After I sent out yesterday's ZGram book review on "One Nation under Israel" by Andrew Hurley - published by Truth Press in Arizona, and reviewed in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs by its editor, Richard Curtiss - I received the following letter from one of my readers:
I read your Zgram on the new book reviewed by Richard Curtiss, editor of WRMEA with interest. I have no doubt that the book is fine and WRMEA is the best source of information about the machinations of the Israelis. I've been a reader of WRMEA for years.
You should be aware, however, that Curtiss and his staff are intensely hostile to "Holocaust" revisionism. Not only do they generally run away from even mentioning revisionism in their magazine, they have repeatedly falsely charged that "revisionists claim that nothing happened to the Jews" in the WWII period. They apparently believe every story of the Holohuggers.
I have challenged them over and over on the subject and they refuse to respond. Curtiss is motivated by craven fear of you-know-who and, apparently, a WW II "frozen in time" mentality common to many of his generation.
It is ironic that he can see so clearly the lies and immorality of Zionist Jews when it comes to mistreatment of the Palestinians but believes every story told by the same people when it comes to the Big H!"
I know that this is true. I, too, have noticed with disbelief how this otherwise extraordinary and courageous publication behaves like the worst of the Holocaustomaniacs when it comes to the Holocaust theme.
I can only explain it by my suspicion that a publication that close to the White House must take precautions to survive, and this is the reason they say what they say and do what they do. It is not becoming and strikes a very odd discord - but, hey, they are otherwise doing excellent work. They'll come around, I am sure. By now, they cannot help knowing!
Look at it this way: How many political and spiritual allies do we have who agree with every word we say but flee like so many bats of hell the moment someone accuses them of having sympathies with "Nazis"?
This is the price we pay - by letting ourselves be vilified by otherwise perfectly nice people because at least part of the struggle's dimensions is seen, by them and by us, as being on the same common wavelength. This, too, will change in time.
Here now is the second part of Richard Curtiss's review, which appeared in the December issue of WRMEA:
(Hurley) concludes his chapter on "The Israeli Lobby" by quoting this complaint by General Harkabi, former chief of Israeli Intelligence and advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Begin, from Harkabi's 1988 book, Israel's Fateful Hour:
"I fail to understand why they (American leaders) are so apprehensive of speaking out and saying that the present (Israeli) policy of annexation will miscarry, that it is bound to fail, that it will end in national bankruptcy or that it is suicidal - whatever is their evaluation. By such diffidence Americans do a disservice to Israel and to themselves."
In his following chapter, "The Israeli Lobby in Action," Hurley quotes liberally from comments by former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, William Fullbright (D-Ar) and Charles Percy (R-IL) and from Sen. Adlai Stevenson III (D-IL), Representatives Paul Findley (R-IL) and Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey (R-CA), for whose political defeats AIPAC takes credit.
Hurley also quotes George Ball, President John F. Kennedy's under secretary of state and President Lyndon Johnson's ambassador to the United Nations, who certainly would have been U.S. secretary of state but for the Israel lobby opposition generated by his frank advice on the cost to the United States of its persistent tilt toward Israel.
"Bad Use of a Good Friend"
Fullbright, for example, pretty well summarizes the contents of this book in a speech he delivered just before the end of his senate term:
"Endlessly pressing the U.S. for money and arms - and invariably getting all and more than she asks - Israel makes bad use of a good friend...Israel's supporters in the U.S....by underwriting intransigence, are encouraging a course which must lead toward her destruction - and just possibly ours as well."
And Ball summarizes the lessons learned by all who have run afoul of Israel's American lobby:
"When leading members of the American Jewish community give (Israel's) government uncritical and unqualified approbation and encouragement for whatever it chooses to do, while striving so far as possible to overwhelm any criticisms of its actions in Congress, and in the public media, they are, in my view, doing neither themselves nor the U.S. a favor...They've got one thing going for them. Most people are terribly concerned not to be accused of being anti-semitic, and the lobby so often equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. They keep pounding away at that theme, and people are deterred from speaking out."
In a chapter examining "Israel and the United States," Hurley notes Israel's success in preventing any congressional investigation of its 1967 attack on a U.S. naval ship, the USS Liberty, in which 34 Americans were killed and 171 injured. In partial explanation he quotes former chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
"I've never seen a president - I don't care who he is - stand up to them (the Israelis). It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what is going on."
In his chapter on "American Jewry and Free Speech," Hurley quotes the late Philip Klutznik, a former U.S. secretary of commerce and mainstream U.S. Jewish leader who became a virtual non-person in the U.S. Jewish community when he began to speak out against Israeli extremism. Describing the reaction to his outspokenness by individual American Jews, Klutznik reported:
"They say to me, 'You are absolutely right in what you say and do, but I can't. I can't stand up as you do.'"
In a 1988 speaking tour, Shulamit Aloni, former leader of Israel's dovish Meretz Party, admonished North American Jewish audiences:
"If you have the right to speak out on human rights in countries all around the world - including Jews in the Soviet Union - you certainly have the right to speak out on human rights in Israel. How wrong does Israel have to be before you speak up?"
Hurley devotes three chapters to the internal stresses within Israel, religious versus secular, extremists versus moderates, that propel Israel steadily toward the goal of the Ariel Sharon wing of the Likud Party - expulsion of all the Palestinian Arabs from all of Palestine. It is this act, Hurley believes, that will lose Israel its American protection, and thus seal its fate in an era when both Israel and its Arab neighbors will have nuclear weapons and the will to use them.
Then, in lawyerly fashion, he cites the three issues whose solutions could avert this nightmare scenario: the problem of the Palestinian refugees, the return by Israel of the occupied territories, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. This chapter, like his final one, "A Plan for Peace," will be of less interest to those familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. On the other hand, for newcomers to the issue who are less interested in its history than its solution, they may be the most valuable 40 pages of the book.
Hurley's work should be on the shelf of every student of the Arab-Israeli dispute. It also is ideal for newcomers to the problem who are sufficiently motivated to read it in its entirety. It is extremely well footnoted, with every quote carefully sourced. To this reviewer, the only weakness of the book is its lack of an index which would enable readers to find, once again, those quotes that are so valuable in getting the attention of the truly perplexed.
This lack is particularly surprising because the book, under two different titles, has had two separate publishers, and has none of the typos, ambiguous sentences or incomplete footnoting that often mar presentations by small publishers. Perhaps in its third printing, and I am sure there will be one when the usefulness of this volume becomes more widely known, its only flaw will be eliminated.
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Thought for the Day:
"After we finally gained the freedom to not be allowed to order "Mein Kampf" via the Internet, we should . . . keep the anti-British, anti-Caucasian, anti-Islamic and anti-German literature from the reader."
(Letter to the Editor of Focus, a German magazine commenting on the Jewish censorship attempts via Internet-book retailers.)