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Dismantling the lobby

By Ramzy Baroud

One cannot emphasise enough the stranglehold Israel’s lobbying infrastructure has on US foreign policy. The36of recent weeks undoubtedly attest to this.

“The special relationship” that has been historically fostered between the US and Israel in fact is often a relationship of leverage, manipulation and intimidation, and often leads to the US supporting actions or resolutions that stand at complete odds with the interests of the American people.

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Book Review: Prof. John Mearsheimer: The Lobby Falters
 
 
London Review of  Books   

Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.’ Words like these are rarely spoken in public in Washington, and anyone who does use them is almost certain not to get a high-level government position. But Admiral Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, greatly admires Freeman: just the sort of person, he thought, to revitalise the intelligence community, which had been very politicised in the Bush years.
 
Predictably alarmed, the Israel lobby launched a smear campaign against Freeman, hoping that he would either quit or be fired by Obama. The opening salvo came in a blog posting by Steven Rosen, a former official of Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, now under indictment for passing secrets to Israel. Freeman’s views of the Middle East, he said, ‘are what you would expect in the Saudi Foreign Ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship’. Prominent pro-Israel journalists such as Jonathan Chait and Martin Peretz of the New Republic, and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, quickly joined the fray and Freeman was hammered in publications that consistently defend Israel, such as the National Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.
 

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South African Elections

by Dr. Firoz Osman

Election manifestoes and party lists are being minutely scrutinised as the electorate debates the various options to elect a leadership that will determine their future over the next few years.

Fifteen years into our democracy, we have unfortunately joined the electoral shenanigans of other nations such as corruption and intimidation. This has become a common and widespread feature of the democratic process, together with a lack of focus on substance, minimal differing policy issues between the various parties, and an overemphasis superficial values and populism.

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Wake up, Christians, or Lose the Holy Land

Western Christendom doesn’t really give a damn about the Holy Land and its people, and couldn’t care less that it is being stolen by Zionists who are unwilling to live there in harmony with other faiths, notes Stuart Littlewood. 
 
 A British man recently applied to the Church of England to have his baptism into the Christian faith cancelled. Five months, he argued, was too young to decide his religious fate. Now 56, he’s against the indoctrination of children in any religion. 
 

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