Greg
Palast, a "Chomsky for Dummies" and "a slim Michael
Moore", emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an
accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs.
Greg Palast, the left wing of the
Lobby
By Israel Shamir
I always
had a problem with Greg Palast. Apparently this critic
of Bush and Blair, an opponent of the war in Iraq, who
wrote for the Guardian and the Observer is a man on our
side, a good left-wing guy. He is apparently against the
corporations, against the neoliberal setup; some of his
ideas are surely good. He is considered “Chomsky for
Dummies” [“more accessible than Chomsky”, his
publisher-suggested quote from a newspaper] and he has a
good class attitude, for instance: “The world’s three
hundred richest people are worth more than the world’s
poorest three billion. The market’s up, but who is the
market? The Gilded One Percent own 4/5th of the nation’s
stocks and bonds.” His philippics against Bush (“an evil
sonovabitch”) are as fiery as those of a preacher in a
mosque in my neighbourhood, and this is not a fault in
my eyes. He is equally outspoken against the war in
Iraq. What else could one ask from a guy?
But at the
second sight, there were small alarums. He was against
Bush and passionately – for Gore and Kerry. As if Gore
and Kerry would keep the US troops out of Iraq. As if
Gore and Kerry would pass the spoils of three hundred
richest men to the poorest three billion. He claimed
that Bush administration covered up… “Saudi financing of
terror”. This smacked of a familiar claim - that the US
made a mistake to attack Iraq - instead of Saudi Arabia,
or Iran. He disliked America, his native land, with too
strong a passion. “Antisemite is one who dislikes Jews
too much”, quipped Yael Lotan, an Israeli writer. The
same goes about America: it’s quite all right to dislike
the superpower, but do not dislike it too much, it’s bad
for your karma.
Palast
wrote: “The United States is ugly. [It is] a
numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts,
Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried
Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald’s up to and leaning
over the Canyon wall.” In my view, this is too much.
Even if your mother – and one’s native land should be as
important as your mother – is ugly, you do not say it,
not even think it.
Palast’s
unequivocal support for unlimited immigration was not
inspired by his compassion to les miserables of the
Third World (also an erroneous position, in my view, but
still comprehensible), but by his profound disdain of
the ordinary local indigenous native.
Characteristically, in his Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Palast argues with a London cockney cabby, whether
England should accept millions of refugees and asylum
seekers. The cabby was horrified by his multiculturalist
attitude, by his indifference to local culture and
tradition. But Palast pooh-poohed “the cabby’s fear of
losing his English identity. Face it, Shakespeare’s
dead. England’s cultural exports are now limited to
soccer hooligans, Princess Di knickknacks and Hugh
Grant.” Face it, Palast, “England’s cultural exports are
now limited to soccer hooligans” because England’s
cultural imports were limited to Greg Palast and others
of your ilk. A new Shakespeare may be alive in England,
as well as a new Melville in the US, but you won’t
recognise him for he won’t fit your ideas. For you,
ordinary people are “brown-shirted antiforeign electoral
mobs”, for us – the sovereign people.
Palast is
obsessed with money, as evident from his title Best
Democracy Money Can Buy. He is not even aware of other
motives, whether noble or vile. For him, “the number one
question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam
really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going
to cost us?”
I have no
idea of Palast’s ethnic background, but ideologically,
nobody can be more Judaic than this man, who worships
money, despises the native and wishes to bomb some place
in the Middle East. These are classic Judaic attitudes,
so I was not surprised when Palast emerged as an
apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs
and Arabs. In his
Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? essay
published in the Jewish ‘progressive’ magazine Tikkun,
Pallast pulls usual ropes; for him, whoever thinks that
the Jewish establishment pushed for the war on Iraq
(including Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently) must adhere
to the Elders of Zion and Christ-killers paradigm. He
writes: “after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion
manipulate the government of the United States into
invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the
expansion of Greater Israel?” Not surprisingly, he finds
the Jews “not guilty”. The bad guys are “a devout
Christian, Norquist [who] channeled a million dollars to
the Christian Coalition”, and “the Houston-Riyadh Big
Oil axis”. The Jews? Forget it: “Wolfowitz and his
neo-con clique— bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their
asses kicked utterly […] A half-dozen confused Jews,
armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no
match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates.”
This is not
the place to repeat the discussion of the Jewish Lobby.
This was done by many people, including Mearsheimer and
Walt (their recent response to Lobby’s attacks is on
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3506
), by Philip Weiss (whose blog
http://mondoweiss.observer.com makes more and more sense
– actually, this man grew a lot since his triumphalist
pieces of 2001, and I read him with great interest), by
our friend Jeff Blankfort, whose emailing list
jblankfort@earthlink.net scans much of American and
British media, and even by my humble self.
