The Venom of Zionists, The Twisted Logic of Fundatmental Christians

09 July 2002

Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, the Californian
audience had been struck silent. Dennis Bernstein, the Jewish host
of KPFA Radio's Flashpoint current affairs programme, was reading
some recent e-mails that he had received from Israel's supporters in
America. Each one left the people in the church – Muslims, Jews,
Christians – in a state of shock. "You
mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed
the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of
Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab
terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!"

Bernstein's sin was to have covered the story of Israel's invasion of
Jenin in April and to have interviewed journalists who investigated the
killings that took place there – including Phil Reeves and Justin
Huggler of The Independent – for his Flashpoint programme.
Bernstein's grandfather was a revered Orthodox Rabbi of
international prominence but neither his family history nor his origins
spared him. "Read this and weep, you mother-fucker self-hating Jew
boy!!!" another e-mail told Bernstein. "God willing a Palestinian will
murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats." Yet another:
"I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist
Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and
cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel." Lubin is
also Jewish, the executive director of the Middle East Children's
Alliance, a one-time committed Zionist but now one of Israel's fiercest
critics. Her e-mails are even worse.

Indeed, you have to come to America to realise just how brave this
small but vocal Jewish community is. Bernstein is the first to
acknowledge that a combination of Israeli lobbyists and conservative
Christian fundamentalists have in effect censored all free discussion
of Israel and the Middle East out of the public domain in the US.
"Everyone else is terrified," Bernstein says. "The only ones who begin
to open their mouths are the Jews in this country. You know, as a kid,
I sent money to plant trees in Israel. But now we are horrified by a
government representing a country that we grew up loving and
cherishing. Israel's defenders have a special vengeance for Jews
who don't fall in line behind Sharon's scorched-earth policy because
they give the lie to the charge that Israel's critics are simply
anti-Semite."

Adam Shapiro is among those who have paid a price for their beliefs.
He is a Jew engaged to an American-born Palestinian, a volunteer
with the International Solidarity Movement who was trapped in Yasser
Arafat's headquarters in the spring while administering medical aid.
After telling CNN that the Sharon government was acting like
"terrorists" while receiving $3bn a year in US military aid, Shapiro and
his family were savaged in the New York Post. The paper slandered
Shapiro as the "Jewish Taliban" and demeaned his family as
"traitors". Israeli supporters publicised his family's address and his
parents were forced to flee their Brooklyn home and seek police
protection. Shapiro's father, a New York public high-school teacher
and a part-time Yeshiva (Jewish day school) teacher, was fired from
his job. His brother receives regular death threats.

Israel's supporters have no qualms about their alliance with the
Christian right. Indeed, the fundamentalists can campaign on their
own in Israel's favour, as I discovered for myself at Stanford recently
when I was about to give a lecture on the media and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, part of a series of talks arranged largely by
Jewish Americans. A right-wing Christian "Free Republic" outfit
posted my name on its website, and described me as a "PLO
butt-kisser" and asked its supporters to "freep" my lecture. A few
demonstrators turned up outside the First United Methodist Church in
Sacramento where I was to speak, waving American and Israeli
flags. "Jew haters!" they screamed at the organisers, a dark irony
since these were non-Jews shrieking their abuse at Jews.

They were also handing out crudely printed flyers. "Nothing to worry
about, Bob," one of my Jewish hosts remarked. "They can't even spell
your name right." True. But also false. "Stop the Lies!" the leaflet read.
"There was no massacre in Jenin. Fiske [sic] is paid big bucks to
spin [lie] for the Arabs..." But the real lie was in that last sentence. I
never take any payment for lectures – so that no one can ever claim
that I'm paid to give the views of others. But the truth didn't matter to
these people. Nor did the content of my talk – which began, by
chance, with the words "There was no massacre" – in which I
described Arafat as a "corrupt, vain little despot" and suicide
bombings as "a fearful, evil weapon". None of this was relevant. The
aim was to shut me up.

Dennis Bernstein sums it up quite simply: "Any US journalist,
columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or
clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately
report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an
anti-Semite." In fact, no sooner had Bernstein made these remarks
than pro-Israeli groups initiated an extraordinary campaign against
some of the most pro-Israeli newspapers in America, all claiming
that The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San
Francisco Chronicle were biased in their coverage of the
Middle-East conflict. Just how The New York Times – which boasts
William Safire and Charles Krauthammer, those giants of pro-Israeli
bias, among its writers – could be anti-Israeli is difficult to see,
although it is just possible that, amid its reports on Israel's
destruction in the West Bank and Gaza, some mildly critical
comments found their way into print. The New York Times, for
example, did report that Israeli soldiers used civilians as human
shields – though only in the very last paragraph of a dispatch from
Jenin.

