It is right and proper to want Israel categorically out of US politics

Politics & Elections
1

I took a stab at this in a previous thread. The underlying question is: How do we get Israel out of our politics? My proposal wasn’t really viable: recall the incoming Speaker for taking AIPAC money, send a message. Savagely take scalps so that the public speaks a language Congress can understand: we don’t want foreign influence affecting our politics. Asking nice won’t cut it- we need to take action like there are genocidaires at the table. Because there are.

The previous thread unwound (at least) two ways. One is that there is no recall option in NY, so the whole question is moot. Plus Jeffries is a “nice guy”, so why take it out on him? It isn’t about him, it is about the Speaker and AIPAC money and foreign influence in our politics. I want AIPAC-money taking candidates separated from decisionmaking in our government. I want Israel separated from decisionmaking in our government. How do we get there? Well, sack the Speaker until we get one that isn’t under this influence. Maybe there are better ways.

The second way the thread unraveled was suggestions of anti-Semitism. I don’t want to complain, I’d like to talk about it. It is natural enough that, with a name like Israel, people equate it with… Judaism itself? Semites writ large? Something like that, such that criticizing the country and their behavior is interpreted as criticizing/hating Jews, or Semites, as demographic groups. “Israel is bad” gets translated to “Jews are bad”, confusion ensues, and the whole thing goes off the rails.

There are multiple issues to discuss in this. The first is the distinction I just made: Israel does not equal Judaism. I’d like to discuss this question- I have come to believe that Israel’s behavior means they aren’t really Jewish at all, as a state, but rather that they are abusing a world religion as a sort of shield to hide behind/justify their actions, much as Evangelicals in America often are just waving bibles around to distract from a purely political agenda. “Hate your neighbor, they’re a liberal!” is the false Gospel they profess, but I digress. “We can kill everybody, we’re Israel!” is their version.

Then there is the question of who is responsible for the Iran war. The reports I have followed suggest that Israel was pre-emptively striking Iran, once again on the false pretense of ‘they’re building a bomb!!’, just like we saw with Iraq. The US’ hand was forced to join the preemptive strike, to preempt the retaliation that would surely occur, so the story goes. Congress didn’t vote on it or really have any involvement of any kind, even if technically they coulda shoulda. The decision to attack, for the US, seems to have been Trump alone.

It raises a lot of questions about Israeli influence over our POTUS, who, for one thing, is said to appear in the Epstein files more times than God appears in the Bible. This line of reasoning boils down to suspicion since the files have not been fully released and we therefore can’t answer all the questions, but one of Trump’s stated reasons for Not releasing the files was, “It would hurt my friends.” Alright, who are his friends? Russia, Israel, and maybe N Korea, and that’s about it. Of the three, only one of those seems mutual. Epstein is reasonably suspected of involvement with MOSSAD, and reasonably suspected of seeking to compromise powerful people, through or on behalf of MOSSAD, with pedo blackmail. MOSSAD works on behalf of and in the interests of Israel. It isn’t proven, but what is known does suggest, at least to me, that Israel has leverage over Trump via Epstein, and that this is a factor, one of the “real reasons” we went to war with Iran. And a reason the files were not released.

Even if that part turns out not to be true, it is still the case that many credible sources- retired generals turned talking heads for instance- cite Israeli influence as the driving force of the war. They certainly weren’t pushing caution and restraint. The unplanned and rushed nature of it supports the “leverage theory”- if the whole of government were deliberating it as the system intended, things would not have proceeded like they did. The fact that our intelligence agencies claimed Iran was Not building a bomb would have had more truck. A war would not have started on a foreign leader’s bare assertion. But if things were arranged to checkmate our system by leveraging/convincing One Guy to make the decision to go to war, it would look like the way it actually played out. It is certainly in Israel’s (perceived) interest to do so.

To do this to my country, depending on what the actual details turn out to be, can rise to the level of an act of war. A foreign country, hijacking our levers of power for its own purposes, stealing the rightful representation that the public is entitled to. This isn’t the behavior of a friend and ally. It is the criminal behavior of an enemy.

So you can see why I am so keen to keep Israeli influence out of our politics. I am indeed singling out Israel specifically, as that is the country that appears to have robbed us all of representation in order to drag us to war. What other country has done that? I can’t think of one, maybe I will later.

