There is no warning label! When you purchase the “Washington Times,” you do so at your own risk. This is how the system works. And, since I live in Baltimore, MD, I also have to pay double the price that Washingtonians fork out for it. What a bummer!
Its “Gas Bag Brigade,” a/k/a its “Commentary Page,” is usually the most toxic to absorb. Sometimes, you run into raving warmongers at that site, like: A.M. “Mad Abe” Rosenthal, Mona “Lock the Anti-War Protesters Up” Charen, William “Neo-Jacobin” Kristol and Sir Henry “Iago” Kissinger.
In the old days, before his expensive addiction to the slot machines was disclosed, William “The Pious” Bennett would also hold court there. Some of his rants in support of Israel were so full of hot air that even the hard core militant Zionists were embarrassed by them. Anyway, sure enough, on Sat. Nov. 8, 2003, the man who once suggested the U.S. should “bomb Canada” appeared on page A13 – one Jonah Goldberg!
In his piece dubbed, “Tortuous Pursuit of Peace,” Goldberg was all in a tizzy about how his beloved Israel had been voted by a majority of Europeans as the “chief threat to world peace.” He wisely chose not to attack the pollsters. So instead, Goldberg focused on why Ariel Sharon’s “Israel isn’t peaceful.” He pontificated that it’s because, “Its neighbors (read 3.5 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories) won’t let it live in peace. Israel refuses to be destroyed, so there’s a conflict,” Goldberg whined. Thanks so much, Jonah, for sharing your dubious wisdom!
Fortunately, there are other reliable, fact-oriented alternatives to finding out the real truth about Goldberg’s highly-romanticized Israel. One of these journals is “The Link,” based in NYC (ameu.org). Under the able leadership of its Executive Director, John F. Mahoney, it is dedicated to enhancing the American public’s understanding of the Middle East.
In a fully documented article, a gutsy writer, educator and researcher, Ronald Bleier, blasted through the Zionist Propaganda Machine. His “In the Beginning, There Was Terror,” commentary, (‘The Link,” Vol. 36, Issue 3, July-Aug, 2003), traced the history of the founding of Israel to the present.
Mahoney cogently set Bleier’s piece up by making this telling point about the focus of the 49-footnoted, thoughtful and compelling article: “We speak so often of the ‘CYCLE’ OF VIOLENCE In the PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT, while the fact is that its blood-drenched HISTORY IS LINEAR: it has a BEGINNING and…it has a PATTERN.”
Bleier described how terrorism in the Middle East “began with the Zionists, who founded the Jewish state.” He wrote that no one should ever forget how their terror tactics included: “blowing up a bus, a train, a ship, a cafe, or a hotel; assassinating a diplomat or a peace negotiator; killing hostages, sending letter bombs; massacring defenseless villagers…”
Bleier, like Goldberg, is Jewish. Bleier’s parents were refugees, in 1944, from Nazi-occupied Europe. They landed in NYC. He attended Yeshiva elementary and high school in Brooklyn. He also served in the Peace Corps and he has taught in the NYC high schools for 25 years.
Meanwhile, apologist Goldberg said the Israelis want peace, but just talking about it, “is nothing but a pretext for their destruction. So, they opt for self-defense.” He conceded that the Sharon Gang has “made mistakes in the process, but one can hardly expect them to to accept suicide simply in the name of world peace.” Goldberg declined to list any of Israel’s “mistakes”. Maybe, it’s because that list would be a little on the long side!
Bleier, on the other hand, goes for the jugular. “Israel’s original sin is Zionism, the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the former Palestine.” He condemns its racist exclusive structure, whereby “only Jews are treated as first-class citizens.” He detailed how, in 1948, the Zionists “expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and never allowed them or their descendants to return. In addition, Israeli forces destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and perpetrated about three dozen massacres. In 1967, the Israelis forced another 350,000 Palestinians to flee the Golan Heights. Since 1967,” Bleier continued, “Israel has placed the Palestinian population of the Territories under military occupation.”
Bleier also revealed how Zionist intriguers, like Oded Yinon, as far back as 1982, were plotting to “dissolve the Arab states by breaking them down into smaller sectarian units.” Targeted by the Israelis to fall like a “house of cards,” were Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Sudan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Morocco and Lebanon. The connection of U.S.-based Neocons to this divide and conquer scheme was also spotlighted.
As for Israel’s so-called “mistakes,” well, Bleier exposes many of them! He wrote about how the Zionists: blew up the King David Hotel, in 1946; murdered Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator, in 1948; adopted, in 1949, a strategy for “regional destabilization” based on the doctrine of “Sacred Terrorism”; massacred Arabs in the Jordanian border village of Kibya, in 1953, Sharon’s 101 Unit was involved; initiated black propaganda operations, like the “Lavon Affair,” in 1954, in Egypt; invaded Lebanon in 1982, costing an “estimated 17,000 to 19,000 lives,” mostly civilians; and finally, bulldozed to death Rachel Corrie, an American peace and justice activist, at Rafah, Occupied Gaza, on March 16, 2003.
In summation, Bleier said, “Never have the Palestinians been so threatened by Israelis policies” as they are today. He put the blame squarely on the Sharon Gang and the Bush-Cheney administration and also a Congress that is “completely” subservient to the Israeli Lobby.
Israel’s terror-filled policy of “provocation and revenge” against its “enemies” in order to “expand its territory,” is the crux of Bleier’s brilliant analysis. While Goldberg, via the “Washington Times,” dishes out baloney about Israel, Bleier pulls the curtain away for Americans to see the real militant Zionist Israel and for all of us to begin to understand why so many Europeans view the Sharon Gang, as a “chief threat to world peace.”
