Israeli Intrigues Linked to Gun Industry

• Powerful, shadowy Zionist holding company dominates American arms business

By Michael Collins Piper

Some AMERICAN FREE PRESS readers are wondering if they are on the wrong side of the issue of Zionism and Israel, a concern based on support for Israel among institutions that have been the bedrock of the American conservative movement.

This pro-Israel point of view was expressed February 10 by a reader, who wrote in a letter to AFP’s editor that she was disappointed with the newspaper’s criticism of Israel. Warning that she has considered canceling her AFP subscription, she wrote that her Bible says, “Bless my people and I will bless you.”

As recently as December 23, the John Birch Society’s The New American published a commentary complaining many Americans “believe that the Jews in Israel are an ‘occupying force’ guilty of apartheid against the Palestinian people, whose land the Jews ‘stole.’ ”

And in November, the National Rifle Association (NRA) dispatched a VIP delegation to visit Israel for a 10-day tour, described in The Jerusalem Post which reported that Joseph R. Gregory, the leader of the delegation, said “We want to demonstrate our appreciation and support of the Israeli people because we feel that Israel is important to the United States and we love our country.”

The NRA bigwigs met with Israeli police and intelligence officials who demonstrated techniques for dealing with suspected terrorists, with the Post citing “one middle-aged female delegate” as having said, “We need to have surveillance like this back home.”

The Post noted that an Israeli spokesman revealed that Israel “had worked with the NRA in the past to share information on operations, intelligence and gun-control management.”

Some take pause in that revelation in light of what the Post did not mention: Steve Friess, an Ann Arbor-based freelance journalist whose stories appear on “BuzzFeed,” one of the top 50 sites on the Internet in the U.S., has exposed the fact that while the NRA has warned against the threat of a national database of firearms or their owners, “the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself.”

On August 20, 2013, Mr. Friess wrote:

The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners . . . has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines, and more.

An article appearing on BuzzFeed two days later by staff reporter Kate Nocera pointed out that the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), an NRA rival “staunchly opposed to background checks for gun owners,” who maintains “that Americans have a constitutional right to carry a weapon without any government regulation or registry,” has attacked the NRA for maintaining this database. NAGR executive director Dudley Brown reflected: “We know the National Security Agency is in on everything, but the fact is, so is the NRA.”

Tying this together is that while the NRA receives much of its funding from the gun industry, the truth is that major forces in that industry are now under the control of a single giant holding company, Freedom Group (FG), which The New York Times reported on November 26, 2011, “is the most powerful and mysterious force in the American commercial gun industry today.”

Here’s where things get interesting, in light of the NRA’s support for—and cooperation with—Israel.

The Times article stated that “even within gun circles, the Freedom Group is something of an enigma. Its rise has been so swift that it has become the subject of wild speculation and grassy-knoll conspiracy theories.” The Times said, “In the realm of consumer rifles and shotguns—long guns, in the trade—[FG] is unrivaled in its size and reach,” noting that the company controls such major arms companies as Bushmaster, Remington, Marlin, Dakota Arms and DPMS Firearms as well as firearms-related manufacturers including S&K industries, silencer manufacturer Advanced Armament Corporation and Barnes Bullets.

On October 14, 2011, the NRA responded to the growing rumors about FG, asserting that “the owners and investors involved are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters.”

The NRA also rushed to assure that rumors that billionaire George Soros—an ardent gun control advocate—held an interest in FG were not true and somehow managed to assert with undocumented authority that he “never will be.”

What the NRA didn’t mention is that FG is a subsidiary of the more gigantic private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., and that the forces behind Cerberus are themselves most unsettling and—note this—intimately tied to the global operations of Israel and Zionism, with which the NRA has now linked itself in an open and enthusiastically collaborative manner.

It’s important to note that “Cerberus made plans to sell its share in the Freedom Group on December 18, 2012, after the Bushmaster AR-15 was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. This decision was made due to a threat by a California state pension board, which owns a stake in the company, to dispose of stakes it holds in any firearms manufacturer that makes weapons banned by California state law.” As of this writing, Cerberus still owns FG.

The founder of Cerberus, billionaire Stephen Feinberg, was described by Israel’s Ha’aretz daily newspaper as “a New York Jew with a golden touch.” In 2006 Cerberus actually purchased the Israeli government’s interest in Bank Leumi, the second largest bank in Israel. Ha’aretz said proceeds from the purchase would go toward “paying off Israel’s high national debt.”

In fact, Cerberus is quite a powerhouse. In a 10-page article in the October 3, 2005 edition of BusinessWeek, the weekly business news magazine launched just weeks before the 1929 stock market crash, and acquired in late 2009 by Bloomberg L.P., which renamed it Bloomberg Businessweek, described Cerberus as “bigger” than such giants as McDonald’s, 3M and Coca-Cola, noting Cerberus controls some 226 Burger King restaurants, the National and Alamo car rental chains, the Formica Corp. and the old Warner Studios (which, though BusinessWeek didn’t say this, had been owned for years by different elements of the Jewish crime syndicate).

Of interest is that two major American political figures are closely associated with Cerberus: ex-Vice President Dan Quayle and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Feinberg’s front man, Quayle is chairman of the board of Cerberus. According to Ha’aretz, Feinberg is a “shy wunderkind” who “makes himself scarce around photographers and sends underlings like Cerberus chair Dan Quayle to sign his deals.”

While defense secretary, Rumsfeld was an investor in Cerberus, well before the U.S. invasion of Iraq (of which Rumsfeld and the pro-Israel lobby were among the foremost advocates)—after which Cerberus profited from setting up military base camps in Iraq.

Another major player in Feinberg’s operations is Jewish wheeler-dealer Michael Steinhardt, one of the first prominent figures in the Wall Street hedge fund racket. Steinhardt has admitted he launched his career with funding from his father, Sol Frank “Red” Steinhardt, New York’s number one “fence” of stolen jewelry, closely associated with Jewish crime syndicate chief Meyer Lansky. Steinhardt said his father gave him envelopes stuffed with $10,000 in cash—something the average American has never seen—implying that his education at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business was funded by his father’s mob lucre.

Known for his devotion to Jewish causes, exemplified by his funding of the hard-line pro-Israel “neoconservative” daily newspaper, The New York Sun, which was founded on April 16, 2002, and ceased publication on September 30, 2008, and is now published only online, Steinhardt has also been a board member and key financial backer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a lobby for the global Jewish agenda. He also chaired the Democratic Leadership Council, in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were prominent, and chairs his own Foundation for Jewish Life as well as Taglit Birthright Israel, funding travel to Israel by young American Jews.

What to make of all of this?

Pro-Israel forces are grabbing control of the gun industry and funding the NRA that is aligned with Israel. And after every gun control “scare” in America—orchestrated by the media monopoly controlled by pro-Israel financial groups—the gun industry makes gigantic profits. All the while, the NRA maintains a massive database on American gun owners.

Is there a secret agenda in play?

One of Israel’s most ubiquitous media advocates, Jennifer Rubin, on February 24, 2013, wrote in her blog in The Washington Post  that “for all intents and purposes, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is now the West’s protector” because Barack Obama won’t wage war on Iran.

Will the NRA rally Americans to pick up arms to wage such a war, urging patriots into supporting another Israeli war of aggression—another step toward the New World Order?

What do you think?

Michael Collins Piper is an author, journalist, lecturer and radio show host. He has spoken in Russia, Malaysia, Iran, Abu Dhabi, Japan, Canada and the U.S.