What the Mainstream ‘News’ Media Aren’t Reporting About Israel, And Why Trump’s Ignorance of History Could Destroy the World, And Why the U.S. Democratic Party Must End and Be Replaced.
20 November 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Trump, like Hitler did, believes that the Bible is, as Hitler referred to it ONLY in his private notes, as being the “Monumental History of Mankind”. Only their interpretations of it are different, but the bigger problem than interpreting it, is its being NOT at all a book of history; it is instead a book of religious propaganda that was selected and canonized by Pope Demasus at the Council of Rome in the year 382. The Roman Catholic Church was the first Christian Church and created Christianity’s canon, or Scripture, or ‘Word of God’, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a book of history; and, by now, though preachers still consider it to be a book of history (because otherwise they wouldn’t be preaching it), historians no longer do. The Bible’s being a book of fiction has enormous political implications, and this article will deal with some of these.
On November 20th, the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (who is too good for mainstream media in the U.S. empire) headlined “FORCE EVACUATION AND SMASH THE CAMPS: A report from inside Gaza” and opened:
Israel, fortified by bombs and funding from the Biden administration, is escalating the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands from the north of Gaza to the south, amid fierce bombing and the deprivation of food and water for those who stay behind. This is continuing amid marches and other demonstrations sponsored by the religious right in Israel whose leadership also is calling for north Gaza to be turned over to Israeli settlers. What was a worrisome rumor in Gaza more and more seems like a reality.
Control over all of Gaza and the West Bank is the core demand of the religious right in Israel that now dominates the government. I was told this week by a well-informed Washington official that the Israeli leadership will formally annex the West Bank in the very near future—perhaps in two weeks—in the hope that the decisive step will end, once and for all, any talk of a two-state solution and will convince some in the skeptical Arab world to reconsider financing the planned reconstruction of Gaza. Arab communities in the West Bank have been under increasingly violent pressure from Israeli police and armed settler attacks have become a sad staple of life.
On the same day, the great ethicist and investigative journalist Caitlin Johnstone headlined “The Real Israel”, and opened:
One of the very few good things coming out of the relentless nightmare happening in Gaza is that at long last the western world is getting a clear look at Israel. The real Israel.
Not the Israel they teach you about in school. Not “the only democracy in the middle east,” where Jews were given safe haven after their victimization at the hands of the Nazis and managed to create a thriving society despite existing in a sea of savage enemies bent on their destruction.
Not that Israel. The real one. Arguably the most racist society on earth, whose existence has depended on nonstop violence, theft, tyranny and abuse since its very inception.
The real Israel, whose government is deliberately and methodically starving Palestinian civilians to death by the tens of thousands just for being the wrong ethnicity.
The real Israel, whose snipers routinely murders Palestinian children by shooting them in the head.
The real Israel, whose military is so sadistic that it created an AI system to specifically target suspected Hamas fighters when they are at home with their families, and called the AI “Where’s Daddy?” because it would be killing fathers when they are at home with their children.
The real Israel, whose soldiers cannot stop posting footage of themselves mockingly dressed in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children.
The real Israel, where Palestinian doctors are raped and tortured to death.
The real Israel, where the majority of men do not believe acquaintance rape or spousal rape are real crimes, and where the majority do not believe the soldiers accused of raping and torturing a Palestinian prisoner to the point of severe injury should face criminal charges.
The real Israel, who routinely bombs buildings full of civilians and then uses sniper drones to pick off the survivors, including children.
The real Israel, whose drones have been heard playing the sounds of crying babies and screaming women in order to lure out civilians so they can be killed.
The real Israel, who has damaged or destroyed 94 percent of the healthcare facilities in Gaza with hundreds of targeted attacks.
The real Israel, whose military forces target medical staff so methodically that doctors and nurses in Gaza reportedly change out of their uniforms when they leave the hospital in order to avoid assassination.
