You don't have to be an anti-Semite to despise and fear Ariel Sharon
author: love
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Watch your step, it's a cointel mindfield out there. Agents, PR firms, and trolls oh my!
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A short talk by Kennett Love: June 19, 2004
Ladies & gentlemen, David Irving, Michael Santomauro, good evening.
. You don't have to be an anti-Semite to perceive that the United States of America has lost control of its politics to a Jewish lobby that puts Israel's interests above our own American interests. That loss would not be of paramount concern if Israel's interests were the same as -- or even vaguely similar to -- our American interests. And you don't have to be an anti-Semite to oppose and fear George W. Bush and the cruel war in Iraq into which he and the neo-cons and the evangelical fundamentalist Christian cults have led America with lies.
I cite the victory of Zionist Jewish money in the defeat of popular congressional incumbents in the Alabama and Georgia primaries for the national elections. Worse yet, and more recently, I cite the Pavlovian pro-Israel foot-licking adherence of John Kerry to the pro-forma platform vows of the Bush administrations -- father and son -- and the cowardly, continuing congressional caucus touting their grossly partisan support for Israel against nearly the entire Muslim world and in defiance of public opinion in Europe and the rest of the Americas.
Israel's character and policies are criticized and courageously opposed by many of its Jewish citizens. But Israel's character and policies are diametrically opposed to American principles.
1. Israel is racist. Its law of return applies only to Jews born of Jewish mothers. It is not the only democracy in the middle east because it is not a democracy. The Arabs and other non-Jews under Israeli control are second class citizens at best. We have abated our racism and we enforce severe laws against it.
2. Israel is terrorist. It was founded on terror. It applied terror to make Arabs flee, across unfixed and non-legal borders, and then declared them to have forfeited their property and homes. Israel confiscated their possessions after their terrified flight and shot many of them when they tried to retrieve family jewelry. They were barred from return in favor of the influx of Jews. One of Israel's most horrendous acts was the massacre of hundreds of women, children, and old men at Deir Yasseen in the course of the war of
conquest which began to escalate in 1947. The bodies were thrown down the village well. The young men were at work in the fields. The UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated while trying to establish borders in accord with the 1947 UN partition of Palestine. The murder was never solved. Israel never seriously investigated it. It was apparently an act of terror to get more territory for Israel. Israel proclaimed itself an independent state in 1948 on May 15, as part of Israel's permanent campaign to kill or expel all non-Jews in Palestine, -- Armenians, Greek orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics among them -- Sharon led an invasion into Lebanon in 1982 and
personally shepherded the massacre of nearly1,000 Palestine refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla outside of Beirut. Only a few weeks ago a Sharon cabinet minister told the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg there were "innocent men among the Palestinians, but they are collectively guilty; we will have to kill them all."
This genocidal policy was born in 1897 in the mind of Theodore Herzl, author of Der Judenstaat [the Jewish State] and the founder of modern political Zionism. He used the term "transfer of populations". That has been a constant Israeli policy, resembling our own killings and forced relocations of native Americans.
3. Israel is theocratic. Our tradition is to separate church and state. Let me insert here that our traditions and our principles are often violated. Our president is a born-again evangelical who claims god told him to attack Saddam Hussein. He did -- with enormous bunker-busting bombs that inflicted incalculable "collateral damage". An estimated 10,000 Iraqis died, but we have not counted.
4. Iraq was targeted at the prompting of the Jewish neo-cons because Iraq, unlike Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon is still officially at war with Israel. Iraq fired missiles at Israel in the gulf war of Bush the father. This war is pre-emptive, a war of choice, not defense and now we are stuck with it.
5. Israel is a vigorous, anachronistic colonialist power. The world sees our "special relationship" with Israel as a partnership in crusading, conquering colonialism. We serve Israel as armorer, banker, diplomatic protector, and relentless vetoer of UN efforts to curb Israel's violations of international laws. The UN's founding charter in 1945 prohibited using force or the threat of force to acquire territory. Just two years later Israel began doing just that in "liberating" Palestine from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in what it called its "war of liberation" in 1947 - 1948 and in its stunning pre-emptive wars and massacres against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982. It seized upon its triumph in 1967 to occupy the West Bank andGaza. They kill and demolish homes and institutions with appalling
heartlessness and insultingly ignore our timid remonstrances. They run the special alliance; we don't. Some alliance! They don't bother to make a pretense of loyalty nor even compromise out of courtesy. They look the other way when we oppose at nuclear programs in Syria, North Korea, China, India, and Pakistan. They made us look the other way while they built a formidable nuclear and missile armory of their own. They corrupted an American citizen named Pollard to steal our secrets for years and scolded us bitterly for sending him to prison for life instead of letting him "return" to the Jewish State.
