By Felix Quigley
September 1, 2008
There is a debate going on at Harry’s Place which it is NOT vital that you read. The debate concerns the anti Israel politics of a person called Joe Quinn. I personally know nothing about Quinn except that his politics are the same as the ISM and the IPSC. These are supporters of Palestinian Arab terrorists and the initials stand for International Solidarity Movement, and Irish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.
Antisemitism in the so-called “Left” cannot be understood without examining Stalin and Stalinism, then also the degeneration caused by Tony Cliff, Mandel, Healy, Grant and others when they decided to support the “Palestinians”, not telling any of their mainly youthful members of the role of the Nazi Hajj Amin el Husseini in the creation of Palestinianism.
These Stalinists, so-called Trotskyists and of course the Imperialist Governments and Media have all worked together to hide the real history of Leon Trotsky, that in the 1930s the great socialist revolutionary was a serious supporter of the Jews setting up their Homeland, the to be Israel.
The Harry’s Place debate is on
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/08/30/quinn-protests-im-talking-about-zionists-not-jews/#comments
Harry’s Place is staffed by British Imperialists and by US Imperialists who supported the destruction of Yugoslavia and lined up with Tudjman, the Islamofascist Izetbegovic and with the gangster terrorist organization the KLA.
The position of Harry’s Place on terror and antisemitism is bogus because the record shows that they supported the Nazi and member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Bosnia, Elija Izetbegovic.
It is one comment that I wish to focus upon. Somebody called MichaelD wrote the following which was in fact more antisemitic in content than was even Quinn. It was claiming in effect that the Jews (Israel) was responsible for the Bush war with Iraq.
[Begin comment by “MichaelD”]
| 31 August 2008, 11:37 am |
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/08/30/quinn-protests-im-talking-about-zionists-not-jews/#comments
OUR PART ANSWER TO “MICHAEL D”
MichaelD said this:
So, David T, is the statement that Douglas Feith acted inappropriately to benefit Israel an “antisemitic canard”? And would it be antisemitic to believe it? And if you think it is, you can perhaps explain why the same conclusion has been reached by some Jewish commentators as well.
But it is a lie. Feith did not act in promoting the war with Iraq in order to help Israel because Feith does not do anything to help Israel, but the US Government, because he is an agent (paid) of the US Government.
This is the biggest lie of the anti-Semitic so-called “Left” of today, in which there is SWP, Socialist Unity, WRP, WSWS and many others
The writer MichaelD is presenting Feith as being a member of the US Government and is acting in a treasonous way to the US people because he is an agent of a foreign government, that is Israel.
About Ford there is much literature and proof that he was an antisemite:
In the period from 1910 to 1918, Ford became increasingly anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor and anti-Semitic. In 1919, he purchased a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. He installed Charles Pipp as editor and hired a journalist, William J. Cameron, to listen to his ideas and write a weekly column, “Mr. Ford’s Page,” to expound his views.
Ford wanted to assert that there was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. He blamed Jewish financiers for fomenting World War I so that they could profit from supplying both sides. He accused Jewish automobile dealers of conspiring to undermine Ford Company sales policies. Ford wanted to make his bizarre beliefs public in the pages of the Dearborn Independent. For a year, editor Pipp resisted running anti-Jewish articles, and resigned rather than publish them. Cameron took over the editorship and, in May 1920, printed the first of a series of articles titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”
For the next 18 months, Cameron ran the “International Jew” as a series, and later collected the articles and published them as a book. Ford’s aide Liebold hired former military intelligence investigators to assist Cameron in gathering so-called “evidence” that “proved” Jewish control of world finance; Jewish organization of radical political movements; and Jewish manipulation of diplomacy to cause wars in which Christians died to enrich Jews. The investigators dredged up rumors that president Woodrow Wilson took secret orders over the phone from Justice Brandeis and that a Jewish member of the Federal Reserve Board personally thwarted Ford’s plan to purchase nitrate mines from the Federal government.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford1.html
This is the anti-Semitic essence of the political position of Henry D Ford all those years ago. Ford was in fact a Nazi and while I am not saying that MichaelD is a Nazi because I do not know this person his lies re Feith above are the same.
