The Jewish Threat — real or imaginary?

trying to learn the truth

Mark Bruzonsky,^[1] Joe Bageant,^[2] Ray McGovern ^[3]

by george.salzman@umb.edu

March 25 - April 9, 2005

this page is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/Discus/2005-04-09.rtf

I’ve been working on what I intended to be my next rant, tentatively titled “The Pageantry of Joe Bageantry”, but I’m putting that aside for the moment because of the urgency of trying to prevent a threatening attack against Iran — over which ominous war clouds are forming, or more accurately, being stirred up.

Joe Bageant’s recent essay, “Drink, Pray, Fuck, Fight: How the Scots-Irish screwed up America”,^[4] was posted on a number of internet sites, as were many of his essays during the past year. One of the sites that I think has them all, The Smirking Chimp,^[5] invites readers to post their reactions on the site immediately following an article. Joe got taken to task by some of his readers for framing his essay in terms, as they saw it, of the influence of Scots-Irish blood-lines, which he said had penetrated a large fraction (almost a third) of the American population. He wrote,

... look back 450 years to a group of Celtic cattle thieves killing one another in the mud along Hadrian’s Wall -- the Borderers. Fanatically religious and war loving, these Scottish Protestants made their way first to Ireland as the “Ulster Scots,” then to American shores during the early 18th century. Known to most Americans as the Scots Irish or Scotch Irish, the Borderers brought cultural values that govern (some would say screw up) the political emotions of millions of Americans to this day.

Not surprisingly, among Bageant’s critics were people who identified themselves with that ethnicity, some of whom really let him have it. What struck me as I read the comments was the ease with which blood and culture might be mixed up, particularly by those who agreed with him. One critic wrote,

Let's face the facts, this whole article is a true fact of life. People don't act a certain way for NO reason. I trace 1/4 of my family heritage to these people. But they were northerners and fought for the north thank god. But I'm tempered with 3/4 Swedish heritage so have the political outlook of a good Swede. I fear for peole who are still living in this mad Scots/Irish mind set. But this article explains a lot about who these crazy Bushites are.

Though ambiguous, because the term heritage is inclusive, this might mean: Three-quarters good Swedish blood tempers one-quarter bad Scots-Irish blood. Fact is, I haven’t read anything by Joe Bageant that isn’t first rate. In this age of leaden prose, his outspoken style is as refreshing as Hunter Thompson’s, and it’s all done with great gusto, humor and honesty. When he’s portraying his culture — southern white working class — he’s as authentic as it’s possible to be, but in this essay I think he let bloodlines get a little too close to culture, or, I should say it the other way, he lets culture get a little too close to bloodlines. Better yet, he doesn’t draw a sharp line between bloodlines and culture.

Still, I know where he’s coming from. “His” people he both loves and finds impossibly ideologized — they just don’t grasp reality. And their ignorance is contributing to the destruction of the America he desperately wishes for. That’s the way I feel about “my” people, or at least many of them. I’m an American Jew. When I was teaching at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota a student asked what tribe I belonged to. I answered, truthfully, “I’m a full-blooded Ashkenazi.”^[6] Most American Jews, whether they’re “full-blooded” or “half- or lesser-breeds” — “bloods” or “breeds” they say on the res — , as are my grand children, carry “Ashkenazi blood.” What does that imply about them individually as human beings? Practically nothing. All their social qualities are products of the culture they grew up in. Just like Bageant’s “full-blooded” Scots-Irish southern white crackers.

As Joe well knows, blood doesn’t explain shit. And yet, as we all also know, it’s often put forward as a supposed explanation for some quality or other. In fact, what this little essay is about is my effort not to fall into the trap of hating those American Jews who have closed their minds to the terrible suffering caused the Palestinian people by the Jewish conquest of their lands. Every tortured person represents a crime against humanity. Every American Jew I know is as aware as he or she is willing to be of the horrors being perpetrated by the nation-state of Israel. And of the critical support provided Israel by the United States and by much of the American Jewish “community.” Those with open minds, and there are many, are on “my” side, but there is an appalling number who parrot the propaganda and ideology promulgated by influential wealthy “pro-Israel” groups and the corporate U.S. mass media. Why? Is it crude Ashkenazi tribalism? Fear of another Judeocide, another Jewish holocaust?

