The U.S. government is bursting with lackeys who place Israel, not America, first. While Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton are ever busy ensuring U.S. foreign policy considers Israel first, now Kenneth Marcus at the Department of Education is working to eliminate any ideas that might prevent the foreign nation holding first priority in our students’ minds, as well.
By Philip Giraldi
I have recently written about how American Jews who are protective of Israel have succeeded in inserting themselves in the U.S. government at various choke points where the bilateral relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington are managed. The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) in the Treasury Department, for instance, is notable in that regard, as it has been a Jewish enclave since its founding under George W. Bush in 2004. Since that time, it has successfully ignored Israeli violations of law to include its nuclear program and colonization of the West Bank while increasing penalties inflicted on countries like Iran, regarded as hostile to Israel. Nor should one forget the Jewish cabal that was largely responsible for the Iraq war, which proved disastrous to genuine American interests.
Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with Scooter Libby at the White House were responsible for the phony intelligence that was stove-piped up to policy makers to make it look as if Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to the United States. Air Force Col. Karen Kwiatkowski has reported how neoconservatives corrupted the intelligence analysis process. Meanwhile Israeli intelligence officers, diplomats, and military personnel were able to move around the Pentagon freely, having special access granted to them by Feith.
As it turned out, there were no such weapons and the only beneficiaries of a shattered Iraq were Israel and Iran. Currently, many of the same people, who in no way suffered career-wise for their poor judgment and their collaboration with a foreign country, are pushing all available buttons to bring about a much bigger war in Syria and a new conflict with Iran. The new policy, spelled out by National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on recent trips to Israel, demands the ouster of Iranians from Syrian territory and regime change in Damascus. It will require a U.S. armed presence in Syria for years to come.
Syria will thereby become the next Afghanistan and Iraq, dysfunctional countries all in a row that once upon a time were both independent and stable. Nowhere has the United States “won” in any sense, and the occupations appear to be interminable. You can blame the dunderheads in Washington for the policy failure, but you must also blame Israel.
One should not ignore the interminable so-called Middle East peace process, either, which is all about protecting Israeli interests. It is being run by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and a team of Orthodox Jews negotiating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is also an Orthodox Jew with a rabbi as his principal advisor. Friedman spends his days defending Israel, even when it shoots dead 70 unarmed demonstrating Gazans.
Recent policy initiatives by the White House have consisted of cutting off all funding to Palestinian refugees in an attempt to make them either surrender or disappear, preferably both. It is a policy dictated by Israel, which provides no benefits to the United States. Bolton, in his recent condemnation of the International Criminal Court, tied the refusal to recognize the court and the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington to attempts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes, meaning American policy is being driven by Israeli interests.
The most recent bit of Israel-first policy in the Trump administration involves the Education Department. As some university students are actually capable of thinking independently and are rejecting the standard Israeli fabricated line about how it is the “only democracy in the Middle East” and “America’s best and truest ally,” both of which are manifestly untrue, it was perhaps inevitable that the government Zionists who are intent on protecting Israel would turn to shutting down any criticism of the Jewish state on campus. There was, however, a little problem sometimes referred to as the First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech. So along comes Kenneth Marcus, and he finds a nice little niche in the government where he can work to stop the process whereby Jewish students, so it is being claimed, are being made uncomfortable by criticism of Israel.
Marcus has been the assistant secretary of education for civil rights since June, which gives him authority to enforce what he chooses to define as the rights of students at universities. The position is quite powerful in that any university or college receiving federal funds can be deprived of that income if it is found to be in violation of the rules that Marcus chooses to enforce.
Marcus is an ardent Zionist, who has frequently been in the news opposing Palestinian groups on campus. His appointment is a major shift in how the Department of Education sees its role in serving as thought police at America’s institutions of higher learning.
It is not as if Marcus’s views were unknown before he was appointed. He previously served as head of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which he founded in 2011 “to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism in American higher education.” He was an outspoken advocate for all things Israeli and Jewish, with particular focus on silencing the Palestinian-led nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have perhaps correctly identified as the biggest threat to their country. Netanyahu, of course, defines a threat as anything that prevents him from dispossessing the Palestinians of the remainder of their land and inducing or forcing them to move elsewhere.
The BDS movement is indeed popular among university students in the United States and also in Europe, as it combines nonviolence with an assertion of the rights of the Palestinian people.
Marcus has reopened a case dismissed in 2014 that was initiated seven years ago by a Zionist group against Rutgers University, claiming that the school permitted a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. Investigation by the Obama administration Department of Education determined that that was not so, but Marcus thinks otherwise, revealing his turnaround decision in a letter to his allies at the Zionist Organization of America.
Marcus’s office does not have jurisdiction over religious discrimination, but it does “aggressively enforce” civil rights “which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin.” So he is calling Jews an “ethnicity” linked to Israel as a “right to self-determination.” Any criticism of the existence of Israel then becomes anti-Semitism and also racist, making the promotion of the Palestinian cause hate speech and therefore subject to being banned on campus.
More than 200 civil rights groups objected to the appointment of Marcus but the Senate nevertheless confirmed the assignment by a 50 to 46 vote. That a partisan like Marcus would be considered as an enforcer of civil rights is a travesty, as he, like many other Jewish Zionists in senior government positions in the Trump administration, are only interested in what they think benefits Israel.
Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review.
