A rebuttal may be expected from me in response to professor Paul Gottfried's recent (January 15th) blog entry “Defending the Israelis....” in Taki's Top Drawer. I am happy to comply, having fully recovered from the tribulations of a week-long croquet tournament. 

Before getting bogged down in the whole depressing subject of Zionism, the Middle East and the Palestinians--in which drama Washington has been intimately involved since day one, going all the way back to 1917--may I suggest that this is not an issue which should be examined through the prism of left-versus-right politics. In general, we have become agog with politics--something Edgar Allen Poe denounced prior to the Civil War.

In particular, many patriotic “paleoconservatives” have become obsessed with analyzing what passes for "conservatism", be it neo or paleo, and what does not.  At this juncture, I beg you to realize that politics is passé and a pack of lies. It is a diversion, a luxury that America and the West can no longer afford. There is an urgent need to get down to brass tacks, to the ultimate issue of right versus wrong, which does not always translate into right versus left. Indeed, that may have always been the case, but more so today, especially with respect to Washington's incendiary policies in the Middle East.

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Dr. Gottfried begins with a non sequitur and a false premise by stating that he feels "compelled to respond" to my "wholesale criticism of the Israelis" contained in "The Sack of Annapolis". Indeed. It should be perfectly obvious that my criticism was not directed at "the Israelis"--but at Zionism, U.S. foreign policy, and at the fraudulent Mideast "peace process" underway in its current incarnation, code-named the Annapolis Conference. To be honest, I do not know who "the Israelis" are, unless that term is being employed in reference to the Semitic tribe in the Bible, to wit, the ancient Hebrews. To be frank, I avoid the term with respect to the current Mideast conflict, because it is misleading, confusing, fanciful and ridiculous.  

In plain English, the present-day Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are not the legitimate descendants of the ancient Hebrews. To call them "the Israelis" is wordplay, a fantasy. They are Zionist Jews, mostly of east and central European origin, to wit, Ashkenazim.  As such, they are primarily not Semitic. They have migrated to Palestine under abnormal, contrived circumstances, first within the framework and under the protection of the far-flung British Empire in the aftermath of World War I, and later in the aftermath of World War II, under the general sponsorship of Washington and its "Israel Lobby".

This enormously successful colonial enterprise in a post-colonial world has been at the expense of the indigenous population on the ground, namely the Palestinian Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, who are Semitic and who, in large measure, have been dispossessed and ethnically cleansed.

Perhaps my Weltanschuang on the question of Palestine and Zionism was best summed up in an article written by former Irish Labor Minister Justin Keating in the pages of the November 2005 issue of The Dubliner. Among other things, Keating states: "At the time, [1950] like many young Europeans with left-wing views, as the full horrors of Nazi genocide became known, I supported the new state. But now I have totally changed my mind. I have reached the conclusion that the Zionists have absolutely no right in what they call Israel, that they have built their state not beside but on top of the Palestinian people, and that there can be no peace as long as contemporary Israel retains its present form. I hasten to make clear that none of this gives me any pleasure, but in the great scheme of things my personal wishes do not weigh heavily in the scale pans of history." You can read Keating's full text here.  

As you may have noticed, critics of Zionism are too often peremptorily cashiered as being “anti-Semitic”. One wonders how this can logically be, because these critics are speaking up for the Palestinians, who have been robbed, demonized and uprooted. This phenomenon of labeling the defenders of Semites as “anti-Semitic” is beyond irony. It is insane. It is a serious problem which has being studiously ignored, and not just by Dr. Gottfried in his recent parochial comments. And why is that? It is a big subject, so let's leave it to another time. 

For the moment suffice it to say that it has become increasingly difficult to deny that virtually all of America's national politicians of both political parties, "liberals" and "conservatives" alike, are deliberately allowing Uncle Sam to be taken to the cleaners in exchange for campaign funding and votes. It amounts to a competition for payoffs. It is a carnival of corruption. If the Palestinians were not powerless and impoverished, they might not be ignored in the halls of power, and American foreign policy might well be different. As it is, the grotesque charade of Washington's Mideast policy--a charade based on domestic politics, cowardice, and influence-peddling--has been going on for many decades. Everyone in Washington knows it, but no one has a clue how to stop it.

