Somaliland CyberSpace

Jewish Lobby's Grip on the U.S. Media

By Dr M.Bali,

Quotables

"The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest". - John Dewey

"Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose". – Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." -- Michael Parenti

"Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all ... we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States."-- Harold Pinter

"The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the U.S.], and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic. People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful --very powerful." Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, a recipient of 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

Summary

This is not a message of intolerance nor of conspiracy theory. It is about a domestic political reality that is widely known overseas but rarely heard of in America because of the fear of anti-semitism charges. No mainstream publication or station will permit these remarks be printed or broadcasted. But if you take the few minutes it takes to go through it, you might learn a thing or two. Doing so this might confirm some of your wonderings of the media conduct as well as on U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East or the War on Terror. All these remarks are backed by published evidence. Following the commentary is a section of web links to research the issue and to hear other voices as well. It is a local issue but one with huge international reach and ramifications.

Absract

Many discerning readers and viewers know by now that most political media outlets have turned themselves into Pro-Jewish news networks. The 125,000 member-donors of the powerful Jewish lobby, American Israeli Political Affairs Committee, maintains a grip over the media by picking up many stories and issues and presenting most sound-alike talking heads and writers whenever the issues under discussions include the Middle East conflict, Islam or terrorism. They also punish savagely anyone who publishes or broadcasts any views contrary to the Lobby's positions.

The Jewish lobby's strangle-hold over the mainstream media defines not only the distorted public view of the Middle Eastern issues, but it is also the reason for the wrong-headed policies the U.S. government adopts towards that vital region.

AIPAC's influence over the mass media is facilited through two seperate but related means: The Jewish ownership of important parts of the mainstream media (1) and through the use of infiltrators. This group's shananigans are deeply embedded by AIPAC in the news production process, from field news-reporting to the backrooms of the studios to the anchors' and editors' desks. AIPAC members are being assigned into all national and regional newspapers, as well as TV and radio networks. (Similar and elaborate arrangements are in place where thousands of AIPAC members are also being planted in most government offices of both Congressional and Executive branches). These inside workers and the lobby groups work together to block out the dessimination of any material that is remotely critical of Jews and Israel, whilst at the same time they push out to the public forums and policy-making councils pro-Israeli interests and view-points.

The news industry should educate itself of the level of infiltration into their organizations. It shouldn't take the magnitude of the horror similar to that of 9/11 tragedies for the news industry and the academic world to wake up to this reality of being used unwittingly by a powerful and ruthless lobby group whose allegiances and interests not only lie external to those of America's but also harmful to long-term American and Israeli interests.

This doesn't mean that the professional integrity of every organization has been compromised nor that every journalist is involved. But the pattern is surprisingly the same. The larger the news organization, say the TV news channels and the major national and regional publications, the more extensive this lobby's influence is. For example, the supposedly public NPR and PBS are the worst compromised with the lobby's well-known members such as Neal Conan, Linda Gradstein, Terry Gross, Renee Montagne, Michele Norris and Ted Koppel zealously promote the AIPAC'S interests. On the cable news, CNN is the glaring case where AIPAC personalities such as Larry King, Paula Zahn, Aaron Brown, Glenn Beck and Wolf Blitzer maintain a tight control over the channel's news broadcasts.

Stephen Lendman of the Centre for Research on Globalization attributes the pro-Israel bias of CNN's "The Situation Room" to Wolf Blitzer's background: "CNN reporter and anchor Wolf Blitzer ... daily spews a different brand of racism along with the usual mix of US empire-supportive lies, myths, rationalizations and lots more heard all over the corporate media airwaves. Blitzer currently hosts a weekday afternoon program called The Situation Room as well as the Sunday Late Edition talk show. He began his journalism career with Reuters in their Tel Aviv bureau before moving to Washington as White House correspondent for the hard line ultraconservative Jerusalem Post. He's held a number of positions at CNN as military affairs reporter during the Gulf war, White House correspondent and more. What's ignored about Blitzer that should stir controvery is that at one time he was a lobbyist for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That and his one-time connection to the Jerusalem Post are part of his roots making it impossible for Blitzer to be objective reporting on anything about Israel or events in the Middle East. It's easy and probably accurate to see him as AIPAC's on-air man at CNN. It's also no surprise that the preponderance of guests he has on with him share his views which are clearly one-sided and strongly pro-Israel."