I used to hate Germans. As an early teenager growing up in Far Rockaway, a small town on Long Island at the outer edge of Queens County (one of the five boroughs that make up New York City), I was somewhat aware of the persecution of Jews in Germany. A schoolmate and friend, Kurt Kahn, was a “pre-refugee”, I think from Austria, but am unsure. His family, probably reasonably well-to-do, had opted to come to America some time before 1939. It’s not that Kurt and I dwelt on what was happening, or even that we knew much at that time, but neither were we totally ignorant. Then in Brooklyn Technical High School, where I was from 1939 to 1943, I took three years of German — the language to study if you thought you wanted to be a scientist — taught by a short stocky little drill meister, Herr Radenhausen, who I became convinced was, at the least, very sympathetic to the Nazis. Now, 66 years later, I can still conjugate a few verbs. My hatred for Germans was spurred, of course, by the Jewish holocaust, and my stereotypical notion that categorized Germans — with some exceptions — as a group of people to be despised.

That generalized hatred persisted for a long time. In spite of the fact that I met and really liked some individuals, like Willie Jentschke – probably Wilhelm, though he was Willie to everyone – a physics faculty member at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana when I was a graduate student there from 1949 to 1953. Well, you know there were “good Jews” too, so why not “good Germans”? Stereotypes can be pretty impervious to “exceptions.” Though I was in western Europe on various occasions, including two year-long stays at major scientific laboratories, I never went or wanted to go to Germany. Not until 1980, when I went with my wife for cancer treatment at the Issels Clinic in Weissach, southern Bavaria, did I see how baseless was my stereotypical view. Hell, Germans were just like everyone else, I finally discovered. Having “German blood” was meaningless for knowing anything significant about a person.

So what about all this “Ashkenazi blood” that American Jews tote around in our veins? Does it make us different? Not at all, I deeply believe.^[7] Still, even it that’s true (and of course I can’t prove it), the significant questions remain: Are Jews different? And if so, Is there a Jewish Threat?

Every distinguishable cultural, ethnic, religious, or national group is obviously different in various ways from other groups, and that holds for Jews too. So in this trivial sense of course Jews are different. Each group exists in a complex culture determined by its historical circumstances, in which an enormous number of factors play significant roles. In the history of American Jews anti-Semitism is one of those factors. In a talk he gave in 2002, Noam Chomsky said,^[8]

“In the US when I was growing up anti-Semitism was a severe problem. ... Even when I got to Harvard 50 years ago, you could cut the anti-Semitism with a knife. ... But now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism, but they are marginal. There's plenty of racism, but it's directed against Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs are targets of enormous racism. Those problems are real but anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately.”

At the same time that Chomsy experienced (or was aware of) anti-Semitism at Harvard University, I was at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where I experienced none. Individual experiences naturally differ, but still, I think it’s fair to say that practically every American Jew of age 10 or more is conscious at least of the idea of anti-Semitism and knows the terrible truth of the Nazi Judeocide. As a formative part of our character that consciousness, an ineradicable part of our historical experience, makes us different from every other ethnic group. Those that experienced other holocausts, e.g. Armenians, American Indians, did not expeience Judeocides. What is critical is how American Jewry, which is by no means a “community” or group of like-minded individuals, has reacted to our perceived difference, and whether that reaction poses a threat to non-Jews and/or to Jews.

American Jews and the Attack on Iraq

Less than three weeks before March 20, 2003, when the U.S. launched its massive military assault on Iraq, U.S. Congressman James P. Moran Jr. of Virginia stated at an anti-war forum, “American Jews are responsible for pushing the country to war with Iraq”, reports an article on the Aztlan website.^[9] The mainstream Washington Post on March 11 stated,^[10]

At the forum, attended by about 120 people at St. Anne's Episcopal Church on March 3, Moran discussed why he thought antiwar sentiment was not more effective in the United States.

