Trump will demonstrate the extent to which countless appendages of the Zionist cause demand America sacrifice itself to protect the barbarities of “the Jewish state” from criticism.
President Donald Trump in Congress to deliver a joint-session speech on March 4. (White House / Flickr)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
During Donald Trump’s first four years in the White House, the stranger to Washington’s infernal ways got nothing done: That cabal of various Deep State appendages — the Democratic Party’s upper echelons, the intelligence apparatus, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., and corporate media — made sure of that.
Trump seems to have thought this through during his four years playing golf at Mar-a–Lago. He returned to the White House two months ago this week with a full-dress plan to get done what he couldn’t first time around.
And now look. Donald Trump the subverted, we have to conclude, was better than Donald Trump the empowered. Who’d’a thunk it? The more Trump does this time around the more one looks back with a weird fondness to the subterfuge of the Trump I regime, unlawful and corrosive of our ailing republic as all that was.
Simplicius, the always stimulating commentator who takes his name from the sixth century Neoplatonist, posted an interesting summation of the present state of affairs the other day. “Trump,” he wrote, “now wallows in a post-euphoric doldrums phase of his floundering second term, when virtually every one of his campaign promises has faltered or flopped.”
Floundering presidents tend to make messes. The mess to which Simplicius refers concerns the Ukraine war and Washington’s relations with Moscow. Ending the former and repairing the latter was the biggest of Trump’s many big promises during last year’s campaign season.
Trump has been all over the place on this key question. The man who stood squarely against the war has now resumed supplying Ukraine with weapons and battlefield intelligence. This past week he had Marco Rubio, who comes over more as a schoolboy than a secretary of state, offering Moscow a ceasefire deal with the Kiev regime as if — one either laughs or does the other thing — the U.S. is the honest broker rather than the principal belligerent in the proxy war former President Joe Biden recklessly provoked.
It is the same wherever one looks — north to Canada, south to Mexico, across the Atlantic to Europe, across the Pacific to China. Altering the direction of policy is one thing, very often what is warranted; creating crises is another, and usually the mark of diplomatic incompetence.
Tariffs that have people recalling the consequences of the Smoot–Hawley Act back in the 1930s, relations with Beijing drifting from tension to hostility, the silly talk of owning Greenland, invading Mexico, repossessing the Panama Canal, and on and on: It is tempting to say Trump is starting to make Joe Biden look good — a feat that would surpass all men’s believing.
But no, we must turn to Israel and the Zionists’ campaign of terror against the Palestinians of Gaza and now the West Bank. And as we do we must forget about anyone making Joe Biden look good — not now, not in the histories yet to be written.
Taking Over From Biden on Israel
Light projection, Washington, D.C., Dec. 31, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
With the Israelis Trump is not floundering. He is picking up just where his genocidal predecessor left off and so getting done exactly what he wants. The two of them are just the same as they face “the Jewish state.” Just as Joe Biden was, Trump is acutely careful never to put a foot wrong with the Zionists.
Steven Witkoff, Trump’s “special envoy” in West Asia — in real life another property developer from New York with no apparent idea of how to conduct diplomacy — supposedly brokered a multi-phased ceasefire between Israel and Hamas soon after Trump took office. I say “supposedly” because we do not know what transpired between Witkoff and the Israelis and we may never. We have an official account with curb appeal for Trump as he poses as statesman for peace.
Since then Witkoff has organized — let’s stay with “supposedly,” as Tel Aviv probably dictated its terms — a seven-week extension of this first phase just as the second phase was due to start. This is not diplomacy, in my read: It is sequenced choreography.
Net: Trump’s man got a ceasefire signed, then arranged for its breach as the Israelis openly plan to resume their campaign of terror. It only looks like floundering, as I say.
Israel has resumed blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, this time water as well as food, tents and other essentials to survival. I read over the weekend that Israel is now preventing record numbers of doctors and aid workers from entering the Strip.
From the White House in response to these straight-out war crimes: No sound.
Over the weekend Trump authorized large-scale airstrikes against Yemen; Reuters reports this is the most extensive U.S. military operation since Trump assumed office. Trump, you will recall, once opposed America’s military escapades abroad. Yemen, you will also recall, is one theater in the “seven-front war” to which Bibi Netanyahu committed Israel last year.