U.S. media and political candidates for presidency are shackled and in bondage to AIPAC. This bondage becomes important when even “Haaretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, has admonished Israelis and Americans that the perception in the Arab world and in the EU of America’s total commitment of Israel is unwise and will erupt in a blowback against Israel itself;…that support for a country that has systematically persecuted another people without letup for 60 years, had made America a pariah nation subject to the frustration, anger, and outright hatred of those who condemn the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians.

The U.S.'s unquestioned public support for Jewish causes like Israel is not by accident nor it has any historical links. This is the mere result of this lobby's 50 year long campaign of pushing for the saturation coverage of seemingly endless pro-Jewish causes and cries through the unwary media and universities in order to build a solid public sympathy for themselves, while at the same time they continously attack the public images of their Middle eastern rivals like Muslims, Arabs, Iranians and Hamas. None of the latter groups in the U.S. have the culture of philantropy and activism, history and war chest to match the Jewish lobby's.

The Jewish lobby's propaganda thrust has been in forging its distinct advantage in pursuing its successful efforts to miseducate the American public opinion that American interests and values are identical to Israeli interests and values and to make American foreign policy and America's wars indistinguishable from Israeli foreign policy and Israel's wars.

But the Twin Towers' fall in 2001 has dealt a blow to this fantasy. Although the mainstream media was on the AIPAC-inspired silence spell, most Americans saw Al Qaida's horrible actions were retaliations against America for supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. But Americans didn't learn a lesson long enough from their recent past as the current administration embarked on a costly and unnecessary war on terror instead of addressing the underlying Palestinian question. Nevertheless, the war in Iraq would not have been possible the way it happened without this solid propaganda campaign and political lobbying power in place. The current frenzy over and the war drumming directed against Iran is also mainly driven by the Jewish lobby. "America's reputation has been seriously damaged by officials who took the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as a licence to panic, to lie, to kidnap, to torture and to jeer at the ancient and modern guarantees of civilisation: habeas corpus, Geneva conventions, alliances, United Nations, common decency", says Godfrey Hodgson on OpenDemocracy article.

Extensive evidence is available now that found that this unquestioned public support for the Jewish lobby causes and their manipulation of the public discourse is the reason behind the U.S.'s blind support for Israel. As a result of this media propaganda and the succesful lobbying campaign, Israel downloads from the U.S. 4-5 billion dollars a year, plus 3 billion dollars bribery a year to Egypt for having made peace with Israel back in 1977.

If more Americans really knew more about the Middle Eastern issues, they would have instead supported the stateless Palestinian refugees. This is consistent with America's core values like the rule of the law, seperation of religion and state, compassion, liberty and equality. But their is a barrier to dessiminating the truth the rest of the world knows about. The Jewish lobby is famous for being liberal in one thing only: That of using the 'anti-semitism' label accusations in order to stifle any public or educational discussions on above topics outside its own narrow tribal narrative.

But the reality is a different matter. The following remarks by historian Tony Judt show how those who are afraid of anti-semitism charges are doing disservice to Jews, Israel and America: "The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences".

Tony Judt continues: "The charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic -- is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left. The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized -- but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" -- it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews. In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia..." -- excerpted from the article "The Country that Wouldn't Grow Up", by Tony Judt, Ha'aretz, http://www.haaretz.com, 5/5/06.

A major obstacle to understanding the Jewish lobby's power and a disguised blessing for AIPAC and other Zionist organizations is the famous shadowy Jewish global conspiracy theories most notoriously embodied by the The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion in Europe in the early twentieth century. Those theories were politically motivated smear campaigns that gave credence to purported Jewish designs for everything from changing global food diets to building of a world government.

