“US President Barack Obama is ‘naïve’ and needs to face up to the threat presented by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, Israel’s National Security Council concluded during a strategic discussion several days ago,” Israel Hayom reported.

The Israeli National Security Council consists of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s closest advisers. And Israel Hayom is not just another right-leaning Israeli tabloid. Referred to by Israelis as the “Bibiton,” or Bibi’s mouthpiece, the paper is an instrument that gives him extraordinary political leverage. The obviously planted article in Israel Hayom rang like a bell sounding the start of Netanyahu’s own campaign in helping the Republican Party oust Obama from the White House.

Israel Hayom’s genesis demonstrates the depth of Netanyahu’s connections in Republican circles. It was created by one of Netanyahu’s top financial supporters, a Las Vegas-based casino tycoon named Sheldon Adelson, who is also a major donor to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Adelson’s closest relationship is with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a longtime ally of Netanyahu who has been running a rancorous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Netanyahu’s less than subtle intervention has become an open issue in Israeli politics. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni of the Kadima Party has criticized Netanyahu for damaging the US-Israeli relationship. “Netanyahu spoke about consensus,” Livni said in May, “and if there is a consensus in Israel, it’s that the relationship with the US is essential to Israel, and a prime minister that harms the relationship with the US over something unsubstantial is harming Israel’s security and deterrence.”

But Livni’s warning has been ignored. Rather than hesitating, the prime minister and his inner circle are moving full steam ahead in their political shadow campaign whose ultimate goal is to remove Obama. Bibi’s war against Obama is unprecedented. While Israeli prime ministers have tried to help incumbent presidents, none have ever waged a full-scale campaign to overthrow them.

Netanyahu has engaged enthusiastic allies in the Republican Congress, led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and within the right-wing media. His neoconservative allies in Washington are launching a “Super PAC” to generate emotional attack ads against Obama and any candidate that might be an obstacle to his policies. And his campaign has even broadened into an attempt to discredit The New York Times, whose editorial page and foreign policy columnists, Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen, have been critical of him.

Netanyahu’s shadow campaign is intended to be a factor in defeating Obama and electing a Republican in his place. He opposed Obama’s early demand to freeze settlements on the West Bank as a precondition for reviving the peace process, a process since the Oslo Accord that Netanyahu has attempted to stall or sabotage, despite his signing of the Wye Agreement under pressure from President Clinton. Since his adamant stand against the settlement freeze, Netanyahu has undermined every effort to engage the peace process. He appears dead set on consolidating Greater Israel, or what many Israelis call “Judea and Samaria,” and has signaled a strong desire to attack Iran.

By all accounts, Netanyahu’s personal chemistry with Obama is toxic. Obama bristles at his belligerence. But Netanyahu’s hostility has reaped rewards from him, having stopped the peace process in its tracks. The latest effort by the Quartet seems doomed to failure. And Netanyahu’s rejectionism has put Obama on the defense. Most of the US Jewish establishment has remained a bulwark for Bibi’s policies. Obama, meanwhile, has been forced to declare America’s “unshakable bond” with Israel, even as Bibi thwarts Obama’s initiatives and attacks him in the Israeli press.

As political strategy, by tainting Obama as less than full-throated in support of Israel, Netanyahu bolsters the Republican themes that the president “apologizes” for US power, is weak on national security, and is an agent of “decline.” By depicting Obama as “weak” on Israel, Netanyahu’s campaign excites right-wing Jews and evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly accept the biblical claims of the Jewish state’s historical right to Greater Israel, Judea and Samaria. Bibi’s deepest attack line against Obama merges theology with ideology.
His campaign against Obama is a high-stakes gambit that will almost certainly color US-Israeli relations well past Election Day. Already, Netanyahu has succeeded in polarizing the political debate, as his agenda is singularly aligned with the Republican Party. Yet Bibi’s short-term objectives are rapidly turning the US-Israel relationship, at least under his aegis, into a partisan issue, another litmus test of conservative ideology rather than national interest.

The personal connection

Netanyahu’s American orientation is partly rooted in his personal history. Raised in suburban Philadelphia, his father, Benzion Netanyahu, was the former press secretary for the godfather of right-wing revisionist Zionism, Zeev Jabotinsky. Benzion Netanyahu (original name: Benzion Mileikowsky) spent his most consequential years in New York raising money for Jabotinsky and the rightist Irgun militia in Palestine. When he returned to Israel to launch a political career, the elder Netanyahu was rejected by Menachem Begin, the Likud Party leader, who, as right wing as he was, considered him dangerously extreme (Arabs are “an enemy by essence,” the elder Netanyahu said recently). But the son triumphed where his father failed, rising at first on his fluency in American political culture, a frequent guest on ABC News’ Nightline and other US broadcast news programs, eventually winning the chairmanship of the Likud Party in 1992.

The following year, Netanyahu published a political manifesto in the form of a memoir, A Durable Peace, edited with a helping hand from American neoconservative Douglas Feith. The book was tailored to the sensibilities of an American audience, particularly one with conservative Republican tendencies. In a revealing passage, Netanyahu warned readers that the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state could lead Latinos to establish a “second Mexico” in the American Southwest: “These [Latinos] would demand not merely equality before the law, or naturalization, or even Spanish as a first language,” he wrote. “Instead they would say that since they form a local majority in the territory [which was forcibly taken from Mexico in the war of 1848], they deserve a state of their own.”
In 1996, when Netanyahu launched an underdog bid for Prime Minister against the grand old man of the Labor Party establishment, Shimon Peres, he contracted the services of Arthur Finkelstein, a reclusive New York-based Republican political consultant. Finkelstein was infamous for orchestrating a come-from-behind victory in 1992 for Jesse Helms, a radical neo-Confederate senator from North Carolina, by race baiting Helms’ black opponent. Finkelstein earned a fortune working for anti-gay candidates like Helms, even while planning to marry his long-term boyfriend.

