The appointment of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General completes a sweep of Jews as the top two domestic law enforcement officers and White House Chief of Staff. It is also a sign that Bush is preparing for a transition to a Guliani Administration by putting his close associates into the top law enforcement positions.
Michael Mukasey is a Hassidic Jew, born in the Bronx, New York and educated at the Orthodox Ramaz School. He was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York when Rudolf Guliani was the United States Attorney. Mukasey’s son currently works for Guliani’s firm. Mukasey then served as a Judge in the Southern District of New York where he presided over the trial of Omar Abdul Rahman and El Sayyid Nosair who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Rahman is the nephew of Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, mastermind of the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Mukasey also presided over the trial of Jose Padillo, the American shoe bomber, who Mukasey ruled could be held as an enemy combatant. The fact that he allowed Padillo access to a lawyer has been misrepresented in the media as a progressive or moderate decision. On the contrary, Mukasey ruled it legal for the United States to hold an American citizen indefinitely without charges. This is where the concept of hate crimes is going to come back to bite all the blacks, gays and others who wanted extra penalties for the reason for a crime. In essence, hate crimes criminalize thought. It was not enough to prosecute someone for assault or murder, extra charges had to be filed if the assault or murder was based on prejudice. Soon, any criminal who does not support Israel’s right to illegally annex the West Bank may end up being called a “terrorist” and be subject the indefinite detention provisions of the Patriot Act as an “enemy combatant.”
And when Mukasey’s nomination seemed to be in trouble, who rode in to the rescue from the Democratic Party, Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Diane Feinstein of California, both Jewish. And today, Arlen Specter, the Jewish Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, has joined his Jewish colleagues in announcing support for Mukasey.
Michael Chertoff, the Director of Homeland Security, is the son and grandson of Rabbis. Born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Chertoff was also hired to work for Rudolf Guliani. Chertoff co-authored the Patriot Act, was the prosecutor of Zacarias Moussaoui, an Al-Queda operative training for a second wave of hijackings, and served as Special Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee. When Michael Chertoff says, “Illegals degrade the environment,” he sounds like an Israeli talking about Palestinian Arabs.
Josh Bolton, the current Chief of Staff for President Bush, is a Kosher Jew who attended the elite St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. where Al Gore went to high school. Mukasey, Chertoff and Bolton are all lawyers who attended the finest law schools. They are all religious Jews from New York and Washington. Under the Israeli Law of Return, all three of them have a “right to return” to Israel, even if they have never been there. This is what the so-called war on terrorism is all about. Palestinians and other Arabs wonder why Jews, born and raised in the United States, have a right to return to land that Palestinians who have lived there for centuries do not. The Arabs see this as straight theft, pure and simple. Just because some people cite scriptural justification does not make it any less a theft.
This is what Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is talking about when he says the Palestinian right of return must be addressed. George W. Bush’s formulation that you are either “with us or against us” in the war on terror is equally true on the question of the civil nature of the United States Constitution. If anyone said, “Only Roman Catholics have a right to buy land and live on Manhattan Island,” everyone would immediately recognize this as a shocking violation of United States Constitutional principles.
Yet, in foreign policy, the United States is repeatedly supporting with arms and massive financial aid policies that would be prohibited in the United States. The Israeli annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in violation of international law and the “right of return” for Jews who have never set foot in Israel are two such examples. The result of American support for these blatantly racist policies is that the idea of a civil, non-sectarian government is being destroyed here in the United States. Separation of church and state can not survive in a nation that supports contrary policies abroad.
So, the crucial question Mukasey, Chertoff and Bolton need to answer when they take an oath to support the United States Constitution is, “Do you believe you have a ‘right’ to live in Israel?” Because if they believe they have such a right, then they have a prima facie conflict of interest. This is what the Middle East conflict is all about. And if the United States is going to support a Jewish State of Israel, a place reserved for Jews based on religious laws, then the Moslems are entitled to have Islamic states as well. The current conflict is because the Moslems, justifiably, perceive an American double standard, support for religious states for the Jews, but calling Islamic states “terrorist.” Unfortunately, this double standard seems totally reasonable to the Bush administration, which entered the White House having lost the election. Double standards are the basis of the Bush philosophy. Rules just don’t apply to them, or when they are in charge, to the United States. That is why we are at war. Other people don’t accept American and Israeli exceptionalism, especially when the United States and Israel know nothing about the people they are holding to their own standards from which they exempt themselves.