I think of these things and then think of the numerous reports we have had over many months that Trump accepted $100 million during his 2024 political campaign from Miriam Adelson, who carries on the arch–Zionist activities of her late husband. Trump’s ties — his debts, indeed — to the Adelsons and other Israel-über-alles obsessives like them lie beyond question.
And lately I think of something else — something it is time we all thought more about.
Mahmoud Khalil & the Attack on Universities
Columbia University building that houses the School of International and Public Affairs, 2020. (Lisianthus1215 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
I know few people who have not been shocked by the arrest without charge — there being nothing to charge — of Mahmoud Khalil, the recent graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, S.I.P.A., and the spokesman of those who have demonstrated against Israel’s genocide and America’s support of it this past year. Those who stand for the Palestinian cause, constitutional lawyers, ordinarily toothless media commentators: All view Khalil’s detention and the Trump administration’s plan to deport him as egregiously over the line.
The Khalil arrest is part of a full-scale attack on Columbia and the opening shot of a campaign against numerous other universities. Trump cut off $400 million in established government grants more or less simultaneously as Immigration and Customs cops stuffed Khalil into a van weekend before last.
The New York Times ran a curious commentary on Trump’s now-obvious blitz against higher education in its Sunday editions. Meghan O’Rourke lectures in English at Yale. This is the pith of the argument she makes under the headline, “The End of the University as We Know It”:
“What is really happening here is an attack on the American faith in knowledge as a value and a public good that has served us well….
If the battle over universities were only about budgets, the fight might be different. But what is being targeted is something more profound: the ability of institutions to sustain the freedoms that form the foundation of our democracy.”
Meghan O’Rourke speaks the truth but not the whole truth. Trump’s operation against America’s institutions of higher learning, while it has a lengthy history among conservatives, is prompted by this administration’s obsession with anti–Semitism — I mean “anti–Semitism,” to be clear. This is the obsession Zionists have purposely cultivated for decades; Trump, with his Adelson money and his indulgence of Israeli terror, merely brings this to a new phase of aggression.
Not once does Meghan O’Rourke mention this, not once the Khalil case. Meghan O’Rourke is effectively a symptom of precisely the advanced cancer she declines to name.
While I was contemplating, along with many, many others, the grossly unjust case of Mahmoud Khalil and all that lies behind it, a report that caused my jaw to collide with the edge of my desk arrived from MintPress News. This was Alan MacLeod’s piece under the headline, “Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal Is Former Israeli Spy.” It appeared three days after Khalil was taken from his apartment near Columbia.
In an instant, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil acquired vast new depths of implication. MacLeod has a habit of adding ballast to reported events in this way: He is among the best investigative journalists now publishing in independent media.
He writes in part:
“Dr. Keren Yarhi–Milo, the Columbia dean at the center of the university’s student purge, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer. Now, she stands accused of helping orchestrate the deportation of a Palestinian student leader and silencing campus dissent against Israel’s war on Gaza….
Khalil’s dean, … head of the School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. Yarhi–Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus, thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has followed the protests.”
It is a long, detailed piece, thoroughly reported, and it caused me to think yet again. How did a former I.D.F. officer on the intelligence side find her way to directing Columbia’s equivalent of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard? O.K., Israeli spookery to the Israeli Mission to the U.N. is a plausible progression. But how did Yarhi–Milo get from there to Columbia’s S.I.P.A.? What could have been the journey?
MacLeod links usefully to one of those puff pieces alumni magazines publish about illustrious graduates, in this case The Owl. Therein we read that the young Yarhi–Milo, raised outside Tel Aviv, read Columbia’s course catalog the way other girls her age read The Bobbsey Twins.
While at the U.N. Mission, she applied to S.I.P.A. and the dean soon afterward called her. In a subsequent interview, Yarhi–Milo reported, “We completely hit it off.” They had “a deep conversation,” and the spook-cum-aspiring scholar was accepted.
Happens all the time, of course. I was for a time a graduate student at S.I.P.A., and I am here to tell you I never had a call from the dean and never had a deep conversation with anyone other than my faculty adviser.
You get the drift here, I trust. By all available evidence, and with my bullshit detectors just back from the shop, this is a too-cute cover story apparently intended to gloss the appointment of a Zionist plant atop a major institution at a major American university.
As Alan MacLeod makes perfectly plain, Yarhi–Milo has acted in behalf of the Zionist cause since her arrival at S.I.P.A. six years ago. She has, indeed, tacitly approved of Khalil’s arrest, having made — his dean for heaven’s sake — no comment since he was forcibly detained.