Netanyahu’s campaign against Peres was defined by Finkelstein’s trademark slashing tactics. Frightening imagery flooded Israeli airwaves. Among Netanyahu’s most successful Finkelstein-crafted attack lines was, “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Even the positive slogans had a negative subtext. “Bibi is good for the Jews,” hinted darkly at the de facto coalition Peres had constructed with Arab-based political parties. Finkelstein’s media assault on Peres, with its suggestion that he and his assassinated predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had stabbed Israel in the back, propelled his client to a narrow victory.

The new Prime Minister relied on a kitchen cabinet of advisers from neoconservative think tanks, especially the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Shalem Center. In 1996, two of these advisers, former Reagan administration Pentagon officials, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, produced a document for Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a once influential base of neocon activity, called “A Clean Break.” The paper advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein and attacking Syria “as a prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East.” (Feith was appointed a Defense Department official in the George W Bush administration and became a fervent defender of the Iraq invasion, leading the effort to fabricate evidence of Saddam Hussein’s operational links with al-Qaeda. General Tommy Frank, who led the invasion, called Feith “the f**king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”)

Backing down to Clinton

President Bill Clinton was, according to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s then-President Steve Grossman, “the most pro-Israeli [president] in America’s history” – and he was committed to fulfilling the Oslo Accords on his watch. He developed an unusually close relationship with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, coming to see him as something of a father figure. When Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Orthodox Jewish extremist, Peres briefly took over, but was soon defeated by Netanyahu. Clinton demanded that Netanyahu begin to withdraw Israeli troops from small portions of land in the occupied West Bank. With pressure mounting, Netanyahu flung himself into the American political wars.

In January 1998, at the beginning of the impeachment scandal, Netanyahu appeared at a rally organized by Reverend Jerry Falwell, a right-wing evangelical Christian icon, who had produced an elaborate conspiracy video accusing Clinton of drug trafficking and complicity in the murder of Vince Foster, his White House deputy legal counsel and old friend, who had, in fact, committed suicide.

Standing beside Falwell before an audience of hundreds of evangelical activists and right-wing Jews, Netanyahu vowed in his signature basso profondo voice never to “divide” Jerusalem, and proclaimed that the “Jewish people” were being “vilified and scorned and misrepresented.” After the rally, Netanyahu shuttled between meetings with conservative pundits and the broadcast studios of Fox News and right-wing Christian TV networks, stirring up his support among America’s most zealous opponents of the peace process.

The most prominent among Netanyahu’s newfound conservative allies was then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an instigator of the impeachment. That April, at a meeting of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, Gingrich condemned Clinton’s attempts to pressure Netanyahu into land-for-peace concessions. “The idea that the President can propose a US map [regarding Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank] for a country he does not know is a disaster,” Gingrich said. Then he complained, “The Clinton administration has not held [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat’s feet to the fire.”

But, by October 1998, Netanyahu had all but caved to Clinton’s pressure. The man who once mocked “advocates of capitulation” now clasped hands with Arafat after a protracted conference at Wye, Maryland. Netanyahu agreed to redeploy Israeli troops from 13 percent of the West Bank, including most of Hebron. His sudden turnabout cost him key support inside Likud, provoking a Knesset vote for early elections. His right-wing base shattered, paving the path for a decisive victory for the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak, a former Israeli general favored and quietly supported by the Clinton administration.

Suddenly in the wilderness, Netanyahu plotted his path back by cultivating the right-wing in the US — the pundits, the Republican politicians, the big donors, Fox News. In 2007, he held a meeting with a small group of conservative activists emerging as key players in the conservative blogosphere. Among those present was Andrew Breitbart, who became a notorious hatchet man staging wild stunts and whose myriad websites routinely carry conspiratorial, racially charged attacks on Obama. Other figures at the meeting included conservative bloggers Scott Johnson, Jim Hoft and Jeff Emmanuel. “At our meeting we talked mostly about the dangers of the Iranian regime acquiring a nuclear bomb,” Johnson recalled, revealing his newly acquired foreign policy expertise. “It was a subject to which Netanyahu had obviously devoted great thought.”

Two years later, Netanyahu returned to the Prime Minister’s office at the head of an even more decidedly right-wing coalition than before government and was determined not to repeat his previous mistakes of “capitulating” to the peace process at the behest of an American president. Now he turned to the movement he had courted to help him undermine and humiliate Obama.

Humiliating Obama

In March 2010, when Obama dispatched Vice President Joseph Biden to Israel in a futile attempt to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu appeared in Jerusalem at a massive rally of 1,000 evangelicals organized by Texas mega-church Pastor John Hagee, a leading Christian Zionist and sometime Holocaust revisionist whose End Times theology committed him to the vision of Greater Israel. Seated onstage beside Netanyahu was Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren (a neoconservative former Shalem Center fellow), and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who had just snubbed a visiting delegation of leading Democratic members of Congress. Before the rapture-ready audience, Netanyahu proclaimed that Jerusalem would remain “the undivided, eternal capital of the Jewish people.”

At once, he authorized the construction of 1,600 new settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem over the stringent objections from the Obama administration. Though the move angered the White House, Ron Dermer, a top Netanyahu aide with close ties to leading Republicans in Washington, reassured the Prime Minister that Republicans would retake Congress. Netanyahu simply rejected Obama’s plea to freeze settlements and then rejected overtures to restart the peace process. In the 2010 mid-term elections, Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives.

