“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that. ... I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
-- Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, at his cabinet meeting October 3, 2001
Ariel Sharon’s words are on the record, but were not reported in the American media. His words express a fact that those in power in the United States do not want the American people to know. Bottom line, the United States is Israel’s pawn. The foreign policy of the world’s predominant superpower is ultimately controlled by Israel, the Jewish state, through its wealthy and powerful representatives and supporters. It isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s simply a fact. Control of American politicians and of public conversation in America is centered in a power block of wealthy Jewish donors and through this same block’s utter ownership and dominance of American media and entertainment. The same could be said about Great Britain, Australia, and increasingly Canada, but our focus is on the United States of Israel (U.S. of I.).
In an article on the Mondoweiss.net website on February 17, 2008, the Jewish founder of the site, Philip Weiss, pointed out: “Even if you’re a secular [not actively religious] Jewish professional who prides himself on his objectivity, there is a ton of cultural pressure on you to support Israel or at least not to betray Israel.” He also refers to a comment from former CNN correspondent Linda Scherzer: “[We], as Jews, must understand that we come with a certain bias … we believe in the Israeli narrative of history … thus we see news reporting through our own prism.”
Over time, everyone in the U.S. must report through that prism, as no conflicting lens is allowed.
Weiss also quotes Dov Zackheim, also Jewish and a former advisor to President George W. Bush, who said, “Jews don’t dominate the policy-making process, but the media is a different story.”
Who’s fooling who? When one controls practically everything that is told to you, one determines policy.
Of course, by bringing this to light, a fact that is very obvious to anyone who works in North American print or broadcast media, the standard reactionary outcry will follow—“It’s anti-Semitic!”, whatever that means. The accusation has been used so often to decry any measure of Israeli policy or action, it’s somewhat lost its meaning. It’s been the ultimate crutch, all a part of the rhetoric (propaganda) package. Don’t criticize Israel. If one does, labelling and blacklisting follows.
In the must-watch 2018 undercover documentary "The Lobby—USA", Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an organization that works closely with the Israeli government’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, admitted on hidden camera, “Anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be.”
That’s not to suggest one won’t hear it used often, but the Israeli lobbyists and agencies have moved on to pressing their agenda in more practical and hardcore ways. For example, in 2019, the powerful Zionist lobby (nationalists who support expanding Israel territory by taking land from the Palestinians) coerced U.S. legislatures at the national and state levels to create laws that made criticism of Israel a crime. Read that again. It’s true. Such a law criminalizing criticism of Israel easily passed in South Carolina.
In mid-January 2020, we read the headline in Israel’s oldest newspaper Haaretz: “South Dakota Governor Signs Executive Order Prohibiting Israel Boycotts.” South Dakota! The story tells us that South Dakota is the twenty-eighth state to have enacted with executive order or legislation that the boycotting of, or in some cases criticizing Israel, is illegal.
Gilad Atzmon is a Jewish jazz musician, political activist, and writer from Tel Aviv. He is a critic of the politicians in power in Israel, so he’s not so popular with the current ruling class. He sums up the ongoing state of affairs nicely: “Jewish power is the ability to get us to stop talking about Jewish power.”
Oh yes, he’s been described by the other common term for a detractor in the nationalist empire, if that detractor is Jewish: a “self-hating Jew.”
This media control practice goes back decades. In a remarkable article in Mother Jones magazine from the February/March 1987 issue, writer Robert I. Friedman spilled the beans about Jewish dominance of American media and the watering down of reports detailing atrocities committed against Arabs. He begins the story by describing events from the viewpoint of a local newspaper reporter in Israel who receives a phone call from an Arab who says his brother was murdered by Israeli soldiers:
For Danny Rubinstein, veteran West Bank correspondent of the Israeli labor movement’s daily newspaper Davar, the unfolding story was hardly shocking. On any given night the 48-year-old reporter is confronted with a stack of similar horror stories from every corner of the West Bank [the Palestinian territory the Israelis are gradually stealing] : in Hebron, Arab shopkeepers are pushed and insulted by militant Jewish settlers; in Ramallah, Palestinian students are beaten by soldiers, slapped and humiliated; Palestinian prisoners in Tulkarem declare a hunger strike; in the village of B’nai Na’im, Arab lands are expropriated [taken] and Jewish settlers vandalize Arab cars. Even documented cases of the torture of Arabs by Israeli soldiers — front-page news in the United States if editors dared publish it — are not unfamiliar to Davar’s readers.