"If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this," Moran said in comments first reported by the Reston [Virginia] Connection and not disputed by Moran. "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."

Whether Moran’s view of the clout of the so-called “leaders of the Jewish community” was correct is of course open to dispute. But his assertion implying strong support from organized Jewry for the war on Iraq was completely obvious, widely recognized and beyond dispute. The predictable disgraceful attack on him for stating an evident truth was harsh, strident and across party lines.

Writing a month after the Iraq attack was launched, Mark Bruzonsky of MER (Middle East Realities) wrote (about April 21 or 22), in part,

... don't expect the very subject of the extraordinary power and shady workings of the Israeli/Jewish lobby on network American TV screens or popular newspaper pages -- there's an informal agreement not to do so, a lot of fear for what happens if one does, and, truth be told, many persons connected with 'the lobby' are in fact owners and senior editors of the publications and TV networks who are guilty of such culpable journalistic and historical negligence.

Patrick Seale, a respected writer with long-time in-depth knowledge of the Middle East, whose current pieces appear in the Guardian (UK) and elsewhere, wrote on March 21, 2003 in an article titled, “War is the Climax of the American-Israeli Partnership”,^[11]

Much of the ideological justification and political pressure for war against Iraq has come from right-wing American Zionists, many of them Jews, closely allied to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and occupying influential positions both inside and outside the Bush administration. It is neither exaggeration, nor anti-Semitism, as they would have it, to say that this is a Bush-Sharon war against Iraq.

As is now widely understood, the genesis of the idea of occupying Iraq can be dated back to the mid-1990s. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and often described as the intellectual driving force behind President Bush's world-view, has for years been pressing US and Israeli leaders to go to war against Iraq. On 8 July 1996, shortly after Benyamin Netanyahu's election victory over Shimon Peres, Perle handed Netanyahu a strategy paper entitled 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm'. It called for the removal of Saddam Hussein as a key Israeli objective and as a means of weakening Syria.

The call for an attack on Iraq was then taken up in 1997 by a right-wing American group called The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose members included Richard Perle; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Eliot Abrams, Middle East director of Bush's National Security Council; Randy Scheunemann, President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; and two influential conservative editors, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Norman Podhoretz of Commentary. With friends such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney ... this group formed a formidable pressure group. The terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 gave these advocates of American empire and of the US-Israeli alliance their chance.

If it is indeed true, as Chomsky said in 2002, that “now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population”, then I believe that all the elements of American Jewry who supported the drive for war against Iraq, and who are now supporting the drive for war against Iran -- taken together constitute a threat to the well-being of all Americans and to the rest of the world’s people, because of the terrible destructive power in the hands of the U.S. government.

Within this gung-ho-for-war group, which allegedly made up 59% of American Jewry,^[12] the elites, — those with the most power and the most influence on government policy — are the most culpable and the most dangerous. I believe that within this sub-group are war criminals who ought to face the international tribunal in Brussels. As for the rest of the war-supporting American Jews, they constitute perhaps a bit over one percent of the American population, and are culpable in the same sense that the entire war-supporting American population is — they allow themselves to remain uninformed, easy targets for swallowing pro-war government and corporate propaganda.

Despite his earlier assertion that Jews were the most influential part of the population, Chomsky, in the question period that followed his talk, said in referring to the power of the Jewish lobby,

technically it's not a Jewish lobby, it's a pro-Israel lobby. A substantial part of the lobby happen to be Christian Fundamentalists ... So there is an Israel lobby and it has influence insofar as it is allied to actual US power. Where it runs into any conflict with US power it dissolves. (Another factor is they have enormous influence over the media because they happen to be strong within the intellectual community.) So yes, they're powerful, but I wouldn't exaggerate their power.