While on a trip to New York days after the Republican victory, Netanyahu authorized another 1,000 more settlement units in East Jerusalem, a direct rebuke of Obama. That same day, Netanyahu held a meeting with the incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, and a leader of the right-wing in the House Republican Conference. Cantor’s office produced a summary of the meeting for the media that contained the remarkably crude statement: Cantor promised Netanyahu that “the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the [Obama] Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington.”

In April 2011, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner personally invited Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress. He was interrupted 36 times by standing ovations – more than Obama during his State of the Union address – despite making such mind-boggling false claims as that the “vast majority” of Israeli settlers live in “neighborhoods in Jerusalem and greater Tel Aviv.”

With a rancorous, multi-billion dollar US presidential campaign certainly looming on the horizon, Netanyahu continued his pattern of making friends in the radical right’s media machine. Among them was Glenn Beck, a Mormon convert and former Fox News host, who had compared a major liberal Jewish religious denomination to radical Islamists and claimed that Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Beck was admonished by the Anti-Defamation League and other mainstream Jewish groups for his anti-Semitic rants against George Soros, a major funder of liberal and Democratic Party-related organizations. In July 2011, Beck traveled to Israel to deliver a diatribe against liberal Israelis demonstrating against Netanyahu’s economic policies, labeling them patsies in a secret Islamist-Communist plot.

When the right-wing Zionist Organization of America honored Beck this November with a prize named after Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, Netanyahu displayed his gratitude in a videotaped tribute. “Glenn, you can be sure that if Sheldon and Miri Adelson put their name to something, it must stand for a lot. You stand for a lot…And I want to tell you how deeply we appreciate this stand of courage and integrity.”

Dear Sasha

In December, Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning former Jerusalem Bureau Chief for The New York Times and one of the few American columnists whose opinions seriously register in the Israeli media, published an uncharacteristically pointed critique of Netanyahu’s leadership. In Friedman’s column were two lines that incited the wrath and fury of the Prime Minister’s office. “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

Neoconservative opinion makers exploded with orchestrated rage accusing Friedman of being a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite. In response, The New York Times gave Netanyahu an opportunity to respond on its opinion page.

But rather than accept the Times’ offer, Netanyahu dispatched Ron Dermer, his key emissary to the American political scene, especially to the conservative movement, now serving as a senior advisor on his staff, to issue what amounted to a declaration of war against the American newspaper of record. Dermer’s letter was extraordinary in its vitriolic, hostile and contemptuous tone. Nothing like it had ever existed before — a vicious official attack from the Prime Minister of Israel on the credibility of The New York Times. Perhaps only a little less surprising was that this major event received nearly no coverage in the American press.

In his scathing letter, Dermer accused the Times of “cavalierly defam[ing] our country,” claiming that 19 out of 20 op-eds published in the Times were “negative” (Dermer did not challenge their factual basis). He concluded, “it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in The New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel.”

One of the remarkable aspects of Dermer’s letter was that it was addressed, “Dear Sasha.” Who is Sasha? Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a staff editor at the Times editorial page, is in charge of assigning pieces on foreign policy. Why did Dermer address his letter to Polakow-Suransky instead of to Andrew Rosenthal, the director of the Times editorial page? Was he singling out Polakow-Suransky because he revealed in his 2010 book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa, that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa’s apartheid government, a bombshell revelation that prompted furious denials from Israeli President Shimon Peres and Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, embarrassing a country that still refuses to discuss its nuclear program in any public forums, and punishes those who do?

Netanyahu’s attack on the Times represented a significant new stage in his shadow war. He was drawing sharp new lines. By rebuking the paper, Netanyahu attempted to define its liberal Zionist, pro-peace process editorial line as hostile to Israeli security needs. And by default, he positioned Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, with its relentlessly anti-Obama, pro-Bibi op-ed page, as the only respectable forum for true friends of Israel.

Bibi’s man in Washington

More than any other candidate in the Republican presidential contest, Newt Gingrich has hewed to Netanyahu’s line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an interview with the cable TV Jewish Channel, Gingrich declared, “We’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab community and they had a chance to go many places.” He added, “I see myself as, in many ways, to be pretty close to Bibi Netanyahu in thinking about the dangers of the world.”

In May 2010, when Gingrich’s presidential campaign was no more than the subject of guarded speculation, Israel Hayom, Bibi’s house organ, provided Gingrich with a Hebrew-language forum to assail Obama’s policies. The tabloid splashed a full page photo of a smiling Gingrich on its front page accompanied by the caption: “The former Chairman of the House of Representatives attacks the blindness of the Western Elites: ‘Evading the confrontation with Evil may bring a second Holocaust, the mistakes made by the White House will exact a terrible price.’”

Israel Hayom’s owner, Las Vegas Sands casino corporation chairman Sheldon Adelson, is America’s eighth wealthiest man. At the same time he was bankrolling Netanyahu’s career, Adelson also became Gingrich’s leading financial angel. The casino kingpin was introduced to Gingrich in 1996 through George Harris, a right-wing anti-tax activist and Clark County, Nevada Republican chairman who helped Adelson block a unionization bid at one of his casinos. Gingrich resigned from Congress in disgrace in 1999, forced out by Republicans, hiding his extramarital affair with a congressional staffer. Adelson stepped in as his financial godfather, pumping millions into the coffers of American Solutions for Winning the Future, an independent political committee that covered Gingrich’s extravagant travel expenses.

