The Barry Chamish mentioned wrote a book alleging Shin Beit involvement in the assasination of Rabin. The e-mail from Chamish on Lieberman was entitled, "Beware Lieberman!" Do a search on usenet to find the whole piece.
Michael Pugliese
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/NewsST081100.htm Friday, August 11, 2000 CANDIDATE LIEBERMAN: HYPOCRITE AND MORAL CRIPPLE by Srdja Trifkovic The theory behind Al Gore’s choice of his running mate was simple: he wanted someone who is not perceived as a raging leftie and a moral degenerate. The Vice President himself has secured his party’s nomination by pandering to every zany, far-left interest group in sight, from radical feminists and “gays” to abortionists and Sharptonite hate purveyors. He has indulged them with gusto, because his instincts are with them; but to have any chance of winning he needed a mainstream “New Democrat.” Enter Senator Joseph Lieberman. Here’s a “moderate” supposedly capable of making moral distinctions: his criticism of President Clinton’s behavior during the Lewinsky affair, once oh-so-embarrassing to the Administration, is suddenly deemed to be an asset. As an orthodox Jew, the theory goes, he would appeal to devout people of all faiths (they are interchangeable, after all…). And the media eagerly played on Gore’s cue, praising his judgment in depriving the Republicans of their supposed “moral edge” and more than hinting that Lieberman’s Jewishness means that Americans should vote Democrat, just to prove that they are not intolerant bigots. As a friend and “clean Hollywood” campaign ally of Bill Bennett – the former Republican education secretary who still passes for a “leading conservative” in Washington – Lieberman is supposedly attractive even to GOP moderates. He can prevail where Gore cannot touch. In the words of Jewish World Review, “He would lend gravitas to a ticket headed by a man whose prime characteristic is a willingness to say or do anything to get elected.” The presence of Lieberman on Gore’s ticket may entice “independents and Republicans who are less than enamored with George W. Bush, to support a Gore candidacy” (Jewish Ledger, June 30). In a nutshell, these have been the arguments of Lieberman’s most vocal promoters. Most notable among them are Sunday morning talking head Morton Kondracke and the cadre of benevolent global hegemonists at The Weekly Standard. (This may mean that Bush has already won: an endorsement from The Weekly Standard is a sure kiss of death to any political hopeful. Remember how it hailed John McCain as the new populist hero, who would destroy Bush and rule the Imperium, one whole week before the hysterical bully from Arizona pulled out of the race?) The problem the Kondrackes and Kristols of this world cannot overcome is that they don’t understand, and rather despise, the ordinary people they presume to lead. Their arrogance makes them oblivious to the fact that Al Gore is a vibrant personality in comparison with Lieberman. Far from “delivering” any significant segment, Lieberman is a liability because to most ordinary Americans he does not project the image of a trusty guardian of moral values and tradition. He comes across as a ponderous, pompous, sanctimonious fool. A reasonable retort to this is that substance should count for more than style: being likeable to millions of common folks, as we know, is no guarantee that you are not an adulterer, perjurer, pathological liar, warmongerer, and perhaps even murderer. We agree, and assert that quite apart from his personality and style Senator Joseph Lieberman is a thoroughly nasty piece of work. On any number of issues he has sided with bad people and bad ideas, he has said bad things and voted for bad laws.
