Jews, a shared strategic interest in democracy in the Middle
East and a spiritual connection to Israel'.
But, of course, a fundamental problem – fundamental in every sense of
the word – lies behind this strange partnership. As Uri Avnery, the
leader of Gush Shalom, the most courageous Israeli peace group,
pointed out in a typically ferocious essay last month, there is a darker
side to the alliance. 'According to its [Christian Zionist] theological
beliefs, the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish
state on all its territory' – an idea that would obviously appeal to Ariel
Sharon – 'so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible.'
But here comes the bad bit. As Avnery says, 'the evangelists don't like to
dwell openly on what comes next: before the coming [of the Messiah],
the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who don't will perish in a
gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is basically an
anti-Semitic teaching, but who cares, so long as they support Israel?'
The power of the Israeli lobby in the United States is debated far more
freely in the Israeli press than in American newspapers or on US tele-
vision. There is, of course, a fine and dangerous line between justified
investigation – and condemnation – of the lobby's power, and the racist
Arab claim that a small cabal of Zionists run the world. Those in
America who share the latter view include a deeply unpleasant
organisation just along the coast from San Francisco at Newport Beach
known as the 'Institute for Historical Research'. These are the
Holocaust deniers whose annual conference last month included a
lecture on 'death sentences imposed by German authorities against
German soldiers... for killing or even mistreating Jews'. Too much of
this and you'd have to join the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
– AIPAC – to restore your sanity. But the Israeli lobby is powerful. In fact,
its influence over the US Congress and Senate calls into question the
degree to which the American legislature has been corrupted by lobby
groups. It is to an Israeli voice – Avnery again – that Americans have to
turn to hear just how mighty the lobby has become. 'Its electoral and
financial power casts a long shadow over both houses of the
Congress,' Avnery writes. 'Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen
were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the
directives of the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If the AIPAC were to
table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators
and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby frightens the
media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel.'
Avnery could have looked no further than the Democratic primary in
Alabama last month for proof of his assertion. Earl Hilliard, the five-term
incumbent, had committed the one mortal sin of any American
politician: he had expressed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians.
He had also visited Libya several years ago. Hilliard's opponent, Artur
Davis, turned into an outspoken supporter of Israel and raised large
amounts of money from the Jewish community, both in Alabama and
nationwide. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that among the
names of the first list of contributors to Davis's campaign funds were
'10 Cohens from New York and New Jersey, but before one gets to the
Cohens, there were Abrams, Ackerman, Adler, Amir, Asher, Baruch,
Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman, Bernstein and Blumenthal. All from
the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles. It's highly unlikely any of
them have ever visited Alabama...' The Jewish newspaper Forward –
essential reading for any serious understanding of the American
Jewish community – quoted a Jewish political activist following the race:
'Hilliard has been a problem in his votes and with guys like that, when
there's any conceivable primary challenge, you take your shot.' Hilliard,
of course, lost to Davis, whose campaign funds reached $781,000.
The AIPAC concentrates on Congress while the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations (CPMAJO), made
up of the heads of 51 Jewish organisations, concentrates on the
executive branch of the US government. Every congressman knows the
names of those critics of Israel who have been undone by the lobby.
Take Senator J William Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee detailed how five million tax-deductable
dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent to Israel and then
recycled back to the US for distribution to organisations seeking to
influence public opinion in favour of Israel; this cost him the chance of
being Secretary of State. He was defeated in the 1974 Democratic
primary after pro-Israeli money poured into the campaign funds of his
rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, following a statement by the AIPAC that
Fulbright was 'consistently unkind to Israel and our supporters in this
country'. Paul Findley, who spent 22 years as a Republican
congressman from Illinois, found his political career destroyed after he
had campaigned against the Israeli lobby – although, ironically, his
book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out was nine weeks on The
Washington Post bestseller list, suggesting that quite a number of
Americans want to know why their congressmen are so pro-Israeli.
Just two months ago, the US House of Representatives voted 352 to 21
to express its unqualified support for Israel. The Senate voted 94 to two
for the same motion. Even as they voted, Ariel Sharon's army was
continuing its destructive invasion of the West Bank. 'I do not recall any
member of Congress asking me if I was in favour of patting Israel on
the back...' James Abu Rizk, an Arab-American of Lebanese origin, told
the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee afterwards. 'No one
else, no average American, has been asked either. But that is the state
of American politics today... The votes and bows have nothing to do with
the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything to do with the money
that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My
estimate is that $6bn flows from the American Treasury to Israel each
year.' Within days, 42 US governors turned up in Sacramento to sign
declarations supporting Israel. California governor Gray Davis and New
York governor George Pataki – California has the largest Jewish
population of any state except New York – arranged the meeting.