Donald Trump is the all-to-public measure of how Zionists have penetrated the very highest levels of the U.S. government. This phenomenon is not new, of course. Trump will now serve to demonstrate the extent to which the countless appendages of the Zionist cause demand America sacrifice itself — its institutions, its laws, its very intelligence — to protect the barbarities of “the Jewish state” from criticism.
The journey of Keren Yarhi–Milo from an Israeli intelligence unit to the top of a leading American institution of higher learning tells us something else. The insidious penetration of Zionists into the very fabric of American life is very extensive, incalculably so. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of this reality — the corruptions, the compromises, the duplicities, the degradations to which our polity is subjected.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Miriam Adelson: “All the money you own will never buy back your soul”
Bob Dylan
Masters of War
I have absolutely NO USE for these frigging Zionists…none. To say that I despise them is putting it mildly.
Actually, Zionists and Americans have more in common than one might think. First, there is the genocide of the Native Americans, which some Israelis find inspring. Next there is the centuries-long habit of identifying Americans with the Biblical Israelistes. Finally, there is the very popular Apocalyptic movement, Dispensationalism, which thinks Israel and all of it’s ways as essential preludes to the Second Coming of Jesus. Dispensatonalist evangelicals are very numerous and in recent years, have been big supporters of Trump.
The depth of intrusion by Zionists into this country is disturbing, indeed. However, dragging along our inept and cowardly politicians to essentially underwrite the genocide of the people of Gaza will, one thinks, ultimately backfire. Israel has this time overstepped the mark, and these fleeting moments of chest-thumping, such as their glee at the fall of the House of Assad, or the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, will meet with the fiercest of resistance, from countless furious souls who have been left behind, with so many of their relatives and friends destroyed by American bunker busters. Hamas, or some iteration thereof, will come back with a vengeance that Israel will live to regret. Would it really have been so intolerable to offer Palestinians equal standing in a One State solution? In time, that will emerge as having been the more just solution, and which will have been an opportunity lost, perhaps forever.
Unfortunately, those drawn to positions of authority are far too often also drawn to its excesses; and excesses of power seem always to require scapegoats, enemies and wars. Humanity has been living with this reality ever since the tribal community organization was replaced with the overlord. The ten thousand year history of masters, god-kings, priestly classes and other forms of essentially the same thing has yet to find a solution to that process and its cycles of consequences. It seems true that an equitable distribution of power in Israel/palestine in a one state solution — people valuing people and accepting limits — would have been preferred and humane, but has never been on offer in reality.
It’s time for an organization to start cataloging what is going on and spread the word via conferences and the media. Scott Ritter talks about being approached by AIPAC operatives to recruit him at a major TV news outlet when he worked there. And there are loads of stores about Israel infiltration of our Congress and assigning an operative to control and manipulate our representatives. I should know, my own representative is on the dole. People need to compare notes, collect data, and start tracking down these foreign-enemy operatives so we can take our country back.
It aint gonna happen: the larger problem is that taking bribes is legal, money is legally defined as “free speech”.
If our wonderful “elected” leaders are bribed puppets, how can anyone speak of “democracy” with a straight face? There is no way to “vote” to change it, the full-blown support for Israel is BIPARTISAN. The Genocide of Palestine continues under the DT2 regime and billions in weapons flow to Israel, paid for by the USA.
Thank Dog Ythgimla, (ith – gim – lah,) the h at the end sounds like the l sound – It’s a dyslexic thing i.e. Almighty spelled backwards, I digress.
This piece by Patrick is my kind of an example of the truth which lavishly anoints those who so self-righteously deserve the painful truth be inflicted upon their miserable souls. In addition I absolutely loath the bully!
Truer words have never been written IMHO.
Now things get a little weird for me. I saw the headline at MintPressNews an had to read the MacLeod story. These insidious creeps deserve to be deported for their actions, at the very least.
FYI and edification I left a comment at SubStack Week in review by Margot Williams March 16. You cannot miss it, it is rather lengthy.
I believe anyone who commented here so far will see the point(s) I made readily.
My offering seems not to have gotten linked to that of Anti-war leftist, it’s the bully thing, but no matter. As you see if you read it I made my points and everything other than my opinions is factual.
Great stuff Patrick!
By the Anti-war leftist is not the bully , nor am I. I’m sure I made this xclear, but ya never know!