Again, this is from three-plus decades ago. The Israeli military occupation of land that is supposed to belong to the future Palestinian state, and the related daily terror, has gone on for at least five decades. More from 1987:
At the opening of a three-day international conference of Jewish journalists organized by the World Zionist Organization, the [Israeli] government press office, and the World Union of Jewish Journalists in January 1985, “Commentary” editor Norman Podhoretz declared: “The role of Jews who write in both the Jewish and general press is to defend Israel, and not join in the attacks on Israel.” Critical reporting of Israel,” he stated, “helps Israel’s enemies—and they are legion [plentiful] in the U.S.—to say more and more openly that Israel is not a democratic country.” Podhoretz, whose opinion magazine is published by the American Jewish Committee, also lambasted the Israeli press, which he said damaged the country’s image by reporting so extensively on Israel’s internal problems. Many mainstream U.S. journalists share some of Podhoretz’s views on covering Israel. And many others who have tried to defy this orthodoxy [doctrine] have come under unrelenting attack from the Israel lobby—a coalition of editors and publishers, pro-Israel PACs [Political Action Committees] and wealthy businessmen, which tried to silence dissidents with accusations of anti-Israel bias or anti-Semitism.
As Friedman points out, one intense public relations effort came as a result of American news coverage of Israel’s war with Lebanon and its slaughter of thousands of unarmed Palestinians in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, in 1982. Instead of concerning itself with matters at or near the border with Lebanon, Israeli war planes continued to pound Beirut, killing helpless civilians well after the conflict’s result had apparently been determined. U.S. news programs were beaming live images back to America. “What is this? What’s going on?” the reporters and anchors asked. “Why are they bombing civilians?”
The man in charge of the refugee camp slaughters was none other than Israel’s then-defense minister (and future prime minister) Ariel Sharon, whom Friedman calls “the architect of the war, [who] lied about the war’s aim, released false casualty figures, imposed rigid censorship, and restricted access to the war zone.”
The Israelis, via wealthy supporters in the U.S., took legal action on multiple levels to squash the coverage In protest, then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin famously shouted, “We don’t care what the goyim [non-Jews] think!”
Closing areas to the press where Arabs are being slaughtered has since become standard practice.
In a highlighted story in the same issue, Friedman shared “Confessions of an Israeli Press Officer”:
When a top Israeli government official comes to the United States, fully 40 percent of his or her time, estimated [press officer Menachem] Shalev, is devoted to meeting the press. Israel can also call on a legion of scientists, soldiers, artists, and academics to promote the Zionist cause. Israel’s ten consulates in the United States monitor the local media and develop relations with journalists. “Israel’s presence in America is all-pervasive,” said Shalev. … Getting previews of network programming is helpful to the Israelis: the same official said he knows of at least three recent instances in which Israel was able to get “negative” network news segments killed. … Newspapers, Shalev concluded, are easier to pressure than the networks because “newspaper executives are usually more accessible. And the chances are, we have a good relationship with the publisher.”
Three to four decades later, with many newspapers dying, those similar interests continue to run the digital and broadcast media. But now that news travels anywhere and everywhere via social media, the Israelis can’t hide all the visuals. So now when Israel slaughters Muslims, it just lies about the details, and/or labels it as something it isn’t.
In the fourth and final episode of The Lobby—USA, we hear an extensive description of the dishonest efforts of The Israel Project (TIP), the main force behind pro-Israel/anti-Palestinian public relations efforts. The TIP manipulates reporters, editors, and even entire networks. The narrator states:
During his volunteer-ship, Tony [the undercover reporter] read an annual report to TIP’s board of directors. It lauded their social media coverage of the 2016 shooting at Sarona market in Tel Aviv. It said TIP’s video was the most watched online content about the attack; the video claimed to show video of Palestinians celebrating the killing of Israelis, something the mainstream media overlooked. But this was not true; this image was taken in Ramallah two years earlier.
The image shows two men playing with fireworks with heavy traffic in the background. They weren’t militants; rather, they were young adults in dress shirts, who literally could have been celebrating a holiday or the results of a football [soccer] match.
