“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon
[a thick stick used as a weapon] is to the totalitarian state.”
— Noam Chomsky, activist, scholar, from his book
“Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.”
Preface
Establishing a cutoff date for the compilation of this book’s material presented a challenging dilemma. It’s extremely difficult because the atrocities or lies that come out of Israel and from its fanatical supporters in the US on a weekly or daily basis never cease to infuriate and amaze. The ultimate in ongoing gall. But after years, even decades, of piling up material to choose from, we selected July 2020 as the cutoff. Surely a few more mind boggling items will sneak in before publishing.
According to The Guardian in Britain, between March 2018 and April 2019, more than 190 unarmed Palestinian border protestors were killed in Gaza, and another 28,000 injured or wounded, with no outrage or backlash from the United States whatsoever. Despite essentially paying for it, Americans were left in the dark about Israel’s criminal behavior, with any mentions of the border protests in the US media somehow taking a pro-Israeli slant.
This book continues with examples of Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinian land owners and stealing and destroying Palestinian property. Make no mistake, with Israeli and American government cooperation, the terror and the theft is institutionally supported.
In April 2018, Michael Moore, the hyper-liberal documentarian, once went this far with a tweet: “A documentary filmmaker, Yaser Murtaja, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on Fri. while wearing helmet & vest w/ “PRESS” marked on them. He was filming a nurse, a doctor & a 12-yr-old student who were protesting. I ask the documentary community 2 pls speak up about this travesty.”
This was a rare baby step. You’ll hear Moore criticize a lot of right wingers, but even he never dares to cross the line and roundly criticize Israeli policies, even when Palestinians are openly murdered.
Fox News, the voice-box for the Trump presidency and the right wing of the Republican Party tweeted: “UN Holds Emergency Meeting on Gaza Clashes” and “Gaza Clashes Leave 7 Dead and Hundreds Injured.” The seven dead and the hundreds injured were Palestinians. Unarmed. “Armed” in this case would have meant teenagers slinging rocks against a nuclear power. “Clashes” are a common fallback term in the US media. It’s so they don’t have to say “unarmed Palestinians were killed by well-armed Israeli soldiers standing hundreds of feet away on the other side of a fence.”
Another popular term heard often in the media is Zionist. Networks can assume that Americans don’t know what “Zionist” means. So on the rare occasion that they’ll actually play a clip from an Arab leader, that politician’s edited words will feature something about “evil Zionists.” The oblivious public will think “Crazy Arab. What the hell is he talking about?” What he’s talking about are fanatically religious Jews terrorizing Palestinian land owners, burning their crops, and stealing their land, all under the watchful eye of the Israeli military (the Israel Defense Forces or IDF), the occupiers of what would be Palestine. Zionists are Jews and others who participate in and/or support this general concept, with the ultimate goal of eliminating all hopes Palestinians have for a homeland. They are led by Israel’s head of state, Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu.
Generally speaking, Zionist means Jewish/Israel nationalist, and not all are fanatics.
Small problem: In the original United Nations decree that created Israel from a former British-held territory in 1948, it also created the future state of Palestine. Simply put, Israel has its land and has kept its portion of the holy city of Jerusalem, and Palestine has not. The Jews have essentially imprisoned one portion (Gaza Strip) of the Palestinian population, while occupying and terrorizing the other portion (the West Bank).
Europeans, not just those considered liberals, moderates, or intellectuals, speak out regularly about Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, as do liberals inside Israel. There are many movements afoot to put an end to the existing apartheid state that has come about as a result of Israel’s policies and plans. It’s closer to home for the Europeans, and they are an educated bunch.
Americans literally only hear the Israeli perspective or nothing at all. National radio, national television, and national newspaper chains—a great majority of which are owned and run by a grand total of six multi-national companies in the United States—are sympathetic to the Jewish regime’s propaganda. This is regardless of whether the outlet is considered “conservative”, “moderate”, or “liberal”. It is literally a monopoly of the collective mind, the dangerous day-to-day reality of living in the United States of Israel (US of I).
By the way, it was revealed in the summer of 2018 that wealthy Jewish-American interests, apparently led by a gentleman named Adam Milstein, helped fund the Canary Mission website (see chapter 10), a site that blacklists college students and professors in the US who speak out against Israel’s atrocities. These campus dwellers support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. In other words, they suggest boycotting Israeli businesses and products, particularly those established on Palestinian land. So in this case, freedom-of-speech equals blacklist, which equals “we’ll make sure you don’t get a job.” Support Israel or starve. Do blacklists of American businessmen and individual media people exist? Hopefully it’s only a short matter of time before we find out.