The real Israel, who hates truth so much that it has been killing historic numbers of journalists in Gaza while preventing foreign journalists from entering the enclave. …
The progressive (i.e., pro-science, anti-myth) Israeli “+972 Magazine” headlined on November 13th, “Trump’s unfinished business for ‘Greater Israel’: From annexation to UNRWA, Trump’s Israel advisors should be taken at their word — and Democrats won’t stand in their way, says Lara Friedman.”, and reported their interview of Friedman:
INTERVIEWER: I want to shift back to the domestic implications of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a crackdown on pro-Palestine activism in the United States, which we’ve seen most recently outlined in places like the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther. [which is based on fiction — the book of Esther, which historians even explicitly CALL “fiction” — that Heritage CALLS, and assumes to constitute, instead “history,” and Heritage refers to the “Persian King Ahaseurus” who did not exist but the one who did exist then was Xerxes I, who did not do what the fictional Ahaseurus did: so, “Esther” is entirely fiction]. Could you explain how these plans are tied to a longer history of legislative developments that you and FMEP have been tracking, which may have gone under the radar over the past few years but will certainly accelerate if Republicans maintain control of the White House, Senate, and House — or even if Democrats control the House, and there are enough pro-Israel Democrats willing to work with Republicans?
FRIEDMAN: The [rhetoric] of “We are the people fighting antisemitism” has proven incredibly valuable to Republicans, both in Congress and at the grassroots [level]. It is a standard flag that they fly as they target anything they view as woke or otherwise hostile to a very hardline illiberal agenda — and academia is at the top of this.
This started before October 7, but the surge in activism in support of Palestinian lives and rights really fueled the Republican anti-woke agenda, under the guise of fighting antisemitism. We saw this earlier when the anti-BDS legislation started being repurposed as anti-CRT [critical race theory] and anti-DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] and anti-ESG [Environment, Social, and Governance]. You’ve got these laws that use state contracts as the hook to punish people for BDS, and then you just edit it slightly, and now you can use it against the entire [list] of things you don’t like.
In terms of where this goes now, I am of two minds. On the one hand, I think it would be inconceivable that this [cynical weaponization of antisemitism to ‘justify’ censorship] will not continue and expand. This is a powerful weapon for the far right: it aligns with Christian evangelical views and the views of a lot of the messianic Jews in Trump’s orbit, those who have accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior but still identify as Jews. It’s been really effective at either bringing Democrats on board or at least making it hard for them to protest because as soon as [they do], that proves they don’t care about antisemitism.
At the same time, some of this depends on how much the public narrative ends up hitting a wall with reality, or whether reality gives in to the public narrative. I’ll cite two pieces of legislation where I think this is important.
One is a bill that was passed by the House earlier this year that would give the Secretary of Treasury nearly unfettered authority to strip the nonprofit status from any U.S. organization that that secretary decides, just by fiat, has links to terrorism. There is no oversight and virtually no meaningful recourse. That passed the House, and then it got stuck. The other bill is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which various Jewish groups have been pushing for years and would codify the IHRA definition into law. It passed the House earlier this year, and then it, too, hit a wall.
Both of them hit a wall not simply because progressives pointed out that they were dangerous, illiberal, and a threat to free speech, but also because the right wing considered them to be an overreach. On the NGO bill, [right wing] people recognized that it could be used by a Democratic president to target all of their organizations. They saw how this could be expanded to allow the IRS to tell NGOs what they can and can’t do.
The NGO bill finally went up for a vote yesterday [Nov. 12]. But it failed because Republican leaders brought it to the floor under a rule that requires a two-thirds majority to pass. If it had come to the floor under normal order — which it still can — it would have easily passed. And the fact that 52 Dems voted for it, notwithstanding the election of Trump, really says it all.
On the IHRA bill, Axios reported recently that [the Democratic leader in the Senate, Sen. Chuck] Schumer has promised to move the bill in the Senate during the lame-duck [period]. The article framed it as a controversial bill among Democrats — as if it’s the Democratic Party giving in to its far-left base on a bill that everybody else agrees should be passed. Except that’s total bullshit: just look at the record when it passed the House. There was an outpouring of opposition to this bill from the entire right wing — from the crazy “we can’t pass this because it’ll make antisemitism illegal,” to the free speech absolutists, to the libertarians, to a whole set of people who argued that this was stealth DEI. …
What are your main takeaways from last week’s election results?
