ZGram - 10/26/2004 - "An Outrageous Invasion Of American
Diplomacy"
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Tue Oct 26 09:23:45 EDT 2004
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever
October 26, 2004
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
Slowly but surely we are succeeding in getting out of the Revisionist
ghetto and making Ernst Zundel's plight known to more mainstream
audiences. For instance, the well-written article below by a retired
Senior Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. Department of State
contains this sentence embedded in a larger context: "... in Canada
one writer, Ernst Zundel, who was not satisfied with the official
version of the Holocaust and, after extensive research said so, has
been in prison for many months, and it is by no means clear that he
will ever get a fair hearing." It just shows you that ever more
people know that "the tail wags the dog," as a recent film has made
clear.
[START]
An Outrageous Invasion
Of American Diplomacy
By Terrell E. Arnold
10-24-4
Last week, with little or no public discussion, Congress passed The
Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004. To dispel any doubt as to
why this was done, President Bush immediately signed it and took his
bragging rights on the campaign trail. This legislation requires the
United States Department of State to monitor and combat anti-Semitism
everywhere in the world (Anti-Semitism is not defined in the
legislation). The legislation requires creation of a special office
in the State Department to oversee such activities and to make an
annual report to the Congress. State would also be expected in any
country where alleged anti-Semitic acts occurred to "combat" those
acts and to publish country "report cards" in a report that is
additional to the annual human rights report State already is
responsible for publishing.
The legislation was passed over State Department objections as
contained in comments of the State Department Spokesman, and in
reported memos to the Congress and the White House.
Why This Legislation Now?
This legislation comes at a time when a growing number of Jews take
the position that anti-Semitism is not a global problem. The
problems, these Jews state, are Zionist extremism and the behavior of
the state of Israel. As stated in an article this week by Gilad
Atzmon, an Israeli: "there is no anti-Semitism any more. In the
devastating reality created by the Jewish state, anti-Semitism has
been replaced by political reaction."
In a recent writing on the traditional Jewish view, Rabbi Joseph
Dershowitz says that the Zionists have "created a pseudo-Judaism
which views the essence of our (Jewish) identity to be a secular
nationalism." The thrust of these arguments is that Jews and Judaism
are not the same thing as the secular state of Israel, and the
behavior of the secular state is the source of Jewish trouble in the
world. Unfortunately the many Jews who disapprove of what Israel does
take the heat along with others.
Below the radar, however, Israeli leadership, supporters of Israel,
and pro Zionist lobbying groups in the United States have worked for
years to build a wall around Israeli actions in Palestine. Their
principal charge against people who object to Israeli actions is that
the critics are "anti-Semitic". The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
makes a continuing effort through a nation-wide program that is
reported on the Middle East Forum website called Campus Watch. This
site regularly comes down hard on academics who take a critical view
of Israel, Zionism or actions against the Palestinians.
The site makes it clear that one aim is to stifle faculty, students,
speakers, or groups on campuses who are likely to criticize Israel,
to favor the Palestinians, or to make disparaging remarks about Jews
or Judaism. A recent example occurred at Duke University in the past
few days where an attempt was made to cancel a conference on
Palestine. All of those approaches have been aimed at making Israeli
treatment of the Palestinian people absolutely disappear from
American awareness.
Those efforts have been accompanied by assurances obtained by Ariel
Sharon from George W. Bush, and by assurances obtained by US Jewish
community leadership from John Kerry that as President either will
totally support Israel.
What Is The Immediate Problem?
It is important to note that the current rise in attacks on Jews,
Jewish symbols and Israel coincides in time with the current
Palestinian uprising that began in 2000. That event was deliberately
provoked by Ariel Sharon,s visit to the temple mount. The Israelis
could not allow a peace process to go forward, and they needed more
excuses for continuing to expel Palestinians. The solution was to
make Palestinians angry enough to fight back, class those acts as
terrorism, and pretend that they, the Israelis, are innocent victims.