Since Donald Trump took office in early 2017, the Netanyahu government in Israel has been doing cartwheels. Just as the scholarly book The Israel Lobby from 2007 represents the most honest and accurate assessment of America-Israel foreign policy, an article in the June 1, 2018 issue of the New Yorker magazine by Adam Entous represents the most robust and detailed description of how these two right-wing Jewish governments (US and Israel) have aligned.
Three paragraphs will suffice for a synopsis: Parenthetical [ ] information is mine, intended for clarification:
By Obama’s second term, his aides no longer bothered to mask their frustration with the Israelis.
“They were never sincere to their commitment to peace,” Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers told me. “They used us as cover, to make it look like they were in a peace process. They were running a play, killing time, waiting out the administration.”
Entous later describes the body language of Netanyahu after getting off a phone call with Donald Trump two days after the latter became President. Via an aide: “He was like a small child who got the best birthday present he could ever imagine.”
The Israelis already had ties to the Trump family: Netanyahu had a long friendship with Charles Kushner, the father of Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner. In recent years, the Kushners, Orthodox Jews who made their fortune in the real-estate business and hold conservative views on Israel, have donated large sums of money to Israeli causes and charities, including tens of thousands of dollars to a yeshiva [an educational institution that studies religious text] in the Beit El settlement, in the West Bank. When Netanyahu visited the Kushners at their home in New Jersey, he sometimes stayed overnight and slept in Jared’s bedroom, while Jared was relegated to the basement.
The Trump administration put that same Jared Kushner, with absolutely no foreign policy experience and 100-percent pro-Israel bias, in charge of overseeing the Israel-Palestine “peace process.”
The Israelis found the Trump circle easy to persuade. Trump and his closest advisers shared Netanyahu’s antipathy [dislike, hostility] toward Obama. They had no government or diplomatic experience, and were eager to please their staunchly pro-Israel and pro-Likud [right wing, pro Zionist political party in Israel] base.
Trump’s American ambassador to Israel, David Freidman, might as well work for the government of Israel. Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest individual political donor, and likely Netanyahu’s as well, was Jewish-American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who gave about $25-million to the 2016 Trump campaign. Adelson demanded that the US move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which of course Trump did once in office. Adelson donated more than $90 million to Republican candidates and causes during the 2018 mid-term election cycle.
Ever wonder why people stand aside and let certain other people get away with the things they get away with, regardless of how dishonest and horrifying? That is correct: Money. (See chapter 10.)
The slaughter of Palestinian protestors continued from the spring into the summer and fall of 2018. Orthodox Jewish settlers continue to harass and terrorize Arab farmers and villagers and work in cooperation with Israel’s government to colonize Palestinian land. No one in America says boo.
Hatred overseas for Israel therefore means hatred for its enabler America, land of the free and home of the brave. This long developing hate is understandable because, for all intents and purposes, Israel and the US are one and the same.
“People are sheep, TV is the shepherd.”
— Jess C. Scott, author
Introduction
To “dumb down” is to fill people’s minds with meaningless “entertainment,” to draw focus away from the topics that really matter to an individual, their community, and their nation. We are exposed to it all the time in the form of reality TV, celebrity worship, or video games. It is sensationalized drivel that makes the producers of this content rich while making fools of the general public. We were warned of this half a century ago by William J. Lederer in his book Nation of Sheep.
So, do you get your “news” from TMZ and Entertainment Tonight, or do you get it from the New York Times and BBC World?
According to a Nielsen report, in 2017 American adults watched an average of five hours of television a day. That’s 35 hours a week, whether it’s commercial TV, pay-per-view channels or streaming services. That’s the average for the 120 million American television households. A dedicated, captive audience, ready to be thoughtfully informed or led to the promised land of the brainwashed. Imagine having the ability to step into someone’s home and deliver a message designed for a specific purpose, every hour of every day of a person’s life. It’s like a superhero power, yet so real it’s taken for granted.
America is commercially homogenized (internally uniform or similar), isolated, and cut off from its neighbors culturally. If one drove from Nebraska to Michigan, little would change. You would see the same signs for the same ubiquitous (common and plentiful) fast-food restaurants, accommodations and truck stops. The corporate nature of the experience is a major part of that homogenization. It’s the same for those commuting an hour in each direction every day for work. Imagine having the power to hop into someone’s car via the radio and deliver the same message almost every single day of a person’s working life.