It’s a question of war and peace. As people across the spectrum have said, “I didn’t vote for this.” We sure didn’t. Only the POTUS seems to have been involved in the decision, and he seems to have been persuaded/leveraged by a foreign power. Namely Israel. So the question is: how to we get them out of our politics?

Of Course it is right and proper to do so. They are a hostile foreign power, if the premises laid out above turn out to be true. Because of questions of war and peace, leverage and influence, money in politics and pedo blackmail. Let’s examine the premises and ask if they are true. If you want to explore the question of whether all of this is actually because I “hate Jews”, go ahead, but notice that isn’t a part of my stated reasons, I am telling you it isn’t the case, and please note how similar that accusation is to TDS. I’d rather discuss the actual issues than deal with people posing as my personal shrink.

The bottom line is that Israel appears to have abused our trust to drag us to war, a betrayal that renders them a hostile foreign power. It is right and proper to want them categorically out of our politics.

2

Um…

About 96% of the members of both houses of Congress have received AIPAC donations.

Good luck with that buddy.

3

You said, and I quote;

Please, explain what you want to happen to the people of Israel, who were born and raised there and have never known any other homeland, what you expect to happen to them when they are “conquered and gone away”.

4

And that is textbook, really. Musk needs to take a few lessons.

5

To the OP, I think that your hyperfocus on AIPAC has been rightfully criticized, because it’s extremely misguided. And that’s a shame, because your poor choice of targets is missing a really important truth about a serious problem in the US. And that’s with lobbyists in general. Is AIPAC really worse that the pharmaceutical companies? Oil companies? The NRA? Is the recent war in Iran worse than all of the deaths from the opioid crisis, or the tens of thousands of gun-related deaths each year, or the impending global disaster if we can’t do enough to curb climate change in time? Or countless other problems that can’t be addressed due to the influence of special interest groups, groups which influence both sides of the aisle.

When I was in middle school, I was learning about the US government and trying to do research to prepare for my participation in some mock debates in school. And in the process I read about how lobbying worked. As a kid, I was confused; it looked like legalized bribery of government policymakers that have become institutionalized, and it made no sense. As I grew older and wiser, and came to learn more about how the world works, I’ve found that my initial impressions were accurate.

The obvious problem, of course, is that the only people who can fix the system are the ones who are benefitting from it. How do you really fix it? To be able to win a competitive election, it takes money, because you have to pay staffers, and run advertisements, and put on events. An honest person with a good brain and good intentions who takes a principled stand and tries to make a bid for office paying costs out of their own pocket and those of friends and family is going to be crushed hard. There’s a reason why such an obviously corrupt and flawed system has nevertheless stayed intact for generations; it is a self-sustaining catastrophe.

If you were to take your sights off of AIPAC and turned them to the real problem, which is the whole concept of lobbyists, I’d be right there with you about how big of an issue it is. But I have no solution. I really don’t know how to even begin. Maybe some great national grass-roots campaign to fund people who refuse to accept any donations from special interests, but that campaign itself needs to get money from somewhere. I really have no clue how that could be done.

It’s certainly not going to come about from “sacking people”. That’s literally magical thinking. You can’t wave a wand and cause every politician to disappear. That’s a “crazy guy punching the ocean to make it behave” sort of move.

6

Israel’s ties to Epstein need to be heavily investigated. But Epstein possibly had ties to intelligence agencies all over the world. Possibly US intelligence, various middle eastern nations, Russia.

Trump is being blackmailed, but I feel its more Russia who is blackmailing him and not Israel. But I’m open to the idea that Israel blackmails him too.

Iran did try to assassinate Trump, so his war on Iran may be personal the same way W Bush started the war against Iraq in part because Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate his father.

However Israel is our ally in our war against Islamic extremism. They share intel with us. We also work with them on military technology like defensive weapons against mortars, rockets, ICBMs, etc.

But fundamentally a lot of evangelical christians feel Israel will usher in the end of the world, so due to that there is always going to be an Israeli aspect of US politics since a lot of christians assign religious significance to them.

Also the dairy industry spends more on lobbying than AIPAC. Do you feel the dairy industry secretly controls the US government?

Its more about holding Israel to a standard that no other nation is held to. Its like when people say they aren’t racist but they hate the inner city, or people who say they aren’t sexist but they hate feminism. The lines get blurry.