Objections to Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians have been a
major cause of anti-Jewish actions for more than fifty years. There
are many countries where governments or private groups are
sympathetic to the Palestinians, or where people simply object to
Israeli violations of human rights. Objections to Israeli actions
have increased in parallel with growing repression of the
Palestinians through targeted assassinations, Israel Defense Force
attacks on refugee camps and towns, wanton shootings of unarmed
teenagers, conflicts between settlers and displaced Palestinians,
destruction of Palestinian orchards and farms, construction of the
so-called security fence"in reality a 24 foot high concrete wall the
main effect of which is to destroy any territorial integrity that
remained for a potential Palestinian state--and continued repression
of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Why The Apparent Sense Of Urgency?
In light of their anticipated increase in expulsions and repression
of the Palestinians, Israeli leadership and supporters have every
reason to expect that retaliatory attacks of the kinds that already
have occurred in various places around the world probably will
increase in the future. Thus the likely purposes of the current
legislative and intimidation drives are to head off future criticism
by getting any and all complaints about Israeli behavior bundled
under the heading: anti-Semitism. By this action the Israelis hope to
retain a claim on the moral high ground that now belongs
significantly, albeit not entirely to Palestinians. Moreover, they
want to make every American diplomatic mission defend the high ground
for Israel, regardless of who the true victims of repression in the
reporting countries may be.
The act tells State to rate governments. The presumption is that any
government that cannot account for an act of reported anti-Semitism,
or cannot control the actions of a dissident group is itself
responsible for such action. That is a severe yardstick, one that the
Congress or any other American institution would not willingly apply
to events in the United States.
How Severe Is The Problem?
How much comment on Middle East issues honestly can be defined as
anti-Semitism, meaning as actions or statements against Jews or
Judaism? The answer to this question is clouded. Blanket assertions
by Jewish groups and defenders that all attacks against Jews or
symbolic targets are anti-Semitic and unprovoked create an impossible
analytical environment. That may indeed be the goal. It would
certainly help the Zionists if no questions of Israeli culpability or
provocation ever arise.
The reported rationale for the legislation is an asserted "alarming
increase in anti-Semitism in several countries. The legislation cited
several examples: (a) a speech of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of
Malaysia; (b) car bombings outside synagogues in Instanbul, Turkey;
(c) anti-Semitic slogans (unspecified) burned into the lawn of
Parliament House in Tasmania; (d) desecration by vandals of
gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Russia; (e) attack on a Jewish
school by vandals in Toronto, Canada; and (f) a fire of unknown
origin at a synagogue in Toulon, France.
Those incidents are deplorable, but the comments of the Malaysian
Prime Minister were on their face provoked by Israeli actions in
Palestine, while there is no handy way to know whether the motive for
the others were actually anti-Semitism, or political objections to
Israeli actions. Nor is it possible to determine whether, in a world
approaching 6.5 billion people, the present number of incidents is
out of proportion with global incidents of vandalism and crimes
against persons or property for other minorities or populations
(emphasis intentional).
What Is Going On Here?
This legislation is only one piece of a comprehensive thought control
process. Part one begins with the canard Zionist extremists have
created about Jews who object to what Israel is doing to Palestinians
or what extreme Zionism is actually doing to damage or destroy
Judaism. Jews who contemplate or make such objections are called
"self-hating" Jews. That is a perverse but no less artful way of
killing the messenger: The basic charge is "None of the things you,
the self-hater, worry about are true, and you only think them because
you hate yourself, or maybe you actually hate Judaism." That charge
aims to fixate the victim somewhere between terror and shame, and
informed judgments are that it has silenced numerous potential Jewish
critics of Israeli behavior.
The second thought control device concerns the Holocaust. No other
event in history is exempt from scrutiny. In this case. however,
there is only one version of the experience and to question any piece
of the official version evokes a charge of "Holocaust denial. Coming
out of the chaos of global war, many details of this experience are
likely to be hard to know, but rigorous efforts have been made to
keep investigators or interested historians from looking at it, even
including laws against revisiting it in such countries as Germany and
France.