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I certainly do not claim to be an expert or a scholar on this subject or on any other. That is one reason I try to provide intelligent links to amplify and back up what is being stated, and there were plenty of them in "The Sack of Annapolis". I often get the impression, however, that most people do not read the links, which is a shame. Dr. Gottfried gives me that impression in this case. Or else he has deliberately ignored/discounted the information contained in the links. In this regard, I followed up the "Annapolis" article with a blog entry in Takimag.com entitled "The Missing Links". There you can read a further explication of what I was trying to do in the original article, plus important links on the topics of the USS Liberty and the American peace activist, Rachel Corrie. 

One of the links in "The Sack of Annapolis" itself was to a short synopsis of the Israel/Palestine conflict found on the website "If Americans Knew". It is most illuminating. What has happened to Palestine in the aftermath of the 1917 Balfour Declaration up until the present moment is nothing less than an outrage. The unvarnished record of Zionist malfeasance and chicanery is there to be examined, much of it in collaboration with Whitehall and the White House, yet some of it perpetrated against Whitehall and Washington, when the Zionists turned on their benefactors. In the latter category, the terrorist bombing of the British HQ at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946 by the Igrun under the leadership of future PM Menachem Begin and the attack on the unarmed USS Liberty in broad daylight in June 1967 come to mind, offhand.

Again, it is a question of right versus wrong. No amount of sophistry and no amount of campaign contributions to servile American politicians is going to expunge this rotten record. Nor can it justify what has happened, and is happening, on the ground to the Palestinians, most of which has been made possible by American largesse and diplomatic cover. It is a disaster. Do you hear any of the American presidential candidates addressing the issue?

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Continuing with Dr. Gottfried's critique of my article, he writes about the return of Palestinian refugees to Palestine as if that occurrence would be on a par with illegal immigration into America. Again, more wordplay, more misdirection, another straw man. He correctly postulates that I am, like most Americans, against illegal immigration, believing it to be detrimental to America. Ergo, I should naturally be against Palestinian immigration, because that would unbalance Jewish demographics. Dr. Gottfried states, "I doubt that Foy would support such a harmful policy for his own land." Hmm. Let's see if I can unravel this mystery. Is it really so baffling and mysterious?

Here's the story. It is a wide world out there, and people should be free to move around in it. Check. There is nothing wrong with immigration per se--within reason and without a hidden agenda to take over and displace. Check. At the present time, the United States has lost control of its own borders. The massive illegal immigration which has taken place is beyond reason and beyond dispute. Check. But what has happened here in America in relatively recent times pales by comparison to what has happened to the Palestinian Arabs and to Palestine over the past 90 years.

You want to talk immigration? Let's talk immigration. The Palestinians have been subjugated thanks to immigration. The consolidation of the conquest of Palestine continues today through a policy of immigration, known as the "right of return". This right applies to every ethnic Jewish individual located anywhere on earth, but not to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees sitting in camps throughout the Middle East and in the Gaza strip. Figure that one out.

Let's rewind the clock. The Palestinians were powerless to control immigration into their own land, once Palestine was captured from the Ottoman Turks by British Imperial forces toward the tail end of World War I. In the subsequent peace arrangements, the English hypocrites overseeing the world from Whitehall felt compelled to hand off their new protectorate, Palestine, to the administration of the Zionists, in the person of the English/Zionist operative, Mr. Herbert Samuel, who was named first “British High Commissioner” of Palestine. Subsequently, under these arrangements there began a continuous immigration of Ashkenazim into Palestine, with the express intent by the Zionists of transforming the entire area into an ethnocentric Jewish state.  

Everyone understood what was going on, not least of whom were the Gentile politicians in power back in Whitehall who had made it possible. This proceeded despite the curious wording of the Balfour Declaration itself: "...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." 

That, of course, was humbug. Tell it today to the people of the Gaza strip, which the Zionists have turned into the largest open air prison in the world and where the New York Times reports that 70% of the occupants are refugees from Palestine proper, tell it to the Arabs of the Golan Heights which Tel Aviv officially annexed from Syria in 1981, tell it to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, tell it to the simple farmers and townspeople on the West Bank who have been living under military occupation since 1967.  The Balfour Declaration is yet another prime example of Albion Perfide. Please take note of a controversial observation in my book, The Unauthorized World Situation Report, published in 2005:

"Is it true that at the time of the Balfour Declaration of 1917--which document was largely composed in Washington by President Wilson’s advisors and approved by him--that the indigenous population of Palestine was 90% Arab and Muslim?  No matter. In 1920 it became part of the British Empire and was then promptly handed over, as a gratuity, by Prime Minister Lloyd George and Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill to the representatives of international Zionism in recognition for their decisive assistance in dragging the befuddled Woodrow Wilson and his anti-war countrymen into the abattoir on the side of jingo John Bull. America’s entry on the western front in France, after the Central Powers had defeated Russia on the eastern front, was a godsend and tipped the scales of victory. Without that intervention, England and France were cooked.

