Greg Palast, a "Chomsky for Dummies" and "a slim Michael Moore", emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs.

Greg Palast, the left wing of the Lobby

By Israel Shamir

I always had a problem with Greg Palast. Apparently this critic of Bush and Blair, an opponent of the war in Iraq, who wrote for the Guardian and the Observer is a man on our side, a good left-wing guy. He is apparently against the corporations, against the neoliberal setup; some of his ideas are surely good. He is considered “Chomsky for Dummies” [“more accessible than Chomsky”, his publisher-suggested quote from a newspaper] and he has a good class attitude, for instance: “The world’s three hundred richest people are worth more than the world’s poorest three billion. The market’s up, but who is the market? The Gilded One Percent own 4/5th of the nation’s stocks and bonds.” His philippics against Bush (“an evil sonovabitch”) are as fiery as those of a preacher in a mosque in my neighbourhood, and this is not a fault in my eyes. He is equally outspoken against the war in Iraq. What else could one ask from a guy?

But at the second sight, there were small alarums. He was against Bush and passionately – for Gore and Kerry. As if Gore and Kerry would keep the US troops out of Iraq. As if Gore and Kerry would pass the spoils of three hundred richest men to the poorest three billion. He claimed that Bush administration covered up… “Saudi financing of terror”. This smacked of a familiar claim - that the US made a mistake to attack Iraq - instead of Saudi Arabia, or Iran. He disliked America, his native land, with too strong a passion. “Antisemite is one who dislikes Jews too much”, quipped Yael Lotan, an Israeli writer. The same goes about America: it’s quite all right to dislike the superpower, but do not dislike it too much, it’s bad for your karma.

Palast wrote: “The United States is ugly. [It is] a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald’s up to and leaning over the Canyon wall.” In my view, this is too much. Even if your mother – and one’s native land should be as important as your mother – is ugly, you do not say it, not even think it.

Palast’s unequivocal support for unlimited immigration was not inspired by his compassion to les miserables of the Third World (also an erroneous position, in my view, but still comprehensible), but by his profound disdain of the ordinary local indigenous native. Characteristically, in his Best Democracy Money Can Buy Palast argues with a London cockney cabby, whether England should accept millions of refugees and asylum seekers. The cabby was horrified by his multiculturalist attitude, by his indifference to local culture and tradition. But Palast pooh-poohed “the cabby’s fear of losing his English identity. Face it, Shakespeare’s dead. England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans, Princess Di knickknacks and Hugh Grant.” Face it, Palast, “England’s cultural exports are now limited to soccer hooligans” because England’s cultural imports were limited to Greg Palast and others of your ilk. A new Shakespeare may be alive in England, as well as a new Melville in the US, but you won’t recognise him for he won’t fit your ideas. For you, ordinary people are “brown-shirted antiforeign electoral mobs”, for us – the sovereign people.

Palast is obsessed with money, as evident from his title Best Democracy Money Can Buy. He is not even aware of other motives, whether noble or vile. For him, “the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to cost us?”

I have no idea of Palast’s ethnic background, but ideologically, nobody can be more Judaic than this man, who worships money, despises the native and wishes to bomb some place in the Middle East. These are classic Judaic attitudes, so I was not surprised when Palast emerged as an apologist for the Jews and an accuser of greedy WASPs and Arabs. In his Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy? essay published in the Jewish ‘progressive’ magazine Tikkun, Pallast pulls usual ropes; for him, whoever thinks that the Jewish establishment pushed for the war on Iraq (including Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently) must adhere to the Elders of Zion and Christ-killers paradigm. He writes: “after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?” Not surprisingly, he finds the Jews “not guilty”. The bad guys are “a devout Christian, Norquist [who] channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition”, and “the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis”. The Jews? Forget it: “Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique— bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly […] A half-dozen confused Jews, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates.”

This is not the place to repeat the discussion of the Jewish Lobby. This was done by many people, including Mearsheimer and Walt (their recent response to Lobby’s attacks is on http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3506 ), by Philip Weiss (whose blog http://mondoweiss.observer.com makes more and more sense – actually, this man grew a lot since his triumphalist pieces of 2001, and I read him with great interest), by our friend Jeff Blankfort, whose emailing list jblankfort@earthlink.net scans much of American and British media, and even by my humble self.

The conclusions we reached are only fortified by the massive apology for the Lobby coming from various Trots, from Socialist Viewpoint, from Greg Palast and others. The Jewish Lobby is like a Stealth jet, and these guys provide it with invisibility. Palast will have to live many more years if he wants to see us weeping over the “neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz being cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank”. We know of worse fate. And he will have to live as long as Methuselah to see us feeling sorry for General Jay Garner, the first Gauleiter of occupied Iraq sacked by his superiors –see item 4.

