Tyler Cowen Interviews Raj Chetty

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Chetty is a bouncing betty bullshit artist in regards to race and ancestry. These non-European clowns are never going to understand the historic American nation. That is why over-educated apes like Chetty want to destroy the historic American nation with mass immigration.

The United States is a European Christian nation-state. The ancestral core of the United States is European Christian. Chetty and his obtuse, anti-White crap is getting annoying. Someone ask Chetty why he supports mass immigration. I have noticed that these celebrities of the ruling class like Chetty don’t like to be asked about their support for mass immigration when they are in public and the cameras are on.

* At the risk of sounding maximally ignorant, I look at this guy, I look at Zakaria, I hear that guy on NPR’s TED program talking about how we should give up on schooling altogether and let kids play with computers (literally just googling it as an answer to everything), and I ask:
does it make more sense that India cranks out high-IQ naifs, or does it make more sense that India cranks out Machiavellian tribalists, arguing, in bad faith, for the weakening of a target population?
India is not a paradise of tolerance, it’s a race riot fixed in equilibrium by clearly defined boundaries. Indians do very well here in part because they devote all their time to making a lot of money in a short period (often through fraud), not because they outperform natives in all-things-equal situations. It’s comparable to the way legacy creeps like Jeb pal around with elite Mexican patrone-figures, and think they want the US to be more like a former Spanish colony because they take for granted that their American rank would transfer, but really, person-to-person, the elite of the Spanish-speaking world are incomparably competitive and would eat a Bush alive.
If so, then how is Raj “attacking”?
Well, what would an Indian know about setting up neighborhoods in terms of ethnicity given their history?

* Would wager a small fortune Chetty’s analysis would even break down in large northern cities that are internally segregated. It’s why otherwise goodwhite Park Slope and Upper West Side parents freak out when the NYC Board of Ed dares to suggest introducing nearby project dwellers to their magic dirt public schools. Recall goodwhite supposed comedian Samantha Bee turning into a Southie shanty Irish harpy at the mere suggestion her little darlings might so co-mingle with lower socioeconomic types who happen to be black and brown. The left will not ever deal honestly with race.

* After reading, it looks like Chetty uses integrated to mean socio-economic integration. His Iowa example is suggestive–all the kids go to the same schools, and the adults have limited social activities that they all participate in.

* Fascinating details about the Manchester attacker and his family from the Anglosphere Tabloid of Record–

Long story short, the whole family is crazy and at least one brother knew about the attack a month in advance.

Also, this seems like a real failure for British counter terrorism- the kid trained in Libya AND Syria, had contact with ISIS recruiters in the U.K., and they’d received warnings about him years back.

* Trained in Libya and in Syria.

Libya wasn’t a hotbed of terrorist activity until a few years ago. What changed? Oh, yeah. We overthrew Gadaffi and then left the country in rubble. Then terrorism and ISIS began to flourish.

Syria wasn’t a hotbed of terrorist activity either. Not until two things happened. First of all, the chaos in Iraq (another country that wasn’t involved in terrorism until we violently destroyed it back in 2003) spilled over the border. Second of all, the U.S. began to arm ISIS and other Islamic groups in Syria.

In conclusion, Libya, Syria, and Iraq used to be secular nations with no terrorism. Then America violently destroyed these secular regimes. Now there’s massive terrorism and extremism. This British Muslim suicide bomber trained in both Libya and Syria. 2 countries he wouldn’t have been able to train in a few years ago – before America destroyed two secular regimes. America was assisted in all these military campaigns by many countries, such as the UK.

* I think the main problem is that real estate prices are insanely high. Since status-striver Americans don’t want to marry and have kids unless they can have a reasonable-sized home in a nice neighborhood, a large fraction of Bay Area people are locked out of the marriage market. Perhaps the more marriage inclined go live in Sacramento – or just get out of California completely.

I can guarantee you if home prices were reasonable, fertility rates would be higher.

The problem is that foreigners keep buying property in America, pushing up coastal real estate prices. They do as as investment and also, if they ever immigrate, they can use these properties as a second home. The same is happening in Canada, Australia, NZ, and the UK.