Lieberman does not care for the preservation of American identity and the essential character (would he call it “Judeo-Christian”?) of its people. He favors open immigration and the misnamed “free trade,” so he voted “yes” on visas for “skilled workers,” and on fast-track trading authority, and on welfare for immigrants. Lieberman’s hypocrisy was especially evident when he condemned Clinton’s sexual behavior as “immoral” and “harmful,” but nevertheless voted against the impeachment as “unjust and unwise.” He was careful to focus his “condemnation” on the seedy goings-on in that closet adjoining the Oval Office, and to ignore the truly impeachable part, such as lying under oath. A nd yet it is this despicable performance during the impeachment debate, as logically senseless and manipulative as it was morally bankrupt, that Lieberman’s amen corner now invokes as the proof of his “integrity,” “courage,” und so weiter, und so weiter… Lieberman has never seen an overseas military intervention, or a punitive embargo, that he did not like. He hailed Clinton’s Christmas bombing of Iraq in 1998 in triumphantly jingoistic spirit, saying that the President “had a pressing responsibility to do exactly what he did tonight as our commander-in-chief. Honestly, if he did not, I think that he would have been derelict in his duties.” His “moral dimension” is curiously absent when it comes to his support of sanctions against Iraq, or Yugoslavia. LIEBERMAN THE BOMBER AND KLA FRIEND Seeing his interventionist zeal, it is unsurprising that Lieberman has criticized the misguided and hugely damaging eastward extension of NATO -- for not being radical enough! In his view it should have gone beyond Poland, Bohemia and Hungary and all the way to Tallin, according to this “man of peace.” But Lieberman is not only a global hegemonist, he is one of the best friends the military-industrial complex has ever had in the Senate. In April 1993 he warned, “If we attempted to chart the potential threats to world and American security in the next five years leading up to ‘98, we’d probably find that while the defense budget goes down, the threats go up.” In fact the defense budgets never went down in real terms, and America has been the threat to others rather than the other way round, but the Senator from Connecticut – a small state but a big source of Pentagon procurement – remains undaunted. His support for NATO expansion is partly due to his enthusiasm for American global empire, but the U.S.-taxpayer-funded defense contractors’ bonanza provided an additional motive. Lieberman’s agenda was apparent from a manipulative commentary he wrote for the Hartford Courant in which he called NATO expansion a proud day for World War II veterans, Polish-Americans, and those “who stood on alert during the Cold War.” The darkest side of Senator Lieberman has to do with his stand of Kosovo. Well before the “KLA” escalated its terrorist campaign in early 1998, instigating the crisis that culminated in the bombing campaign a year later, Albanian separatists were active purchasing political influence in the nation’s capital. Their key backer was Bob Dole, that “Senator from
Tirana,” but Lieberman soon became a major asset. He has received ample funds from Albanian lobbyists ($10,000 from the National Albanian-American PAC in 1994 alone). This champion of campaign finance reform deemed such donations kosher, and performed on cue: already in October 1998, way ahead of the rest of the pack, he went on national television to advocate bombing Serbia. It was not only a matter of U.S./NATO “credibility,” said he, but also of morality: “it’s a question of acting early to stop a broader war in the Balkans, but also it’s a question of acting out of our humanitarian values to prevent the kind of starvation of women and children and freezing to death of women and children and older people…” But once he did get that longed-for bombing, Lieberman could not contemplate stopping short of total victory. He urged an unlimited escalation of the war with ground troops, and actively advocated war crimes against Serb civilians: I hope the air campaign, even if it does not convince Milosevic to order his troops out of Kosovo, will so devastate his economy, which it’s doing now, so ruin the lives of his people, that they will rise up and throw him out. But there is no substitute for victory here. If it takes ground troops, we must use them. Some weeks later, on May 23, 1999, Lieberman repeated his call for indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civilian targets in Serbia on Fox News. When the presenter said, “But wait, I thought we weren’t trying to make life miserable for regular, every day Serbs,” Lieberman’s answer was unambiguous: Oh, we are. I mean that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months. We’re not only hitting military targets, otherwise why would we be cutting off the water supply and knocking out the power stations -- turning the lights out. We’re trying through the air campaign to break the will of the Serbian people so they will force their leader to break his will to then order the troops out of Kosovo. Here was this paragon of moral virtue actively advocating war crimes against innocent (“regular”) civilians. Some words require no comment, they literally speak for themselves. For commentary we cede to George Szamuely (antiwar.com): “Terrorizing civilians, destroying their economy, ruining their lives so as to get them to change their government is without question a flagrant and outrageous violation of the laws of war. Lieberman worries about gangsta rap. But the United States as a gangsta state is more than OK by him.” Lieberman additionally repaid his Albanian benefactors by sponsoring - along with Sen. John McCain – the infamous “Kosovo Self-Defense Act” that would have provided $25 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to equip 10,000 KLA “fighters” with arms and anti-tank weapons. In the event Lieberman’s good friends did not need the goodies: they were given a free hand to kill and expel non-Albanians from Kosovo under the benevolent gaze of NATO