In fact, in Canada one writer, Ernst Zundel, who was not satisfied
with the official version of the Holocaust and, after extensive
research said so, has been in prison for many months, and it is by no
means clear that he will ever get a fair hearing. A French critic of
the official version of the Holocaust appears on the verge of losing
his position as number two in a French political party as well as his
job as a university professor. That is pretty persuasive killing of
the messenger.
The third element is thought control on university campuses. Through
a combination of legislation - at least in process - and intimidation
via Campus Watch, a variously successful effort has been made
throughout the United States to prevent detached and scholarly
examination or commentaries on the Palestine issues or any other that
include criticism of Israel. The Santorum/Brownbeck amendment to
Title IV of the Higher Education Act, as some critics see it, seeks
to impose thought control through grant administration and other
devices. The goal is to keep potential messengers nervous and silent
on campuses country wide.
The fourth element is the charge of anti-Semitism. Here the effort is
to include under the label any statement or action related to Israel,
Judaism, Jewishness, or the Holocaust, and to make the entire set of
subjects taboo at all levels of discourse. That is the unstated
purpose of the legislation passed by Congress last week. The goal is
to silence all criticism by anyone, anywhere, particularly of Israeli
policy and actions toward Palestinians, through an elaborate
construct of the shame sanction, in this case enforced by the United
States through the State Department. That State already does a
comprehensive global report on matters affecting freedon of religion
obviously does not satisfy the Zionist extremist urge to kill the
messenger. They want to enlist official harrassment by US diplomats
in the kill.
What Is Wrong With Such A Law?
This law is an outrage because it forces the Department of State,
perforce the US Government to bias its reporting of human rights
violations by concentrating on alleged anti-Semitism--as State
objected in its submission to the Congress--by forcing focus on a
single set of events. Americans in general did not seek this law or
even know about its consideration. Since the pressure from ADL and
other Israel supporting lobbyists who got this law introduced and
passed will be to make any attack on Jewish targets or symbols acts
of anti-Semitism, there will be no honest reporting on possible
violations of religious freedom or human rights. A blanket label of
anti-Semitism will foreclose any examination of the reasons for the
attacks.
The current Zionist effort is part of a long process going back more
than 50 years. The problems actually began with the League of Nations
Mandate that required the Jews to achieve a majority in Palestine
before the State of Israel could come into being. The only way that
could be achieved was to remove the Palestinians and bring in more
Jews from outside, because the indigenous Jews numbered only about
50,000 while there were well over a million Palestinians. That
process began in earnest with Jewish terrorists of the Stern and
Irgun groups massacring the people of the village of Deir Yassin.
Since that time over 400 Palestinian villages have been emptied,
razed or occupied by incoming Jews who became the new Israelis, and
the displaced Palestinians have ended up in Gaza or West Bank refugee
camps or abroad.
The Zionist party line is that beginning in 1948, without
provocation, the Arabs took the position that the Israelis should be
driven into the sea, and all the Israelis have done since has been
defend their rights. However, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians
from their homes and villages in the late 40s early 50s began the
Palestinian problem.
The Israelis now say that a two state solution is impossible, and one
proof of that is the unwillingness of Israeli settlers - a quarter
million strong - to give up their settlements in the West Bank.
Settlers appear to be a growing political force in Israeli politics,
and their settlements"promoted and subsidized by the Israeli
government"are intended to scuttle the two state solution.
Many Palestinians, as well as many Jews, do not want a two state
solution anyway. They want one state that is open to both. But that
conflicts with the Zionist ambition to have an exclusively Jewish
state. It is perhaps unfortunate that the idea of a mono-racist,
mono-religious state is contrary to the needs of the case, out of
step with the times as well as with the leading philosophies of
modern states.
What Kind Of Reporting Now And In Future?