"....The facts are there to be examined. The Palestinians were betrayed by the British from the outset. The Palestinians, like all the Arabs led by Colonel T.E. Lawrence, the so-called “Lawrence of Arabia”, were used as cannon fodder to help bring about the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the East. Once that goal was accomplished, instead of gaining some measure of freedom and independence in 1919--as they had every right to expect even without the Wilsonian blather--the Arabs were unceremoniously jettisoned. They got saddled not just temporarily with the British and the French, but subsequently with millions of Russian, European and American Jews to boot, the latter permanently."

That is where the matter rests today. A steady immigration into Palestine, commencing in the aftermath of the Great War, was made possible by London and Washington. It transmogrified the area, all to the detriment of the indigenes, the Palestinian Arabs who had been living there for well over a millennium. I confess to being opposed to such large-scale immigration, legal or illegal, and I would not want my country to be the target of a well-orchestrated scheme as outlined above. To come to the point, I would not regard the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and their land as a "harmful policy" but rather as an attempt, a gesture, to make amends by the Zionists and by their powerful enablers for the harm done to the Palestinians. Of course, this long-overdue redressing of wrongs is most unlikely to happen.

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Under the current circumstances, we have arrived at the advanced stage of madness in this country, thanks to the "Israel Lobby" and the gross corruption in Washington, where the White House and the U.S. Congress have relegated America into acting as a de facto client state for Tel Aviv. This effectively means that there will be no peace for the Palestinians except the "peace" dictated by bullets, bulldozers, helicopter gun-ships, massive concrete walls and miles of barbed wire, with Uncle Sam picking up the bill. This is how Zionism has transformed the Holy Land and, as a byproduct, helped to create the present world crisis.

Maybe you have heard about it. Something called the "war on terror" or the "clash of civilizations" which has led us down the path to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. It amounts to a Pandora's box of horrors, and is the "blowback" from decades of non-stop pandering to the aforementioned "Israel Lobby" in all its many manifestations. The arrogance of the "neocons" and of the AIPAC crowd is simply a reflection of this reality and of their success. They are arrogant not because their geopolitical ideas are so brilliant, but because our public officials are so suborned and ignorant, starting with the two men at the very top.

In closing, let me say I am bemused by Dr. Gottfried's statement in passing that he "...was shocked that so little curiosity was displayed by the American government about the fate of the USS Liberty." Really? We are left to wonder what the good professor thinks could account for this strange lack of interest, and what exactly happened to that unarmed U.S. Navy ship back in June of 1967 and why was it attacked by the Israeli navy and air force. Gottfried has nothing more to say. The matter is dealt with in a passing comment, then dropped.

And what are we to make of the following statement: "Just because Israel’s friends in the U.S. are insufferable loudmouths does not mean that we should ask the Israelis to commit suicide"? Talk about non sequiturs. It is all quite perplexing and discouraging. No one has suggested that anyone commit suicide. Moreover, I do not regard Dick Cheney, the CEO of the Bush Jr. Administration, as a loudmouth. The man is just extremely deluded and misguided individual, albeit under a best case diagnosis.  

My overall intent is to promote intellectual honesty and urge compassion for those who have been victimized, over many decades, by big power politics in Palestine and in the neighboring region. I suggest that we are not witnessing that enlightenment in the actions of the "neocon" cabal who hijacked Washington in January 2001--nor in the policies of Tel Aviv, nor from the Zionist lobby called AIPAC, nor from Messrs. Cheney and Bush Jr, nor from the ongoing presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, et alia.

And sometimes when it comes to Zionism and the Middle East, enlightenment is hard to find even in the writings of the paleoconservative sage, professor Paul Gottfried. Everyone appears to be on the same page with respect to this topic. They are actively enabling and cheerleading a fraudulent enterprise.

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Copyright 2008 Patrick Foy