War on Terrorism

Links:
Reopen 9/11 Investigation
Secret Wars Intercom
Scholars for 9/11 Truth
Official Confusion

The Roots of Terrorism

U.S. complicity in Israel's illegal behavior began in earnest in 1967, when Israel, with the clandestine cooperation of President Lyndon B. Johnson, accelerated its takeover of Arab land. Following these conquests, Israel's U.S. lobby pressured the U.S. government into giving ever-increasing amounts of money and armaments, as well as unconditional political support, to the state of Israel. Little pressure was required. Conscious of the threat of being labeled anti-Semitic, members of Congress almost always cooperated.

So did the executive branch. Professor Noam Chomsky, who deserves recognition as the longest-standing Jewish American defender of Palestinian rights, believes the U.S. administration is guilty of "unilateral rejectionism," opposing any measures that could be viewed as anti-Israel. He believes the bureaucracy is a self starter in this respect and needs no prodding. He contends that, in recent years, the U.S. government has acted on its own in providing decisive support to Israel's policies, under which "Palestinians have suffered terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources, crucially water."

Chomsky may be right in his assessment of the executive branch, but the intimidation factor is alive and well on Capitol Hill, where most members, while privately resenting the pressure, dutifully toed the Israeli line. If voting is kept secret, I am confident that aid to Israel would have long ago been heavily conditioned - if not terminated - in both chambers.

In the Oval Office, recent misleading influences on Middle East policy have come from several sources. The most influential group consisted of Republican members of Congress and other party members whose main concern was Bush's election to a second term as president. They welcomed support from all possible groups, especially the politically astute pro-Israel clique.

Another group consisted of staff members who felt constrained to defend the behavior of the state of Israel at all costs. This group included several Jews and fundamentalist Christians. The fundamentalists, often identified as right-wing Christians, were a major element in Bush's election to the presidency. Combined, the Jewish and fundamentalist Christian elements constituted less than 20% of the U.S. population, but they occupied positions of influence in Washington out of proportion to their numbers. Nevertheless, they still far outnumbered the ardently pro-Israel groups in the rest of the world.

Surprisingly, the White House staff, as well as the rest of the executive branch, was almost devoid of Muslims, a voting bloc that overwhelmingly supported Bush in his election to the presidency in 2000. In the balloting, Muslim votes gave Bush a national plurality estimated at two million. In Florida, the state that ultimately provided the electors that put Bush in the White House, an estimated 90 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Bush. His plurality among Muslims was more than ninety thousand. Remarkably, twenty-six thousand of that plurality came from first-time voters.

Agha Saeed, who engineered the national bloc voting for Bush summed it up: "U.S. Muslims crossed the political Rubicon. They formed a new coalition of voters." In the White House, Bush and his political lieutenants did not seem to notice. As they planned Bush's re-election campaign in 2004, they could not count on bloc support from the Muslim community.

The third group consisted of gatekeepers, staff members whose duties included shielding the president from unpleasantness and limiting his appointments to people who would tell him what he wanted to hear.

These combined influences kept the president and to members of his team dangerously isolated from the real America - and the realities of the Middle East. Only a handful of major U.S. periodicals provided balanced coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Knowledgeable viewers searched in vain for balanced reporting of Middle East events on television.