The supporters of CUFI moved up the convention center escalators and took their seats for a plenary session. Onstage were the first guests, all recognizable from Fox News—Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol, onetime CIA director James Woolsey, and the Council on Foreign Relations fellow Elliott Abrams, a presidentially pardoned veteran of foreign policy disasters on two continents. Sitting right next to them was John Hagee, the burly Christian Zionist pastor who founded CUFI in 2006 He leaned into a microphone, passionately explaining why supporters of Israel should not be tricked by casualty reports.“Since July 8, more than 1,000 rockets have been launched into Israel by Hamas from Gaza,” said Hagee, who speaks with a captivating rumble that could make a brunch order sound like a lost gospel. “Two-thirds of Israel’s population has had to run to bomb shelters, having 90 seconds to save their lives.”The objective of Hamas, said Hagee, “is to win the media war with dead civilians. We’ve come to Washington to ask our government to stop demanding for Israel to show restraint.”More than 4,800 evangelicals and Jews broke into applause. Some raised their arms and turned up their palms; a shofar-maker from New Jersey blew on one of his horns.“If a foreign power had launched 1,000 rockets into America, we would be pulling the gates of the White House down,” said Hagee. “Let Israel finish the job. Let every rocket be dismantled. Let every tunnel be destroyed.”Hagee had set the theme: This year’s CUFI conference, followed by its members’ lobbying trips to Congress, would pressure the Obama administration not to broker an early cease-fire in Israel. The people of Israel would not suffer so that “John Kerry could win his Nobel Peace prize.” (Hagee made that joke again at an evening, music-and-dancing stuffed CUFI celebration, which started with a taped message from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.) American evangelicals needed to imagine themselves as Israelis, praise the “miracle” of the Iron Dome missile defense system, and understand that the Jews had a biblical mandate to the entire Holy Land.“I’ll bless those that bless you and I’ll curse those that curse you,” said Hagee, quoting from the book of Genesis. “That’s God’s foreign policy statement, and it has not changed.”ANDThat was backed up by the speeches, and by the hallway conversations. Israel was one war away from destroying Hamas—unless John Kerry stopped it. Iran was one missile away from a second Holocaust—unless the Obama administration acted. On Monday night, Hagee gave a special award to Republican super PAC donor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who turned and thanked the mostly Christian audience for backing Israel.“If you had been there during the Holocaust, you would have stood up and fought for the Jewish people,” said Miriam Adelson. “And maybe the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened.”“I’ve never had a greater warm feeling than being honored by Pastor Hagee,” said a beaming Sheldon Adelson.But the honors were mutual. Speaker after speaker gave the evangelicals ammunition for the next time someone criticized the Gaza operation, or shamed Israel over the body count.“Here’s a message for America: Don’t ever turn your back on Israel, because God will turn his back on us,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. “More Germans died in World War II than American soldiers. That didn’t make the Germans right.”Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who debuted at the conference in 2013 and got its loudest ovation this year, walked the crowd through all the Obama administration betrayals. Remember, how Kerry had warned that Israel could become an apartheid state—a “slander and a lie.” Remember how Kerry had acknowledged the BDS movement and angered Israel’s leaders. The Obama administration was naive; CUFI wasn’t.“It is Hamas who is putting women and children on top of the rockets,” said Cruz, “because they value the missiles and rockets more than they value their own civilians.”
Monday, 1 September 2014
Israel’s Embedded American Operatives Aid the Genocide in Gaza
Extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu enjoys an overwhelmingly accommodating media in the United States along with a contemptible Congress packed with corrupt and cowardly weasels, lickspittles and nut case religious zealots whose dedication to a foreign country stabs their actual constituents in the back. The fealty that Netanyahu receives from this lamentable “co-equal” branch of government was evident when he received 29 standing ovations during an address to the U.S. Congress in 2011. He also is able to play the corrupt state-corporate media like a Stradivarius in order to receive an unprecedented forum on U.S. national television to push his lies and propaganda to sell the product that is the slaughter of women and children in Gaza.
In the early days of Operation Protective Edge – one of those deceptive military style names that sell so well to star-spangled schmucks in the Homeland – Bibi was a fixture on those Sunday morning “news” shows that are nothing more than propaganda organs of the warfare state. His fascistic genocidal policies are routinely given cover by “America’s most trusted name in news” and mealy-mouthed celebrity pundit Wolf Blitzer, a former AIPAC lobbyist whose objectivity is non-existent when it comes to defending extremist Israeli actions. His ridiculous feature on exploring the “terror tunnels of Hamas” last month was as ludicrous and phony as when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault.
Foremost among the Christian Zionist organizations is CUFI orChristians United for Israel led by Texas radical cleric John Hagee. There is no more important bastion of the chicken-fried brand of cracker “Christianity” to the mustering of the flock to carry the torch for Netanyahu’s war crimes in America. The annual CUFI summitwas just held last month in Washington and attracted the exalted high priests of Israeli supremacy and the genocide necessary to deliver to Bibi everything that God once promised and then some. The heavy hitters being the Grand Poobah of neocon propaganda William Kristol, the fiendish Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, former CIA Director James “World War IV” Woolsey and Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer who has been seriously referred to as “Bibi’s brain”. Additional guests of dishonor at this sordid soiree were the typical extremist Republicans, in particular the increasingly unstable Senator Lindsey Graham, batshit crazy CongresswomanMichelle Bachmann, Senator Jim Inhofe who is squealing like a stuck pig about ISIS destroying an American city and the wettest of wet dreams of Christian fascists who have long been awaiting the arrival of their führer: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a bizarre land of chicken-fried motherfuckery.
David Wiegel writes of the event for Slate in a piece entitled “Inside the Most Insanely Pro-Israel Meeting You Could Ever Attend” from which I excerpt the following:
It could have been scripted by Joseph Goebbels and choregraphed by Leni Riefenstahl and it was taking place right here in America in the city of sin on the Potomac, not far from AIPAC central command. You have to give it to Netanyahu,he is a chronic and dedicated meddler in U.S. domestic politics and is able to consistently get his message out despite the lies, spin and demagoguery. What often goes unmentioned is the work of thousands of activist electronic shock troops in the cyber wars who churn out racist screeds and blog posts, invade comment threads and engage in coordinated blog swarms to spew accusations of anti-Semitism at critics.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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