In their 1967 war they ambushed our electronic surveillance ship, the "Liberty", in broad daylight with aircraft guns and bombs, motor torpedo boats, even a submarine, crippling the ship and killing some 35 of its crew and wounding dozens more. Israel pressed the day-long attack in the face of oversize American flags and radio identifications and may-days. Israel has given no explanation or expression of and has balked inquiry into the incident. And so have we. President Johnson called off a rescue sortie by the sixth fleet. Survivors of the "liberty" attack have stubbornly sought to learn the reasons why. It is time we ended the "special relationship." It hasn't even a name or agreement to govern its conduct.
President George Washington warned against such a special alliance in his farewell address, saying:
"the nation which indulges toward an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. ... sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."
..."in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! ... real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests."
President Truman in 1947 broke the 150-year-old spell of president Washington's warning against entangling alliances by launching the Marshall plan of aid for Western Europe and the Truman Doctrine to block communist influence in Greece and Turkey.
Israel is touchy about its "legitimate right to exist", citing most frequently the story of god's covenant with Abram, later Abraham, made before Abram had departed from Ur of the Chaldees, his ancestral birthplace in what is now Iraq. The story begins with god's promise of his favor for Abram and his descendants (genesis 12 passim):
"now the lord had said to Abram, get thee out of thy country, ... unto a
land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, ..." when Abram had reached Canaan, north of Palestine, god appeared to him again and said: "unto thy seed will I give this land." There was no mention of a
covenant until genesis 15:18, when the lord said to Abram: "unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the River Euphrates."
The story has god giving land and other promises to Abram right and left. The details differed widely from promise to promise. Years later Joshua, the first conqueror of Palestine, quoted a surprisingly frank admission from god:
"I have given you a land for which ye did not labor, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and olive yards which ye planted not do ye eat."
I suggest that these stories came down in recitations from the days of mythology, all of it folklore, through centuries when Zeus and Venus and Athena were as real as Jehovah and Noah or Abraham or Moses - "an ancient time" as E.l. Doctorow put it, "when no distinction was possible between fact and fiction, ... as in Homer. As in Genesis."
Both parties to a covenant must be alive at the signing. When I covenanted to buy an apartment in New York while I was in Egypt covering the 1973 war for ABC, my lawyer told me later that the deal was delayed until he thought to listen to a radio to hear my live broadcast.
The Muslims, although Abraham appears as Ibrahim in the qur'an, reject the idea that the covenant has any legal standing, giving the Jews any right to trespass on the land of the Canaanites or the Palestinians or the Lebanese or the Syrians and the Egyptians. There is no independent evidence that Abraham ever existed, ever crossed the line between mythology and history. So the Abrahamic covenant has no firm basis in law. Perhaps in tradition.
And the brutal colonialist conduct of Israel is certainly not an acceptable underpinning for a "legitimate right to exist". Our reputation in the world has been tarred and feathered by our total and uncomplaining support of Israel's illegal occupation of nearly all of Palestine.
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Biographical Sketch
Kennett Love was born on August 17, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri. He served from 1943-1946 as a United States Navy pilot during World War II. Like many GIs, Love returned to school after the war and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia College in 1948.
He began his career as a writer and a journalist in 1948 by working as a reporter for the Hudson Dispatch, in Union City, New Jersey. Love served as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, between 1948 and 1962. His assignments included coverage of activities in the Middle East, East Africa, West Africa and Europe. Love was an eight-time winner of the Publisher's Writing Prize. He served in Ethiopia, Morocco, Tunisia and training centers in the United States as a Planner Evaluator for the Peace Corps between 1963 and 1964. Love was an associate professor at Princeton University's School of Oriental Studies from 1964 to 1968. Between 1971-1973 he was a professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, and served as a Cairo correspondent for ABC News. In 1974 Love began to pursue a career as a free lance writer, editor and photographer. For the past two years he has engaged in research and interviews for a history of the 1953 coup in Iran. Love's major published work is the 'Suez: The Twice Fought War. He has produced many articles, reviews, broadcasts and taken photographs which have appeared nationally and internationally.
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by : Kennett Love
 http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6417
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