By Theo Horesh
Marx once wrote that history always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But while the Iraq War was a tragedy, farcical is too weak a word for Operation Epstein Fury.
What binds them together, apart from the tragic blunders they represent, the horrifying murder of innocents they involve, and the manipulation of the American public they required, is that they are all the work of Israel—and the real joke is that anyone still believes them at all.
Netanyahu first began trying to push the United States into a war with Iran in 1993, with the bogus claim that they are a few months away from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it took Israel's kompromat on a president at the center of a scandal involving the mass rape of children for them to finally succeed. Israel laid the groundwork for war with Iran by buying-off American politicians and destroying their most vocal critics in Washington, buying up sites that allowed Israel to be criticized freely and extorting support by entrapping politicians in the rape of children.
Israel lost the war of ideas, where it still occurs, but they have been able to suppress it elsewhere by commandeering the public sphere. It is hard to think of any other issue in the past century that has been so thoroughly censored in western democracies than the criticism of Israel. So, perhaps it should have been no surprise that criticism of the most closely observed gen•cide in human history would have been so throughly shut down, in spite of politically informed observers increasingly coming to detest Israel. But given the implications of support for such naked mass murder, it is nevertheless astonishing.
Israel bears a striking resemblance to Nazi Germany in its attacks on neighbors and theft of their land. But the greatest resemblance of all lies its total dehumanization of victims, and their determination to destroy anyone who stands in their way. Iran is not being attacked because they pose a nuclear threat to Israel, let alone the United States—the idea is laughable. No, it is because they had the nerve to challenge the dominance of a state that has spent the past two years attacking eight nations, stealing land from three, and exterminating a people. Whatever else may be said of the state’s human rights record, Iran’s resistance to Israel’s attacks on its neighbors betrays a rare decency lacking in all but a few western leaders.
But the most astonishing thing of all is that we have been here before. Israel dragged the United States into a $2 trillion war with Iraq through its well placed columnists and agents in the Bush administration, who infamously argued that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
So, it shouldn’t surprise us to see them doing it again with Iran, but they would never have gotten away with it without the dutiful support of the media, which spreads their lies and destroys their critics. And whether or not Israel knew about the 9-11 attack before it happened, as a conservative reading of the evidence suggests, the massive control Israel exercised over American foreign policy allowed them to shape the response to the event into the Islamophobic War on Terror.
Israel worked long and hard to stoke the hatred for Muslims that is required to sustain this war. The outsized presence of Israelis in every comment section flooded by Islamophobes is perhaps the clearest and most measurable indicator today, as is their funding of the most Islamophobic politicians across the western world. The Israeli identity is dependent upon the imagined superiority of Jews to the people whose land they are stealing, but the existence of the state itself is dependent on convincing western nations that we share a common enemy. Hence, a significant portion of the leading Islamophobic intellectuals are either Israelis or else they are supported by the state.
The most astonishing thing of all is the way Israel has so successfully contributed to the destruction of democratic institutions in the United States that it has been able to lead the country to war with what until recently was just 21 percent support for it. Israel has destroyed some of the country’s most decent politicians that challenged their dominance, while corrupting the best that were left through threats and bribes. And it has been doing it for decades through what is arguably the most powerful lobby in the country. The question is why we continue to let them, and why every politician who takes their bribes is not being shouted down in forums across the country.
Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
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