Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com

Friday, August 20, 2010

Newly declassified documents highlighting how the Israeli lobby routinely paid off journalists in the U.S. corporate media to write pro-Zionist propaganda in support of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Iran during the 60’s have taken on new significance after the Atlantic Monthly, which is named in the documents as being complicit in the bribing scandal, recently published a cover story hyping the necessity and inevitability of an Israeli attack on Iran.

“Declassified files from a Senate investigation into Israeli-funded covert public relations and lobbying activity in the United States were released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on July 23rd, 2010. The subpoenaed documents reveal Israel’s clandestine programs for “cultivation of editors,” the “stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines” as well as U.S. reporting about sensitive subjects such as the Dimona nuclear weapons facility,” reports the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy.

The documents make specific reference to The Atlantic Monthly publication, and how “arrangements” are made with The Atlantic to publish articles sympathetic to Israel and hostile to Palestine and Iran.

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The files also mention other news sources, such as the Scripps-Howard chain, that the lobby planned to penetrate in order to achieve a “break through,” in other words news sources that the lobby had not yet been able to pressure and pay off as progenitors of Israeli propaganda.

One of the excerpts from the files describes the achievements of the so-called “Magazine Committee” in placing propaganda in U.S. media outlets, stating, “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines.”

The lobby was also active in assisting the U.S. media in its cover up of The Lavon Affair, which centered around false-flag Israeli terrorist attacks on U.S. government facilities in Egypt.

Appearing on Russia Today, Institute for Research on Middle Eastern Policy director Grant F. Smith said the Senate investigation focused around, “Looking into groups who brought $36 million dollars into the U.S. to plant stories in the U.S. media and promote Israeli foreign policy objectives in the United States,” adding that the documents from the investigation were extremely relevant “because they reveal a vast effort to divert U.S. attention from the Israeli Dimona nuclear weapons facility by saying it was merely a research center,” even as Israel now obsessively hypes the supposed threat of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

When the individuals responsible for the illegal program were outed, the activities of the group were merely transferred into the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), noted Grant, which continues today as the foremost Israeli lobbying entity.

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The revelation contained in the declassified documents, that $50,000 dollars was funneled to The Atlantic Magazine in order to derail a U.S. peace proposal related to Palestine, is particularly alarming given the fact that The Atlantic is now, “On the forefront of an AIPAC drive to get the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities,” stated Grant.

Indeed, The Atlantic’s cover story this month, written by dual Israeli-U.S. national Jeffrey Goldberg, is entitled The Point of No Return, and amounts to nothing less than a manipulative public relations offensive to convince reads of the inevitability and necessity of attacking Iran.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald savages the article, pointing out that it employs the familiar propaganda tactic of comparing Iran with Nazi Germany.

“No discussion of any of this is complete without noting that it was endlessly claimed that it was Saddam who was the New Hitler in order ratchet up fear levels and justify an attack that country, too. How many times can we be persuaded to attack the New Hitler?” asks Greenwald.

It’s hardly surprising that Goldberg would be so enthusiastic to sell the war on Iran, given that he was a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and has spent his entire journalistic career promoting wars based on phony pretexts.

Goldberg’s 2002 New Yorker article entitled The Great Terror, was credited with providing a huge boost to the Bush administration’s argument for invading Iraq and was praised by ex-CIA director and habitual warmonger James Woolsey, while other critics savaged the piece as “a J-school nightmare: bad sources, compromised sources, unacknowledged uncertainties, and the whole text spun through with an alarmist rhetoric that is now either laughable or nauseating, depending on your mood.”

In The Great Terror, Goldberg propagandizes about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and talks at length about the mythical ties between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, a thoroughly debunked connection that even Dick Cheney himself later had to admit was completely without merit.

“In five years , I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality,” Goldberg wrote in 2002, a startling example of how spectacularly wrong his forecast turned out to be.

Given this history of bias, agenda-driven and inaccurate reporting, Goldberg’s current Atlantic Monthly article should be dismissed for what it is – an artificially placed example of foreign propaganda – written by a dual citizen with the express purpose of hyping and promoting an attack on Iran.

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“The Senate investigation ultimately failed in its efforts to regulate secret foreign media manipulation and lobbying. The AZC transformed into AIPAC, and today The Atlantic is virtually alone among remnants of the battered magazine industry in its return to profitability,” writes Grant Smith. “Jeffrey Goldberg’s prolific work no doubt helps propel that bottom line. But readers should remember the origin of deceptive waves of content that washed ashore in American magazines.”

RELATED: Declassified Senate Investigation Files Reveal Clandestine Israeli PR Campaign in America

RELATED: The Israel Lobby Swims The Atlantic

RELATED: How propagandists function: Exhibit A

RELATED: Scott Horton Interviews Gareth Porter on Goldberg’s fearmongering propaganda piece

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