Well, how powerful is the Israel-Über-Alles Lobby?

Chomsky’s position has been criticized for “letting American Jews off the hook.” Jeffrey Blankfort, in an essay, “The Israel Lobby and the Left”^[13] writes of a 1991 lecture on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Chomsky gave at the University of California at Berkeley. Replying to a question about the influence of America’s Israel lobby, Blankfort reports Chomsky saying that its reputation was generally exaggerated and like other lobbies, it only appears to be powerful when its position lines up with that of the “elites” who determine policy in Washington. ... “Chomsky’s response”, wrote Blankfort, “drew a warm round of applause from members of the audience who were no doubt pleased to have American Jews absolved of any blame for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, then in the fourth year of their first intifada.”

The strongest argument I have seen for the decisive power of the Jewish neocons within the government and in the corporate media is by Jeffrey Blankfort. His 2003 essay “The Israel Lobby and the Left” was followed in 2004 by “War for Israel”^[14], and in a few weeks a third article, “Damage Control: Noam Chomsky & the Israel-Palestine Conflict”^[15] is to appear. I have had access only to the first two, but it seems to me that the difference between Chomsky’s and Blankfort’s assessments is not of very great significance. After all, the major issue confronting human society is that we are faced with ongoing devastating, colossal destruction of peoples and the biosphere by the commitment of the United States government to dominate the world. Whether the power to make these awful decisions is actually in the hands of the non-Jewish elites (Bush Jr., Cheney, Rumsford), which it assuredly is, or whether the Jewish neocons in and out of government have amassed enough clout to persuade and/or coerce from Bush et al the actions they want, the terrible results are the same. How to apportion responsibility is not nearly as critical as stopping this cabal of power- and money-crazed cretins.

Without having seen Blankfort’s third paper, it seems to me that despite the fact that ultimately the power to decide is in the hands of the top elites,^[16] the political weight of the Jewish neocons is sufficient to have influenced the U.S. to pursue a course of conquest that they, the Jewish neocons, had formulated. Their goal is to secure, within the framework of overall U.S. world domination, Israeli domination of the Middle East. Moreover, there is a large number of American Jews who support the neocon program. Because of these ‘facts’ (though I can’t prove them, I believe they are facts, whose validity Blankfort comes close to establishing), I would say that those American Jews who support the U.S. and Israeli governments are a direct threat to the well-being of all of us, and to all of the world’s peoples.

The ultimate responsibility (blame)

Shortly after Bush’s inauguration for a second term, I posted an essay, “Stop the U. S. drive for global domination ― a call to the world’s people”^[17] that said in part,

Unlike the reactions of many who accepted the announced electoral triumph of Bush, and scorned the supposed stupidity of the many Americans who voted for him, I don’t ... scorn as stupid the millions of ordinary people who voted for him. What we in the United States are faced with is the fact that we are probably the most brain-washed population in the world, subjected to an extremely effective flood of misinformation ...

In an announcement that the paper was posted, I said, “Many critics, enraged at the inhumanity, and the lying and stealing of the Bush administration, find it easy to vent their anger on the American electorate. I argue that we should not sell the American people short, that the basic problem lies elsewhere.” One almost immediate response took me to task, saying in part,

Subject: Venting anger on the American Electorate

From: Chris Herz <cdherz44@yahoo.com>

There is much blame to go around: The Liberals, in their eagerness to avoid being called radical abandoned working class Americans to the tender mercies of their employers and the reactionary church.

But no person, led by his own rancorous prejudices can escape responsibility for voting Fascist. If an uneducated electrician like myself can go to the libraries, get on the net, can read ..., that way is open to my fellows too. It's a fact that they do not wish to hear challenges to their inveterate religious, racial and national chauvinism. I know them well, for they are my neighbors and my co-workers.

The absolute best work on working-class Bushwackos around is done by Joe Bageant, whose articles may be found on the internet.

You bet the electorate is to blame.

