Are Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby now a threat to the survival of the US-Israel relationship?
In her first response to the killing of the American ambassador and three others in Libya, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she had asked herself the question that many Americans were asking – how it could have happened?
The most likely answer, it seems to me, is that it was a well planned terrorist attack not a spontaneous happening, not part of the protest against video clips of a film that denigrates and insults the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. Some 24 hours before the attack al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video on Jihadist forums. In it he acknowledged the death of his second in command, Abu Yahya, and urged Libyans to avenge his killing. (Abu Yahya was killed by a US drone strike – an American targeted assassination – in Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan on 4 June).
It that light the peaceful protest outside the US consulate in Benghazi against the insulting film was a very convenient cover for the well planned terrorist attack. It was not a secret that Libya’s own security forces do not have the ability to be effective beyond their Tripoli capital, so it has to be assumed that America’s own security arrangements for protecting Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his colleagues left much to be desired.
Hillary’s how question had to be asked but even more important is the one that nobody in the Obama administration or the Romney camp wants to pose – the why question.
The shortest possible answer to the question of what drives and fuels violent, murderous Islamic fundamentalism in its various forms can be given in three words – American foreign policy.
When President George “Dubya” Bush declared his “war on global terrorism”, American foreign policy became the best recruiting sergeant for Islam’s men of violence. It is true that in the past year or two, as a consequence of Obama-authorized American violence (Israeli-like state terrorism in my view), al-Qaeda has suffered some serious setbacks; but the task of putting violent Islamic fundamentalism out of business will only become a mission possible when American foreign policy can command the respect of most Arabs and other Muslims everywhere.
For that to happen the American policy of support for the Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel right or wrong has got to be ended.
At the risk of provoking some of my readers to say again that my qualified optimism is misplaced and that it will never happen, I have to say that I am still entertaining the hope that a second-term President Obama will put America’s own best interests first even to the extent of confronting the Zionist monster and its lobby in Congress and the mainstream media (Fox News in particular).
Today I allowed my optimism to be re-inforced (a little) by a most interesting piece written by Philip Weiss for his web site Mondoweiss. The headline over the piece is Netanyahu’s warmongering spells high noon for the Israel lobby. (Weiss is an influential Jewish-American journalist who describes himself as an “anti-Zionist” and his web site has been described as “a nucleus of anti-Zionist writing.” He said recently that he was particularly gratified to see a growing number of Jews moving in his direction. “I think there’s going to be a big anti-Zionist moment in American Jewish life. I just think it’s inevitable.”)
The opening paragraph of his latest piece is this:
It’s high noon for the Israel lobby at last. The American establishment is balking at the idea of war with Iran, and calling out the neoconservatives for pushing it; and Netanyahu’s tantrum is allowing liberal American Jews to declare they’re not on his side. There seems a likelihood that the “special relationship” with our closest ally will at last be politicized, or at least that war with Iran will come up in the presidential debates – and Romney forced to say he doesn’t want it either, because Americans don’t want it.
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