According to media reports, State took the position in its objections
to the new law that the Department is already charged with providing
an annual report to the Congress on human rights and religious
freedom, and that report requires collecting data and reporting on
such actions, no matter who might be the victims. The new law, says
State, requires that the right of Jews who may be the subject of such
violations in some countries will be given priority in reporting. The
position the legislation presents is that Jews are the most important
potential victims of human rights violations in any country. As a
matter of policy, not only will the law require State to single out
those incidents for special reporting, State officials will be
expected to take action to assure that such incidents are not
repeated and the perpetrators are punished.
In short, the actual working of the law, unstated of course, is that
on behalf of the Zionists the United States will become the legal
defender of Jews who may be the subjects of violent or offensive
actions anywhere in the world for any reason. What the Zionists have
done, it appears, is buy themselves the equivalent of an attaché in
the US Embassy. By this action, the US Congress has given Zionists,
Jews, or Israel supporters in any country a right to petition the
United States for redress of grievances, and the State Department is
legally required to respond.
In objecting to this outrageous invasion of American diplomacy, one
is at risk of being accused of holocaust denial as well as
anti-Semitism. That risk is part of the problem, because it is one of
the accusations that supporters of this legislation will throw at
objectors. On the one hand, one cannot and should not deny the
massive human rights crimes that were committed by the Nazis against
non-Aryan and non-supportive peoples of Central Europe during latter
phases of World War II. But it is only a proper respect for humanity
that we establish as accurately as possible the numbers as well as
the racial, ethnic, religious, and national origins of the victims,
as well as the perpetrators, and that we do an honest job of
reporting on what we find. At this time, people of the world
generally have neither an accurate nor a complete picture of Nazi
crimes, and in the pervasive atmosphere of refusal to look at the
entire experience, we are not likely to learn. The parallel of
Palestine is more than metaphorical.
What Kind Of Distortions Will Occur?
In a world driven by the self-serving Zionist impulses behind the
Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, we are likely to experience the same
distortions of truth and perception that perturb history of the
holocaust. Ours is a time when, thanks to the mindset of the Bush
administration, our people are overly pre-occupied with terrorism and
the people who commit acts of terror, and we are designing for
ourselves a repeat of the holocaust distortions. Bush and the
neo-cons, aided by supportive media, have singled out Muslims and
through careless use of language have brought our people and our
government to focus exclusively on Islamic terrorists.
In the process the Bush administration and cooperative media have
committed a thought crime against the whole of Islam. They have
simply ignored the fact that most terrorist groups and their causes
are not Islamic. Most events are not in Islamic countries, and most
of the victims are not Americans. That is a mirror image of holocaust
distortion, and it is the kind of story telling that the law just
signed by Bush wants the State Department to indulge in worldwide.
State rightly took the position that such a reporting requirement
will take diplomatic eyes off the ball in several ways. First, the
human rights problems of virtually all countries with dissident
elements are caused by governments and elites, or by extremists who
are tolerated by them, such as is now occurring in Darfur. Secondly,
under this law, American diplomats will be required to use their
assets, their experience, contacts and sources of influence to pursue
charges of anti-Semitism that largely will relate to political
objections to Israeli behavior. US diplomatic effectiveness worldwide
will be impaired by this requirement, and countless peoples and
causes will be done an injustice by it. The quality of American
diplomacy, as well as the credibility and respect for American
diplomats will be impaired by it.
State can and should add to its human rights reporting any
conclusions, findings or official comments in reporting countries
about how and why the climate for anti-Semitism has changed. That
would include observations such as in the 2003 report on France that
officials attribute much of the problem to the Israeli-Palestinian
situation.
What Is A Balanced View?
It is important to make a distinction between sentiments or actions
that are directed on the one hand against Jews as a matter of
religion or ethnicity, and on the other hand against the visible
manifestations, representatives and symbols of Israeli policies and
actions. An attack on the Israeli Embassy should not be viewed as
anti-Semitic any more than an attack on the American Embassy should
be viewed as anti-Christian. Israeli policies and actions are a
legitimate secular area of potential discussion and disagreement, and
they should not be sheltered from public view or protected from the
objections of people who are affected by them or who simply
disapprove.