When Gingrich embarked on the presidential trail, George Harris became his campaign finance co-chair, representing Adelson by proxy. (Adelson’s Sands corporation is currently facing a federal criminal probe for allegedly bribing foreign officials). And when Gingrich provoked a hailstorm of criticism for claiming the Palestinians were “invented,” Adelson publicly defended him. “Read the history of those who call themselves Palestinians, and you will hear why [Newt] Gingrich said recently that the Palestinians are an invented people,” Adelson told a group of American Jews visiting Israel on a program he funds, Taglit-Birthright Israel.

Despite Gingrich’s dismal finish in the Iowa caucuses, the opening contest in the Republican contest, Adelson has staunchly remained on his side, donating US$5 million to a Super PAC created to support Gingrich’s campaign in the key primary state of South Carolina, his Armageddon.

Bibi’s Super PAC

When Gingrich quits the race, Netanyahu will not be without a candidate. He can count on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to carry the neoconservative banner all the way to Election Day. Of Romney’s 22 campaign foreign policy advisers, 15 worked in the administration of George W Bush, and six were original members of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative group that called for regime change in Iraq.

Romney’s own Super PAC, Restore Our Future, credited with destroying Gingrich’s hopes in Iowa through a relentless barrage of negative ads, is financed in part by Mel Sembler, a Florida-based a multi-millionaire shopping mall developer and veteran Republican fundraiser, appointed the US ambassador to Italy by President George W Bush. Sembler was mired in scandal when the federal government revoked the license of a chain of adolescent treatment centers he founded after former teenage patients complained they were sexually abused, psychologically tortured and humiliated during sadistic behavior modification programs. Less well known is the financial largesse Sembler has bestowed on neoconservative outfits supporting Netanyahu’s policies. He is also a close friend of Adelson.

In November 2011, President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy commiserated about Netanyahu, unaware that their voices were picked up by a live microphone. “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama complained to Sarkozy. Romney seized on the episode as proof of Obama’s disqualifying leadership and proof of his own fitness for office. “We have here yet another reason why we need new leadership in the White House,” Romney declared. (Joining the chorus of pro-Bibi attacks on Obama were the Netanyahu-approved bloggers Breitbart, Hoft, and Johnson).

In ramping up the effort to turn Israel into an anti-Obama wedge issue, a group of neoconservative Netanyahu allies have started a independent political committee called the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI). The group’s name was inspired by the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, an organization that Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, helped lead during World War II in part to raise money for the right-wing Irgun militia in Palestine. The group’s board comprises a Who’s Who of Washington neoconservatives. It is directed by Noah Pollak, a former assistant editor of Azure, the in-house journal of the Adelson-funded Shalem Center, several of whose fellows are now in Netanyahu’s inner circle of advisers. Pollak was credited with helping the Israeli army launch a YouTube channel to rebut accusations that it committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.

This month, the ECI established a Super PAC in order to use unlimited corporate contributions for political attack ads. The group’s first major presidential campaign ad buy targeted Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), a fervently anti-war libertarian candidate who has called for an end to the special relationship between Israel and the United States. Scheduled to air in the key primary state of South Carolina, where the Republican electorate is dominated by right-wing evangelicals, the ad features Gary Bauer, an ECI board member, Christian right leader and failed presidential candidate staring into the camera, warning that “Ron Paul’s conservatism is isolationist and conspiratorial.” (Bauer endorsed former Senator Rick Santorum, a right-wing Catholic, who has declared, “All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis. They are not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian. This is Israeli land.”)

Jewish concerns

While Obama and the Democratic Party elite have kept silent in the face of Netanyahu’s American shadow war, its polarizing effects have prompted resistance from an unexpected place: the Jewish-American establishment. Weeks of Republican attacks on Obama for his supposed molly-coddling of Israel enemies caused deep discomfort in the offices of mainstream Jewish groups, which have lobbied for decades to consolidate support for Israel in both major American political parties. With Israel deliberately being shaped into a campaign wedge issue, some Jewish leaders worried that rank-and-file Democratic voters would begin to sour on the US-Israel special relationship.

In October, two of the US’s oldest and most prominent Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, released a “National Pledge for Unity” urging politicians, religious leaders and other Jewish groups aimed at preserving bipartisan support for Israel. “We want the discourse on US support for Israel to avoid the sometimes polarizing debates and political attacks that have emerged in recent weeks, as candidates have challenged their opponents’ pro-Israel bone fides or questioned the current administration’s foreign policy approach vis-a-vis Israel,” declared Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. “The last thing America and Israel need right now is the distractions of having Israel bandied about as a tool for waging political attacks.”

The Emergency Committee for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition, an Adelson-funded, pro-Netanyahu group that claims to raise “tens of millions” of dollars for Republican candidates each election cycle, not only rejected the unity pledge, but accused its authors of attempting to suppress pro-Israel activism. In a defiant statement by its chairman, neoconservative activist William Kristol, the ECI proclaimed, “This attempt to silence those of us who have ‘questioned the current administration’s foreign policy approach vis-a-vis Israel’ will re-energize us.” Thus the show went on. The effort to lower the temperature only became another occasion for the pro-Netanyahu operation to raise the heat. As their anti-Obama campaign intensifies, Israel is being merged seamlessly with traditional right-wing wedge issues such as abortion, gay marriage and the menace of immigration.

