For those of you who may not know, I have been tapped by an Iranian media outlet to answer a series of questions around the Arab-Israel conflict and have agreed to do so. These are the final questions and then I am done with this particular exercise:
6- Do you think that Wall Street is the main site of them (Zionists)?
7- “U.S foreign policy” : What is your assessment?
8- America's foreign policy towards Iran: What is your assessment?Most of these questions contain the same presumption, i.e., that Jewish people have an inordinate influence in public and political life within the United States, thus my answers to all of these questions reflect the fact that the questions, themselves, suggest the kind of Nazi-era and traditional anti-Jewish racism that leads to violence toward us.
The whole notion that "Zionists" (i.e., Jews) have an outsized and corrupting influence within their countries of residence is the central theme of the kind anti-Jewish racism that resulted in my family being lined up and shot in ditches in the Ukraine. It was obviously one of the driving themes of Nazi Germany and it is one of the driving themes of contemporary Imperial Islam and western progressive anti-Zionism.
As for U.S. foreign policy, the biggest mistake (if mistake, it was) that the Obama administration made was in promoting the rise of radical Islam under the delusion that radical Islam has moderate segments, like the Muslim Brotherhood, that can be messaged and influenced toward western interests, if not values.
The Obama administration is the first American administration to seriously attempt any such project and it has done so without in any way alerting the American public of its actual policies or intentions. Jimmy Carter was weak in his response to the theocratic Iranian Revolution of 1979, but I am not so familiar with the foreign policy of that administration that I would ever claim that it positively aided and abetted the rise of political Islam within the Middle East. The same cannot be said of the Obama administration. The key is Obama's famous (or infamous) Cairo speech in which he, in effect, promised the Muslim Brotherhood, and political Islam, more generally, a new American foreign policy more in keeping with their interests. Thus, of course, Mubarak had to go and Obama came before the world community at the United Nations and bragged about the U.S. - Islamist alliance under the transparent guise of "Arab Spring" and faux-democracy.
He did not, obviously, put it in such terms. He merely suggested that the United States supported the Arab revolutions and (lo and behold) the Arab revolutions just happened to be Islamist in nature.
The Obama administration, thus, promoted the rise of political Islam under the veil of "democracy."
The western left, including the Obama administration, hailed the "Arab Spring" as a great democratic movement, but that was never the case and now we are seeing the fruits of this delusion as almost the entire Middle East goes down in flames, with Arabs killing Arabs in the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands, and as Islamists fight Islamists in the Syrian streets.
One of the obvious fundamental tensions within the Middle East is between Shia and Sunni and between Cairo and Riyadh versus Teheran. It is not only Israel and the United States that does not wish to see Iran gain nuclear weaponry, but neither does Egypt or Saudi Arabia. It should be U.S. foreign policy to prevent any such possibility, but that is unlikely under this weak American administration. Thus there is a very distinct possibility that Israel will do the dirty work of the west and of the Sunnis by taking out the Iranian nuclear project, if it is able.
When Israel does so (if it does so) the Jews of the Middle East will be met by a storm of hatred by those within the very same countries that have benefited most.
And, with that, I conclude my answers to these questions.