7

It’s not really a problem, it just means we need to choose our leaders from the other 4%. Like I said in the other thread, AOC/Talarico, done.

But a serious discussion of this topic might be best done in a thread where the OP is not a

(Checks forum, decides to leave that sentence unfinished)

8

What?

Secretly? No.

Ronald Reagan, in his official statement about the distribution of the Cheese Inventory of the Commodity Credit Corporation, said,

“The 1981 farm bill I signed today will slow the rise in price support levels, but even under this bill, surpluses will continue to pile up. A total of more than 560 million pounds [250,000 t] of cheese has already been consigned to warehouses, so more distributions may be necessary as we continue our drive to root out waste in government and make the best possible use of our nation’s resources.”
Government cheese - Wikipedia

9

If only they’d change it to Irving…

10

…and maybe get nose jobs….

11

It’s hardly confusing. It’s a pro-genocide position - probably the first time someone has actually openly expressed a literally pro-genocide position on this issue on this board in this current go-around of discussion. There’s not really any way to explain one’s way out of that.

12

It doesn’t look like Israel is going to be able to survive the US exit from the region- they have simply made too many enemies. The best plan I have seen is relocation to Brazil, assuming there is some kind in international HOA such that they can be evicted if they start killing all their neighbors.

I don’t want them killed. Let’s remember that the country was founded as a refuge for victims of genocide. A Jewish homeland, yes, also that of course. But today, the victims of genocide are the Palestinians- you might have heard of them, they lived in Israel before it was Israel. I favor a one-state solution- Palestine. I expect many Israelis would simply stay put and go along to get along

13

Israel will be just fine, with or without the US’s help.

14

You simply haven’t been paying attention.

15
Summary

Well, there is indeed more to worry about than AIPAC. The larger issue is campaign finance. The best first move would probably be to repeal Citizens United. After that… I’d say look to other countries for models of how to go about it, though that might not translate to the US. Politics is about power, and big companies and organizations have it. I am critical of Big Capital generally, as a “bad influence” on politics, but the flip side of that is that with enough wealth and influence, one kind of Is politics.

That all goes out the window when we’re talking about foreign influence. It is one thing if an American company has too much influence on American politics, and the examples you list are good ones. We can use those examples as guideposts for where to set up the fences in the future to limit corporate/money influence, kind of like how Roosevelt halfway defined antitrust in his fight with the railroad interests. But foreign interests? And the kind of gross skullduggery that seems to have occurred to lead us to this pointless war with Iran? Well, pointless if you exclude Israeli interests, and that’s my point. Foreign influence will lead us to policies that are pointless from the perspective of the general public- yanno, the people who elect representatives and ostensibly hold the power in our system?

Yeah, I’d say that the Iran war Is worse than the opioid crisis. It has already likely cost us our whole position in the region, and more billions of $$ than drug abuse. It threatens to bring the whole region to conflagration, threatening many millions of lives, and is causing economic hardship to just about every regular Joe in the world. It will likely spell the end of Israel, and in the meantime has turned me, and millions more, against them. Even 5 years ago I would have said we were friends and allies. Not anymore, and not going forward.

Eh, not to diminish the opioid problem. I can’t believe Perdue got away with it to the degree they did. We have a highly, um, “classist” system? We got rid of slavery a long time ago, but racism has only receded gradually over time. Now the “new slaves” who get totally fleeced are addicts, and then minimum wage workers. We’ve got problems here to address, and indigenous corporations and other interests actually could be recruited to help and not just vampire us all to death. But foreign interests? Those will lead us into more pointlessness and waste.

17

Moderating: Both Politics & Elections and Great Debates have been operating under rules you might not be aware of since early 2020. New Rules for Politics and Elections – January 2020

Some highlights:

All that quoted, jumping off to Perdue is going off-topic. A lot of your last post is pushing off-topic. I will hide the post in fact to avoid a larger hijack.

19

In other words, in P&E, don’t @Try2B_Comprehensive.

20

So when you said, “I want them converted to Palestine or else conquered and gone away, and the never, Ever want them influencing my government ever again, in any way” you weren’t, in fact, suggesting a genocide of Israeli Jews? Instead you were suggesting that they would be forced to relocate en masse to Brazil? It seems really unlikely that Israelis would be driven entirely off their homeland.