In short, we went part of the way with Mr. Palast, but what’s enough, enough. Let him prefer General Jay Garner to Paul Bremer III, Kerry to Bush, Jews to Texans and Saudi Arabia to Iraq as a good place to bomb. Coprophagi may choose between various kinds of excrements, but we are free from this worry.

P.S. After the first publication of the article, our friend Ian Buckley wrote: According to this, Greg Palast is indeed 'a Jewish leftie' : http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.08.15/faces.html . He is often funny and has an agreeable habit of getting up the noses of some of the powerful, but the above article illustrates his deficiencies… The article in the Jewish newspaper Forward makes it clear:

“[In his eyes] his fans are too conspiracy-theory-minded. Too anti-American. Too antisemitic. "A large part of my European readership I wouldn't urinate on," Palast told the Forward. Some Europeans aren't so wild about him, either. Unlike some of his fellow Jewish lefties, Palast is not ready to dismiss antisemitism when he sees it. "The members of the Jewish left — and I certainly am one of them — are very glib about antisemitism and the dangers out there," he said. "The British left is infused with the worst elements of antisemitism."

He even sees antisemitism in the pages of his own newspaper.

"When the Hebrew teachers in Tehran, in Iran, were put on trial as spies for Israel — which was beyond unlikely — my paper had an editorial by some fool saying, well, we shouldn't attack Iran — there's very good evidence, and we shouldn't vilify everyone George Bush says is our enemy," he said. "They want Israel to release people who are admitted child killers, but the Hebrew teachers should rightly be in jail."

Never one to compromise his opinions, when the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera offered Palast a job, he turned it down cold; he refers to the station as TNN, Terrorist News Network.”

Thus an opinion of Mr Palast about the Lobby is as valid as that of Abe Foxman and Daniel Pipes.

P.P.S. To my great regret, our wonderful Cynthia McKinney accepted Greg Palast's help in her electoral campaign, and she wrote:

From: "Cynthia McKinney" Subject: Free!! Blog with Greg Palast and me 7:00 this evening!

Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:12:47 -0400

If you'd like to blog directly with Greg Palast and me, please join us by following the directions sent to me below by Christy in Palast's office. It's free and hopefully, will be loads of fun!

Probably we shall witness erosion of her position vs. Israel very soon. She is not to be blamed: no politician in the US can do without a pipeline to the Lobby.

2. Here is a response of Jeff Blankfort:

This is an interesting article by investigative journalist Greg Palast who has, in the past, has avoided any mention of Israel or the Israel lobby even in his book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," when, if he really wanted to know who the biggest buyers were, he could have readily found them in the internet among the Mother Jones 400, and the big donors from the Communications and Finance industries on the Center for Public Integrity site, and they are not oil men. Of the 400 top donors to the 2000 election cycle, 7 of the top 10, 12 of the top 20 and at least 125 of the top 250 were Jewish. Haim Saban, an Israeli-American, and a big backer of AIPAC, gave to the Democrats in 2002, $12.3 million, which is two million more than Ken Lay and Exxon gave to the Republicans over a 10 year period but strangely, it didn't get the same media attention.

On the other hand, this article of his bears out what I have been saying for the three years, that the neo-con notion to take over and privatize Iraqi oil was nonsense and flied in the face of how the oil industry operates, that the neo-cons were no longer running the show, but what Palast doesn't deal with is the initial opposition to the war on the part of Bush Sr., as well as James Baker, and oil company executives including Phillip Carroll of Shell, nor does he, once again, mention that not only were the neo-cons the main tub thumpers for the war, it was also supported by the major organizations of the Israel lobby, led by AIPAC and the parade of pro-Israel Jewish columnists who are nationally syndicated and led by Tom Freedman, William Safire (since replaced by David Brooks), Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and all the publications of Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman. The war was also called for by the major principals of both Likud and Labor in Israel, Sharon, Netanyahu and Peres, as well as Chef of Staff Shall Mofaz who said that after taking care of Iraq, the US should do the same with Syria and Iran.

If Palast was not so intent on shielding Israel and its American supporters from scrutiny, he would have acknowledged that the reason that the Democrats joined the Bush administration in supporting the war was that the majority of their funding comes from pro-Israel lobbyists which makes the Party, as Prof. Francis Boyle recently said, "a front for AIPAC." Now that the war has taken out Saddam and literally destroyed the country, the Democrats are allowed to criticize the conduct of the war, but not so directly the war itself, and will be ready to serve the lobby's call when it comes to taking on Iran. They have already overwhelmingly approved the Iran Freedom Act, the latest AIPAC war-mongering effort.