The
conclusions we reached are only fortified by the massive
apology for the Lobby coming from various Trots, from
Socialist Viewpoint, from Greg Palast and others. The
Jewish Lobby is like a Stealth jet, and these guys
provide it with invisibility. Palast will have to live
many more years if he wants to see us weeping over the
“neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz being cast out of
the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank”.
We know of worse fate. And he will have to live as long
as Methuselah to see us
feeling sorry for General Jay Garner, the first
Gauleiter of occupied Iraq sacked by his superiors –see
item 4.
In short,
we went part of the way with Mr. Palast, but what’s
enough, enough. Let him prefer General Jay Garner to
Paul Bremer III, Kerry to Bush, Jews to Texans and Saudi
Arabia to Iraq as a good place to bomb. Coprophagi may
choose between various kinds of excrements, but we are
free from this worry.
P.S. After
the first publication of the article, our friend Ian
Buckley wrote: According to this, Greg Palast is indeed
'a Jewish leftie' :
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.08.15/faces.html
. He is often funny and has an agreeable habit of
getting up the noses of some of the powerful, but the
above article illustrates his deficiencies…
The article
in the Jewish newspaper Forward makes it clear:
“[In his
eyes] his fans are too conspiracy-theory-minded. Too
anti-American. Too antisemitic. "A large part of my
European readership I wouldn't urinate on," Palast told
the Forward. Some Europeans aren't so wild about him,
either. Unlike some of his fellow Jewish lefties, Palast
is not ready to dismiss antisemitism when he sees it.
"The members of the Jewish left — and I certainly am one
of them — are very glib about antisemitism and the
dangers out there," he said. "The British left is
infused with the worst elements of antisemitism."
He even
sees antisemitism in the pages of his own newspaper.
"When the
Hebrew teachers in Tehran, in Iran, were put on trial as
spies for Israel — which was beyond unlikely — my paper
had an editorial by some fool saying, well, we shouldn't
attack Iran — there's very good evidence, and we
shouldn't vilify everyone George Bush says is our
enemy," he said. "They want Israel to release people who
are admitted child killers, but the Hebrew teachers
should rightly be in jail."
Never one
to compromise his opinions, when the Arab news channel
Al-Jazeera offered Palast a job, he turned it down cold;
he refers to the station as TNN, Terrorist News
Network.”
Thus an opinion of Mr Palast about
the Lobby is as valid as that of Abe Foxman and Daniel
Pipes.
P.P.S. To my great regret, our
wonderful Cynthia McKinney accepted Greg Palast's help
in her electoral campaign, and she wrote:
From: "Cynthia McKinney" Subject:
Free!! Blog with Greg Palast and me 7:00 this evening!
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:12:47 -0400
If you'd like to blog directly with
Greg Palast and me, please join us by following the
directions sent to me below by Christy in Palast's
office. It's free and hopefully, will be loads of fun!
Probably we shall witness erosion of
her position vs. Israel very soon. She is not to be
blamed: no politician in the US can do without a
pipeline to the Lobby.
2. Here
is a response of Jeff Blankfort:
This is an
interesting article by investigative journalist Greg
Palast who has, in the past, has avoided any mention of
Israel or the Israel lobby even in his book, "The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy," when, if he really wanted to
know who the biggest buyers were, he could have readily
found them in the internet among the Mother Jones 400,
and the big donors from the Communications and Finance
industries on the Center for Public Integrity site, and
they are not oil men. Of the 400 top donors to the 2000
election cycle, 7 of the top 10, 12 of the top 20 and at
least 125 of the top 250 were Jewish. Haim Saban, an
Israeli-American, and a big backer of AIPAC, gave to the
Democrats in 2002, $12.3 million, which is two million
more than Ken Lay and Exxon gave to the Republicans over
a 10 year period but strangely, it didn't get the same
media attention.
On the
other hand, this article of his bears out what I have
been saying for the three years, that the neo-con notion
to take over and privatize Iraqi oil was nonsense and
flied in the face of how the oil industry operates, that
the neo-cons were no longer running the show, but what
Palast doesn't deal with is the initial opposition to
the war on the part of Bush Sr., as well as James Baker,
and oil company executives including Phillip Carroll of
Shell, nor does he, once again, mention that not only
were the neo-cons the main tub thumpers for the war, it
was also supported by the major organizations of the
Israel lobby, led by AIPAC and the parade of pro-Israel
Jewish columnists who are nationally syndicated and led
by Tom Freedman, William Safire (since replaced by David
Brooks), Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and all the
publications of Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman.
The war was also called for by the major principals of
both Likud and Labor in Israel, Sharon, Netanyahu and
Peres, as well as Chef of Staff Shall Mofaz who said
that after taking care of Iraq, the US should do the
same with Syria and Iran.
