swifty's revenge wrote:what makes you think it isn't true? Coz its not on the news?
these are the core points. Edited.sry, i always edit.
1) There is an extremely powerful, radically pro-Israel power inside the government and media of the United States.
2) That this power is organized by many powerful Jewish groups and has allies among some Gentiles and some evangelical groups.
3) That this power has influenced American foreign policy to support the criminal actions of Israel.
4) That support of Israel and its agenda has harmed the strategic and other interests of the American people.
5) That it has made America a target of terrorism
6) That it had a leading role in America going to war in Iraq for the strategic interests of Israel while damaging the interests of America
Swifty, please don't think I take seriously ANYTHING that is put out in the conventional media!!!!
On the contrary. I think it probably very likely that the Israeli government has an extremely powerful lobby at Washington. The Israelis invest a huge amount of money and effort into their propaganda machine. They crow about it quite openly. And they are extremely clever at reconstructing and recontextualising their outrageous behaviour in terms that the rest of the world will swallow. They have much of the Western media and a good deal of the Western population thinking that 'poor little Israel' with its nuclear arsenal, its committment to torture as a political tool and its viciously aggressive leaders (the last one was a convicted war criminal) is the victim here instead of the agressor. There are all sorts of structural reasons why it is so successful in convincing people of these things, but that's another argument.
No, what I found laughable about this document was that, just like the American and much of the British media, it has swallowed the Bush government's propaganda line that the current Administration is trying to create a democratic framework within the Middle-East, etc, etc. It expects us to believe that the failures of this administration are the results of distortion by Israeli lobbying. This is the 'poor little U.S doing its best to save the world but being manipulated by clever foreigners' argument all over again. U.S. government propaganda effort to its own population and the rest of the world is just as successful as anything that the Israelis put out at hiding its true motives. It is the best resourced propaganda machine in the world and its successes put the Israelis into the shade.
The current Bush administration, like its predecessors (and the Blair governement, like its predecessors) is simply following some well-established and by now traditional, Foreign Policy goals, to gain control of an economically critical region. The fact that it is a messy business and costing thousands of lives is pretty traditional too. Violence on this scale is always uncontrollable.
Academic apologists will always find ways of blaming their government's actions on others. The broad strategic policies of Bush and his cohorts are not a mistake or a miscalculation (though their actual tactics seem to have been based on a totally ignorant perception of the region), they are not the result of meddling by foreign lobbyists and pressure groups, they are intended.
The last thing Bush or any American or British government would want to see in the Middle East is any independent, democratic system developing. The governments of our two countries have been working to keep the region destablished for over a century. They have brought down any regional government that looked as though it might have some ideas of its own. A democratic Middle-East would be much more difficult for the West to control.
Just look at the foreign policy history of your governments (and mine), where just about everywhere they have supported dictatorial and agressive regimes, destablised democratic ones and supplied genocidal maniacs with the wherewithall to commit atrocities. Their support of Israel is just one example in a long line of the same.
The boot is actually on the other foot. Israel is totally dependent for its position of a vast programme of military aid from the U.S. The U.S. supports it to do its dirty work for it in the region. The U.S. could easily have restrained Israel's recent genocidal actions, for instance. It chose not to do so for its own reasons. That also is typical.
OK Rant over.
Glum!!!!!