The solution is to kick out the foreign home buyers. Make it illegal for them to own property here. Another solution is to put a massively huge tax on their property, which makes them sell. Once the foreigners stop buying, real estate prices will fall.

I also think a national daycare system, as they have in France, would be helpful too.

* The thing is, Chetty is never going to Notice the things that Steve does because Chetty would like to have a lucrative career, be respectfully interviewed on mainstream outlets and give TED talks.
I don’t know to what extent he is actually Noticing the same things Steve does and is stifling himself, or is Crimestopping himself from even thinking things, but there is no upside for him in becoming a Noticer and finding himself working as a blogger asking for donations in order to provide for his family.

* Raj Chetty is pretty smart, and I bet he is privately noticing all of the same things. As an aside, his dad is also a heavy duty data-driven statistical economist, and the older Indians I’ve met from India are not particularly pc—quite the opposite. Chances are that opinions about minority groups in the United States were not stifled at the dinner table during young Raj’s upbringing, but I speculate.

As you say, he can’t go there, without losing his livelihood and being ostracized from his professional cohort. It takes a lot of guts for an immigrant kid to choose the path of being a loner with ornery and unpopular opinions. I don’t’ know of any. Even Dinesh D’Souza chose that path as a brown-skinned conservative novelty at Dartmouth during the Reagan era purely as a career move.

* You ought to see Indians bullshit their way around an IT company. From the outside looking in (like the Jews), they become better than the natives at the lingo and at exploiting corporate and cultural values for their own benefit.

As the saying goes, “If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” Hire one Indian in a management position, and soon you notice Indians start to sprinkle throughout the corporate cubes. They stick together and act together in ways totally foreign to the natives as the Indians climb corporate ladders … together.

Is this now Satya Nadella became the head of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai the head of Google? I’m suspicious.

The most extreme case I’ve seen is an Indian (naturalized citizen) low-bid and win a major IT contract with the U.S. Department of Defense and then outsource the labor to family and friends in India. How did he win the contract? The contract was awarded on the recommendation of the Defense Agency’s CIO … who was also Indian. Soon after the contract award, the Indian-owned company was awarded another contract to make up for its inability to execute under the original low bid.

Hence, it does not surprise me to see Chetty systematically confuse and obfuscate the meaning of the term “diversity” to support racial and cultural diversity in the United States as the “scientific principle” driving the upward mobility and economic prosperity of White people… as a subtle way of supporting the increased immigration of Indians and others from equally alien cultures and religions.

* Indians are by far the schemiest schemers who ever schemed. Their feigned docile ingenuousness and affability make them all the more formidable; the archetypally inscrutable Oriental of eastern Asia is a rank amateur in comparison. I expect it’s to do with the cacophony of ethnicities, tribes, languages, religions, castes, and so on all crammed into the subcontinent and adopting a hyperdense agrarian and urban lifestyle from time immemorial, unhelped by its location at the nexus of east and west along the Silk Road. These factors all combined to select for some really Byzantine politicking, passive-aggression, backstabbing, and the long con to negotiate the horror-show since seldom was a large enough, homogenous enough contingent around to just kill the other fellow honourably. From Alexander’s time to the British Raj, they were betrayng each other to wholly alien outsiders in exchange for privileges as the running dogs of the conquerers, so despicable and selfish are they. It’s interesting to compare their history to that of the Hellenic city-states to see what rôle geography and a sparse population played in making the latter an honourable people: pastoral, thassalocratic, pastoral, motivated by honour (vs. shame) – just as you say, this Chetty clown will never understand it because it is not in his DNA the way it is ours, and even if he does intellectually understand it, he’ll never admit it because he is not interested in science, knowledge and truth, but rather in his own scheming careerism, true to form for an Indian. Q.E.D.