None the less, the campaign of boycotts and e-mails got under way.
More than 1,000 readers suspended their subscriptions to the Los
Angeles Times, while a blizzard of e-mails told pro-Israeli readers to
cancel their subscription to The New York Times for a day. On the
East Coast, at least one local radio station has lost $1m from a
Jewish philanthropist while other stations attempting to cover the
Middle East with some degree of fairness are said to have lost even
more. When the San Francisco Chronicle published a four-page
guide to the conflict, its editors had to meet a 14-member delegation
of local Jewish groups to discuss their grievances.

According to Michael Futterman, who chairs the Middle East strategy
committee of 80 Bay Area synagogues, Jewish anger hit "boiling
point" when the Chronicle failed to cover a pro-Israeli rally in San
Francisco. Needless to say, the Chronicle's "Readers'
Representative", Dick Rogers, published a grovelling, self-flagellating
apology. "The paper didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally," he
wrote. "This wasn't fair and balanced coverage." Another objection
came from a Jewish reader who objected to the word "terror" being
placed within inverted commas in a Chronicle headline that read
"Sharon says 'terror' justifies assault". The reader's point? The
Chronicle's reporting "harmonises well with Palestinian
propaganda, which tries to divert attention from the terrorist campaign
against Israel (which enjoys almost unanimous support among
Palestinians, all the way from Yasser Arafat to the 10-year-old who
dreams of blowing himself up one day) and instead describes
Israel's military moves as groundless, evil bullying tactics."

And so it goes on. On a radio show with me in Berkeley, the
Chronicle's foreign editor, Andrew Ross, tried to laugh off the
influence of the pro-Israeli lobby – "the famous lobby", he called it
with that deference that is half way between acknowledgement and
fear – but the Israeli Consul General Yossi Amrani had no hesitation
in campaigning against the Chronicle, describing a paper largely
docile in its reporting of the Middle East as "a professionally and
politically biased, pro-Palestinian newspaper".

The Chronicle's four-page pull-out on the Middle East was, in fact, a
soft sell. Its headline – "The Current Strife Between The Israelis And
The Palestinians Is A Battle For Control Of Land" – missed the
obvious point: that one of the two groups that were "battling for control
of the land" – the Palestinians – had been occupied by Israel for 35
years.

The most astonishing – and least covered – story is in fact the
alliance of Israeli lobbyists and Christian Zionist fundamentalists, a
coalition that began in 1978 with the publication of a Likud plan to
encourage fundamentalist churches to give their support to Israel. By
1980, there was an "International Christian Embassy" in Jerusalem;
and in 1985, a Christian Zionist lobby emerged at a "National Prayer
Breakfast for Israel" whose principal speaker was Benjamin
Netanyahu, who was to become Israeli prime minister. "A sense of
history, poetry and morality imbued the Christian Zionists who, more
than a century ago, began to write, plan and organise for Israel's
restoration," Netanyahu told his audience. The so-called National
Unity Coalition for Israel became a lobbying arm of Christian Zionism
with contacts in Congress and neo-conservative think-tanks in
Washington.

In May this year, the Israeli embassy in Washington, no less,
arranged a prayer breakfast for Christian Zionists. Present were
Alonzo Short, a member of the board of "Promise Keepers", and
Michael Little who is president of the "Christian Broadcasting
Network". Event hosts were listed as including those dour old
Christian conservatives Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who once
financed a rogue television station in southern Lebanon which
threatened Muslim villagers and broadcast tirades by Major Saad
Haddad, Israel's stooge militia leader in Lebanon. In Tennessee,
Jewish officials invited hundreds of Christians to join Jewish crowds
at a pro-Israel solidarity rally in Memphis.

On the face of it, this coalition seems natural. The Jewish
Anti-Defamation League felt able to run an ad that included an article
by a former Christian coalition executive director Ralph Reed,
headlined "We People of Faith Stand Firmly With Israel". Christians,
Reed claimed, supported Israel because of "their humanitarian
impulse to help and protect Jews, a shared strategic interest in
democracy in the Middle East and a spiritual connection to Israel".