Of course what Chris means when he describes himself as “an uneducated electrician” is just that he doesn’t have any fancy credentials or titles. But there are more shitheads with elegant titles than you can shake a stick at. Intelligence isn’t something that’s measured and certified in any really meaningful way, other than for bestowing privilege and, supposedly, prestige.

The responsibility, as Chris correctly says, is ours — our responsibility to inform ourselves so that we know how to act intelligently, and then to act. In the same way that the part of American Jewry that chooses to remain ignorant is a threat to the entire world, so too is the part of the American people that remains ignorant. Support for the American Empire, for Israel’s conquest of the Palestinians, and for the fascist democracy in the U.S. required to implement those goals is the threat. In saying this I do not mean to ignore the responsibility of the part of Israeli Jewry that supports Israel’s Zionist Project with its necessarily racist brutality. But I emphasize American culpability because this is where the power is mainly concentrated.

Preventing the threatened attack on Iran

Under the headline “War Summit: Sharon and Bush to meet to plan Iran Attack”, Mark Bruzonsky’s MER e-mail distribution on March 24, 2005 included part of an essay by former Senior CIA Agent Ray McGovern titled, “Attacking Iran: I Know It Sounds Crazy, But...”^[18] McGovern writes,

...the notion that the Bush administration would mount a "preemptive" air attack on Iran seems insane. And still more insane if the objective includes overthrowing Iran's government ... under the rubric of "regime change."

. . .

The very same men who ... brought us the war in Iraq are now focusing on Iran, which they view as the only remaining obstacle to American domination of the entire oil-rich Middle East. They calculate that, with a docile, corporate-owned press, a co-opted mainstream church, and a still-trusting populace, the United States and/or the Israelis can launch a successful air offensive to disrupt any Iranian nuclear weapons programs -- with the added bonus of possibly causing the regime in power in Iran to crumble.

. . .

...the neocons seem to believe that, in the wake of the November election, they now have a carte-blanche "mandate." And with the president's new "capital to spend," they appear determined to spend it, sooner rather than later.

. . .

...In a speech given on February 18, former UN arms inspector and Marine officer Scott Ritter (who was totally on target before the Iraq War on that country's lack of weapons of mass destruction) claimed that the president has already "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June in order to destroy its alleged nuclear weapons program and eventually bring about "regime change."

. . .

Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has for some time appeared eager to enlist Washington's support for an early "pre-emptive" strike on Iran.

. . .

As for President Bush, over the past four years he has amply demonstrated his preference for the counsel of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who, as Gen. Scowcroft said publicly, has the president "wrapped around his little finger." (As Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until he was unceremoniously removed at the turn of the year, Scowcroft was in a position to know.)

. . .

The nuclear issue is indeed paramount ...

. . .

The reality is that, except for Israel, the Middle East is nuclear free. ...

It’s well to have in mind that Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years (see Note 3) from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. In that capacity he served, evidently loyally and to the best of his ability, supporting all the murderous efforts of the CIA on behalf of the U.S. government in its bipartisan drive for global domination. So far as I know, he is not opposed to the idea of the U.S. as an imperial power ruling the world. He is not devoted to human well-being or human rights at a fundamental level, though he does religious-based charitable work in his retirement. He would not, I believe, now be revealing some of the inside knowledge he gained during his years in service to the empire if he were not upset that the “crazies”, now called neocons, are likely to screw up the whole enterprise because, unlike their powerful “sane” predecessors, of whom he counts himself one, they are wildly irrational and dogmatic, real fanatics.

Nevertheless, it is good that Ray McGovern is contributing to our store of information as a former insider. His recent paper points clearly, as does much other evidence, to the danger of an attack, either by Israeli or U.S. military, on Iran, for the supposed benefit of Israel within the overall framework of U.S. global domination.