We then hear from the president of TIP at the time, Josh Block: “There are also other things that we do that are completely off the radar. We work together with a lot of other organizations. We produce content that they then publish with their own name on it.”
About six months after the release of The Lobby—USA online, Block surprisingly resigned his position at TIP, as did a number of officials from other organizations who were exposed in the documentary.
Keep in mind that six major conglomerates own 90 percent of the media in the United States, with more potential mergers on the horizon. Centralized control of information is intensified control of information. The six are General Electric/Comcast, News Corp (Fox), Disney, Viacom/CBS, Time Warner, and Sony. Their sizes and structures change and morph with every merger or acquisition.
CBS and its sixty or so other cable networks, publishing houses, and video entities were until recently headed by Sumner Redstone (born Sumner Murray Rothstein), now in his early nineties. His grandchildren will eventually receive most of his $5-billion fortune while his daughter Shari may or may not oversee the basics of the business. In the meantime, he turned control of the CBS side over to a man named Leslie Moonves (deposed in 2018 for alleged sexual harassment), and the Viacom monstrosity to Philippe Dauman.
Disney, until early 2020, was run by a succession of Jews/Zionists: Robert (Bob) Iger and his predecessor Disney chairman Michael Eisner. Eisner worked for Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, who left after about a decade to form Dreamworks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Eisner then replaced Katzenberg with Michael Ovitz.
Disney owns ESPN, Marvel, ABC, and about eighty other networks. It purchased 20th Century Fox entertainment in 2019.
Time Warner is run by Jeff Bewkes (who is not Jewish). Time Warner owns HBO, run by a man named Richard Plepler. Warner Brothers is run by the first Asian-American to be the CEO of a major studio, Kevin Tsujihara, who replaced his thirty-year predecessor, a man named Barry Meyer. CNN is overseen by Jeff Zucker, who formerly ran NBC Entertainment.
The chairman and CEO of Comcast/NBC is a man named Brian Roberts, originally from Philadelphia. Comcast owns and runs at least one hundred different networks and digital ventures.
The head man at News Corp/Fox is the famous and somewhat controversial Rupert Murdoch, whose net worth is listed at more than $15 billion and whose entities include forty different networks and a couple dozen publishing entities. He’s Australian with Scottish ancestry. Fox provides a platform for nationalist/Zionist support.
Sony is a Japanese-owned and led conglomerate. Its North American production entity Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group is run by a man named Tim Rothman. He oversees worldwide operations that include Columbia Pictures after spending almost two decades at Fox.
Not one of the news or information entities within any of the aforementioned corporations took any interest whatsoever in discussing the content of “The Israel Lobby,” an article published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, and later expanded into a book published in 2007. The authors, John Mearsheimer, a distinguished political science scholar at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, never made a mainstream appearance on radio or television in North America, despite producing what some would consider the most accurate assessment of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The book questioned America’s relationship with Israel and evaluated the extreme power held by Jewish donors and lobbyists over the politics and policy making decisions in both countries. From page viii of the book’s preface:
The case advanced in the article was straightforward. After describing the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel, we argued that this support could not be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. Instead, it was due largely to the political power of the Israel lobby, a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seeks to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel. In addition to encouraging the United States to back Israel more or less unconditionally, groups and individuals in the lobby played key roles in shaping American policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, and the ongoing confrontations with Syria and Iran. We suggested that these policies were not in the U.S. national interest and were in fact harmful to Israel’s long-term interests as well.
Heavily researched and footnoted by two scholars, this seemed like a reasonable and interesting discussion. Not a chance. Not even the Charlie Rose program on public broadcasting would touch it. What some considered a liberal to centrist think-tank at the time, the program hosted by Charley Rose featured long-form sit-down conversations about a diversity of topics in entertainment, politics, and government, and even visits from the man Zionists loved to hate, then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was allowed on the show because he could be grilled and ridiculed while trying to master the English language. But there was no way those in power were going to allow two qualified English-speaking intellectuals to jump on the air and criticize Israel. No Face the Nation, no Meet the Press. Mearsheimer and Walt were ostracized [banished and ridiculed] by prominent Zionists inside and outside the media and relegated to the fringe.
If the mainstream media is looking for “experts” to discuss a topic, they turn to a stable of readily available regulars.