But, of course, a fundamental problem – fundamental in every sense
of the word – lies behind this strange partnership. As Uri Avnery, the
leader of Gush Shalom, the most courageous Israeli peace group,
pointed out in a typically ferocious essay last month, there is a darker
side to the alliance. "According to its [Christian Zionist] theological
beliefs, the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a
Jewish state on all its territory" – an idea that would obviously appeal
to Ariel Sharon – "so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ
possible." But here comes the bad bit. As Avnery says, "the
evangelists don't like to dwell openly on what comes next: before the
coming [of the Messiah], the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those
who don't will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of
Armageddon. This is basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but who
cares, so long as they support Israel?"

The power of the Israeli lobby in the United States is debated far
more freely in the Israeli press than in American newspapers or on
US tele- vision. There is, of course, a fine and dangerous line
between justified investigation – and condemnation – of the lobby's
power, and the racist Arab claim that a small cabal of Zionists run the
world. Those in America who share the latter view include a deeply
unpleasant organisation just along the coast from San Francisco at
Newport Beach known as the "Institute for Historical Research".
These are the Holocaust deniers whose annual conference last
month included a lecture on "death sentences imposed by German
authorities against German soldiers... for killing or even mistreating
Jews". Too much of this and you'd have to join the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC – to restore your sanity. But the
Israeli lobby is powerful. In fact, its influence over the US Congress
and Senate calls into question the degree to which the American
legislature has been corrupted by lobby groups. It is to an Israeli
voice – Avnery again – that Americans have to turn to hear just how
mighty the lobby has become. "Its electoral and financial power casts
a long shadow over both houses of the Congress," Avnery writes.
"Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were elected with the help
of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the Jewish
lobby is political suicide. If the AIPAC were to table a resolution
abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300
Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby frightens the media,
too, and assures their adherence to Israel."

Avnery could have looked no further than the Democratic primary in
Alabama last month for proof of his assertion. Earl Hilliard, the
five-term incumbent, had committed the one mortal sin of any
American politician: he had expressed sympathy for the cause of the
Palestinians. He had also visited Libya several years ago. Hilliard's
opponent, Artur Davis, turned into an outspoken supporter of Israel
and raised large amounts of money from the Jewish community, both
in Alabama and nationwide. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted
that among the names of the first list of contributors to Davis's
campaign funds were "10 Cohens from New York and New Jersey,
but before one gets to the Cohens, there were Abrams, Ackerman,
Adler, Amir, Asher, Baruch, Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman,
Bernstein and Blumenthal. All from the East Coast, Chicago and Los
Angeles. It's highly unlikely any of them have ever visited Alabama..."
The Jewish newspaper Forward – essential reading for any serious
understanding of the American Jewish community – quoted a Jewish
political activist following the race: "Hilliard has been a problem in his
votes and with guys like that, when there's any conceivable primary
challenge, you take your shot." Hilliard, of course, lost to Davis,
whose campaign funds reached $781,000.

The AIPAC concentrates on Congress while the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations (CPMAJO),
made up of the heads of 51 Jewish organisations, concentrates on
the executive branch of the US government. Every congressman
knows the names of those critics of Israel who have been undone by
the lobby. Take Senator J William Fulbright, whose 1963 testimony to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee detailed how five million
tax-deductable dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent
to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution to
organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour of Israel;
this cost him the chance of being Secretary of State. He was defeated
in the 1974 Democratic primary after pro-Israeli money poured into
the campaign funds of his rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, following a
statement by the AIPAC that Fulbright was "consistently unkind to
Israel and our supporters in this country". Paul Findley, who spent 22
years as a Republican congressman from Illinois, found his political
career destroyed after he had campaigned against the Israeli lobby –
although, ironically, his book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out
was nine weeks on The Washington Post bestseller list, suggesting
that quite a number of Americans want to know why their
congressmen are so pro-Israeli.

Just two months ago, the US House of Representatives voted 352 to
21 to express its unqualified support for Israel. The Senate voted 94
to two for the same motion. Even as they voted, Ariel Sharon's army
was continuing its destructive invasion of the West Bank. "I do not
recall any member of Congress asking me if I was in favour of patting
Israel on the back..." James Abu Rizk, an Arab-American of Lebanese
origin, told the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee
afterwards. "No one else, no average American, has been asked
either. But that is the state of American politics today... The votes and
bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have
everything to do with the money that is fed into their campaigns by
members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that $6bn flows from the
American Treasury to Israel each year." Within days, 42 US governors
turned up in Sacramento to sign declarations supporting Israel.
California governor Gray Davis and New York governor George Pataki
– California has the largest Jewish population of any state except
New York – arranged the meeting.