Summary and conclusion

A “redneck” friend of mine, Charlie Tripp <charlie_y_lucy@yahoo.com> is in construction -- used to be a contractor. He told me that when the students at Kent State University were gunned down at the campus parking lot by National Guard troops, he and his redneck building buddies reacted, "Good. Just a fuckin' bunch of commies. They deserved it." Charlie explained how he became radicalized. It was a slow process. A woman he knew questioned him about some things. She didn't scorn him as though he was an ignoramus, though he sure as hell was ignorant. She knew, as Bageant would say, that his mother hadn't dropped him on his head.^[19] He was dumb because that's how society wanted him, and had made him -- a dumb working-class stiff. His friend asked him questions about things he hadn't known or considered before, and gradually got him to start thinking. That was all he needed, to begin to question some of his assumptions, encouraged by an unthreatening friend. You don't get people to do that by hammering on them or telling them they are ignorant assholes.

Joe Bageant may seem to be coming down hard on his poor white working class drinking buddies when he says,

What these folks really need is for someone to say out loud: “Now lookee here dammit! You are dumber than a sack of hammers and should'a got an education so you would have half a notion of what's going on.” Someone once told me that and, along with the advice never to mix Mad Dog 20-20 with whiskey, it is the best I ever received.

But the thrust of this Bageant essay, "Sons of a Laboring God: Getting Down and Dumb at Burt's Tavern", is that depriving poor people of the chance to get a decent education is deliberate. It's purpose is to keep them dumb. He cites the following: “Too much public education only gets working people riled up and full of backsass.” -- Virginia Senator Harry Flood Byrd.

That's right. If the American people knew the truth about what course the U.S. and Israeli governments are pursuing, then we would all be 'riled up and full of backsass', and would demand of the Jewish neocons and their American Jewish supporters,

Jews, off our backs!

We are Americans, not Israelis!

Above all, we are human beings! We demand there be no attack on Iran, or on any other country or peoples. We reject all forms of colonialism, imperialism or other attempts to dominate the lives of any human beings. We will not give our lives, our energy, or our wealth to support conquest and destruction of any peoples.^[P.S.] ___________________________

Notes.

^[1] Mark Bruzonsky <mark@middleeast.org> is described on the Middle East Realities (MER) website, at http://www.middleeast.org/ , as the founder and publisher of MER, who has visited the Middle East region over 150 times. I find his e-mail distributions very valuable.

^[2] Joe Bageant <bageantjb@netscape.net> is a magazine editor and essayist living in Winchester, Virginia. He has a slew of great essays, full of unvarnished truths, telling it like it is. He was a total unknown to me (as I was to him) until an e-mail from my close friend of many years, James Herod <anarresodo@comcast.net>, on Dec 31, 2004 clued me in and sent Bageant’s URL, http://www.coldtype.net/joe.html . There’s also a fine essay by Herod, “Indigenism” related to some of the ideas explored here, at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/21.htm .

^[3] Ray McGovern <rrmcgovern@aol.com> is described on a website of Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas, at

http://faculty.schreiner.edu/tomwells/ray_mcgovern_bio.htm . A “Distinguished Military Graduate” of Fordham in 1962, he began his 27-year stint in the CIA immediately, clothed the first two years as an “intelligence officer in the Army.” On his “honorable” retirement in 1989 (I think) he was commended for his service, which extended over the terms of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr., the first and last only partially. He emphasizes that he was a CIA “analyst”, i.e. not in the “covert action” part of the CIA.

Unlike Philip Agee, who graduated from the Univ. of Notre Dame six years earlier, and who resigned after 12 years in the CIA because he couldn’t stomach it any longer, and did everything possible to publicly “Tell Truth to Power”, McGovern stomached it right through all those 27 murderous years of CIA atrocities. Then, like ‘peanuts’ Carter after his turn at the head of the empire, McGovern began working charitably for the poor. I have nothing against someone becoming a “born-again human being”, after all, better late than never, but better earlier.

^[4] “Drink, Pray, Fuck, Fight, How the Scots-Irish Screwed Up America”, available at http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.05/Essays/02.Joe.Scots.pdf . The same essay, but with a more “politically correct” title, is available as

“Drink, Pray, Fight, Fuck: The Borderer Legacy Haunts America”, at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Bageant0126.htm .