The deepening wedge

In his writings and in the company of his inner circle, Netanyahu has expressed almost as much disdain for liberal Jewish supporters of Israel as he has for the professed enemies of the Jewish state. His book, A Durable Peace, is filled with attacks on Israeli advocates of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, accusing them of “cloying sentimentalism” and falling victim to the “relentless Jewish desire to see an end to struggle.” Netanyahu was said to privately fume about Obama’s Jewish senior advisor, David Axelrod, and his then-Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, an ardent liberal Zionist whose father was born and raised in Israel. Netanyahu reportedly called them “self-hating Jews.”

After two decades of cultivating the culture warriors of the American right as allies against those seeking “an end to struggle,” Netanyahu is beginning to see results. He initiated and propelled a polarization process that has enabled Republicans to use Israel as a cudgel for attacking their opponents, and did so over the objections of powerful mainstream Jewish-American interests. Haim Malka, a senior fellow for the center-right Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, predicted in a recent paper: “The partisan wedge is likely to deepen, posing considerable challenges to Israel and the US-Israeli partnership.”

In the past, America’s Israel lobby sold the US-Israel alliance as a marriage of two vibrant democracies united by shared liberal values. In the current environment of heightened polarization, the special relationship is increasingly marketed to Americans as a united front of besieged bastions of Western civilization against an incipient Islamic onslaught. Rapture ready evangelicals, right-wing ultra-nationalists, and Republican Jews are far more likely to be attracted to this sort of alliance than cosmopolitan liberals. And this may be exactly the way Netanyahu wants it.

But he is far from confident that he can dislodge Obama. Steeling himself for a possible second Obama term, Netanyahu has signaled his intention to move up the date of Israel’s national election. Hanan Krystal, a political analyst for Israel Radio, explained Netanyahu’s possible motives to Reuters: “At the highest echelons, they have long been saying that if Obama is elected for a second term, the carrot will be replaced by a stick.”

Update #1: Perry repeated his mis-citation of Fehrenbach in the Wall Street Journal today.

Update #2: A friend wonders if Doug Feith, who is now advising Perry on foreign policy, was the one who slipped Fehrenbach’s quote in.

Yesterday, Republican presidential candidate and current Texas Governor Rick Perry attacked President Barack Obama and the Palestinian UN statehood bid in a foreign newspaper, the Jerusalem Post. Perry devoted most of the editorial to assailing Obama as anti-Israel. But buried in the op-ed, in a line intended to highlight the shared values of Texas and Israel, Perry quoted the historian T.R. Fehrenbach. “Historian T.R. Fehrenbach once observed that my home state of Texas and Israel share the experience of ‘civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies,’” Perry wrote.

Fehrenbach published an authoritative book on the ethnic cleansing of the Comanche Indians by the Anglo settlers of Texas. He wrote with deep sympathy for the indigenous population, and though he expressed a strong identification with Texan culture, he was harshly critical of the settlers’ cruely toward the native population. Perry’s quoting of Fehrenbach seemed curious, so I opened up my copy of Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans” to see if he cited the historian accurately. When I found the passage Perry had pulled from, my suspicions were realized: Perry (or more likely some half-wit speechwriter) had distorted Fehrenbach’s original text and taken it wildly out of context.

The full passage Perry quoted from is on page 257 of Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star:”

The Texan’s attitudes, his inherent chauvinism and the seeds of his belligerence, sprouted from his conscious effort to take and hold his land. It was the reaction of essentially civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies they despised. The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land.

Fehrenbach would have agreed with Perry that Texas shared values with Israel. But unlike Perry, he thought that those values were all the wrong ones: hatred of the other, a reliance on violence to seize land, and a legacy of ethnic cleansing. According to Fehrenbach, what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1947 and ‘48 — and continues to do — is analogous to the Texans’ treatment of the Comanches and Mexicans during the 19th century. The comparison highlights Israel’s distinction as the world’s last settler-colonial state; a country based on an anachronistic system of ethnic exclusivism. It is hard to imagine that Perry would have scored any political points by quoting Fehrenbach accurately. So instead, in the name of his presidential ambitions, he distorted and abused the writing of one of the Lone Star state’s most celebrated historians.

The following was originally published in Alternet.

The sudden rise of Islamophobia in the United States is alarming while the movement that advances anti-Muslim resentment seems bizarre and filled with eccentric, even dangerous characters. But when viewed in the context of a new, groundbreaking research document by the Center for American Progress and an obscure, decades-old political memorandum by a long-forgotten former Supreme Court Justice, the Islamophobic crusade raging across the country appears perfectly in line with longstanding goals and methods of conservative organizing, and is aimed at much more than demonizing Muslims.

In 1971, former US Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell submitted a confidential memorandum to his friend, Eugene Sydnor, the chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce, an umbrella group representing American big business. Powell, who was serving on the boards of 11 corporations at the time, warned that America was suffering from a surplus of democratic freedom thanks to the legacy of the New Left and the countercultural revolt of the 1960’s. He declared, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” Powell warned that “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries” were joining forces with “perfectly respectable elements of society from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” to bring down American capitalism.

To roll back the surge of democracy that supposedly threatened corporate predominance, Powell urged the Chamber of Commerce to finance the creation of a new political and cultural infrastructure — a “counter-establishment” capable of unraveling the liberal establishment. The infrastructure would consist of pseudo-scholarly journals, “experts” promoted through speakers bureaus, campus pressure groups, publishing houses, lobbyists and partisan idea factories masquerading as think tanks. He wrote that operatives of the network would have to affect a “more aggressive attitude,” leveling relentless personal attacks against the perceived enemies of big business. By the last days of the Nixon administration, Attorney General John Mitchell was boasting that his conservative friends were going to take the country “so far to the right we won’t recognize it.”

