Monday, February 26, 2007

"My people are American. My time is now."

Citatet ovan är från George Gerschwin, 1926. Gerschwin var icke-troende, hade inte ens genomgått bar mitzvah, och hans uttalande stämmer mycket vä överens med vad sir Edwin Montagu, den ende judiska medlemmen av det brittiska kabinettet sa några år ridigare apropå Balfourdeklarationen, där planerna på en judisk stat i Palestina först tog form: I consider myself a British citizen. All my life I've been trying to get out of the ghetto, and now you want to put me back in there again."

Lenni Brenner redogör för det faktum att den "judiska" befolkningen i USA är de som minst stöder någon religion. Ett försvinnande litet fåtal av dem som identifierar sig som judar kallar sig zionister och ett ännu mindre fåtal av dessa står för en mycket stor del av kampanjbidragen till de två stora kapitalistiska partierna.


(......) A personal experience tells it all about liberals and Zionism. In 1971, the Vietnam-era National Peace Action Coalition asked me to draw in Eldon Clingen, the Liberal Party member of the New York City Council from Manhattan. We had been in the Socialist Party's youth In the 1950s. He joined the Libs on assignment but subsequently involved himself in Democratic Party politics, without changing party registration. But, as he was "Mr. Clean Air" for his leadership in the anti-pollution effort, the Libs asked him to be their Council candidate.

He was pleased to get his Lib faction involved. We chatted. I mentioned that lower-case liberals, against war in Vietnam, shot passing Arabs, even camels, to get Jewish votes.

"Oh, you have me wrong. I'm of Christian descent, and when I think of the terrible things Christians have done to Jews, I say I can't do enough for the Jews."

I told him that the next time he called for more 'enough' for Israel, he should write a check to me because, although I'm a Jew, I don't get any of that 'enough.'

"OK, I'll tell it like it is: In order for a liberal – and I mean a lower-case liberal – to win in New York, he must have the Black, Puerto Rican and Jewish votes because he can't get the Irish or Italian vote. They are locked away with the right-wing. But Blacks and Puerto Ricans don't give us money. So don't tell me about terrible things Israelis are doing to Palestinians. It would upset me. But I'm not going to break with my meal ticket."

The moral of the story is that, while it is crucial to talk about oil industry domination of US foreign policy, it is just as crucial to talk about Zionist funding and its enormous influence on domestic politics. The discussion of both factors must be within a context of insisting that ordinary Americans, Jew or gentile, are fools if they continue to support parties that are so obviously funded by the rich.

Far from being afraid of discussing Zionist funding, it should be a major point in any critique of private contributions. Jews are less than 2.5% of the people. Zionists are now considerably less than 22% of all Jews. (My current estimate is ca. 10%.) And rich campaign contributors are a minority of Zionists. Yet we have an overwhelmingly gentile Congress that is emphatically more pro-Zionist than the majority of Jews.

Far from being a diversion of public attention from the capitalist nature of American politics, as some leftists fear, talking about Zionist money is one of the best ways of making that point. Because of the civil rights struggle and other battles, equality for all races, religions, nationalities, has become part of the broad American value system. Because of this, my percentage estimate of the Jewish proportion of the 400 richest Americans (80), which, trust me on this, is shared by serious scholars, has an automatic tendency to shock. But isn't capitalism is about inequality? It is absurd to think that a system that sanctifies inequality could be egalitarian in the ethno-religious distribution of wealth.

All that is necessary to make the important point that it isn't Jewish contributions but Zionist slush that is offensive, is to cite the fact that we now can see that the Zionists are a minority of Jews. Talk about the oil industry and Zionist contributions at the same time, and people will get the correct idea that we are trying to explain a complex problem in detail.

Let's go further. What US support for Israel and support for Saudi Arabia additionally have in common is that both regimes are theocratic states. An atheist of Jewish background should be concerned if we talked about Israel and didn't talk about Saudi Arabia. So the moral of the story is talk about both. Additionally, everyone now sees a growing alliance between the Zionist establishment and the so-called Christian Zionists. These fanatics support Israel because of their lunatic notion that the creation of Israel means that Christ is coming, any minute now, to save a Christian America, and send all those atheist Jews, and atheist gentiles, to hell. Hitherto, the Jewish establishment could at least be relied on to resist attempts to convert America into a 'Christian' government. But, with the new alliance on foreign policy, that resistance is getting weaker and weaker. The Christian right now reasonably expects an increase in Zionist votes and funding for their candidates. Indeed it is a central tenet of Jewish neo-con politics that it is unreasonable to expect perpetual Christian Zionist support for Israel, unless they get something back in return.

