Democrat Jewish anti-semitism


Found this on KOS

It was funny to see a real Left wing jew, betwixt and between on
the war, zionism, etc

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/29/211738/415

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Bush's Jewish Iraq Connection and Anti-Semitism on the Left
by Mr Futomaki
Sat Apr 29, 2006 at 06:17:38 PM PDT
First things first, I am Jewish. Today I received a forward
from my mother (also Jewish), which she had sent out to various
Jewish friends and family, listing various items of
"Presidential Trivia" involving Jews (e.g., "ULYSSES S. GRANT
was the first President to attend a Synagogue service while in
office"; "THEODORE ROOSEVELT was the first President to appoint
a Jew to a presidential cabinet.").

The email concluded like this: "GEORGE W. BUSH is the first
President since Herbert Hoover who has no Jews in his cabinet at
all. No wonder he screws up so stupendously."

I knew that this was false, because Chertoff is Jewish, as are
numerous present and former members of his Administration. But
what I learned in refuting this bit of false "trivia" made me
worried and conflicted...

Mr Futomaki's diary :: ::
Here is the full text of the response I sent to my mother and
all the folks she had cc'ed in her initial email:



Au contraire. While I abhor George W. Bush, this claim is just
not true. In fact, I wish it WERE true. (To see why, please
scroll down to the bottom, even if you don't read the entire
email.)

The following current and former Bush Administration members
are all Jewish:

==============

MICHAEL CHERTOFF is Secretary of Homeland Security. He is the
son of a rabbi, and, in addition to being an American citizen,
is also a citizen of Israel under Israeli law, as his mother is
an Israeli citizen. He coordinated the federal government's
"response" to Hurricane Katrina, and designated Michael D.
Brown, head of FEMA, as the primary federal official to lead the
deployment and coordination of all federal response resources
and forces in the Gulf Coast region. Later, Chertoff came under
criticism for his incompetence in handling the Katrina response.
1,604 Americans died; many of those deaths could have been
prevented. While Bush said afer the fact that "nobody could
have anticipated the breach of the levees," a leaked video later
established that both Bush and Chertoff knew that the levees
would likely be breached well before the storm hit land, while
there was still time to act on this information. Bush and
Chertoff did not.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ was Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001-2005.
In 2005, Bush nominated him to be president of the World Bank.
He lived in Israel for a year while his father, Jacob, taught at
the Technion. His sister made aliyah and lives in Israel. He is
a primary architect of the Iraq War.

DOUGLAS FEITH was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from
2001-2005. His father, Dalck Feith, was a Holocaust survivor.
He has served on the board of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs. He is also a primary architect of the Iraq
war.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS served during Bush's first term in office as
Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the
National Security Council for Near East and North African
Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term (February, 2005),
Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Adviser.
Under Reagan, after the Iran-Contra Affair, he pleaded guilty to
two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information
from Congress.

JOSHUA BOLTEN is the new White House Chief of Staff, elevated to
this position in March, 2006. Formerly, he was the Director of
the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). According to the
Stanford Law School Lawyer (magazine), Bolten "belongs to a
local temple, tries to attend Sabbath dinner at his sister's
house when he can on Friday nights, and doesn't eat pork."

DOV ZAKHEIM was Undersecretary of Defense from 2001-2004. He is
an ordained Orthodox Jewish Rabbi. During the 2000 U.S.
Presidential election campaign Zakheim served as a foreign
policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by
Condoleezza Rice. He has been an adjunct professor at Yeshiva
University.

I. LEWIS "SCOOTER" LIBBY is Jewish. (The "I" stands for
"Irve.") He was former Chief of Staff and Assistant for
National Security Affairs to Vice President *** Cheney. He
resigned after being indicted for obstruction of justice,
perjury, and making false statements.

MARK D. WEINBERG served as Bush's Assistant Secretary of Housing
and Urban Development for Public Affairs.

BRAD BLAKEMAN formerly served as lead advance representative for
the Bush-Cheney 2000 Presidential campaign. He was later
appointed the Deputy Assistant to the President for Appointments
and Scheduling. He formerly served on the United States
Holocaust Memorial Council.