Though still obscure, the Powell’ memo is one of the most important documents in recent American history. It was a blueprint for the creation of the American conservative movement, a political contingent that now controls the Republican Party and influences mainstream American opinion in ways Powell could have never imagined. Powell’s vision came to life during the late 1970’s, when neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol and former Treasury Secretary William Simon gathered together a small group of business tycoons concerned willing to lay down millions in seed money necessary to raise up a network of conservative think tanks, talking heads, and magazines capable of flooding the media with right-wing opinions, capturing the courts and taking control of Congress. Chief among the right-wing sugardaddies was Richard Mellon Scaife, a reclusive billionaire from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who controlled much of the Mellon oil fortune.

Through his various foundations, Mellon Scaife helped finance the creation of the pillars of the conservative movement, from the Federalist Society, which spearheaded the right’s takeover of the federal court system, to the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that functions as the outsourced brain of the congressional Republicans, to the Media Research Center, a right-wing watchdog group that has helped manufacture the concept of “liberal media bias.” The Tea Party, a far-right constellation of pressure groups bankrolled by extraction industry barons like the Koch Brothers, is the latest incarnation of the corporate funded conservative counter-establishment.

Scaife’s name turned up again this month in connection with a familiar cabal of right-wing corporate moneymen financing a small and relatively new political network determined to promote Islamophobia throughout America. According to an authoritative 130-page report by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank based in Washington, Scaife and other conservative sugardaddies have pumped $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 into the Islamophobic network. Most of the money has gone to five figures known for bigoted, extremist views on Muslims, Arabs, and people of color. They are: Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative academic who urged Israel to employ methods of terrorism against Palestinian civilians and “raze Palestinian villages;” Frank Gaffney, a rightist national security wonk who has called the practice of Shariah a form of “sedition;” Robert Spencer, a writer and activist who has said that “everyone knows” most or all terrorists are Muslims; Stephen Emerson, a self-styled terror “expert” who blamed Muslims for the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, which turned out to have been conducted by a right-wing white nationalist terrorist; and David Yerushalmi, a far-right legal activist who has argued that whites are genetically superior to people of color. Behind these figures lies a cadre of equally vitriolic activists like Pamela Geller and Brigitte Gabriel who hype their work. (Read more about the Islamophobic network in my piece, “The Great Fear.”

The Islamophobic network has injected its paranoid vision of a Muslim plot to takeover the United States into the mainstream through the established conservative political apparatus, spreading anti-Muslim hysteria through right-wing radio and heavily trafficked websites like Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace, which boasts Gaffney as a key contributor. This year’s Republican presidential primary campaign became a platform for Islamophobic conspiracy theories and attacks on Muslim-Americans in general, with candidates suggesting on national television that they might demand loyalty oaths for Muslims who want to serve in the federal government. But the Islamophobic crusade has had practical consequences as well. Mosque burnings are becoming a commonplace phenomenon and anti-Muslim attitudes have reached an all-time high among Americans; The most extreme byproduct of Islamophobic campaigning was, of course, the recent terrorist rampage by the Norwegian right-wing activist Anders Behring Breivik, who quoted Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and other Islamophobic ideologues scores of times in his manifesto.

While the anti-Muslim crusaders are fairly new to most observers of American politics, they are no more than cogs in a well-honed conservative political operation that functions in the top-down style that Powell envisioned. And like Powell, behind their empty rhetoric of freedom lies a deep seated contempt for democracy. The words of Yerushalmi, the extremist legal activist, expose the real sensibility and goals of his movement: “While our constitutional republic was specifically designed to insulate our national leaders from the masses, democracy has seeped up through the cracks and corroded everything we once deemed sacred about our political order,” Yerushalmi wrote. “Prior to the Civil War, the electorate, essentially white Christian men, had access to local government. It was here, where men shared an intimacy born of family ties, shared religious beliefs, and common cultural signposts, that representative government was meant to touch our daily lives. With the social and cultural revolution which followed the emancipation, man’s relationship to political order was radically nationalized and democratized. Today, there is simply no basis to resist ‘democracy’ and the ‘open society.’”

The cadre of bigots bankrolled by corporate barons to stir fears of Islam may be focused on stigmatizing Muslims, but they are only a part of a much broader movement whose ultimate target is democracy itself.

Avowed Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee is a natural ally of the Bibi-Barak-Lieberman government

Mike Huckabee was in Jerusalem today on an important junket related to his likely presidential campaign. He used his speech before the Knesset to denounce the Egyptian uprising as a threat to all humankind, warning that “the situation could threaten the world and all those who seek peace and security. The real threat to Israelis is not the bomb but the people behind it, not weapons but the madmen behind them.”

Bibi has essentially muzzled his cabinet ministers, warning them not to make any public statements about the uprising. It is not easy for so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” to say that it wants to keep it that way. So Huckabee was left with a golden opportunity to channel the sentiments of the Israeli government and mainstream Israeli society in an address carried to the Israel public as a top story on radio and TV news (I listened to the speech on Israeli national radio today while riding a minibus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem).

Huckabee’s speech earned praise from Yisrael Beiteinu’s Yulia Shamalov-Berkowitz, who said Huckabee spoke “very Zionistically.” MK Tzipi Hotovely from the governing Likud party echoed Huckabee, declaring that ”the conflict in this region is not a matter of territory, but simply Islam against Judaism, not 1967 borders but the very formation of the state in 1948.”

The language of religious warfare is not exclusive to the Zionist right. MK Binyamin Ben Eliezer, a leader of the shrinking and essentially moribund Labor Party, warned that the Egyptian uprising signals the beginning of renewed conflict. “There will be a new order in the Middle East,” he said recently, noting that he has been in discussions with Mubarak. “It will become more extreme, militant and radical towards Israel from an Islamic point of view. The conclusion that we will draw is that we did not take advantage of the potential for agreements when the Middle East was more moderate.”

