This is an excellent piece from JuanCole.com today that explains exactly how Americans, and especially the moderate Jews here, have been manipulated by a network of neo-conservative, well connected extremists. They are very powerful people here and in Israel so Yes....many of them are Jewish. Their ideology conflicts with certain American ideals, values and ethics. They use the cry of Anti-Semitism to stifle any and all criticism. They have literally gotten away with murder. Until the masses understand the dynamics of what is really going on, it will continue rot and infest American as it has steadily been doing for the past 9 years.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the 'Anti-Semitism' ChargeThe great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel's reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing around making fools of themselves by smearing critics of those policies as racists. (Anyone who knows how Likud supporters talk among themselves about Arabs and other outsiders can only be amused at their impudent hypocrisy in playing the race card.)
The mess that Mossad's mercenaries (some of them possibly from the Fateh Palestinian faction also opposed to Hamas) made of a routine political assassination in Dubai of a Hamas agent funneling arms from Iran is a blow against Ithe image of daring, stone-cold competence cultivated by the Israeli security establishment. The killing went smoothly, but it transpires that the assassins had not only stolen the passport identities of British and Irish citizens, but those of several Israeli dual citizens originally from the UK, as well. Mossad thus made potential problems for those passport holders for the rest of their lives, since Interpol will be interested every time the numbers pop up at an airport check-in.
The incident has roiled diplomatic relations with Ireland and the UK. But it is also controversial in Israel (not the assassination but the bumbling clumsy identity theft against Israeli citizens). After all, branding an innocent Israeli an assassin is a sort of blood libel. Indeed, casual political assassination as a routine Israeli method of statecraft makes many Jews uncomfortable, as is visible in Steven Spielberg's film, Munich.
But the harbingers of isolation are numerous. The Netanyahu government has largely defied President Obama's requests for a halt to the colonization of the West Bank (a freeze on building new settlements in part of the West Bank, while existing settlements are expanded and Palestinians are thrown in the street in Jerusalem does not count).
The Israeli siege of the children of Gaza, some of whom are looking skinnier, is impossible to justify and provoked even a US congressman to urge a forceful breaking of the blockade. The Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes (and which also acknowledges Hamas war crimes) for the United Nations is likely to attain an official status of a sort denied to previous such clear-eyed examinations of Israeli military action. (Israel's leadership suffered not the least from dropping nearly a million cluster bombs on the civilian farms of southern Lebanon in the last 3 days of the 2006 Lebanon War, though this targeting of civilians was illegal and the US Congress had stipulated that the weapons could not be used that way).
Continue reading here:
http://wbx.me/l/?p=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.juancole.com%2F2010%2F02%2Fdecline-of-israeli-right-and-increasing.html