But AIPAC and other modern religio-ethnic lobby groups don't need to follow the playbooks of the Protocols. They are instead conventional political pressure groups who engage in regular political give-or-take activities using methods well-established and deeply engrained in a free and consumerist society.

AIPAC, which is only one of main Jewish groups, has 125,000 enrolled donor-members and an anual budget of 100 million dollars. Its eight divisions subscribe to every known publication and they read them all. If they see any views they don't approve of, they pass that information on to the discussions mailing lists they maintain for members to stay in contact. The rest is easily acomplished by the enrolled members who flood the offending party's bigwigs with thousands of calls and messages. Only one experience like that will drive the point home: Play it safe and don't allow such controversial things published or broadcasted. Why?

The reason is because they don't want to spend weeks and months defending themselves when they would get thousands of angry e-mails and calls. If you were on the recieving end, you could ignore tons of e-mail messages, but you couldn't afford to do so when you must answer a call after call of thousands of people calling you the worst names around. Why? Because someone was allowed to tell the other side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or they outed the name of the Jewish Lobby and its zionist interests that are contrary to those of America's. (In return, to reward sympathetic journalists, pundits and politicians, AIPAC sends scores of them to paid lavish trips to Israel every year).

"[M]ost citizens are unaware of the startling fact that for years our U.S. Middle East policy has not been crafted by seasoned experts who are committed to America's basic national interests. The United States provides the support without which Israel could not maintain its repression of human rights and its territorial expansion". says Congressman Paul Findley, CNI Founding Chairman, Author of "They Dare to Speak Out" and other books, US Congress (R-IL). "This collusive relationship severely damages the U.S. influence and credibility worldwide. It has led our government into a disgraceful practice of turning a blind eye to Israeli violations of both international and U.S. law, a habit widely noted by foreign leaders",

Allowing this to happen indefinately makes a mockery, beyond any doubt, of any notion of producing a publicly useful news and commentary for the diverse society we are, especially on issues that have many repercussions for the physical, economic and energy security in the U.S. and the World. The media industry should stop wasting its resources, time and money, in keep supporting AIPAC and other Jewish lobby groups.

Stop AIPAC before it stops your commute.

Perverse Quote of the election season: "The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel". -- Ann Lewis, AIPAC member and an advisor to Hillary Clinton.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

I have listed below some more links to follow on to research this issue. You will be amazed how much was out there that you weren't aware of.

Links

  1. "Documentary" The Israel lobby:
  2. What is AIPAC for?
  3. Stop Aipac.
  4. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", by John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt () Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 27, 2007. (The work's thesis is that "The Lobby", defined as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction", promotes "crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians" and also "hostility towards Syria and Iran" and is a primary cause for the United States to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state [Israel]; and that U.S. Middle East policy has been driven primarily by domestic politics, especially the "Israel Lobby".
  5. The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
  6. The Power of Israel in the United States by James Petras.
  7. They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby", by Paul Findley (2003).
  8. Beyond Chutzpah: Misuse of Anti-Semitism"... by Norman G. Finkelstein.
  9. The origin of the Palestine-Israeli conflict.
  10. Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine". by Ilan Pappe. Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer at Haifa University.
  11. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
  12. Sharon to Peres: "We Control America".
  13. AIPAC's website
  14. Olmert to U.S.: Impose naval blockade on Iran.
  15. B. R. Gowani. What If the Israeli Lobby was the Islamic Lobby?
  16. B. R. Gowani. What If the Israeli Lobby was the Islamic Lobby? Part 2.
  17. Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict
  18. Jewish lobby watch
Notes

1. According to this report by National Vanguard Books, some of the following entities are owned by Jewish people. News Corp. owns Fox Network, run by Peter Chernin. Owns also The Weekly Standard, a mouthpiece of the Neoconservatives. Time-Warner-AOLmedia empire. Disney World, by Sumner Redstone. Owns CBS and MTV Viacom. owns 238 TV stations. NBC Universal is owned by Jewish media mogul, Edgar Bronfman, Jr.And much more.