Given the statements of Bibi-Barak-Lieberman proxies and supporters like Huckabee, it is not hard to predict Israel’s behavior after Mubarak finally capitulates. The Israeli military-intelligence apparatus and its public relations ancillary are almost certainly crafting a tentative plan to destabilize their neighbor, or simply touching up a dusty, well-worn blueprint. They know that if Zionism is to persevere in the heart of the Middle East, and to continue to besiege and colonize Arabs — Huckabee also called for more settlement building in the West Bank — the political aspirations of Egypt’s people must be crushed, again and again.

Huckabee’s visit marks the opening of what would be the first element of any plan to destabilize Egypt: a rhetorical campaign carried out by sympathetic media and political figures (the American right-wing, heavily influenced by Christian Zionist theology, is a natural ally) to delegitimize whatever comes after Mubarak as a radical Islamist regime that not only threatens Israel, but the Western world as well.

How did a racist, conspiratorial crank become the GOP's anti-Obama point man?

These are good times for Jerome Corsi. Already notorious for his factually challenged book-length takedown of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Unfit For Command, the 61-year-old Corsi has another hit on his hands. His new book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality has made Corsi a hot commodity again on the right-wing radio circuit, the bane of the Obama campaign and catapulted to the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list. With his newfound notoriety, Corsi has brought his pathographic anti-Obama narrative to hundreds of thousands of readers–and millions on radio and TV–just as he did with Kerry. Corsi has become the court bard of the conservative movement. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Corsi told the New York Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Corsi’s success represents the apotheosis of a long, strange trip from the furthest shores of the right into the national spotlight. During George W. Bush’s first term, Corsi was a little-known financial services marketing specialist. In 1995, according to the Boston Globe, he coaxed twenty people into a shadowy investment venture in Poland that ultimately lost them a total of $1.2 million. “It ruined my career in the brokerage business, and it was a sad story for a lot of people,” said Bradley Amundson, one of those enlisted into Corsi’s bungled scheme. The FBI opened an investigation but never filed any charges.

Corsi had dabbled off-and-on the fringes of conservative backlash politics for nearly three decades. In his spare time, which he appeared to have lots of, Corsi busied himself at his computer, firing off opinions on the far-right website Free Republic, marked by their sexual and racial obsessions.

In a comment typical of the dozens he posted under the handle “jrlc,” Corsi wrote, “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” In another, he ranted, “Isn’t the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA–oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon’s [sic] first act in office was to promote ‘gays in the military.’ RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters–it all goes together.”

Then he composed Unfit For Command, suddenly vaulting into best-sellerdom. Surrounded by the media buzz of talk radio and Fox News, Corsi no longer plied the seamy troll-zones of the right-wing blogosphere. Overnight, he had become a conservative folk hero. But as Bush’s popularity waned during his second term, Corsi’s star dimmed. He tried to reignite it by co-authoring a book with “prophecy expert” Michael Evans, Showdown with Nuclear Iran, calling on the United States and Israel to attack Iran “before it’s too late,” and another, Black Gold Stranglehold, claiming to expose the Big Lie that will “enslave” Americans: “the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource.” Corsi’s conspiracy theories consolidated his cult status, but he did not revive the brightness of his Swiftboating campaign. As another presidential election approached, however, Corsi followed his well-trod path back to renown.

In early 2007, Corsi huddled with an old friend, Howard Phillips, a veteran conservative operative who had attempted to organize the anti-government militia movement into a cohesive political bloc during the 1990s. Corsi emerged from their discussion convinced of his destiny. He would declare his campaign for the presidential nomination of the ultra-right Constitution Party, enthusiastically embrace the party’s call for a complete halt on immigration, banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and upholding its official platform that the “US Constitution established a Republic under God, rather than a democracy.” With this momentous announcement, Corsi hoped to cast himself as the last, best hope to save America from the godless, globalist duocracy conspiring to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada into a “North American Union.” (His latest flop, published in 2007, was a screed entitled, The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.)

In July 2007, Corsi spoke before the Texas Constitution Party. At the time, he remained focused on foiling the ambitions of Hillary and Bill Clinton. “I don’t want Bill Clinton anywhere near the White House,” Corsi proclaimed. “We had enough serial rape going on when he was president.” But Corsi didn’t want a Republican in the White House either, especially not Senator John McCain. The war-scarred McCain, Corsi wrote in a column for the far-right webzine WorldNetDaily, is a possible jihadist dupe who “has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs…a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda.” Even George W. Bush was now treasonous. “Bush,” he told the Texas Constitution Party, “is post-America and post-God,” a figure so indebted to foreign interests that he had allowed “communist China” to “run its gunboats up the Mississippi.” In Corsi’s mind, both parties were fronts for the money-masters, the Trilateralists, the plotters of Bohemian Grove–the “elitists who want to destroy the nation-state.”

“They don’t want to offend anybody. They don’t want to offend Mexico. They don’t want to offend God,” he railed, accidentally inverting what he meant to say. “They take God out of my money. I think we ought to offend Mexico! I think we ought to offend the sexual abusers! I think we ought to respect God.”