MichaelD has a veneer of learning but it is only a veneer. Because what he says here can be countered because
- Feith was acting against the stated positions of Israel. This includes Arik Sharon who was opposed to the war against Iraq. Israel saw as the main enemy Iran and not Iraq. So it has proved. With Saddam removed Iran has been immeasurably strengthened. Feith was pursuing the interests of the US ruling elite against the interests of both the ordinary people of America and against the interests of Israel. Hence the whole argument of MichaelD is based on one Big Lie. (see note at the end about position of Sharon on the Iraq war. Showing that the focus of Sharon who was leading the Israeli Government was all the time on Iran, not on Iraq, and he was being dragged along on Iraq by the Bush Government)
- Events have proved that Israel was very correct to be opposed to war with Iraq and their sense that the Neocons did not represent them, whether some had a Jewish tag after their names or not they were careerists and imperialists in the service of US and British Imperialism. Saddam was certainly a hater of Israel, but he was rather more secularist than religious. And Iraq was historically an enemy of Iran. That is one of the results of the war, Iran has been strengthened and the position of Israel is far more precarious, to such an extent that I personally can see no alternative to the continued existence of Israel than to stop the Iranian nuclear bomb creation whatever it takes.
Feith has been no friend of the Jews, no friend either of Zionism which despite the fiendish distortions of MichaelD is nothing more than the desire of the Jews to have a Homeland, free from anti-Semitism, something which the great socialist revolutionary Leon Trotsky committed himself to fully in the 1930s. In relation to this since MichaelD may be a “socialist” I would like to know what his position is on this principle which Trotsky fought for and what is his position on groups who are calling for a boycott of Israel, while they hide the factuial information concerning the Nazi roots (Mufti of Jerusalem) to the Palestinian movement of Arafat and Hamas.
So I answer his point re Feith, that he is promoting a lie re Feith, and throw a few questions back to Michael D as well.
DavidD will answer how he wishes. I answer differently anyhow because I agree with DavidD on hardly anything, except perhaps that Israel is the Homeland of the Jews and that it is under attack from antisemites, IN ALL THEIR GUISES.
On a related issue Israeli leaders in their stupidity joined with US and British Imperialist puppet Saakashvili and as far as we can gather in the attack on Tskhinvali leveled the Jewish Quarter. These present Israeli leaders do not represent Zionism at all.
Additional note on Sharon and the Iraq war:
He asserted that while Washington was inevitably focusing on Saddam Hussein — whom he called “insane” — the White House shared his concern that Iran was also seeking weapons of mass destruction, and developing missiles capable of striking Israel and even Europe.
“I talked about these things with Vladimir Putin a few days ago and I have been to Washington and one of the things I talked about was what will be (sic) later, if Iraq is going to be disarmed.
“One of the things I mentioned is that the free world should take all the necessary steps to prevent irresponsible countries from having weapons of mass destruction: Iran, Iraq of course, and Libya is working on a nuclear weapon.”
He accused Tehran of sponsoring the Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah, which he claimed had up to 10,000 short-range missiles stationed in Lebanon ready to strike Israeli towns, of smuggling weapons to the Palestinian Authority, and of trying to turn Israel’s one million Arab citizens against the Jewish state. “Iran is a centre of world terror and Iran makes every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction on the one hand and ballistic missiles,” he said. “That is a danger to the Middle East, to Israel and a danger to Europe.
“They are working now on a ballistic missile of 1,300km. They have almost reached this range already. They were talking in the past about 2,500km and even 5,000km.”
Mr Sharon made it abundantly clear that he would not hold back from retaliating, as Israel did at Washington’s behest in 1991, if his nation came under serious attack. “First, we understand the sensitivity. We are living here, we were born here. Israel will make every effort not to interfere,” he said.
But he warned: “If Israel, and I made it very clear, is attacked by weapons of mass destruction . . . Israel will react. Is it clear? I believe that they understand that Israel will not be able not to defend itself.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article822318.ece
On this issue, also answering these lies by MichaelD I refer you to a good article by Ami Isseroff, “The Jews started the war…Once again!”
