Monday, January 20, 2014

The “Israel First” Industry and CEO Profiteering

By James Petras

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Conclusion
The Great Transformation among American Jewish charitable organizations is evidenced by the shift (1) from social aid for working Jews, poor immigrants and elderly Holocaust victims to political influence peddling at the service of a highly militarized Israeli state, (2) from engaging in social welfare for American Jews to political lobbying for military transfers to Israel, (3) from grassroots leaders sharing life styles and struggles with their rank and file donors to millionaire CEO’s entertaining Zionist billionaires and banging tables for Israel at the White House and paying off Congressional influentials, (4) from reaching out and aligning with Americans active for peace with justice in the Middle East to embracing every tin horn monarch and dictator who signs off on Israeli annexation of Palestinian land.
The key to the transformation is located in the ideological and structural transformation among the leaders of the Jewish organizations. The rise to prominence – centrality – of billionaire/millionaire Zionist donors have put in place leaders who mirror their Israel First outlook and who have similarly enriched themselves. Secondly, the Great Transformation of Jewish charitable organizations has resulted from the ascendancy of an ethnic supremacist ideology which views others as inferior subjects to be ruled by the Higher Intelligence of Jewish political and business leaders; and which orders, that the ‘disobedient’, be castigated as “anti-Semites” and punished by jail. media ostracism, overt threats and most commonly denied employment. A key consequence of the rise to political power of the formerly socially conscious Jewish organizations, is the shedding of their popular mass base: members have resigned in protest over the CEO’s manipulative authoritarian leadership style. Expulsions and harassment have forced others to retire.But most of all the leaderships blind political submission to Israeli state policy and self-enrichment has alienated growing numbers of young socially active Jews as well as middle age Jews who are disenchanted with their gonif leaders.
As disenchantment grows, the organized groups and leaders act with greater discipline and aggression to preserve their false image as “representatives of the Jewish community”. Jewish dissidents are silenced or isolated. The CEO “leaders” and their rabbinical allies fuse ethno-supremacy, the menorah, the Israeli flag and the politics of Israel First into a powerful instrument of internal control. Lucrative salaries and personal enrichment at the service of Israel are not a crime: they are viewed as virtue; at least in the eyes of respectable … gonifs.
I remember the Jewish brother of a neighborhood friend who joined the Lincoln Brigade and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. More recently I recall a student at Binghamton University telling me he was going to Israel to join the IDF. No doubt his “militancy” will translate into breaking the legs of protesting Palestinian school kids. Yes a ‘transformation’ has taken place but I must confess that I prefer Izzy Levine’s candy and comic book store where grammar school kids socialized, descendents of Sicilians, Odessa Jews, Afro-Americans and Spartan Greeks, over the current Judeo-centric CEO’s who run the Israel First industry. Izzy was a greater American than Abe Foxman political blackmailer, police informer and millionaire."

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