The Military Dimension
Last week, John Abizaid, the former commander of American forces in Iraq, said that the United States forces were going to be in the Middle East fifty years from now. It is important to remember that it was the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia in the wake of the first Gulf War in 1991 that led to the split between Osama Bin Laden and the Saudi government and the formation of Al-Queda. During Operation Desert Shield, the prelude to the Desert Storm expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney promised the Saudis that the American troops would be gone six months after Iraq was thrown out of Kuwait. They are still there.
Later the same week, retired General Joseph Ralston, George Bush’s representative to the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) resigned saying that the United States was breaking its promises to Turkey and pushing the Turks and Iranians toward each other. The reason for his statement is that the Kurds, which like many other ethnic groups wanted an independent Kurdistan homeland carved out of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, were the big losers at Versailles. So the millions of Kurds are divided between Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
The Real American Foreign Policy: Not a War Against Terrorism, but a War for Zionism and Against Socialism
So, are Americans just incompetent, ignorant morons; or is there a real foreign policy we are not being told about? During World War I, Great Britain, then the dominant foreign power in the Middle East, made incompatible promises to both the Arabs and the Jews. Britain promised independence to their Arab allies who joined them in fighting the Turks and a homeland for the Jews in Palestine under the Balfour Declaration. After the war, they reneged on those promises, but the Jews took up arms to force Britain out of Palestine and to help establish Israel.
After twenty-five years of bloody mandatory rule under the League of Nations and United Nations mandates, Britain decided to get out of the Middle East. At the time of the founding of Israel, a common comment was that Britain had deliberately created a chaotic situation in the Middle East so that if they could not control it, then no one else would be able to, either.
In the years since the end of World War II, United States foreign policy has been mostly to destroy socialist countries and recently, to dismember them completely. Like the destruction of Yugoslavia, the current destruction and dismemberment of Iraq is designed to leave Israel the strongest military power in the Middle East with no nation in the area cohesive or peaceful enough to mount a military challenge. The support in the State Department and Pentagon for a “federal” Iraq of three weak parts is adamantly opposed by Turkey and Iran because they see an independent Iraqi Kurdestan in the north as the entity around which an independent Kurdistan will grow at the expense of Turkey and Iran. While dismembering Turkey, a member of NATO, is problematic; dismembering Iran would be just what the doctor ordered in terms of leaving Israel as the only viable military state in the Middle East.
In any event, the current United States policy for the Middle East is continued conflict and destabization, but not too severe to stop the flow of oil.
Water, the Real Root of the Middle East Conflict
Forgetting the politics for the moment, there is no solution to the Middle East conflict that does not include more water: either pipelines from water surplus nations, or a crash Manhattan type project to perfect desalination technology. Sixty years ago, Israel was a nation of 600,000 people, not 6 million. The Arab nations, too, have mushrooming populations. Western diplomats from the Quartet fail to understand that Islamic culture does not really care about land. Historically they were nomads. It is water that makes the land valuable. If you want the Palestinians to give up their right to return to Israel, then need to be offered alternative lands in exchange. They might, in fact, be willing to live on the West Bank or in Sinai or in any of the current deserts in the Middle East if there was water to make those lands habitable. Also, Israel wants to retain the West Bank because of its water. Maybe Israel would be willing to vacate the Golan Heights and the West Bank if it could secure other sources of water. So, water is the key, regardless of any political considerations. And as long as there is water scarcity in the Middle East, the economies of the nations will be socialist by necessity. When water, which is necessary for life, is in short supply, it must be shared equally. To understand Hamas, it is well to remember that when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, 5,000 Israeli settlers used 85% of the water and the 1.2 million Palestinians used 15%. [The water problem in the Middle East has been solved by the importation of food, the production of which is the biggest consumer of water.]
The attempt at a military solution is not only futile, it is criminal. Spending trillions of dollars on arms and destruction in one of the poorest areas of the world is not consonant with United States ideals and philosophy. And the Middle East conflict must be solved soon, not in ten, twenty nor fifty years, because the terrorist movements coming down the pike are going to make the current conflict look like peace and tranquility in retrospect.