^[5] The Smirking Chimp website, at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/ , has “Drink, Pray, Fuck, Fight, How the Scots Irish Screwed Up America”, available at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=19542 .

^[6] Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Jews from Germany, Poland, Austria and Eastern Europe. In historical times, Ashkenazi Jews usually spoke Yiddish or Slavic languages. (from the Wikipedia Encyclopedia)

^[7] I don’t mean to ignore the existence of inherited diseases within the Ashkenazi Jewish population, for example Tay-Sachs disease, for which one in 25 is estimated to be a genetic carrier, and one in 3,000 to be afflicted. The differential incidence of such diseases among different population groups reflects gene-pool differences. These are real, but not related to the social behavior of an individual Ashkenazi.

^[8] Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>, “Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinians”, in a talk at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on October 11, 2002. From an edited transcript of a live video link-up to public meetings called by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other groups and organizations throughout Scotland and the north of England. Available at http://www.variant.randomstate.org/16texts/Chomsky.html. The text came to my attention by the Middle East Realities (MER) e-mail from Mark Bruzonsky on March 22, 2005.

^[9] “US Congressman says Jews are behind war against Iraq”, La Voz de Aztlan, http://aztlan.net/jewsbehindwar.htm.

^[10] The Washington Post, March 11, 2003, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A7832-2003Mar10&notFound=true

^[11] Patrick Seale, “War is the Climax of the American-Israeli Partnership”, March 21, 2003, is available at http://www.mafhoum.com/press4/seale137.htm . It was reprinted in the MER e-mail distribution on March 31, 2005, and appeared as an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, but I haven’t located those URLs.

^[12] A January 2002 poll by the American Jewish Committee, as reported in The Politics of Anti-Semitism, published by CounterPunch and AK Press, 2003, p.30.

^[13] Jeffrey Blankfort, <jblankfort@earthlink.net> “The Israel Lobby and the Left”, first published by Left Curve, is available on their website at http://www.leftcurve.org/LC27WebPages/IsraelLobby.htlm .

^[14] Jeffrey Blankfort, “War for Israel”, first published by Left Curve, is available on their website at http://www.leftcurve.org/LC28WebPages/WarForIsrael.html .

^[15] Jeffrey Blankfort, “Damage Control: Noam Chomsky & the Israel-Palestine Conflict”, is to be published in a few weeks by Left Curve, and will presumably be on their website soon after.

^[16] Recent evidence indicating that the neocons are not in control was reported by investigative journalist Greg Palast working with BBC Newsnight and Harpers magazine. He reported on “two conflicting plans [for Iraqi oil], setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists." "Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.” The BBC Newsnight report by Greg Palast is available at http://www.canadiandimension.mb.ca/extra/d032805gp.htm .

^[17] Stop the U. S. drive for global domination ― a call to the world’s people, is available at

http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/Discus/2005-01-21.htm .

^[18] Ray McGovern, “Attacking Iran: I Know It Sounds Crazy, But...” This essay was posted March 1, 2005 by Tom Englehardt on his site at

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2230 with an interesting preface by Tom. It is also on various other sites, among them Truthout, where it is available at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/030205B.shtml , but without Englehardt’s prefactory comments.

During the early 1980s, McGovern was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former colleagues founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

^[19] Joe Bageant's June 29, 2004 essay, "Sons of a Laboring God: Getting Down and Dumb at Burt's Tavern", is available also at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June04/Bageant0629.htm . Joe's statement in the essay: "Despite how it appears, our mamas did not drop us on our heads."

^[P.S.] The final paragraph is to emphasize that the demand to Jewish neocons and their American Jewish supporters is not just an expression of nationalism, but is based on the common humanity of all peoples.

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All comments and criticisms are welcome. <george.salzman@umb.edu>

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Last update of this page: April 9, 2005