It is a shame that Palast has not employed his excellent investigative skills to examine this aspect of American society and instead has allowed them to play second fiddle to his attachment to Israel. Otherwise, he would not also be trying to convince us that both Bolton and Wolfowitz have important roles still to play for the Bush regime.

3. Greg Palast is a slimmed-down version of Michael Moore. Here is a relevant piece:

Wendy Campbell vs. Michael Moore



6. From Laura Lewis





You're much harder core on Palast than I was with my simple statement of disappointment that he showed the blindspot so many seem to have where Israel is concerned. I must admit, his piece disappointed me, especially his need to set the tone with the classic anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Christ killers and Elder's comments. Those pretty much discredited the rest of the piece from the get go for those of us in the know. Problem is, due to pieces like Palast's, most of us aren't in the know and this article in Tikkun shows he's part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. We have to many problem parts. We need more solution parts.







From Jim Dean

The Jewish Lobby shills are fairly easy to spot in the media. All you have to do is read about any major problem or controversy where certain Jewish interests are obviously entwined, and these normally intelligent and insightful journalists become instantly blind to it. No other issue makes them instantly braindead.

For the goyim journalist fear is a major component as they work in a ghetto type environment when it comes to discussing Israel. And then of course there is ignorance...no shortage of that around. And last, of course...prejudice. But there is also the intelligence aspect of it.

Intelligence agency infiltration of the media is an old old game but you don't read hardly a word about it in investigative journalism. Our CIA, and others, have done this for years and so has our wonderfully ally Israel right here in the land of free speech.

I am not saying that their shills are graduates of Mossad. That would be more expensive. They are recruited like most are recruited, some for money (career assistance) and some purely for ideological reasons, most often a combination of the two. They got their hooks into the early teleevangelist the same way. They were in a position to greatly assist in building them up...as long as they had a good understanding about a few things. There is one that we have who flew around on an Israeli Gov. Leat jet for a couple of years.

It's the perfect infiltration set up. You have protection of sources. And you are somewhat protected yourself from FBI investigations. Once your career is 'advanced' high enough (Judith Miller?) you can be a source for leaks, and you can even reveal your sources to your Israeli handler if you want to. They do require some payback for the career help they offer.

They have a separate program for retiring US generals and flag officers They screen them prior to retirement to determine who is likely to remain in the public eye. They are approached about their retirement plans and if they are subservient enough are offered help getting some 'board directorships' or nice consulting positions 'for such a good friend of Israel'. This is topped off with a five star deluxe trip to Israel where they are wined and dined.

There is a lot of beneath the surface revulsion to this going on by those below that level of rank. Our top officers are being seduced into the Jewish Lobby propaganda machine in what many tell me is a classic Intel infiltration operation. Our own Intel people (the ones who are not Israel-phobes) are just aghast at the proto dual citizenship compromising that goes on. God only knows what they turn over to the Israelis, the doors they open.

One result of this is nary a critical word from our veteran organizations regarding the most obvious Israeli security excesses, the biggest being the massive Israeli Intel operations that have been running here for decades. I hardly ever meet an military Intel person who is not aware of this, and most all of them are completely complacent about it. 'Above my pay grade'...and 'that's really a political issue' are the most common dodges that are trotted out about it. They won't even discuss the USS Liberty. They just hang their heads in shame.

I have no specific information on Mr. Palast, but he is what we would call in the Intel business 'a person of interest'. Now Judith Miller on the other hand, she may be on their payroll. After all, she was able to wiggle her way into the actual interrogations of some of Saddam top Lts. while she went around with the Army WMD units in Iraq. My sources told me this was unprecedented, having a journalist present in such situations. Her DoD NeoCon buddies got her right in there. They were there for each other and it wasn't a freak accident.

And what other country do you think might have had an interest in knowing what she learned in those interrogations...and quickly? Does anyone think that her NeoCon buddies who got her on the inside were not getting detailed reports of everything that she learned?

This is called 'front door' espionage. No break ins are necessary. You just make an appointment. The media refuses to cover this, and for very good reason. They are involved. But when you think of how many Israeli spy networks that US Intel broke up in the US last year...and the year before that...and on and on...you can see how the midlevel people could have a jaded attitude about the whole mess.

It's a national disgrace.

Jim Dean

Heritage TV...Atlanta