[New Republic] Jeffrey Goldberg - In bin Laden's view of usury, Western banking is Jewish banking. "As a result of [usury], in all their different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, seems at times to view the world entirely through the prism of a Jewish conspiracy, and he regularly breaks new ground in the field of state-supported Holocaust denial. The Judeocentric understanding of America's foreign policy is now the special province of two ostensibly reputable scholars, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Their new book represents the most sustained attack against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin. The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is comically one-sided. In their telling, Israel is perpetually the aggressor; it has never made a serious move toward peace and compromise; and its existence has never been threatened by the Arabs, who are portrayed as out-numbered, out-funded, and under-armed victims of Zionist aggression. The Israel of Mearsheimer and Walt is simply unrecognizable to anyone who is halfway fair and halfway learned about the Middle East.
2007-10-05 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive