To Trump or Not To Trump (Part I)

…by Jonas E. Alexis

I really hope I’m wrong about Donald Trump. He reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised America that he would never send soldiers to die in foreign lands. We all know that FDR did the exact opposite when he took office.[1]

FDR quickly became an agent for the powers that be, the powers that be led us to one deception after another during the Pearl Harbor debacle, and the Pearl Harbor debacle eventually became a template for the United States entering World War II.

One of the chief agents who was responsible for perpetuating colossal lies and hoaxes about Japan and Pearl Harbor was a Jewish agent by the name of Harry Dexter White.

White was basically working for the Soviet Union. Without him, the attack on Pearl Harbor would have almost certainly been impossible, and without the attack on Pearl Habor, FDR would have almost certainly needed a different and stupid justification for going to World War II.[2]

Trump, like FDR, talks on both sides of his mouth. He said he disapproved the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but then he moved on to tell us that he would send troops in places like Iraq and Syria to “take the oil.”[3]

Trump doesn’t like the Iraq debacle, but he still supports the chief entity which led America to that complete mess: the Israeli regime, which was and is still under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.[4] Trump declared last year:

“I’m very close to Israel . . .very close. I have a great relationship, very close. Far better than our president has. I know Bibi very well. In fact, he asked me if I’d do a commercial for him. In fact, I’m the only so-called celebrity that did a commercial for him.”

The Obama administration, though it is still being shaken by the powers that be in Tel Aviv (most specifically with respect to the Syrian situation), did call Netanyahu “a chickenshit” once.[5] Trump intends to improve things. How? He said: “I think he’s [Obama] one of the worst things that’s ever happened to Israel.”

Trump’s father used to work with oligarchs like Murray Kushner, and “Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, switched to Judaism to marry The New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner—Murray’s nephew. In another wedding, Eric Trump, Donald’s 30-year-old son, recently married Jewish TV producer Lara Yunaska.”

Trump confused people even more when he said that he will “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Trump must know that there have been numerous studies done on the effectiveness of torture and it has never worked![6]

Enhanced interrogation techniques have become so pathetic over the years that people who supported the sinking ship are now abandoning it.[7] So, why does Trump want to go back to this system? That is certainly confusion.

There is more. Trump has recently declared that Israel has every right to keep building the West Bank settlements. In order to build this case, he used a ridiculous and sophomoric argument which has been debunked years ago. He said:

“There are thousands of missiles being launched into Israel. Who would put up with that? Who would stand for it?’”[8]

Bill Clinton has recently propounded something similar.[9] First of all, let me state categorically that I am in complete agreement with Trump’s second clause here. Who in his right mind would put up with a regime slaughtering and killing innocent men, women and children for decades and destroying their livelihood, which is exactly what Israel has been doing since 1948?

This point has been widely documented in one way or another by Jewish historians and scholars and writers such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim, Miko Peled, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, etc.[10] Perhaps it is pertinent to bring in Morris’ interesting statement here once again:

“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”[11]

In a similar vein, Avi Shlaim of Oxford University (emeritus) writes in his study The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World that Israeli soldiers committed crimes from the very foundation of Israel:

“From time to time the soldiers who [razed Arab villages] committed atrocities, among them gang rape, murder, and, one occasion, the dumping of 120 suspected infiltrators in the Arava desert without water. The atrocities were committed not in the heat of battle but for the most part against innocent civilians, including women and children…

“Soldiers in an army that still prided itself on the precept of ‘the purity of arms’ showed growing disregard for human lives and carried out some barbaric acts that can only be described as war crimes.”[12]

Benny Morris says the same thing in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.[13] If you think that this is just ancient history and has nothing to do with the current situation in the region, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Listen to Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon:

“We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza…There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire. Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.”[14]

So, the ridiculous and risible argument that Palestinians are launching thousands upon thousands of missiles in Israel has long been dead, and one has to be really desperate to resuscitate it. The so-called missiles are basically a reaction to Israel’s perpetual wars and merciless exterminations. Gaza, as Ron Paul once put it, is still a concentration camp. Jewish writer Lawrence Weschler has also called Gaza a concentration camp.

In fact, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset Moshe Feiglin once called for “the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.”[15]

In short, Trump seems to be operating outside of practical reason with respect to the Middle East. He does say some nice things here and there, and the Neoconservatives really hate him, a clear sign that the Neocon establishment is in a really bad shape.

In fact, the Neocons would prefer any other presidential candidate over Trump.[16] In fact, they have already changed ship.[17] In fact, Bill Kristol, who is a member of what Jim W. Dean has called “the gang that can’t shoot straight,” was trying to coach marionette Mitt Romney for an independent candidate.[18]

Neocon Max Boot has called Trump the “No. 1 security threat to the United States today.” He added that “It’s simply a reality.”[19] Why?

Because Trump has already made an appeal to “America First.” To Boot, this principle is a “Nazi-sympathizing movement,” which Boot says is “an accurate reflection” of Trump’s “quasi-isolationist philosophy and also of his almost limitless ignorance.”[20]

Boot needs to thank goodness that Trump is a businessman and not really thinker or intellectual because Boot is acting like a miserable, desperate, and pathetic individual who hasn’t quite realized that Trump is not the inventor of the term. Boot ought to know that the Founding Fathers of America upheld an arguably isolationist view, particularly with respect to foreign policy.[21] The Founding Fathers would have almost certainly been shocked to see that we are giving Israel at least $3 billion every single year.

Then Boot moves on to place a libelous accusation on Trump, which was unnecessary and generally dumb: “Trump is the most pessimistic candidate about the future of America that we have seen since Jimmy Carter.”[22]

Boot again is ceremoniously and indirectly crowning Trump as a scholar because Trump even has ads which explicitly displays: “Make America great again.” Whether he is lying is a different issue, and this was not part of Boot’s argument.

But if “Make America great again” is a pessimistic idea, then Boot needs to go back to the University of California and Yale and ask for a refund because he did not learn a damn thing over there. He is obviously shaming those institutions.

Moreover, Boot is implicitly telling us that he only learned essentially Talmudic ideology at those institutions. And we all know that Talmudic ideology is, at bottom, against everything that the West holds dear.

If this sounds strange, then consider this. Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has recently declared that even criticism of Israel is now anti-Semitic. In other words, it is “heads I win, tails you lose.”

We certainly ought to ignore buffoonery in order to make progress, and we will let Boot and Shaked analyze themselves and see if they can realize that their idiocy is actually weakening their cause.

But that should not let Trump off the hook either. He hasn’t criticized Israel’s perpetual demolition of Palestinian homes at all. The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions itself has reported that Israel has destroyed 28,000 Palestinian homes since 1967. How many Israeli homes that have been literally destroyed? Zero!

It is really pathetic that Trump would remain silent on this issue. He simply cannot tell us that he doesn’t know any of this. The only person who has been able to criticize Israel openly is Bernie Sanders. Sanders made it very clear that Israel has used “disproportionate” force in Gaza and that “we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.”

Not only that, Sanders declared that Benjamin Netanyahu “is not right all the time.”[23] Former U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who is still associated with Sanders, once dropped the political bomb by saying that Israel was actually “gassing Syrians to frame their dictator, Bashar al-Assad.”[24] Wilkerson said:

“This could’ve been an Israeli false flag operation, it could’ve been an opposition in Syria … or it could’ve been an actual use by Bashar Assad.”[25]

This is obviously a rational position because there were obviously multiple hypotheses on this very issue. But the West quickly slandered Assad as the perpetrator when in fact the whole thing was actually a false flag operation. Yair Rosenberg of Tablet Magazine declared that “Only cranks–or worse–would insinuate that the Jewish state was somehow responsible for such an atrocity.”[26]

Well, Rosenberg, would that be the first time for Israel to get involved in covert operations? Doesn’t the Mossad have a history of operating similar psychological warfare?[27] Didn’t Israeli ambassador Michael Oren say that he preferred terrorists in Syria over the Assad government?[28] Hasn’t Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon declared explicitly that Israel would choose ISIS over Iran?[29]

Haven’t scholars like Gareth Porter and Trita Parsi historically shown that the so-called Iran nuclear weapons program was an invention by the Israelis which has little or no basis in reality?[30] And hasn’t the intelligence community itself reached almost the same conclusion?[31]

In any event, Sanders did oppose a no-fly zone in Syria,[32] but he  shot himself in the toes by saying that he endorsed Obama’s deployment of troops to Syria. He also supported the so-called “kill list.” To his credit, Sanders does talk about how the oligarchs have universally created an economic disaster in America.

“Wall Street is still out of control,” he wrote in the New York Times last December. “Seven years ago, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department bailed out the largest financial institutions in this country because they were considered too big to fail.”[33] He continued to say:

“To rein in Wall Street, we should begin by reforming the Federal Reserve, which oversees financial institutions and which uses monetary policy to maintain price stability and full employment.”[34]

The Fed, according to Sanders, rigged the economy in the United States. “Raising interest rates now is a disaster for small business owners who need loans to hire more workers and Americans who need more jobs and higher wages.”

Sanders again has some good points with respect to the Fed, but he defeats them by saying: “As a rule, the Fed should not raise interest rates until unemployment is lower than 4 percent. Raising rates must be done only as a last resort — not to fight phantom inflation.”[35]

Sanders ought to know that interest rates are largely the problem, if not the problem. The historical name for it is usury, which always ends up destroying any booming and successful economy.

Yes, Sanders is right about Goldman Sachs, but playing with usury is like putting gasoline in a burnish bush and then magically expecting things to get better.

The main problem with the economy, as E. Michael Jones cogently and historically argues in his 1400-page study Barren Metal, is the conflict between labor and usury.[36] Through usury, the oligarchs have destroyed the economy and family formation in the United States and elsewhere by cheating people out of their labor.

“The purpose of economic activity,” Jones argues, “is the good of the nation,”[37] not the good of a select group of people who can rig the system at will. The oligarchs find usury useful because it is the most sophisticated way of wiggling out of the economic order.

Perhaps Sanders does not understand the metaphysics of usury because he is a self-proclaimed socialist.[38]

As for Hillary Clinton, she once talked about the average American who “are still barely getting by, barely holding on, not seeing the rewards that they believe their hard work should have merited.” She railed against the “shadow banking system that operated without accountability.”

So far, so good. But where was Clinton getting some of her funding campaign? From a “shadow banking system” known as Goldman Sachs, “the wealthiest and most successful bank in Wall Street history.”[39] “The firm has donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation.” In 2013, Clinton “gave two paid speeches to Goldman Sachs audiences. (Her customary fee is $200,000 a speech.)“[40]

Goldman Sachs eventually gave Clinton $675,000 in the fall of 2013 for numerous speeches.[41] Between 2004 and 2005, Hillary delivered four speech for Goldman Sachs, for which she received $650,000.[42]

Keep in mind that it was the same Clinton who previously said that “no bank is too big to fail, and no executive too powerful to jail” and that she has the political mechanism to drag those criminals behind bars and throw out the keys.[43]

Upon inspection, the Clinton family has a long history of secretly making pernicious deals with oligarchic powers like Goldman Sachs. In fact, the company basically bought the Clinton family since 1991,

“when Robert Rubin, then co-chair co-senior partner of the bank, met Bill Clinton at a Manhattan dinner party and was so impressed by him that he signed on as an economic adviser to Clinton’s campaign for the 1992 Democratic nomination.”[44]

We are told that “Rubin and other Goldman partners ‘mobilized their networks to raise money for the upstart candidate.’”[45] To make a long story short, Ruben played a major role on ruining the economy from 1995 until 1999, and Goldman Sachs largely contributed to the crash market of 2008.[46]

“On thirteen occasions between 2009 and 2016, Goldman was penalized by US courts or government agencies for fraudulent or deceptive practices that were committed mostly between 2006 and 2009. Four of these penalties amounted to $300 million or more.

“In July 2010 the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Goldman $550 million for the fraudulent marketing of its Abacus CDO; the bank had allowed its client John Paulson to stuff the CDO with toxic ingredients, mostly in the form of mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and then to bet against the CDO when it was marketed by taking a short position. Paulson earned around $1 billion when the CDO lost value as it was designed to do.”[47]

Matt Taibi was obviously ahead of the curve when he said in 2010:

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

“In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”[48]

Alex Brummer of the Daily Mail compared members of Goldman Sachs to some kind of a secret society largely because they are always ready to do any pernicious activity so as to get the almighty dollar.[49] What does that tell us about Clinton, when she began to receive one check after another from an entity which literally wrecked the U.S. economy?

We hope that decent Americans and people of reason everywhere are using their minds during this presidential race to challenge candidates to follow practical reason in the moral and political sphere. Only then can we defeat the oligarchs and the New World Order.

In the next article, we will invite former US senate candidate Mark Dankof to provide some insightful comments on Donald Trump and other issues.

[1] For a good historical study on this, see Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: F.D. R. and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001). We will discuss this book at length this summer.

[2] See for example John Koster, Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2012). Thanks to Mark Dankof for making me aware of this book. We will discuss it at length in the summer.

[3] Quoted in Tim Mak, Trump Wants to Re-Invade Iraq; Bomb Things,” Daily Beast, August 12, 2015; see also Matt Wells, “Donald Trump’s remedy for America: oil from Iraq to ‘pay ourselves back,’” Guardian, March 15, 2013; “Trump: We Should Take Libya’s Oil,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2011.

[4] For further studies on this, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar & Straus, 2007); for a recent development, see Grant F. Smith, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America (Washington: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Inc., 2016).

[5] Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here,” Atlantic, October 28, 2014.

[6] See Shane M O’Mara, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

[7] Jeff Stein, “CIA Would Refuse Trump Torture Orders, Top Former Officials Say,” Newsweek, February 2, 2016.

[8] “Trump endorses Jewish settlement expansion in West Bank,” Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2016; “EXCLUSIVE: Trump insists Israel should keep building West Bank settlements as he says Netanyahu should ‘keep moving forward’ because Palestinians fired ‘thousands of missiles’ at Jewish state,” Daily Mail, May 3, 2016.

[9] Brianna Gurciullo, “Bill Clinton: ‘I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state,’” Politico, May 13, 2016.

[10] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007); Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (New York: Verso, 1995 and 2003); Method and Madness (New York: OR Books, 2014); Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010); Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1999); Miko Peled, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, 2012); John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar & Straus, 2007).

[11] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest?: An Interview with Benny Morris,” Counter Punch, January 16, 2004.

[12] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000 and 2014), 87.

[13] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210-249.

[14] Gilad Sharon, “A decisive conclusion is necessary,” Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2012.

[15] Quoted in Jill Reilly, “Israeli official calls for concentration camps in Gaza and ‘the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters,’” Daily Mail, August 4, 2014.

[16] For a recent development, see for example “Against Trump,” National Review, January 21, 2016; David French, “No, Trump Isn’t Actually Better than Hillary,” National Review, March 29, 2016; Thomas Sowell, “Conservatives for Trump?,” Jewish World Review, April 26, 2016.

[17] “Exodus Begins: Neocons Pledge to Support Clinton Over Trump,” Sputnik News, April 5, 2016.

[18] Robert Costa, “Mitt Romney met privately with William Kristol, who is leading the effort to draft an independent candidate,” Washington Post, May 6, 2016.

[19] Max Boot, “Why Trump is a Security Threat,” Commentary, March 27, 2016.

[20] Ibid.

[21] See for example Paul A. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1963).

[22] Boot, “Why Trump is a Security Threat,” Commentary, March 27, 2016.

[23] Roger Cohen, “Bernie’s Israel Heresy,” NY Times, April 18, 1016.

[24] Yair Rosenberg, “Why is Sanders Taking Foreign Policy Advice from Someone Who Suggested Israel—Not Assad—Gassed Syrians?,” Tablet Magazine, February 24, 2016.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] See for example Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995 and 2015); Michael Bar-Zohar (Author), Nissim Mishal, Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service (New York: HarperCollins, 2012); Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars (New York: Levant Books, 2012 and 2014); Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1991); Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

[28] Herb Keinon, “’Israel wanted Assad gone since start of Syria civil war,’” Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2013.

[29] Jack Moore, “Israeli Defense Minister: I Prefer ISIS to Iran on Our Borders,” Newsweek, January 20, 2016.

[30] Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Charlottesville: Just World Books, 2014); Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

[31] Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work,” NY Times, December 3, 2007; Mark Hosenball, “Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nuke in Iran,” Newsweek, September 15, 2009; James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb,” NY Times, February 24, 2012; http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/international/20071203_release.pdf.

[32] John Wagner and Anne Gearan, “Bernie Sanders sides with Obama and against Clinton on no-fly zone in Syria,” Washington Post, October 3, 2015.

[33] Bernie Sanders, “To Rein In Wall Street, Fix the Fed,” NY Times, December 23, 2015.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014).

[37] Ibid., 1372.

[38] See for example David A. Fahrenthold, “Bernie Sanders is in with the enemy, some old allies say,” Washington Post, July 25, 2015; John Dillon, “Exactly What Kind Of Socialist Is Bernie Sanders?,” National Public Radio, August 17, 2015; for related topics, see Michael Kruse, “Bernie Sanders Has a Secret,” Politico, July 9, 2015.

[39] Ben White, “The Goldman Sachs primary,” Politico, March 2, 2015.

[40] David Corn, “Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Problem,” Mother Jones, June 4, 2014.

[41] Simon Head, “Clinton and Goldman: Why It Matters,” NY Review of Books, April 12, 2016.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.; see also Alex Brummer, “As Goldman Sachs posts huge profits from the economic crisis, the question is: Did it cause the problems in the first place?,” Daily Mail, July 18, 2009; Matt Taibbi, “The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet,” Rolling Stone, February 12, 2014; Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” NY Times, March 14, 2012.

[47] Head, “Clinton and Goldman: Why It Matters,” NY Review of Books, April 12, 2016.

[48] Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010.

[49] Alex Brummer, “As Goldman Sachs posts huge profits from the economic crisis, the question is: Did it cause the problems in the first place?,” Daily Mail, July 18, 2009.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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