This is obviously a moment of reckoning for Democrats, and Gaza did play a role. If you look at Senator [Bob] Casey’s loss in Pennsylvania, for example, where the amount [of votes] he lost by is smaller than the number of people who voted for the Green Party candidate, who’s a Palestinian American, that seat alone is clearly Gaza-impacted.
And one can argue that it’s impacted even more by the fact that people didn’t show up. If the normal number of voters had shown up, then [anger about Gaza] probably wouldn’t have mattered. The percentage of the [vote for] Green Party [candidates] isn’t greater than in previous years. But this year, it had a definitive impact.
We’re still waiting to see final numbers, but I think turnout is a big piece of it. And to the extent that the Democratic Party assumed that they would have a similar turnout to the last Biden election [in 2020], where you had a really energized base, I think they assumed wrong. Gaza is a piece of the disillusionment of this base: the cynicism, the sense that “this party doesn’t care about me and isn’t reflecting me.” A lot of people either didn’t show up, voted for a third-party candidate, or voted for Trump. And we have clear evidence of this where, down ballot, the Democrats outperformed Harris: [in Michigan], a state where Harris lost but Rashida Tlaib won, or [in Minnesota], where Harris did worse than Ilhan Omar.
There are some very simplistic arguments [about the election outcome being a result of] the fact that [Harris] is a woman or that she’s black. We actually had significant successes for female candidates and women of color in this election, where they did better on the same ticket than she did. Even [Rep. Elissa] Slotkin, a Jewish woman, won a Senate seat in Michigan while Harris lost. So no one can say this is about antisemitism. And Slotkin differentiated herself from Harris: she actually spoke in terms that expressed compassion, empathy, and care for Palestinians. Did it go as far as some of us would have liked? No. Did it go far enough [for constituents] to say, “I believe you, I think you care”? Apparently it did. And that makes a difference.
For years, I’ve been saying to friends in the Democratic Party that if you want a warning for what can happen [here], look at the Labor Party in Israel. If your strategy [to win] is consistently to try to attract people from the right and center right, taking for granted your own base — assuming that “our own base will vote for us no matter what, and that we can win without the people on the far edges of that base” — the Labor Party is a really good example of where that takes you.
Years ago, in the period after the Second Intifada, I was talking to a friend in a Labor Party leadership position. This was when [the party] was saying, “We can’t touch the Palestine issue — it’ll destroy us. We have to keep leaning to the center.” I told them, “You can either wear this issue as a crown and own it and be proud of it and have a clear agenda, and then if you win you’ve got a mandate and if you lose you can criticize the other [party] for not doing what they should have done. Or you can wear it as a heavy chain that will drag you to the bottom of the sea in every election.”
And that’s where we are today: the Labor Party has moved to the right and [as a result] almost out of existence, because the [Israeli] right doesn’t vote for it — they’re not going to vote for “Likud lite,” they’re going to vote for Likud. And we essentially have an Israeli political spectrum that is a battle between parties from the center-right to the far-right and some vestigial left-wing parties. So there’s something for Democrats to learn from the Israeli experience.
So looking at Slotkin’s reelection, or races like Summer Lee’s in Pennsylvania, do you see any new openings for Palestinian rights advocacy — or at least a reflection of the fact that taking a strong, pro-Palestine stance is not an electoral liability?
That’s going to depend fundamentally on the Democratic Party and who it decides to listen to when it learns the lessons of this election. We already saw learned pundits on TV during the election saying Democrats were losing because they weren’t pro-Israel enough. We’re seeing analysis that if they attacked more in the pro-Israel direction, they would have captured whatever part of the Jewish community didn’t vote for them, which is ridiculous — there’s a certain percentage that always votes Republican.
The bottom line is that you’ve had clear messages from the Democratic electorate that there is a broad spectrum of views on Gaza and on Israel, which precedes this election, and that there is a lot of space to be more even-handed.
Since the Oslo Accords, the Democratic Party has chosen to continually move further and further to the right [on Israel], and from the Obama era onward, to the [position of] no daylight [between the U.S. and Israel], shoulder-to-shoulder; they are not just with the Republicans, they’re to the right of the Republicans on this. And [that comes] with a clear statement to the base: “We simply don’t care about you, or maybe we consider you a liability and would rather have you mad at us because we think we can gain more from the right than by actually keeping our left. We’re so convinced that you’ll vote for us no matter what, or that we can win without you.”