The actions of Palestinians, Iraqis or other peoples who seek to
repel and eject invading armies cannot legitimately be classed as
terrorism. At the same time though, kidnappings, beheadings, and
suicide bombings obviously cross a human rights line no matter how
just the cause of the perpetrators may be or who may be the victims.
The United States should not allow itself to remain in the position
of defending the Israelis against the consequences of their
aggressive and self-centered actions, while coming down hard on the
Palestinians for defending themselves. While protective of Judaism,
as we must be of any other religion, we should not allow ourselves to
be a foil for irresponsible and repressive Israeli actions.
Protecting the Jews as Jews is not a problem for us. Protecting the
Israelis as political actors whose treatment of the Palestinians is
reprehensible is entirely another matter. In this light, both the
White House and the Congress, as well as the Kerry campaign, are on
the wrong side of the Israeli political issues, and that posture is
enormously costly to the United States virtually everywhere in the
world.
How Can State Cope?
As the State Department attempts to implement this law, officials can
do the principle things required by continuing to report as they do
on human rights in every country. Using France and Australia as
examples, since they have been singled out as particular areas of
anti-Semitism, the 2003 report is indicative of what properly can be
done. Under the heading of freedom of religion, the report includes
an enumeration of incidents as well as descriptions of the
perpetrators where known and iindications of any actions taken by
government to deal with the incidents.
US diplomatic approachs might be appropriate, on behalf of American
Jews, to protest a genuinely anti-Semitic incident. However, our
diplomats should not fall into the trap of protesting French or any
other private reactions to Israeli policies and actions. To protect
the integrity of US diplomacy, State therefore has to look behind the
reasons for any incident to determine whether the motive of the
perpetrator relates to Jewish religion or ethnicity or Israeli
politics. If the root causes are politics, the human rights report
should make that clear.
What Ultimately Is The Problem?
The root problem here is an improper Israeli/Zionist extremist drive
to force the United States to provide political cover for Israeli
actions against the Palestinians. This, however, is only a specific
application of a much larger abuse of the American system. As stated
by Alfred M. Lilienthal more than two decades ago, Americans really
need to look at what is going on here. According to Lilienthal:
QUOTE: Our system of representative government has been profoundly
affected by the growing influence and affluence of minority pressure
groups, whose strength invariably increases as presidential elections
approach. This makes it virtually impossible to formulate foreign
policy in the American national interest.
This explains why the politicians have been mesmerized by fear of the
"Jewish vote" in a hotly contested state. The inordinate Israelist
influence over the White House, the Congress and other elected
officials, stems from this ability to pander bloc votes. Few Jews
appreciate the methodology employed by the powerful Zionist lobby in
Washington to keep the politicians in line. It's not exactly pretty,
and even in the declining morality of our day, I am certain that many
would be revolted by what is done in their name to help the Middle
East's "bastion of democracy." UNQUOTE.
That appraisal is excerpted from a much broader critical statement
made by Lilienthal in 1981. Zionist manipulation of our leadership
and our policies are far worse and even more open than they were two
decades ago. It is time that all Americans take to heart the words of
this wise, honest, and widely respected Jew, and seriously fight back.
What Must Be Done?
Congress and the President have made it clear to the whole world that
on any matters pertaining to the Middle East they are catering to
Israel. They are prepared to buy votes and other political favors by
protecting Israel from the consequences of continuing repression of
the Palestinian people. In this instance they have made a law that
provides American political cover for ongoing Israeli violations of
human rights.
The law is an outrageous Zionist interference in American diplomacy
and in the internal affairs of the United States. It should never
have been enacted. It should not be applied. To protect our diplomats
and our reputation abroad, The Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of
2004 should be repealed at the earliest possible moment.
For all reported cases, our diplomats should observe and report as
requred for the annual report on human rights. Americans should be
diligent about dealing with any actual cases of anti-Semitism in the
United States. However, the Israelis have their own Embassies. Let
them explain themselves and fight their own battles. Hopefully they
will listen, learn, and moderate their own behavior.
**********
[END]
The writer is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US
Department of State. He will welcome comments at
wecanstopit at charter.net
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