The Traitor Within

May 1, 2014

On 5 April 2014, former Irgun and Knesset member, Uri Avnery, said this at the Gush Shalom web site:

“If anyone had any illusions about American politics, they were dispelled this week. The casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson, organized a public display of his power. He summoned to his Las Vegas betting paradise the four most probable Republican candidates for the next presidential elections, in order to choose one of them. All the invitees heeded the summons, of course.

It was a shameless exhibition. The politicians groveled before the casino lord. Mighty governors of important states did their best to sell themselves like applicants at a job interview. Each of them tried to trump the others in promising to do the Mogul’s bidding.

Flanked by Israeli bodyguards, Adelson grilled the American hopefuls. And what was he demanding from the future president of the United States? First of all and above everything else, blind and unconditional obedience to the government of another state: Israel.

Adelson is one of the richest Jews in the world. He is also a fanatical rightist, not only an American rightist, but also an Israeli one. While he is now looking for the best American president money can buy, he has already chosen his Israeli stooge. He has done something unprecedented in Israeli history: created an instrument to impose his ultra-right views on the Israeli people. For this purpose he has invested large sums of money in a daily newspaper of his creation. It is called “Israel Hayom” (Israel today), and is literally priceless: it is distributed for nothing all over the country. Its readership is now the largest in the country, threatening the existence of the former No. 1, ‘Yedioth Ahronoth’ and killing the next one, ‘Maariv.’

The sole purpose of Adelson’s paper is to serve Binyamin Netanyahu, personally and politically, unconditionally and unreservedly. This is such a blatant intervention in Israeli politics by a foreign billionaire that it is causing a reaction: all Knesset factions, both rightist and leftist (except the Likud, of course) have signed a demand to put an end to this corruption of democracy…

Everything Adelson does is done openly, proudly, shamelessly. I wonder how ordinary Americans react to this spectacle of one billionaire, especially a Jewish one, choosing their next president for them. We are told that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and and across the globe. In the crazy mental world of the anti-Semites, Jews control the cosmos. And here we have a Jew, straight out of the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, trying to appoint the ruler of the mightiest country on the planet…

The basic problem is that the American political process is totally corrupt. There is no other way to put it. In order to become the nominee of one major party, and then to be elected president, one needs enormous sums of money. Since the major battlefield is TV, and candidates have to pay for it, these sums get bigger and bigger…

A billionaire does not donate a fortune for a presidential candidate for nothing. That’s not how he became a billionaire in the first place. Once he gets his man elected, he demands his pound of flesh, many pounds… If he succeeds in installing his favorite in the White House, the US will become totally subservient to the extreme right-wing in Israel. He might as well put Netanyahu in the Oval Office… If Adelson could dictate our future, it would spell disaster for our country…

There is no way to roll back the corruption of the political process in the US, or here, without completely changing the electoral system. As long as huge sums are needed to get elected, corruption will reign supreme.”