occupiers. A JEW, OR JEW-ISH? Lieberman’s Senate votes, his flawed judgment, his public statements, the sources of his money, and his overall hypocrisy are Lieberman’s record. That record should make him unelectable - quite apart from his much flaunted Jewishness, which should not be a major issue one way or another. But since Vice-President Gore in announcing his choice, and the courtier press in hailing it, and above all Lieberman himself, have all chosen to insist on The Jewish Thing, so be it. They’ve asked for it, and they should not be surprised if the issue of Lieberman’s supposed religiosity, his morality and core identity are subjected to close scrutiny. The adoring media are ignoring the fact that there are Jews, here and in Israel, who take a very dim view of Lieberman’s posturing. Israeli investigative journalist and writer Barry Chamish (chamish at netvision.net) has pointed out that Lieberman – as well as Gore and Clinton – all belong to the Council On Foreign Relation (CFR), an elite organization incompatible with Judaism. He quotes Rabbi Marvin Antleman, the author of a proposal submitted to the Rabbinical Council of America in 1972 to condemn the CFR and to prevent its members from infiltrating Jewish institutions. Two years later, in his book To Eliminate The Opiate Rabbi Antelman claimed that the CFR’s objective was to destroy authentic Judaism by planting its members throughout Jewish media, charitable and educational institutes. Since the CFR’s position is that Israel must return to its vulnerable 1948 borders, and Jerusalem is to be divided into two national capitals, Rabbi Antleman doubts the authenticity of Lieberman’s commitment to Orthodox Jewry: “How can you be Orthodox and belong to an organization which promotes the division of Jerusalem and which, in the past, has financially backed such irreligious movements as communism and nazism?” he asks. “The CFR’s purpose is to promote and arm violent and disruptive national movements in order to upset the world’s status quo and replace it with their alternative world order. There is no place within for a religious Jew unless he is dangerous window dressing.” Rabbi Antelman’s comment on Lieberman’s candidacy was simple: “We’re being sold a bill of goods again.” It may be used to sweeten the demand for major Israeli concessions, with American Jews unable to accuse the administration of being anti-Israel. Chamish thinks that the same strategy was used in 1972, when CFR executive Henry Kissinger was named Secretary of State: as proud of Kissinger as they are of Lieberman today, the Jewish community were oblivious to the true impact of his policies: This time around, not only does the current “peace” process get a boost, so does the Hillary Clinton campaign for a New York senatorial seat. And the Jews, so excited by Lieberman’s nomination, as usual, do not suspect how cynically they are being set up. Sooner of later Lieberman’s possible dual allegiance to America and Israel will become a debating point. Observes Antleman, “And that will miss the real issue, which is Lieberman’s allegiance to the CFR. It will prove stronger than all his sentimental ties to America, Israel and to Judaism itself.” If Lieberman’s CFR membership and his support for “partial birth abortion” put his commitment to orthodox Judaism in doubt, then he is only “Jew-ish,” by ethnicity rather than faith. This being so, Lieberman ceases to be “the first Jew who is nominated as candidate for major national office.” It was, as we all know, Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964 -- unless one insists on equating ethnicity with religion – which is the root of so many evils in the Balkans or in Ireland.
If Lieberman were as “sensitive” about the feelings of others as we are told he is, he would have noticed that he is allowed things unimaginable to the majority of Americans. His first speech after being selected by Al Gore started with a prayer and a passage from the Bible – and that was just fine with the media, since the prayer was not to Christ, and the quotation is not from the New Testament. But recall how George Bush was attacked for naming Jesus Christ, in response to a question about the philosopher who had the greatest impact on his life: Hey, he was “bringing his religion up”! The rank hypocrisy of its all was apparent in the furor over allegedly anti-Semitic remarks about Lieberman by a black NAACP activist in Dallas, Lee Alcorn. But Mary Mostert has demonstrated (www.originalsources.com) that Alcorn’s quotes were edited so as to take them totally out of context. He was branded “repulsive” and “un-American” when he expressed concerns about Leiberman “not because he objected to his religion – but because he thought Gore should have chosen someone else and because of the Middle East Peace negotiations.” And so, questions that would have been inevitably asked had a Muslim of Arabic parentage been selected are now verboten. Mary Mostert doubts that the media pack’s dual criteria can be sustained for long: For months the "politically correct" either ignored or ridiculed Alan Keyes, a conservative, articulate black presidential candidate. Yet a black man can ’t suggest he is not pleased about Senator Lieberman’s candidacy? Is there a double standard here? I can’t think of a more effective way to fuel anti-Semitism in this country than by telling the black community that they can’t express their concerns, legitimate or not, because the candidate is Jewish, after they’ve watched a candidate of their race treated the way the liberal media treated Alan Keyes. * * * We hope that Senator Lieberman’s uninspiring personal style and delivery will not be held against him. We wish he would be judged strictly on his political, intellectual and moral merits. But in America style decides the issue. Skillfully manipulative crooks can get away with anything; just remember who is still in the White House. The thought of four years of Gore and Lieberman on the nation’s flickering screens is enough to make Canada look like an exciting place of exile. It should be enough to bring Bush and Cheney into the White House.