If Palast
was not so intent on shielding Israel and its American
supporters from scrutiny, he would have acknowledged
that the reason that the Democrats joined the Bush
administration in supporting the war was that the
majority of their funding comes from pro-Israel
lobbyists which makes the Party, as Prof. Francis Boyle
recently said, "a front for AIPAC." Now that the war has
taken out Saddam and literally destroyed the country,
the Democrats are allowed to criticize the conduct of
the war, but not so directly the war itself, and will be
ready to serve the lobby's call when it comes to taking
on Iran. They have already overwhelmingly approved the
Iran Freedom Act, the latest AIPAC war-mongering effort.
It is a
shame that Palast has not employed his excellent
investigative skills to examine this aspect of American
society and instead has allowed them to play second
fiddle to his attachment to Israel. Otherwise, he would
not also be trying to convince us that both Bolton and
Wolfowitz have important roles still to play for the
Bush regime.
3. Greg
Palast is a slimmed-down version of Michael Moore. Here
is a relevant piece:
Wendy
Campbell vs. Michael Moore
6.
From Laura Lewis
You're much
harder core on Palast than I was with my simple
statement of disappointment that he showed the blindspot
so many seem to have where Israel is concerned. I must
admit, his piece disappointed me, especially his need to
set the tone with the classic anti-Jewish rhetoric of
the Christ killers and Elder's comments. Those pretty
much discredited the rest of the piece from the get go
for those of us in the know. Problem is, due to pieces
like Palast's, most of us aren't in the know and this
article in Tikkun shows he's part of the problem,
rather than part of the solution. We have to many
problem parts. We need more solution parts.
From Jim
Dean
The Jewish Lobby shills are fairly easy to spot in the
media. All you have to do is read about any major
problem or controversy where certain Jewish interests
are obviously entwined, and these normally intelligent
and insightful journalists become instantly blind to it.
No other issue makes them instantly braindead.
For the goyim journalist fear is a major component as
they work in a ghetto type environment when it comes to
discussing Israel. And then of course there is
ignorance...no shortage of that around. And last, of
course...prejudice. But there is also the intelligence
aspect of it.
Intelligence agency infiltration of the media is an old
old game but you don't read hardly a word about it in
investigative journalism. Our CIA, and others, have done
this for years and so has our wonderfully ally Israel
right here in the land of free speech.
I am not saying that their shills are graduates of
Mossad. That would be more expensive. They are recruited
like most are recruited, some for money (career
assistance) and some purely for ideological reasons,
most often a combination of the two. They got their
hooks into the early teleevangelist the same way. They
were in a position to greatly assist in building them
up...as long as they had a good understanding about a
few things. There is one that we have who flew around on
an Israeli Gov. Leat jet for a couple of years.
It's the perfect infiltration set up. You have
protection of sources. And you are somewhat protected
yourself from FBI investigations. Once your career is
'advanced' high enough (Judith Miller?) you can be a
source for leaks, and you can even reveal your sources
to your Israeli handler if you want to. They do require
some payback for the career help they offer.
They have a separate program for retiring US generals
and flag officers They screen them prior to retirement
to determine who is likely to remain in the public eye.
They are approached about their retirement plans and if
they are subservient enough are offered help getting
some 'board directorships' or nice consulting positions
'for such a good friend of Israel'. This is topped off
with a five star deluxe trip to Israel where they are
wined and dined.
There is a lot of beneath the surface revulsion to this
going on by those below that level of rank. Our top
officers are being seduced into the Jewish Lobby
propaganda machine in what many tell me is a classic
Intel infiltration operation. Our own Intel people (the
ones who are not Israel-phobes) are just aghast at the
proto dual citizenship compromising that goes on. God
only knows what they turn over to the Israelis, the
doors they open.
One result of this is nary a critical word from our
veteran organizations regarding the most obvious Israeli
security excesses, the biggest being the massive Israeli
Intel operations that have been running here for
decades. I hardly ever meet an military Intel person who
is not aware of this, and most all of them are
completely complacent about it. 'Above my pay
grade'...and 'that's really a political issue' are the
most common dodges that are trotted out about it. They
won't even discuss the USS Liberty. They just hang their
heads in shame.
I have no specific information on Mr. Palast, but he is
what we would call in the Intel business 'a person of
interest'. Now Judith Miller on the other hand, she may
be on their payroll. After all, she was able to wiggle
her way into the actual interrogations of some of Saddam
top Lts. while she went around with the Army WMD units
in Iraq. My sources told me this was unprecedented,
having a journalist present in such situations. Her DoD
NeoCon buddies got her right in there. They were there
for each other and it wasn't a freak accident.
And what other country do you think might have had an
interest in knowing what she learned in those
interrogations...and quickly? Does anyone think that her
NeoCon buddies who got her on the inside were not
getting detailed reports of everything that she learned?
This is called 'front door' espionage. No break ins are
necessary. You just make an appointment. The media
refuses to cover this, and for very good reason. They
are involved. But when you think of how many Israeli spy
networks that US Intel broke up in the US last
year...and the year before that...and on and on...you
can see how the midlevel people could have a jaded
attitude about the whole mess.
It's a national disgrace.
Jim Dean
Heritage
TV...Atlanta