* It’s true they lack the altruistic cohesion you suggest on any large scale, but exactly the granular infighting and backbiting you describe is why they will handily strike opportunistic bargains with each other (or even outsiders) in the same way, say, two narcotraficantes or mafiosos might to get a leg up over The Man or The Other Fellow. Like thieves, there is no honour among them, but there are plenty of rackets and conspiracies. They also engage in these behaviours with each other more than with outsiders for the same reasons criminals will deal with each other regarding their illicit deeds but not, often, virtuous people: only the equally selfish fellow with his own nefarious agenda can be relied upon not to spill the beans or violate the terms let it bring things crashing down upon him as well….

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Who’s an anti-Semite?

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes:

The Jewish left has been calling conservatives “anti-Semites” — not to mention “fascists” and “racists” — for as long as I have been alive.Yet, outside of the Muslim world, virtually all anti-Semitism and Israel-hatred comes from the left. Of course, to most left-wing (as opposed to liberal) Jews, Israel-hatred is not the same as anti-Semitism. One can even help those who wish to destroy Israel — through supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, for example — and still be honored by Jewish institutions. Two local examples: Ed Asner was just given a lifetime achievement award at the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival. and Cornel West was invited by the UCLA Department of Jewish Studies to give a keynote address.

But no matter how destructive the left is — not only to Jews and Israel, but to civilized society as demonstrated by the intolerance and violence at our left-wing universities — it’s the right that frightens most American Jews.

Which brings me to an advertisement in the May 12 edition of the Jewish Journal by a Jewish leftist attacking Ann Coulter as an anti-Semite and me for defending her against that charge.

I don’t know what prompted the ad, since none of the allegations against Coulter is recent. The issue is gone and largely forgotten. My best guess is that precisely because there is so much Israel- and Jew-hatred emanating from the left, the man who took out the ad felt it necessary to find a prominent right-wing example of anti-Semitism. And since it is so rare, he revived the Coulter issue.

The irony is that even if Ann Coulter were an anti-Semite, this lone voice would hardly come close to matching the anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism coming from the left that permeate Western universities, intellectual life and the media.

But even that irony doesn’t apply, since Ann Coulter is strongly pro-Israel. But, again, neither matters to most Jews on the left, since, as far as these Jews are concerned, being pro-Israel doesn’t make you a friend of the Jews and being anti-Israel doesn’t make you an enemy of the Jews.

Posted in Ann Coulter, Anti-Semitism | Comments Off on Who’s an anti-Semite?

UCLA Professor: What’s Wrong with Jews Being a Minority in Israel?

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Luke Ford

David Suissa writes for the Jewish Journal:

Professor Makdisi based many of his arguments on universal values such as fairness, equality, justice, and so on. Focusing on those values helped him finesse the Achilles Heel of the BDS movement– the fact that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Promoting the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel, for example, means the effective end of the Jewish state, what a panelist on the Pearl side called “national suicide.”

Makdisi took that word — suicide — and ran with it, almost ridiculing it as an example of needless hysterics from the Zionist side. You could see where he was going. What kind of just society would treat the arrival of Palestinians as a national suicide? Sure, there may be a great number of Palestinians who want to return to Israel, but what’s wrong with Arabs and Jews living side by side, in full equality, in the same state and under the same government?

Then, he got carried away and blurted out these words:

“What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?”

There was a gasp among some pro-Israel members of the audience. Pearl himself made a grimace, and commented that minorities are not treated very well in the Middle East.

I have a feeling Makdisi regretted his words as soon as he said them.

Why? Because he’s no fool. He’s a knowledgeable professor, and he surely knows what’s wrong with Jews being a minority in a country of the Middle East.

He knows that, for centuries, Jews in Arab and Muslim countries were treated as second-class citizens, or Dhimmis. He knows that many of those Jews were persecuted and expelled after the birth of Israel in 1948.

He knows that there are 50 Muslim countries in the world, but only one Jewish state.

He knows that in many of those 50 countries, non-Muslim minorities are routinely persecuted and oppressed.

He knows that the Arab minority in Israel has more rights, freedom, legal protections and economic opportunities than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.

He knows all of that.

So, when he said, so innocently, “What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?” he probably forgot who was in the audience. Maybe he thought he was talking to a Students for Justice in Palestine crowd, for whom a Jewish minority in the Jewish state would be like manna from heaven.

But he wasn’t. There were some proud Zionists in the audience, and I was one of them.

I’m a Jew who was born in an Arab country, where my ancestors were a minority for centuries. The stories I heard were not of human rights and equality. They were stories about surviving by behaving — by keeping our heads down and our mouths shut. My grandparents in Morocco never got to fight for their rights. They couldn’t.

That’s why for 1900 years Jews from all over the world dreamed and yearned to return home to Zion and Jerusalem. That’s why the Zionist movement fought so hard for the rebirth of the Jewish state. Because the Jewish experience of being a vulnerable minority in a hostile land is certainly not one we want to relive.

For Makdisi to suggest that it’s OK for Jews to become dhimmis again, well, if you ask me, that’s not very moral.

It sucks being a minority. I don’t enjoy that whites are a minority in Southern California. I don’t like it that whites will be a minority of the population by around 2042.

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Yes, Virginia (Dare) There Is a Cultural Marxism–And It’s Taking Over Conservatism Inc.

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Luke Ford

Paul Gottfried writes: Not only does Cultural Marxism exist, but it now appears to be taking over Conservatism Inc. Thus even with Paris burning, National Review was still attacking the Right. In the second round of the French election, Tom Rogan urged a vote for Emmanuel Macron on the grounds Marine Le Pen is insufficiently hostile to Vladimir Putin and is a “socialist” because she “supports protectionism.” Macron’s actual onetime membership in the Socialist Party, and his view that there was no such thing as French culture, apparently was not a problem [French election: American Conservatives Should Support Macron, April 24, 2017].

Conservatism Inc. goes along because these goals are partially achieved through corporate capitalists, who actively push Leftist social agendas and punish entire communities if they’re insufficiently enthusiastic about gay marriage, gay scout leaders, transgendered rest rooms, sanctuary cities etc.. Wedded as it is to a clichéd defense of the “free market,” the Beltway Right not only won’t oppose this plutocratic agenda, but instead offers tax cuts to the wealthiest and most malevolent actors.

It is because Cultural Marxism can co-exist with our current economic and political structure that our so-called “conservatives” are far more likely to align with the New Left than the Old Right. The behavior of our own captains of industry shows the rot is deep and that multiculturalism is very much part of American “liberal democratic” thinking, even informing our bogus conservatism. “Conservatism” is now defined as waging endless wars in the name of universalist values that any other generation would have called radically leftist. And Cultural Marxists themselves now define what we call “Western values”—for example, accepting homosexuality

The takeover is so complete, we might even say “Cultural Marxism” has outlived its usefulness as a label or as a description of a hostile foreign ideology. Instead, we’re dealing with “conservatives,” who are, in many ways, more extreme and more destructive than the Frankfurt School itself.

Many conservatives seem to believe Cultural Marxism is just a foreign eccentricity somehow smuggled into our country. Allan Bloom’s “conservative” bestseller The Closing of the American Mind [PDF] contended that multiculturalism was just another example of “The German Connection.” This is ludicrous.

Case in point: unlike Horkheimer, or my onetime teacher Herbert Marcuse, leading writers within Conservatism Inc. are sympathetic to something like gay marriage.

These include:

Indeed, homosexual liberation is so central to modern conservatism that the Beltway Right’s pundits urge American soldiers to impose it at bayonet point around the world. Kirchick complains we haven’t pressed the Russian “thug” Vladimir Putin hard enough to accept such “conservative” features of public life as gay pride parades. [Why Putin’s Defense of “Traditional Values” Is Really A War on Freedom, by James Kirchick, Foreign Policy, January 3, 2014]

Another frequent contributor to National Review, Jillian Kay Melchior, expressed concern that American withdrawal from Ukraine might expose that region to greater Russian control and thereby diminish rights for the transgendered. [Ukrainians are still alone in their heroic fight for freedom, New York Post, October 8, 2015]

If that’s how our Respectable Right reacts to social issues, then it may be ridiculous to continue denouncing the original Cultural Marxists. Our revolutionary thinking has whizzed past those iconoclastic German Jews who created the Frankfurt Institute in the 1920s and then moved their enterprise to the US in the 1930s. Blaming these long-dead intellectuals for our present aberrations may be like blaming Nazi atrocities on Latin fascists in 1920. We’re better served by examining those who selectively adopted the original model to find out what really happened.

At this point we should ask not whether the Frankfurt School continues to cast a shadow over us but instead ask why are “conservatives” acquiescing to or even championing reforms more radical than anything one encounters in Adorno and Horkheimer?

ORDER IT NOW

Admittedly, Conservatism Inc. has drifted so far to the Left that one no longer blinks in surprise when a respected conservative journalist extolls Leon Trotsky and the Communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Yet it’s still startling to see just how far left the Beltway “Right” has moved on social issues. Even more noteworthy is how unwilling the movement is to see any contradiction between this process and the claim they are “conservatives.”

And let’s not pretend that Conservatism Inc. is simply running a “Big Tent.” Those who direct the top-down Beltway Right are eager to reach out to the Left, providing those they recruit share their belligerent interventionist foreign policy views and do nothing to offend neoconservative benefactors, while purging everything on their right.

This post-Christian, post-bourgeois consensus is now centered in the US and in affiliate Western countries and transmitted through our culture industry, educational system, Deep-State bureaucracy, and Establishment political parties.

The Beltway Right operates like front parties under the old Soviet system. Like those parties, our Establishment Right tries to “fit in” by dutifully undermining those to its the Right and slowly absorbing the social positions and heroes of the Left.

Occasionally it catches hell for not moving fast enough to the Left. But this only bolsters the image of Conservatism, Inc. as defenders of traditional America against the Left—an image that it won’t lose even as it veers farther in the direction of its supposed adversary.

Posted in Conservatives, Paul Gottfried | Comments Off on Yes, Virginia (Dare) There Is a Cultural Marxism–And It’s Taking Over Conservatism Inc.

Mondoweiss: ‘Why is Israel’s interference in American politics not subject to a congressional probe? Because it’s so successful.’

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Luke Ford

I find Mondoweiss a challenge to read and to simultaneously keep my equanimity. The website challenges my assumptions about the moral superiority of the Jews and of the Jewish state.

I can’t think of any Middle Eastern country I would rather live in than Israel. I can’t think of any people I would rather belong to than Jews. I can’t think of any life I’d rather live than the Orthodox Jewish one.

Still, it’s good to read challenges like this one:

Link:

The other day, I asked a longtime Democratic Party insider who is working on the Russia-gate investigation which country interfered more in U.S. politics, Russia or Israel. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Israel, of course.”

Which underscores my concern about the hysteria raging across Official Washington about “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential campaign: There is no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of Israel-gate.

The problem is that if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.

So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both appeared before AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton promising to take the U.S.-Israeli relationship “to the next level” – whatever that meant – and Trump vowing not to “pander” and then pandering like crazy.

Congress is no different. It has given Israel’s controversial Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a record-tying three invitations to address joint sessions of Congress (matching the number of times British Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared). We then witnessed the Republicans and Democrats competing to see how often their members could bounce up and down and who could cheer Netanyahu the loudest, even when the Israeli prime minister was instructing the Congress to follow his position on Iran rather than President Obama’s.

Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize political influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby’s largesse and who doesn’t. On the rare occasion when members of Congress step out of line – and take a stand that offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a well-funded opponent in their next race, a tactic that dates back decades.

Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy (both Republicans from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby’s wrath when they opened channels of communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the cause of seeking peace. Findley was targeted and defeated in 1982; Percy in 1984.

Findley recounted his experience in a 1985 book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, in which Findley called the lobby “the 700-pound gorilla in Washington.” The book was harshly criticized in a New York Times review by Adam Clymer, who called it “an angry, one-sided book that seems often to be little more than a stringing together of stray incidents.”

