Belgium: Academic says Israel lobby of controls America and inflicts "unspeakable miseries" on the world

Jean Bricmont

Jean Bricmont teaches physics at the Catholic University of Louvain and is a fellow-member of the prestigious Belgian Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts.  He is obsessed with Israel and is a promoter of conspiracy theories about the "Israel lobby". Like many Europeans he is a passionate defender of Muslims.  In France, some people on the left are horrified by what Bricmont writes and have like journalist Aude Lancelin denounce his support for "extremists, anti-Semites and holocaust-deniers", communist intellectual Danielle Bleitrach and others.  But not the  Belgian elites.

Bricmont wrote an essay for Counterpunch (see Counterpunch: A Neo Nazi Magazine) in 2006 - and nothing has changed since.  In it he advocates the "de-Zionisation" (doesn't this remind you of "de-Nazification?) of the American mind.  No less. Well, so far the American "idiots" have superbly ignored the ravings of an unsufferably arrogant man for whom Americans are Zionized brainwashed fools who have relinquished their self-determination to the benefit of the Lobby.  The article is titled The De-Zionization of the American Mind:

[...]  But the level of hatred that leads a large number of people to applaud an event like September 11 is peculiar to the Middle East. Indeed, the main political significance of September 11 did not derive from the number of people killed or even the spectacular achievement of the attackers, but from the fact that the attack was popular in large parts of the Middle East. That much was understood by Americans leaders and infuriated them. Such a level of hatred calls for explanation.

And there can be only one explanation: United States support for Israel. It is indeed Israel that is the main object of hatred, for reasons we shall describe, but since the United States uncritically supports Israel on almost every issue, constantly praises it as "the only democracy in the Middle East" and provides its main financial backing, the result is a "transfer" of hatred.

Why is Israel so hated? The constant stalling of "peace plans" in favor of more settlements and more war aggravates that hatred, but the basic cause lies in the very principles on which that state is build. There are basically two arguments that have justified establishing the State of Israel in Palestine: one is that God gave that land to the Jews, and the other is the Holocaust. The first one is deeply insulting to people who are profoundly religious, like most Arabs, but of another creed. And, for the second, it amounts to making people pay for a crime that they did not commit. 

Both arguments are deeply racist, with their claim that it is right for Jews, and only Jews, to set up a state in a land that would obviously be Arab, like Jordan or Lebanon, if not for the slow Zionist invasion. [...]

[...]  why isn’t this understood in the United States either? There are traditionally two answers to that: one is that the population is manipulated into supporting Israel by the government, the arms merchants or the oil industry, because Israel is a strategic U.S. ally; the other answer is that the United States is manipulated by the Israel lobby. The idea that Israel is a strategic ally, if by that one means a useful ally (useful to, say, the oil interests, broadly understood), although widely accepted, specially in the Left, does not survive a critical examination. That may have been the case in 1967 or even during the Cold War period, although one could argue that, even then, the Arab states were attracted by the Soviet Union only because it might support them in their struggle against Israel, albeit ineffectively. [...]

Finally, just imagine that the United States would make a 180 turn and suddenly side with the Palestinians [...]

What effect would that have? Can anyone doubt that such a change of policy would facilitate U.S. access to oil fields and help it gain strategic allies (if any were still needed) throughout the Muslim world? In the Middle East, the main charge against the United States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be "manipulated by the Jews". Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including its control over oil. Thus the notion of Israel as "strategic ally" makes no sense.  [...]

The Israel lobby does not work like other lobbies, for example, the arms and the oil industry lobbies (which is one of the reasons why it is easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, as long as one does not understand how it really exerts its influence).  [...]

What protects the Israel lobby is the fact that anyone who would denounce an opponent funded by the Lobby as a quasi-agent of a foreign power would immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, imagine that Big Business is unhappy with the current U.S. policies (as it well may be) and wants to change them–how could they do it? Any criticism of Lobby influence on U.S. policy would immediately trigger the anti-Zionism-is-anti-Semitism accusation.  So the strength of the Israel lobby resides in part in this second line of defense, which itself is linked to its influence on the media. [...]

The problem, and that is why the Israel lobby is so effective, is that it expresses a world view that is accepted too easily by too many Americans. After all, nothing could be more ridiculous than accusing someone of anti-Semitism because he wants or claims to put America’s interests above those of Israel. Yet, the accusation is likely to be effective, but only because years of ideological brainwashing have predisposed people to consider U.S. and Israeli interests as identical — although instead of "interests" one speaks of "values".

Associated with this identification comes a systematically hostile view of the Arab and Muslim world, which both increases the lobby’s effectiveness and is in part the result of its propaganda. Despite all the talk about anti-racism and "political correctness", there is an almost total lack of understanding of the Arab viewpoint on Palestine, and, in particular, of the racist nature of the problem. It is this triple layer of control (selective funding, the anti-Semitism card, or rather canard, and the interiorization) that gives the lobby its peculiar strength. (And that is also why it is easy to dismiss its strength by saying, for instance, that, obviously, Jews don’t control America. Sure, but direct control is not the way it works.)  [...]

Peace in the Middle East can only come when this feeling of Israeli superiority is shattered, and Americans have a great responsibility is doing half of the job, the one concerning kneejerk U.S. support.  [...]

Also, if the United States were to distance itself from Israel, it would pursue policies opposed to the traditional ones, and far more humane. [...]

What is at stake in the de-Zionization of the American mind is not only the fate of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine but also unspeakable miseries for the people of that region and maybe of the rest of the world. The ultimate irony in all this is that the fate of much of the world depends of the American people exercizing their right to self-determination, which, of course, they should.

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