Sometimes the support of Israel's loyalists in Congress turns into farce.
Tom Delay – reacting to CNN founder Ted Turner's criticism of Israel –
went so far out of his way to justify Israeli occupation of the West Bank
that he blurted out on MSNBC television that the Palestinians 'should
become citizens' of Israel, an idea unlikely to commend itself to his
friend Ariel Sharon. Texas Republican Richard Armey went the other
way. 'I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I happen to
believe the Palestinians should leave... to have those people who have
been aggressors against Israel retired to some other area.' Do the
people of Texas know that their representative is supporting 'ethnic
cleansing' in the Middle East? Or are they silent because they prefer not
to speak out?
Censorship takes many forms. When Ishai Sagi and Ram
Rahat-Goodman, two Israeli reserve soldiers who refused to serve in
the West Bank or Gaza, were scheduled to debate their decision at
Sacramento's Congregation B'nai Israel in May, their appearance was
cancelled. Steve Meinreith, who is chairman of the Israel Affairs
Committee at B'nai Israel, remarked bleakly that 'intimidation on the
part of certain sectors of the community has deprived the entire
community of hearing a point of view that is being widely debated in
Israel. Some people feel it's too dangerous...'
Does President Bush? His long-awaited Middle-East speech was
Israeli policy from start to finish. A group of Jewish leaders, including
Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz – who said recently that the idea of
executing the families of Palestinian suicide bombers was a legitimate
if flawed attempt at finding a balance between preventing terrorism and
preserving democracy – and the AIPAC and CPMAJO heads all sent
clear word to the President that no pressure should be put on Israel.
Wiesel – whose courage permeates his books on the Holocaust but
who lamentably failed to condemn the massacre of Palestinian
refugees in Beirut in 1982 at the hands of Israel's Lebanese allies, said
he felt 'sadness', but his sadness was 'with Israel, not against Israel'
because 'after all the Israeli soldiers did not kill' – took out a full page in
The New York Times. In this, he urged Bush to 'please remember that
Ariel Sharon, a military man who knows the ugly face of war better than
anyone, is ready to make 'painful sacrifices' to end the conflict.' Sharon
was held 'personally responsible' for the massacre by Israel's own
commission of inquiry – but there was no mention of that from Wiesel,
who told reporters in May that he would like to revoke Arafat's Nobel
prize.
President Bush was not going to oppose these pressures. His father
may well have lost his re-election because he dared to tell Israel that it
must make peace with the Arabs. Bush is not going to make the same
mistake – nor does brother Jeb want to lose his forthcoming
governorship election. Thus Sharon's delight at the Bush speech, and it
was left to a lonely and brave voice – Mitchell Plitnick of the Jewish Voice
for Peace – to state that 'few speeches could be considered to be as
destructive as that of the American President... Few things are as
blinding as unbridled arrogance.'
Or as vicious as the messages that still pour in to Dennis Bernstein
and Barbara Lubin, whose Middle East Children's Alliance,
co-ordinating with Israeli peace groups, is trying to raise money to
rebuild the Jenin refugee camp. 'I got a call the other day at 5am,'
Bernstein told me. 'This guy says to me: 'You got a lot of nerve going
and eating at that Jewish deli.' What comes after that?' Before I left San
Francisco, Lubin showed me her latest e-mails. 'Dear Cunt,' one of
them begins, 'When we want your opinion you fucking Nazi cunt, we will
have one of your Palestinian buddies fuck it [sic] of you. I hope that in
your next trip to the occupied territories you are blown to bits by one of
your Palestinian buddies [sic] bombs.' Another, equally obscene, adds
that 'you should be ashamed of yourself, a so-called Jewish woman
advocating the destruction of Israel'.
Less crude language, of course, greeted President Bush's speech. Pat
Robertson thought the Bush address 'brilliant'. Senator Charles
Schumer, a totally loyal pro-Israeli Democrat from New York, said that
'clearly, on the politics, this is going to please supporters of Israel as
well as the Christian coalition types'. He could say that again. For who
could be more Christian than President George W Bush?
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