Open Letter to President Obama: Change the Rules of the Game
Dear President Obama,
A photo op with Netanyahu and Abbas is no disguise for the fact that on the matter of getting a real peace process going in the Middle East, “Yes, we can” has become “No, we can’t”. And there’s no mystery about why. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rejection of your call for a complete settlement freeze is merely a symptom of the underlying problem. It is that Zionism – a colonial enterprise pure and simple – is not interested in peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept.
I understand completely that the limits of what you can now do are set by the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress on matters to do with Israel. But that will remain the case only if you continue to play the game by the rules of your pork-barrel system. You could change the rules. How? By going over the heads of Congress, and those of your Zionist minders, and talking directly and honestly to your fellow Americans and the world. You have the perfect opportunity to do just that when you make your first address on the platform of the United Nations in New York this coming Wednesday.
A main point to make to your fellow citizens is that it’s not in America’s own best interests to go on supporting Israel right-or-wrong. The short answer to those who ask why is this. It can’t be in America’s best interests to have 1.4 billion Muslims as enemies, especially when the vast majority of them would prefer to be America’s friends. Anti-Americanism is not a natural phenomenon. It’s the product of America’s arrogance of power and the double standards of American foreign policy, double standards which are at their most visible in support for the Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel right-or-wrong.
I am aware that there is an alternative view. America in particular and the West in general must have enemies in order to keep the Military Industrial Complex going (on taxpayers’ money) as a major creator of wealth and jobs. But this, I hope you’ll agree, Mr. President, is the view of Mad Men. In your country they are called neo-cons, a term which includes die-hard American Zionists who, some think, should be charged with treason for putting the interests of a foreign power first.
It was, of course, one of your most illustrious predecessors, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who named the Military Industrial Complex and warned Americans that they would have to be on their guard to prevent it acquiring “unwarranted influence” that could “endanger liberties and the democratic process.” As I document in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Eisenhower was also the first and the last American President to contain Zionism. (My own view is that President Kennedy most probably would have done if he had been allowed to live and served a second term; but there isn’t time to go into that now).
If I was writing the script for your address to the United Nations, I would have you quote the words President Eisenhower spoke to the nation in February 1957 when he was a in the process of reading the riot act to Israel. As you’ll recall, Israel conspired with Britain and France to make war on Eygpt for the purpose of taking back the Suez Canal which Nasser had nationalized and, the conspirators hoped, creating the conditions that would lead to Nasser’s downfall. (Real life British 007′s were in Cairo with orders to assassinate him if the opportunity arose). Israel occupied the Sinai desert and Sharm el-Sheik and was telling Eisenhower that it would withdraw only if its conditions were met. Eisenhower said this (my emphasis added):
Israel insists on firm guarantees as a condition to withdrawing its forces of invasion. If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order. We will have countenanced the use of force as a means of settling international differences and gaining national advantage… If the UN once admits that international disputes can be settled using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organisation and our best hope for establishing real world order.
As it happened the clock was turned back on President Johnson’s watch, after he or somebody very high up in his administration gave Israel the greenlight to attack Eygpt in June 1967.
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