Meanwhile, for decades, the CBS-TV news magazine program 60 Minutes, broadcast into our homes on Sunday evenings, has been the absolute go-to for Americans looking for an hour of investigative reporting and compelling interviews with celebrities and world leaders. The viewing demographic skews a bit conservative and older, as has been the network’s trademark for many years. But many families, regardless of socio-economic status, or at least the adults in those households, anticipate the show each week. The late Don Hewitt, the Jewish executive producer of the program, ran it from 1968 to 2014.
Longtime stalwart host Mike Wallace, also Jewish, took the greatest liberties in tilting viewer sentiments in favor of Israel and against Muslims in general. His one hatchet job in 2006 made an impact that effectively lingers today, negatively affecting important sentiments almost a decade since his death. It was as egregious [shocking, horrible] an act of manipulation you will find in the history of journalism. It was a great Mike Wallace/60 Minutes fabrication, and naturally for his efforts he was presented an Emmy Award.
What Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said to Wallace in an interview in Tehran in the summer of 2006 is as follows:
"I think that the Israeli government is a fabricated government, and I have talked about the solution. The solution is democracy. We have said “allow Palestinian people to participate in a free and fair referendum to express their views.” What we are saying only serves the cause of durable peace. We want durable peace in that part of the world. A durable peace will only come about once the views of the people are met. So we said “allow the people of Palestine to participate in a referendum to choose their desired government,” and, of course, for the war to come to an end as well. Why are they refusing to allow this to go ahead? Even the Palestinian administration and government, which has been elected by the people, is being attacked on a daily basis, and its high-ranking officials are assassinated and arrested. Yesterday, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament was arrested, elected by the people, mind you. So how long can this go on? We believe that this problem has to be dealt with fundamentally. I believe that the American government is blindly supporting this government of occupation. It should lift its support, allow the people to participate in free and fair elections. Whatever happens, let it be. We will accept and go along. The result will be as you said earlier, sir."
The interview was shown on television on August 6, 2006, but the editors cut Ahmadinejad’s words after he spoke “I think that the Israeli government is a fabricated government, and I have talked about the solution.” At that point, an interjection from Wallace is voiced over: “Fabricated from the Holocaust, which he said may also have been fabricated.” Ahmadinejad never said that. But the quote has been attributed to Ahmadinejad and repeated ad nausem by the likes of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ahmadinejad’s actual response, aired on C-Span days later, unedited, was logical, reasonable, and peaceful. But who watches C-Span? Millions watched the 60 Minutes interview that rigidly followed the Zionist playbook: lie, promote hate of Iran, war with Iran (an earlier lie worked in Iraq), and demonize an adversary of Israel.
At one point, after dealing with aggressive questions, the Iranian felt forced to ask Wallace, “Are you the representative of the Zionist regime? Or a journalist?” Apparently Wallace was both.
As summed up in the Mondoweiss article of April 12, 2012, headlined “Wallace Interview with Ahmadinejad Was Little More than Deliberate Demonization”:
The interview made headlines around the world and Ahmadinejad’s reputation as a genocidal threat to Israel and a confrontational denier of the Holocaust was truly cemented in the hearts and minds of Western audiences. But those threats and denials came from Wallace’s voice-over, not Ahmadinejad’s actual words. … No military threats, only a call for democratic elections and a government that represents the will of the people. But none of that made it into the final cut of the interview shown on CBS.
A far more dangerous ongoing element of the pro-Israel media dominance is the utter control over the messaging on national syndicated radio. This is not surprising given media ownership; the top-rated national programs are all blatantly pro-Israel. As of early 2020, nine (!) of the top twenty programs in the United States of Israel fall under a “conservative talk” format, a format that automatically promises the listener a pro-Israel slant. Some are more aggressive than others. While the top-rated Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity clearly follow along at the time, Mark Levin and Michael Savage fearlessly make things a bit more provocative. Levin loves to use the term “Islama-Nazis” to describe the Iranian regime, certain other Muslims, and/or Arab immigrants. This is a putrid generalization, mis-characterization, and the simplest form of fear mongering. This is what is fed to white, middle class, poor, middle-America; the heart-landers listening daily on their car or truck radios.
There was one “progressive talk” categorized program in the top-20 in the United States, but as it is business-centric, you likely won’t hear Thom Hartmann critiquing Israel on his namesake program.