JAY LEFKOWITZ formerly served as the Deputy Assistant to the
President for Domestic Policy at the White House. He is now
Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea. He has previously
served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the International
Conference on Anti-Semitism sponsored by the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe.

ARI FLEISCHER was formerly the White House Press Secretary.

RICHARD PERLE was formerly the Chairman of the Department of
Defense's Defense Policy Board (until 2003), and remains a
member of that Board. Perle is said to be the person behind the
US policy on Iraq. In a 2002 interview with PBS, he said that
"[s]upport for Saddam, including within his military
organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.
Now, it isn't going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn't going
to be months either." (This was four years ago.) Perle
advocated invading Iraq with only 40,000 troops, and complained
about the calls by then Gen. Eric Shinseki to use 250,000
troops. On September 22, 2003 at a luncheon gathering at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute, he stated that "a
year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand
square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is
no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of
people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been
liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And
it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense
of liberation."

Perle is now a Consultant to the Secretary of Defense, Donald
Rumsfeld. (He was Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan.)
He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs, and a director of the Jerusalem
Post. During the Reagan Administration, he was widely criticized
for corruption after it was reported that he had recommended
that the Army purchase an armaments system from an Israeli
company that a year earlier had paid him $50,000 in consulting
fees. He was also accused, in a report submitted to the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission, of having breached his
fiduciary responsibilities as a director of Hollinger
International by authorizing several controversial transactions
which diverted the company's net profit from the shareholders to
the accounts of various executives. At Hollinger, Perle received
over $3 million in bonuses on top of his salary, bringing the
total to $5.4 million, and the investigating committee called
for him to return the money.

AARON FRIEDBERG served from 2003 to 2005 in the office of the
Vice President as deputy assistant for national-security affairs
and director of policy planning.

===============

While only Chertoff, as Secretary of Homeland Security, is an
official "member of the Cabinet," Bolten, as Chief of Staff, is
also a "Cabinet-level official" and can attend Cabinet meetings.
The other members named above are not technically members of the
Cabinet or Cabinet-level officials, but nonetheless are Bush
Administration insiders, many with significant policy influence.

Note also that Wolfowitz, Libby, Abrams, Zakheim, Friedberg,
and Perle, as members of the neo-conservative "Project for a New
American Century," were among the lead architects of the
disastrous Iraq War. (Many other prominent neo-cons involved
with the Project for a New American Century are also Jewish,
including Yale professor Donald
Kagan, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Hudson
Institute Fellow and former Editor-in-Chief of the American
Jewish Committee's monthly magazine Norman Podhoretz.)

So, to sum up:

(1) Bush does have at least one Jewish Cabinet member, two
Jewish "Cabinet-level officials," and numerous Jewish members of
his administration.

(2) One of these Jews, Libby, has been indicted for perjury,
obstruction of justice, and false statements for his involvement
in the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal (Libby). Another, Abrams,
pleaded guilty to unlawfully withholding information from
Congress during Iran Contra. A third, Perle, was accused of
corruption in his business practices.

(3) At least six of these Jews are prominent neo-cons and
members of the "Project for a New American Century" who helped
engineer the fiasco in Iraq (Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby, Abrams,
Zakheim, Friedberg).

All in all, it seems that the George W. Bush administration
has not "screw[ed] up so stupendously" due to a LACK of Jews.
There are plenty of Jews in his coterie. They are, however,
almost to a one, corrupt, lawbreaking, power-hungry opportunists
with delusional views of foreign policy. They got us into this
Iraq quagmire. They surround Donald Rumsfeld and tell him what
to do. They give the rest of us Jews a bad name, and cause many
on the Left to wonder whether our foreign policy isn't in fact
controlled by a "Zionist cabal." While I certainly disagree, in
light of all the above information I can imagine why they might
suspect this.

I, for one, wish that the Bush Administration HAD NEVER HAD ANY
of these Jews in the first place. There would perhaps be 2400
fewer dead American soldiers, who knows how many tens of
thousands fewer dead Iraqi civilians, and our country would not
be hated around the world, nor have its hands tied militarily in
dealing with the current situation with Iran.