Enforced Silence

Since then, there have been fewer and fewer members of Congress or other American politicians who have dared to speak out, judging that – when it comes to the Israeli lobby – discretion is the better part of valor. Today, many U.S. pols grovel before the Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval kings courting the blessings of the Pope at the Vatican.

During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed with suspicion, traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within rocket-range of Gaza while steering clear of showing much empathy for the Palestinians.

In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tried to exploit the tense Obama-Netanyahu relationship by stopping in Israel to win a tacit endorsement from Netanyahu. The 2016 campaign was no exception with both Clinton and Trump stressing their love of Israel in their appearances before AIPAC.

Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and American supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have exploited that reality.

One of Israel’s most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has poured millions of dollars in “dark money” into political candidates and groups that support Israel’s interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a nuclear bomb inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump favorite having donated a record $5 million to Trump’s inaugural celebration.

Of course, many Israel-connected political donations are much smaller but no less influential. A quarter century ago, I was told how an aide to a Democratic foreign policy chairman, who faced a surprisingly tough race after redistricting, turned to the head of AIPAC for help and, almost overnight, donations were pouring in from all over the country. The chairman was most thankful.

The October Surprise Mystery

Israel’s involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin played a key role in helping Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages before Election Day.

Begin despised Carter for the Camp David Accords that forced Israel to give back the Sinai to Egypt. Begin also believed that Carter was too sympathetic to the Palestinians and – if he won a second term – would conspire with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to impose a two-state solution on Israel.

Begin’s contempt for Carter was not even a secret. In a 1991 book, The Last Option, senior Israeli intelligence and foreign policy official David Kimche explained Begin’s motive for dreading Carter’s reelection. Kimche said Israeli officials had gotten wind of “collusion” between Carter and Sadat “to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Kimche continued, “This plan prepared behind Israel’s back and without her knowledge must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”

But Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in 1980 when, Kimche wrote, “he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”

In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe also noted that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.

“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David,” Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel’s back.”

So, in order to buy time for Israel to “change the facts on the ground” by moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection had to be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.

Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and intelligence operatives who described how Reagan’s campaign, mostly through future CIA Director William Casey and past CIA Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in 1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for keeping the hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as President.)

Discrediting History

Though the evidence of the so-called October Surprise deal is far stronger than the current case for believing that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media have refused to accept it, deeming it a “conspiracy theory.”

One of the reasons for the hostility directed against the 1980 case was the link to Israel, which did not want its hand in manipulating the election of a U.S. president to become an accepted part of American history. So, for instance, the Israeli government went to great lengths to discredit Ben-Menashe after he began to speak with reporters and to give testimony to the U.S. Congress.

When I was a Newsweek correspondent and first interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990, the Israeli government initially insisted that he was an impostor, that he had no connection to Israeli intelligence.

However, when I obtained documentary evidence of Ben-Menashe’s work for a military intelligence unit, the Israelis admitted that they had lied but then insisted that he was just a low-level translator, a claim that was further contradicted by other documents showing that he had traveled widely around the world on missions to obtain weapons for the Israel-to-Iran arms pipeline.

Nevertheless, the Israeli government along with sympathetic American reporters and members of the U.S. Congress managed to shut down any serious investigation into the 1980 operation, which was, in effect, the prequel to Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal of 1984-86. Thus, U.S. history was miswritten. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative; Secrecy & Privilege; and Trick or Treason.]

Looking back over the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, it is clear that Israel exercised significant influence over U.S. presidents since its founding in 1948, but the rise of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in the 1970s – led by former Jewish terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – marked a time when Israel shed any inhibitions about interfering directly in U.S. politics.

Much as Begin and Shamir engaged in terror attacks on British officials and Palestinian civilians during Israel’s founding era, the Likudniks who held power in 1980 believed that the Zionist cause trumped normal restraints on their actions. In other words, the ends justified the means.

In the 1980s, Israel also mounted spying operations aimed at the U.S. government, including those of intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard, who fed highly sensitive documents to Israel and – after being caught and spending almost three decades in prison – was paroled and welcomed as a hero inside Israel.

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