Regional radio can be just as influenced, and influential. A Washington Post article talks about “big conservative donors who have helped fuel the rise of local radio networks such as Salem Radio Network, BOTT Radio Network, and American Family Radio.”
The article by Sarah Ellison on January 23, 2020 is entitled: “Trumpworld Has Converted the Nation’s Regional Talk Radio Hosts into a Loyal Army.” The likelihood of these entities supporting Israel when the topic comes up is very, very, very high:
Salem started out as a small fundamentalist Christian operation run out of Southern California and has expanded aggressively in recent years, particularly in swing states. It supports nationally syndicated hosts such as Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, and Joe Walsh, in addition to a host of regional personalities largely unknown outside their areas. According to Salem, it now serves more than 2,000 radio stations across the country.
Conservative groups such as the secretive Council for National Policy, backed by billionaire conservative families such as the Kochs, the Mercers, and the family of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, whose sister is former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, have fueled that expansion, according to a new book by Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. “These conservative networks have expanded even as local newspapers around the country have dwindled,” Nelson said in an interview. They have “gobbled up independent and local stations, boosted their signals, and made them into an unseen powerhouse in the middle of the country.”
Not so independent or local anymore.
News programs provide rhetoric, talk programs promote propaganda; ultimately both are one and the same.
American taxpayers provide about $4 billion every year to Israel, a country led by hawkish [aggressive, merciless] right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is in full support of stealing Palestinian land, terrorizing Muslims, and treating Jewish and Arab residents of Israel by separate rules and regulations. His ultimate goal, and the goal of those in power who think like him or support him, is to see Palestine eliminated and a greater Israel populated by Jews alone. The latter part is unrealistic on many levels, but then again having a working class and/or servant class of Arabs and Africans living with limited rights is well within his reality.
Ironic, considering Netanyahu often says it’s the Palestinians who want to wipe Israel off the map, as he wipes Palestine off the map.
This job became a lot easier with the arrival of Donald Trump.
In a remarkably detailed and honest expose by Adam Entous in the June 18, 2018 edition of The New Yorker, we learn that with the changeover from Obama, conditions for the Palestinians would only get worse, and Israel’s theft of land, settlement development and the terrorizing of the Arab population would now move ahead unabated. “Trump tried to cast himself as an honest broker who was ‘right down the middle,’ but his advisers—Kushner, David Friedman, and Jason Greenblatt—couldn’t be more aligned with Netanyahu if he had chosen them himself.”
While all of this should be urgently important to Americans, they’re purposely left in the dark.
For one, the Israelis and their powerful lobby want the U.S. to attack Iran for them, just like the U.S. attacked Iraq for them in 2003 (see chapter 11). Meanwhile, Israel’s treatment of Israeli Arabs living in Israel proper resembles the former Apartheid state in South Africa (see chapter 8), condemned by America and most of the world until it was overturned. Arabs as second-class citizens with fewer rights, freedoms, and privileges than Jews is being institutionalized by a recent “Nation-State” law passed in Israel’s Knesset [national legislature], while just outside Netanyahu’s empire, ongoing Israeli terror and war crimes against Palestinians on Palestinian land continues. This terror and destruction takes place before, during, and after the stealing of Palestinian property.
The United States and its citizens are along for the ride. Hatred toward America from around the world due to its support of Israel has left American citizens who travel outside the U.S. and its military personnel in danger. One could argue worldwide Islamic terror against “Western nations” begins and ends with the Palestinian issue and is simply a response to Jewish terror and American cooperation. This dislike and mistrust is not because the United States has Cadillacs and dancing girls.
Early in 2019, Egyptian President al-Sissi reconfirmed what remains obvious. In the opening sentence of an article by Noa Landau published on February 2, 2019 in the Haaretz newspaper in Israel, she summarized:
The failure to reach a fair and final settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents the main source of instability in the Middle East, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi said Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. Sissi’s remark came two days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau leaked a video in which the prime minister of Bahrain [an Arabic island kingdom in the Persian Gulf] is heard at a closed dinner telling Warsaw conference participants that the Iranian issue is more “toxic” than the Palestinian issue.
Pivoting the focus from Palestine to Iran (see chapter 12) by any means necessary, whenever possible, is the ongoing propaganda mission of Mr. Netanyahu, who’s well aware of his completely captive American audience.
This chapter began with a quote from former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and it ends with one from Netanyahu in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in our way.”
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