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Massive Zionist Slush Fund Used To Influence Presidential Election
By Ralph Nader
In
your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and
change," "change and hope" have been your trademark
declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your
political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not
"hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status
quo.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received
enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street
interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never
before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his
Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700
billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so
much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S.
Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power,
coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872
Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the
corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example)
you have shown that you are their man?
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To
advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage,
integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take,
for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian
rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman
for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression,
occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of
the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and
Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue
of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a
majority of Jewish-Americans.
You
know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and
Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state
solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will
there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet
you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous,
demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination
of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem,"
and opposed negotiations with Hamas--the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the
Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected news-
paper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct
negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is
what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with
the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is
the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."
During
your visit to Israel
this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of your time for Palestinians with
no news conference, and no visit to Palestinian refugee camps that would have
focused the media on the brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported
the illegal, cruel blockade of Gaza
in defiance of international law and the United Nations charter. You focused on
southern Israeli casualties which during the past year have
totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian
casualties on the Gaza
side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and its replacement
with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit a viable
Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full economic and
diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you played the role of
a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians with the feeling of much
shock and little awe.
David
Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip succinctly:
"There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact that there
are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a candidate, but not as a
President."
Palestinian
American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not utter a single
criticism of Israel,
"of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that
make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians. ...Even the Bush
administration recently criticized Israeli's use of cluster bombs against
Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for elaboration]. But Obama defended
Israeli's assault on Lebanon
as an exercise of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"
In
numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the
Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the heart of
a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.
Israeli
writer and peace advocate--Uri Avnery--described Obama's appearance before
AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning,
adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American
interests. After all, the US
has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow
it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image
in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future -- if and when he is elected
president," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's
declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace.
And what is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad
for the Palestinian people."
A
further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned your
back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send surrogates to
speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous churches and
synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. Even George W. Bush
visited the Grand Mosque in Washington
D.C. after9/11 to express
proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major religious group of
innocents.
Although
the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 titled
"Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing
examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of life,
who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. Three
days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by
Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque."
None
of these comments and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans
-- even though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.
Perhaps
nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the mildest
version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to
prohibit former presidentJimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic
National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents and one accorded
in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.
Here
was a President who negotiated peace between Israel
and Egypt,
but his recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid
of the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him.
Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this critical
international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the stage to
"tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the Carter Center's
post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!
But
then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American life.
(See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez,
on www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor
Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You always
mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention
of the "poor" in America.
Should
you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented upward career
move follow-ing a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke
"change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power
of the "corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power
from the few to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man
who does not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges
the forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and
the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is
transforming of American politics--opening it up to the public funding of
elections (through voluntary approaches) -- and allowing smaller candidates to
have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now
restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.
Your
presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands.
"Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when
"reality" consumes it daily.
Sincerely,
Ralph
Nader
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(Issue # 45, November 10, 2008)
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