To make an eleven-hour drive in Europe would mean crossing through the national boundaries of at least three countries. The cultural experience would vary dramatically. The languages would change, as would the offerings catering to the traveling public. People who travel in the United States lack that exposure to cultural differences.
Instead, the US, according to a May 2019 Pew Research Center poll, is made up of a white, male, Republican population, 49 percent of which gets bothered or uncomfortable when it hears someone speak a language foreign to their own. How insecure can such a society be? Where does such a threat come from?
What if, while driving, you came across a national radio personality referring to Iranians as “Islama-Nazis” on a daily basis. This radio personality relentlessly continues to drill this garbage into your head using lies and exaggerations to make a “convincing” case that Muslims are evil and Jews are good. Or calling out Iraq or Iran as evil empires, while Israel is a shining example of a law-abiding country and a force for good. What if this radio personality was joined by four or five other nationally syndicated radio hosts to spout the same message.
They, like your national politicians, fall right in line.
All the while, it is not in the best interests of the United States of America to be “one with Israel.” It’s only in the best interests of Israel and in particular certain Jewish interests in both countries for the United States to be “one with Israel.” Yet, as the facts, articles, and arguments contained in this book will bear out, for all practical, economic, military, and governmental purposes, the United States is indeed one with Israel. Americans live in the United States of Israel.
This is not to profess dislike or distrust of the Jewish population. It is a minority of the population that seeks to horde all power and to build an empire in any sect. Radicalism or fanaticism or extreme nationalism is dangerous in any form, under any religion or flag. It just so happens that only one “culture” presently controls the reins of the world’s lone English-speaking superpower.
America is Israel’s pawn, and the leaders of Israel periodically admit or boast of this fact. As Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon put it in 2001 during a political argument, “I want to tell you something very clear: don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
For all intents and purposes, American media and culture are under the thumb of a Jewish hierarchy, therefore giving this hierarchy control of the most complex and powerful public relations apparatus the world has ever known. This is not a “conspiracy theory”; this is fact—from movies, to television, to news, to radio programming, to the written word.
This is a book based on fact, and its purpose is to seek peaceful solutions to violence and war. The message is geared towards the best interests of the United States of America and all of its citizens.
This book offers articles and reports written by journalists, as well as public statements made on the record by politicians and officials over the last three decades. It is written in as simple and nontechnical a manner as possible, so that everyone can read it, debate the ideas, and draw their own conclusions about the issues presented.
Specifically, this book explores a peaceful two-state solution in Palestine, an end to Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid, and ways to end the dangerous influence Israel has over the US State Department and military.
This book will strive to never “bury the lede.” That’s when an editor buries the most important subject matter or headline of a story inside a story of lesser importance. This occurs on a regular basis as it relates to the coverage of Israel in the United States, and it happened again on August 11, 2011, in a story about the Israeli economy.
In Ethan Bronner’s story headlined “Protests Force Israel to Confront Wealth Gap” in the New York Times, Bronner eventually comes round to this point: the protestors “point to things like a swollen defense budget, subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox and the cost of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where the Interior Ministry said Thursday that it would build 1,600 units and announced plans for 2,700 more.” Oh really!? That should have been your headline, conveniently lost in paragraph eight.
The United States hands over three to four billion dollars in defense money every year to Israel, despite the fact that Israel has been building and expanding settlements (a.k.a. stealing land) from the Palestinians for almost half a century. Israel keeps expanding and while the US sometimes protests half-heartedly, it keeps on handing over the cash—American taxpayer cash.
Burying the lede is just a raindrop in the gigantic ocean of public relations carried out by Israel and its Jewish interests in the United States on a daily basis.
This book, like any other book, article, or comment critical of Israel and related American foreign policy will draw the usual responses: “hatred of Jews”, “anti-Semitism”, and/or “Jewish conspiracy theories.” Fear not these common labels and scare tactics; it’s time to take back your country and hold your elected officials, some of them unwitting agents of Israeli policy, accountable.
Don’t be afraid to read this book, don’t be afraid to share it, and don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. It won’t be easy, because true freedom of speech is presently a myth in America.
Wake up, educate yourself, and fear nothing.