In other words, we are now in a complex political crisis with profound domestic and international consequences. A complex situation can't be dealt with in a one-sided manner. We have no choice but to examine all parts of the situation. If we denounce all the criminals, Americans, Arabs, Christians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, for their crimes, from a democratic secular perspective, in a scientific manner, the Zionists and their Democratic and Republican patrons can say anything they want. An educated public will see that we don't want to deny anyone their rights. On the contrary, they will see that we want to extend human equality and secularism, here and in the Middle East.

Lenni Brenner is editor of 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, and a contributor to CounterPunch's new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Pirater på hugget, Jolly Roger i topp

Följande är från kanadensisk författaren Jeff Wells www.rigint.blogspot.com och har ett par år på nacken men kan vara bra att veta. Rätar ut vissa frågetecken. Kolla även t ex "Bill and George: Happy at last" på samma sajt

Thanks to Cryptogon for hosting an mp3 of the recent BBC Radio 4 documentary on Skull and Bones.

Most of the material will be familiar to those who've tried to educate themselves about the shadowy old boy network of privileged Yalies, but here's something I hadn't heard before: in the presidential papers of George HW Bush is a letter from John Kerry, which he'd signed with the traditional salutation of the Bonesman bond, "Yours in 322."

New, but not surprising. As Alexandra Robbins revealed in Secrets of the Tomb, Kerry has been an active adult recruiter for S&B (in 1986 he tried to "tap" a reluctant Jacob Weisberg, future editor of Slate, who was shocked that a liberal senator could support such an organization), and is said to use "322" as a mnemonic device. And of course his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is the widow of a Republican Bonesman, Senator John Heinz.

For many - too many - Skull and Bones means either It's the Illuminati! or It's a frat house! (The latter charge has become increasingly shrill since Kerry became the presumptive Democratic nominee.) While it's true that founder William Russell was greatly influenced by Germanic secret societies, particularly the Bavarian Illuminati, I think it's a mistake to get hung up on the legacy of Adam Weishaupt. More revealing, and more enduring, is the legacy of the opium trade.

Samuel Russell, William's cousin, founded Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to purchase cheap opium in Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited. Americans were competing for narco dollars with the British, who were importing higher quality Indian grades, and were founding family fortunes in the process. Russell's chief of operations in Canton was Warren Delano Jr, the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Russell's early investors included John Cleve Green, who financed Princeton, and Joseph Coolidge, whose son organized United Fruit which tied together the colonial interests of many New England families, and grandson Archibald Coolidge who co-founded the Council on Foreign Relations. And then there's the Forbes family - the Forbes in "John Forbes Kerry" - who "took drug smuggling to its highest level of profitability and left a legacy that extends into modern times," as Steven Sora writes in Secret Societies of America's Elite.

Skull and Bones - established in 1832 and incorporated in 1856 as the Russell Trust - was sustained by opium money, and established its influence through its ability to place graduates in key positions in the lucrative global drug trade.

Sora advances the thesis that the secret business of societies such as Skull and Bones has been to facilitate the accrual of criminal wealth by a privileged pirate class through such means as drug-running, slave-trading and arms-dealing. Knowing this history, we can make more sense of how a supposedly distinguished family such as Bush can be mixed up in so many stories of drug-running, weapons-smuggling and money-laundering. In the context of the opium trade, the CIA's stuffing Golden Triangle heroin in the corpses of GIs killed in Vietnam and protecting the importation of crack to America's inner cities reads suddenly like business as usual.

That both George Bush and John Kerry are Bonesmen may be nothing but a fluke of the American overclass. That in 2003, George Bush appointed a Bonesman, William H Donaldson, to head the Securites and Exchange Commission, the regulatory body responsible for investigating charges of 9/11 insider trading, is no fluke. That Donaldson is a longtime friend of the Bush family, and classmate of fellow Bonesman and terrorist money launderer Jonathan Bush, is no joke.

Skull and Bones remains to some a silly issue, but an issue it will remain so long as the question "Do you know General Russell?" can send an old boy into a trance faster than "Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?"

posted by Jeff at 1:52 AM