God help us in November, 2006.



So...as a Jewish American, after doing all this research, I
don't know what to feel. On one hand, as a card-carrying
liberal, I agree with almost everything I read on the liberal
blogs. On the other hand, I've occasionally felt threatened or
angered by comments on the blogs that American foreign policy is
controlled by "Zionists," that Iraq is about "Oil, Israel, [et
al.]," and other vaguely anti-Semitic comments suggesting that
"the Jews" control the Pentagon and the White House (much as it
has long been alleged that "the Jews" control the media). I
daresay that in some liberal circles, it's become okay to say
this.

I always thought it was just faddish far-left anti-Semitism that
generated these comments. But after putting together my
compendium of Jewish officials in the Bush Administration to
refute my mother, I found that a disproportionately high
proportion of Bush's policy advisers and of the Iraq War
planners are Jewish.

What should I make of this, as a Jew? One thing's for sure,
these assholes give the rest of us Jews a bad name. I wonder
how many liberals whom I agree with on every other substantive
issue of policy now think that "the Jews" are responsible for
Iraq (and now Iran) and all the rest. It's not hard to connect
the dots above and get an anti-Semitic picture, although I think
there are many other possible pictures to draw if you zoom out
and add more dots. For example, Jews had nothing to do with
Halliburton and the military-industrial complex, or (as far as I
know) the oil industry, which as we all know is fundamentally
responsible for this disastrous war to as great a degree or
greater than the Project for a New American Century and any
alleged Israel connection.

Still, this dramatis personae list I put together in innocently
trying to refute the "no Jews in the Bush Administration"
statement has shaken me up a bit. I'm interested in your
comments -- whether or not you're Jewish -- are you worried that
Bush's Jewish connections have poisoned the Left's opinion of
American Jews? To the extent it has done so, do you think that
latent anti-Semitism is to blame at all, or is the "anti-
Zionism" rhetoric of ANSWER and the like justified in your
opinion? If you are Jewish, like me, do you ever feel alienated
by your brethren on the Left when they start talking of Zionist
conspiracies and our Zionist U.S. foreign policy? What does
actually reading all the facts I came across make you think?
(And what about the AIPAC spying scandal?) I think that this is
often a big elephant in the room when talking about AIPAC,
Israel, and the neo-cons...

(If I were a super-tinfoil hat paranoid type, I might wonder
whether the military-industrial-oil complex or anti-Semitic
interests at the heart of the Right were using these Jews like
puppets. You know, hand-pick a non-representative group of Jews
that support a disastrous foreign policy, for pro-Israel
purposes, that happens to align with the financial interests of
Halliburton and the military-industrial complex. Then, when
these Jews of course go on to propose a disastrous Iraq policy
that enriches the Halliburtons and the military-industrial
complex, Bush follows it. Then when public opinion sours on the
war and gets restive, but after the Halliburtons get filty rich
on war profiteering, blame it on "the Zionists" who sneakily
infiltrated the government and caused us to invade and lose in
Iraq -- like the Nazi Germans blamed Germany's WWI loss on
subversive Jews. Then, the Halliburtons get to sit contentedly
on their piles of ill-gotten wealth, while "the Jews" end up
taking the fall. Many things make me doubt this is the plan,
but I wouldn't put it past Goebbels--I mean Rove--to have
thought of this. Incidentally, this also happened in the U.S.
Civil War, where corrupt industrialists and military higher-ups
were profiteering off of the war. They blamed it on "the Jews,"
and as a result, General U.S. Grant kicked all Jews out of
Union-occupied Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, lest those
truly responsible for the war profiteering have to take the
blame. Thankfully, President Lincoln overturned this military
order. But anyway, this has all happened before in U.S.
history, so it's not inconceivable it would happen again, even
if a little paranoid to suggest at the moment.)
*Edit:* I should add that my Holocaust survivor grandfather, who
lived through the Nuremberg Laws, scapegoating, warrantless
spying, censorship, detention camps, concentration camps,
torture, and everything else voted for Bush in 2004, in part
because he feels that Bush is "a friend of Israel." I have no
idea how to begin to respond to that.





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