4international 
David T,
To use Joe Quinn’s article as a sort of “test-case” to see what people’s standards were was a good idea, but in my view it failed because, though we can see quotes from Quinn, we cannot see the evidence upon which they are supposedly based. To take one instance, Quinn states that Israeli interests can see to it that any investigation into spying can be quashed, and goes on to imply certain things about 9/11; and this is presumably one of those cases where you say he is “recycling and promoting long standing ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ theories about Jewish control…”
But if you look at the article from which the quote is taken, it seems that he has based his claim on a 2001 Fox News report by Carl Cameron. In it, Cameron states that investigators have told Fox News that to pursue certain Israeli spying cases would be “career suicide”. He also says that the Israelis had intelligence on 9/11 but did not share it. Unfortunately for Quinn, the report was pulled by Fox shortly afterwards, presumably for lack of evidence. So while Quinn is very probably wrong, we cannot simply say he was recycling ‘Protocol’ type statements. (Quinn was trying to milk the male goat, and you were trying to catch the produce in a sieve).
Whatever we might make of Quinn’s claims in the light of these new facts, the point I am making is that before we can decide whether something is an “antisemitic canard (or trope)”, we have to see both the claim and the evidence that is put forward to support it. For this reason I would like to challenge you on a different case for which there is much more reliable evidence.
The claim is that, in the run-up to the Iraq war, some Jewish Neoconservatives acted inappropriately in order to make war with Iraq more likely in the hope that Israel’s position in the region would be strengthened. This is claim is usually made in regard to people like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, David Wurmser and so on. Unsurprisingly, the claim is often dismissed as an antisemitic canard, but in my view the claim is certainly not baseless.
But it is obvious that for reasons of space I cannot adduce all the evidence that is used to substantiate the claim. Indeed, I cannot do that even for a single individual. But since my goal is not to prove the case, but only to see whether you, David T, think that the whole affair is baseless antisemitism, I will take a single “test-case”, that of Douglas Feith, in the knowledge that if the claim is antisemitic in regard to him, it is so in regard to them all.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Douglas Feith was the third most important individual in the United States Department of defence, behind Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. Feith is from a Zionist background, and has strong links both to American Zionism and to Israel. He has been a board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and he and his father were honorary guests in 1997 at the Zionist Organization of America’s 100th anniversary banquet, where their “Service to Israel and the Jewish people” was acknowledged.
Moreover, in 1996 he was part of a study group which produced the Clean Break report for Benjamin Netanyahu advising Israel to overthrow Saddam, and in 1998 was one of the signatories to an open letter to the Clinton administration which also advised the US to overthrow Saddam.
He was also a senior figure in the US administration in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and it is at this point that his activities become very interesting. For Feith helped set up and then ran the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit and the Office of Special Plans (OSP).
These groups produced much of the spurious evidence which was used to build a case for the war in Iraq; and subsequent inquiries have shown that these departments also manipulated evidence, misled officials, and deliberately bypassed normal intelligence channels. Moreover, a number of figures who encountered these groups have stated that their activities were highly questionable, and that the departments were run solely with the intention of presenting unsubstantiated material as evidence.
These facts are all in the public domain, and Feith’s conduct has been extensively analysed, so there is no reason why what I have said cannot be posted. Here, in fact, is a link to a Statement made at the Senate Armed Services Committee by Senator Carl Levin, which supports what I said above. (It was Carl Levin who first investigated the character of the pre-war intelligence):
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=269010
http://www.senate.gov/~levin/issues/index4.cfm?MainIssue=Iraq&SubIssue=IraqIntelligenceInquiry
Of course, this is plainly only a very brief outline, so anyone interested will have to do a search on Feith’s name, but such a search which will reveal that there are a whole range of articles critical of Feith and supporting the contentions above.
And, in any event, my aim is not to prove conclusively that the charges against Feith are true; I only want to know from David T whether, on the evidence supplied, it would be antisemitic to say that at least one Jewish Neoconservative acted inappropriately in the run-up to the war in Iraq with Israel’s security in mind
So, David T, is the statement that Douglas Feith acted inappropriately to benefit Israel an “antisemitic canard”? And would it be antisemitic to believe it? And if you think it is, you can perhaps explain why the same conclusion has been reached by some Jewish commentators as well.
I hope you can see why I selected this case. The claim can be supported by senate reports and other evidence, so we do not have to veer off into generalities. And to say that it is merely a conspiracy would be a contemptible tactic.