The depth of intrusion by Zionists into this country is disturbing, indeed. However, dragging along our inept and cowardly politicians to essentially underwrite the genocide of the people of Gaza will, one thinks, ultimately backfire. Israel has this time overstepped the mark, and these fleeting moments of chest-thumping, such as their glee at the fall of the House of Assad, or the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, will meet with the fiercest of resistance, from countless furious souls who have been left behind, with so many of their relatives and friends destroyed by American bunker busters. Hamas, or some iteration thereof, will come back with a vengeance that Israel will live to regret. Would it really have been so intolerable to offer Palestinians equal standing in a One State solution? In time, that will emerge as having been the more just solution, and which will have been an opportunity lost, perhaps forever.
Just when you think you can’t get more shocked by how far the Zionists how infiltrated our government, media, NGOs, our entire country, you get tasered by something like this!!
lol
It always amazes me when Americans behave as if they were a democratic and free nation.
Take a short look at the history of Presidential election campaigns. Think about how far back you have to go to find the last Presidential candidate who did not spend part of his campaign in Tel Aviv, kowtowing to the master.
Then wake up and realize you are just Israel’s bitch.
He had deep conversations with a faculty advisor? At the American engineering school I attended in the distant ’80’s, they were too busy making money from DOD grants and consulting side-jobs to talk to mere students.
Catching one to get a needed signature, which was usually accompanied by a busy person saying something stupid while trying to sound smart was about the totality of interacting with one’s faculty advisor. And talk to the Dean? LOL. Only if you took his pet course, or got called into his office. He sat in the Chair with the name of a Corporation on it!
This can’t be true. Please say this is not true.
I know…things have to actually happen before they are reported on, but anyone surprised by any of this has not allowed themselves to imagine the obvious; all the pieces are there for historians to (yet once again) point to the failures of understanding in the immediacy of the action. Pretty clearly such delays are deadly in a world with increasing immediacy of and vast power over ‘all things’ — just consider something so mundane as a bank check taking 2 days to clear and now funds move in seconds. Expand that simplicity into thousands of other human actions, from a letter to grandma to AI assisted drone strikes and the need to either slow down our actions or speed up our correct understanding of them is (also) obvious. Just pointing them out after is like the 2 days to clear a check — the ‘real’ world has already moved on.
2 key points from early passages.
1) Most people now forget that this is Trump’s 2nd term, with everything that comes with that. 2nd term Presidents have a short shelf-life before facing the problem that Trump is going to absolutely hate, which is that the political world moves on past them. And Trump’s got Peter Thiel waiting in the wings for him to exit stage right.
2) The man Trump seems to emulate, one Chancellor Hitler of Germany, had some early success and it went to his head. He became convinced of his own brilliance, and that the “experts” around him were fools. It began when he knew he could bluff the English and the French, over the objections of his generals. That time, the Corporal was proud to be smarter than the Generals. But this got out of control by the time he was ordering both the largest tank battle in history at Kursk and his evil Final Solution. He was too convinced of his own brilliance, and a losing streak didn’t shake that opinion, but only strengthened it somehow as is normal for the delusional. Then, when he survived an assassination attempt, he went into “messenger from God” sort of mode towards the end, but didn’t get any smarter or realistic, of course.
The dual Israeli citizens, the Zionist power configuration, the pro-Israel zealots are really overreaching now; the arrogance and belligerence is off the charts. You’d think some of their smarter and more wise propagandists would try and rein some of this in to a certain degree.
Probably the most seminal question of the day — will the American people become privy to this level of perfidy and treachery against them (not to mention against the many Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East) in order to deliver the heavy backlash it so richly deserves?
In a just world, 95% of the politicians would be voted out of office and charged with treason. Just about every single major media talking head and million dollar host would be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Nader puts the Gaza death toll at well over 200,000.
For further reading:
“Power of Israel in the United States” by James Petras
“They Dare to Speak Out” by Paul Findley
“Against our better Judgement” by Alison Weir
“Host and the Parasite” by Greg Felton
“Holocaust Industry” by Norman Finkelstein
“Jewish History, Jewish Religion” by Israel Shahak
I imagine Ralph Nader is correct with his estimate. Killing civilians in Gaza has been normalized thanks to the likes of Mirim Adelson and her 100 million dollar donations to the cause of genocide.
Exactly.
Such a damn shame. It’s all so pitiful.
Thank you.
Finally some common sense and practical information.