By Michael Collins Piper — AFP Republican critics of President-elect Barack Obama are enthusiastically shouting “gotcha” in the wake of allegations that Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.) was secretly trying to sell Obama’s vacant Senate seat. However, there are much bigger long-term policy implications at work behind the scenes.
The truth is that Illinois politics—particularly in Obama’s home base of Chicago—have long been known as a cauldron of venal political corruption with a handful of powerful secret interests directing the course of events. Even if Obama has “clean hands,” the thread of corruption surrounding the governor and other Democratic power brokers may start to unravel, implicating many close Obama associates.
Already, Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is being implicated in the context of the bizarre Senate seat-for-sale tragicomedy.
TheWatergate affair, which came to light as a result of a break-in by operatives linked to the Republican Nixon administration, snowballed into a more-wide-ranging series of scandals involving influence peddling, obstruction of justice, bribery, illegal campaign contributions, etc, netting a host of GOP figures and ultimately bringing down Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Although an argument can be made that there was a secret agenda behind the Watergate affair—that it was effectively a coup d’etat designed to topple Nixon (who was intent on cleaning house in official Washington and redirecting U.S. foreign policy against the long-standing “special relationship” with Israel)—the fact is that the scandal did entwine the president and prevent him from acting as he wished, and kept Nixon at bay for the two years following the 1972 election (which Nixon won by a landslide) until he was forced out of office.
The ongoing revelations in Illinois may well have a similar impact on the new Obama administration, keeping the president on edge, essentially destabilized.
This is precisely what happened with the so-called “Whitewater” scandal that enveloped Bill and Hillary Clinton from virtually the first days of his administration, ultimately leading—through a tangled series of events—to the Monica Lewinsky mess, involving Bill Clinton’s illicit affair with a White House intern.
Despite the common (and quite inaccurate) perception— particularly by Clinton’s many “conservative” critics—that somehow the “liberal media” lionized Clinton during his presidency, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the truth is that throughout his presidency, Clinton was very much under fire from the mass media in America.
The record demonstrates that it was that media— which is controlled by Jewish families and financial networks sympathetic to Israel—which played such a large part in promoting public knowledge of the scandals surrounding the Clintons.
The January 4, 1999 issue of The Nation featured a revealing article by Michael Tomasky which examined this phenomenon in quite revealing detail.
Tomasky pointed out that it was actually The New York Times—the flagship “liberal” newspaper—which played a substantial part in leaking many damaging revelations from the long-running investigation of President Clinton and Hillary Clinton by Special Prosecutor Ken Starr. Tomasky wrote: “At every crucial turn and pivot, the Times’ editorial page has marched in lockstep with the prosecutor and his cheering section.”
“Why is this worth remarking on?” asked Tomasky. Because, he pointed out, “on national matters, [the Times’ editorial] page serves as more of an ideological Baedeker, instructing the country’s elite as to what constitutes responsible liberal opinion.”
In other words, The New York Times—voice of the pro-Israel elite—was telling its readers that it was “okay” to support Ken Starr’s maneuvering against Clinton. And so the question, then, was why one of America’s most liberal presidents would be the target of the editorial wrath of the very liberal New York Times.
The answer it was that it was because Bill Clinton was perceived to be insufficiently supportive of the demands of Israel. In fact, the Lewinsky scandal forced the president into retreat as far as pushing Israel was concerned—much to the delight of Israel’s Likud.
On Jan. 27, 1998 The Washington Post let the cat out of the bag when it reported that “last week, Clinton demonstrated he could not compel the Israelis to meet their responsibilities for a further military pullback. This week [in the wake of the scandal] he is even less capable, if only because people in his own party, not to mention the Republicans, will not support a policy of greater pressure on Israel.”
Should there be any doubt that Bill and Hillary Clinton were certainly aware that the Lewinsky affair was being promoted by Israel’s Likudniks and their American allies, bear in mind that at the height of the Lewinsky frenzy the first lady publicly called for the creation of a Palestinian state. This was a clear shot over Israel’s bow, much to the shock of Israel’s U.S. partisans.
The first lady was, as a consequence, thrashed relentlessly by Israel’s partisans, but there’s no question that this was an obvious and calculated provocation by Hillary (and certainly her husband) meant to show her husband’s enemies that the Clintons could play hardball with Israel if necessary.
Although the Clinton administration itself formally distanced itself from Hillary’s remarks, the point had been made.
Ultimately—some seven years later, in December of 2005—the truth about the Israeli role in utilizing the Lewinsky affair to put pressure on Clinton emerged.
Television evangelist Jerry Falwell couldn’t resist bragging and admitting the truth: he and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu did conspire— at a critical time—to trip up Clinton and specifically use the pressure of the Lewinsky scandal to force Clinton to abandon pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupiedWest Bank.
Falwell’s confession didn’t make national news—as it should have. Instead, the preacher’s confession came buried in a lengthy story in the December 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, describing the flourishing love affair between American evangelicals such as Falwell and hard-line Jewish extremist forces in Israel then under the leadership of Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.
The admission by Falwell confirmed precisely what this author first revealed in The Spotlight in 1998 and later recounted in a lecture before the Arab League’s official think tank, the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, in March of 2003.
Although, following my lecture, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a lobby for Israel, denounced as a “bizarre conspiracy theory” my charge that “Monica-gate” did have Israeli origins, the assertion by Falwell that the public unveiling of the Lewinsky affair forced Clinton to pull back on pressuring Israel confirmed exactly what I had charged.
Regarding Falwell’s recounting of how he worked with Netanyahu in undermining Clinton’s pressure on Israel, Vanity Fair reported:
On a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before [Netanyahu’s] scheduled meeting with Clinton. “I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi [Netanyahu] and he spoke to us that night,” recalls Falwell. “It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton. . . . The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. “Bibi told me later,” Falwell recalls, “that the next morning Bill Clinton said, ‘I know where you were last night.’” The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. . . . It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal . . . Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel.
What Falwell did not mention—at least as reported by Vanity Fair—is that his meeting with the Israeli leader took place on the very evening before the mass media in America broke open the Monica Lewinsky scandal with much fanfare.
Nor did Falwell mention that one of Netanyahu’s leading American publicists, neo-conservative power broker William Kristol, was the first American media figure to publicly hint (in the days before the scandal was officially unveiled) that there were forthcoming revelations regarding a sex scandal about to be unveiled to Clinton’s detriment.
The story of Clinton’s imbroglio with Israel is something Bill and Hillary Clinton would prefer be forgotten, but the lesson of Israel’s success in using such a scandal to batter Clinton is not something that Israel and its media allies will forget.
Barack Obama stands warned as his administration is now the subject of a frenzy of investigation and cover up surrounding corruption within the circles that brought him to power.
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