We saw this a little bit with the Bernie [Sanders’ presidential] campaign [in 2016]. I remember talking to someone on the Clinton campaign after Bernie dropped out, and they were still showing open contempt for Bernie [supporters]. This person looked at me and said, “We don’t need them. We can win without them.” If you have contempt for your base, at some point your base is going to have contempt for you.
When a significant, decisive portion of your base either casts a protest vote or stays home — effectively saying, “I can’t support you at this point,” or “I’d rather let you lose and learn a lesson than continue to be implicated in policies that are anathema to my values” — does that lesson get learned?
On 20 October 2024, I headlined “THE PREDICAMENT THAT ISRAEL FORCES UPON JEWISH PROGRESSIVES” and documented that for progressive Jews, such as the American Jew Friedman, and such as the Israeli publishers of “+972 Magazine”, Israel itself is hell. But the problem isn’t only in Israel. I am no atheist, but I agree 100% with “The Friendly Athiest,” on November 20th, headlining “Texas is about to push Bible lessons in public elementary schools” and ripping Texas officials who have agreed to allocate nearly a million dollars of Texas taxpayers’ money to propagandize in the state’s public schools that the Bible is a book of history instead of what it actually is, which is a book of religious propaganda — Christian propaganda, which is to be paid for by all Texans. An example in that article is “The Bible said Esther saved the Jewish people by foiling a plot to eradicate them, which is why she was included in this unit [of K-12 public education]… but unlike everyone else, there was no evidence she ever actually existed.” [However, notice there that even the source linked-to there by “The Friendly Atheist” actually UNDERSTATES the reality — that source says: “The historical reality of this biblical episode, and whether or not Esther actually existed, has often been questioned,” but there ACTUALLY IS NO EVIDENCE that she existed, and all of the relevant history that DOES exist is INCONSISTENT with such a person’s having been there at that time. So, the evidence that DOES exist is INCONSISTENT with her having existed. This is far stronger than saying merely that “there was no evidence she ever actually existed.”] Students were never told that. Her story was given the same treatment as the one of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a bus.” Whether this Texas law is even compliant with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, only judges will say, but it is certainly EVIL to tax non-Christians to pay for their childen to be bomarded with Christian propaganda. Are American public schools, like the ones in Israel, or in Austria when Hitler was born, to be allowed to teach such ancient hatreds?
If Biden and/or Trump take the Bible to be the “Monumental History of Mankind” and on this basis believe that ‘God’ gave ‘Israel’ to ‘the Jews’ (Genesis 15:18-21), and that ‘He’ ordered ‘the Jews’ to exterminate the people living there, the Palestinians (Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-18), and Iran disagrees with that, and Russia sides then with Iran, we could all get blown up. For what? For stupidity.
Concerning what the solution to this (i.e, to the Democratic Party’s having earned and now — on November 5th — received the contempt of its former voters) should be, I add here, that in 1860, the Whig Party, which had been one of America’s two major political Parties (the other being the Democratic Party), became replaced by Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which was the most progressive Party in America while Lincoln lived, but which promptly upon his assassination became replaced by America’s rising class of super-rich who handed off to the by-then-discredited (racist) Democratic Party any remaining pretenses to being populist instead of elitist. So, right now is the best of all opportunities for the creation of a Progressive Party in America to compete openly aginst BOTH of America’s existing profoundly corrupt Parties. The goal then would be to win 33+% of the popular vote in the next Presidential election, when, yet again, EACH of the now-existing corrupt Parties will nominate yet another politician who (like both Harris and Trump did in 2023) will have more “Disapprove” than “Approve” ratings in the polls. Between now and 2028, the goal would be for this new Party to select (however it would be done) to be its nominee, someone who has extraordinarily high net-approval ratings. Then, perhaps at the next election, America’s two leading Parties would be the Republicans for the conservatives, and the Progressives for the progressives. If a new Progressive Party can reach 33+% of the popular vote in a national election, then it will replace the Democratic Party, and U.S. voters will then be offered a choice between a Progressive nominee versus a Republican (conservative) nominee. And THAT would be fair. And maybe THEN we could have a democracy.
PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.