Sometimes the support of Israel's loyalists in Congress turns into
farce. Tom Delay – reacting to CNN founder Ted Turner's criticism of
Israel – went so far out of his way to justify Israeli occupation of the
West Bank that he blurted out on MSNBC television that the
Palestinians "should become citizens" of Israel, an idea unlikely to
commend itself to his friend Ariel Sharon. Texas Republican Richard
Armey went the other way. "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire
West Bank. I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave... to
have those people who have been aggressors against Israel retired
to some other area." Do the people of Texas know that their
representative is supporting "ethnic cleansing" in the Middle East? Or
are they silent because they prefer not to speak out?

Censorship takes many forms. When Ishai Sagi and Ram
Rahat-Goodman, two Israeli reserve soldiers who refused to serve in
the West Bank or Gaza, were scheduled to debate their decision at
Sacramento's Congregation B'nai Israel in May, their appearance
was cancelled. Steve Meinreith, who is chairman of the Israel Affairs
Committee at B'nai Israel, remarked bleakly that "intimidation on the
part of certain sectors of the community has deprived the entire
community of hearing a point of view that is being widely debated in
Israel. Some people feel it's too dangerous..."

Does President Bush? His long-awaited Middle-East speech was
Israeli policy from start to finish. A group of Jewish leaders, including
Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz – who said recently that the idea of
executing the families of Palestinian suicide bombers was a
legitimate if flawed attempt at finding a balance between preventing
terrorism and preserving democracy – and the AIPAC and CPMAJO
heads all sent clear word to the President that no pressure should be
put on Israel. Wiesel – whose courage permeates his books on the
Holocaust but who lamentably failed to condemn the massacre of
Palestinian refugees in Beirut in 1982 at the hands of Israel's
Lebanese allies, said he felt "sadness", but his sadness was "with
Israel, not against Israel" because "after all the Israeli soldiers did
not kill" – took out a full page in The New York Times. In this, he
urged Bush to "please remember that Ariel Sharon, a military man
who knows the ugly face of war better than anyone, is ready to make
'painful sacrifices' to end the conflict." Sharon was held "personally
responsible" for the massacre by Israel's own commission of inquiry
– but there was no mention of that from Wiesel, who told reporters in
May that he would like to revoke Arafat's Nobel prize.

President Bush was not going to oppose these pressures. His father
may well have lost his re-election because he dared to tell Israel that
it must make peace with the Arabs. Bush is not going to make the
same mistake – nor does brother Jeb want to lose his forthcoming
governorship election. Thus Sharon's delight at the Bush speech,
and it was left to a lonely and brave voice – Mitchell Plitnick of the
Jewish Voice for Peace – to state that "few speeches could be
considered to be as destructive as that of the American President...
Few things are as blinding as unbridled arrogance."

Or as vicious as the messages that still pour in to Dennis Bernstein
and Barbara Lubin, whose Middle East Children's Alliance,
co-ordinating with Israeli peace groups, is trying to raise money to
rebuild the Jenin refugee camp. "I got a call the other day at 5am,"
Bernstein told me. "This guy says to me: 'You got a lot of nerve going
and eating at that Jewish deli.' What comes after that?" Before I left
San Francisco, Lubin showed me her latest e-mails. "Dear Cunt,"
one of them begins, "When we want your opinion you fucking Nazi
cunt, we will have one of your Palestinian buddies fuck it [sic] of you. I
hope that in your next trip to the occupied territories you are blown to
bits by one of your Palestinian buddies [sic] bombs." Another, equally
obscene, adds that "you should be ashamed of yourself, a so-called
Jewish woman advocating the destruction of Israel".

Less crude language, of course, greeted President Bush's speech.
Pat Robertson thought the Bush address "brilliant". Senator Charles
Schumer, a totally loyal pro-Israeli Democrat from New York, said that
"clearly, on the politics, this is going to please supporters of Israel as
well as the Christian coalition types". He could say that again. For
who could be more Christian than President George W Bush?