Corsi’s audience went wild with applause, cheering almost as loudly as they did when he recounted a self-congratulatory tale of hanging up on a telemarketer because he was from India. Despite the mounting enthusiasm for his candidacy, Corsi unaccountably withdrew from the race just days after his Texas address. He promptly endorsed Chuck Baldwin, a theocratic Baptist pastor who had left the Republican Party in 2000 to protest what he viewed as Bush’s extreme liberalism. Bush, according to Baldwin, was “in bed with homosexuals” (or “sodomites” as he likes to call them) and had gone soft on abortion providers, whom Baldwin believed should be marched en masse to the gallows.

“Chuck [Baldwin], I know personally. He’s a man of God,” Corsi told the Constitution Party’s national convention in May. “He believes in the Constitution and he believes in the United States of America.”

Baldwin also believes that “moneychangers” of a certain Chosen People are “Destroying America–and Christians Don’t See It.” That is the title of a commentary he wrote in February of 2008. In it, he wrote: “The moneychangers of Jesus’ day were the equivalent of the international bankers of our day. With the consent and approbation of the Jewish leaders, these bankers set up shop in the Temple. Their purpose was to exchange whatever currency the Jewish worshipper brought with him or her into Jewish currency, which would then be used to purchase whatever sacrifice the worshipper required.” For proof, Baldwin cited the investigations of his associate, “Dr. Jerry Corsi,” who had bravely “exposed the moneychangers who are the driving force behind the burgeoning North American Union.”

Backed by Corsi, Baldwin seized the Constitution Party’s nomination this May. Then he unfurled a bold new agenda, calling for “an independent investigative committee to analyze” whether the attacks of 9/11 were an inside government job. Corsi, for his part, shared Baldwin’s skepticism. “The government’s explanation of the jet fuel fire is not a sufficient explanation,” Corsi said in January on the radio show hosted by Alex Jones, a fellow Baldwin supporter who promotes himself as “the grandfather of what has come to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.”

“With people like you starting to question 9/11 with the science,” Jones marveled, “boy that’s really gonna…”

“That’s what rattles the cage,” said Corsi in a self-satisfied tone.

In late 2007, with Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Corsi gleaned a new opportunity to “rattle the cage.” He punched out a proposal for an anti-Obama attack book,Obama Nation, and floated it to right-wing publishers. Mary Matalin, the longtime Republican consultant and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was hunting for titles for her two-year-old publishing imprint, Threshold, a conservative division of Simon and Schuster. When Corsi’s proposal landed on her desk, she was thrilled.

Matalin promptly signed Corsi to a lucrative deal, positioning Obama Nation as Threshold’s premier release of the summer season. In anticipation of heavy sales, Matalin ordered the printing of 475,000 copies. When the book was released in early August, conservative foundations and think tanks ensured its early success with a massive bulk buy, propelling it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Like Unfit For Command, which wrongly claimed that Kerry had falsified combat reports in order to earn medals in Vietnam, Obama Nation was larded with crackpot smears cobbled together from assorted right-wing blog posts. Corsi asserted, for example, that Obama had “extensive connections to Islam,” that he may have snorted cocaine in the Senate, and that he has staffed his campaign with card-carrying communists (including the former youth politics reporter at The Nation, Sam Graham-Felsen, an official Obama blogger and self-described progressive Democrat).

But even as Media Matters for America documented an extensive litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations in Obama Nation, and a nearly unanimous chorus of reviewers panned the book–”poisonous crap,” according to Time columnist Joe Klein–the Obama campaign could not afford to repeat Kerry’s fatal mistake of ignoring Corsi and leaving the debunking to the press. On August 14, the Obama campaign released a forty-one-page “investigative report on the lies in Jerome Corsi’s Obama Nation, entitled, Unfit For Publication. While the booklet systematically undermined the credibility of Corsi’s writing, it also underlined the pivotal role Corsi played in the Republican attack machine.

Thrown on the defensive by the revelation of Corsi’s myriad factual errors, Matalin rushed to her author’s defense. Obama Nation, she told the New York Times, “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be a political book. Instead, it is “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” Following Matalin’s lead, the conservative movement rallied to Corsi’s side. Rush Limbaugh hailedObama Nation as a “pretty damn good” book; Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted Corsi twice on his top-rated Hannity and Colmes, asking him during his second appearance whether Obama was ever a drug dealer. Meanwhile, the National Review’s Mark Levin assailed the media for “wanting to know about anything [Corsi] has ever said or written and his associations.” Even John McCain refused to condemn Corsi’s work. When asked by a reporter about Obama Nation, McCain responded simply, “Gotta keep your sense of humor.”

Though the conservative movement’s most influential media personalities are clamoring for interviews, Corsi still found time to visit the fringe figures that had promoted his conspiratorial tracts during his lean years between campaigns. On August 4, Corsi reunited with Alex Jones, the 9/11 “Truther,” to claim that Obama “really” was a Muslim. “We should not have anybody as president who–both their parents aren’t Americans,” Jones barked. “Bottom line, that’s always been the way it is.” Two weeks later, Corsi scheduled a spot on something called “James Edwards’ Political Cesspool,” a show he had already appeared on in July.

Who is James Edwards? A 28-year-old self-described “white nationalist,” he has leveraged sponsorship from neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial groups to become America’s most popular white supremacist radio host. On his website, Edwards has boasted of his friendship with neo-Nazi activist David Duke, and written “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to” African-Americans. He also warned “Hollywood promotes white genocide.” For Edwards, Corsi’s anti-Obama attacks were only a slight detour from the racialist ranting his show usually entertains.

However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters reported on Corsi’s planned appearance on Edwards’ show, Corsi quietly withdrew, claiming through his publicist that “travel plans have changed.” Bigger venues, in any case, await him. Once again, he’s a star–the crank acclaimed by conservatives as the greatest investigative journalist of the day.