A short talk by Kennett Love:

He served (see biographical sketch below) as The New York Times' correspondent
 in the Middle East from 1953-1956, in London until 1959, and at the United
Nations in New York until 1962. In these places he had access to the men who
shook the world. He is the author of the most definitive book on the Suez wars
-- SUEZ: The Twice-fought War--Published in 1969.

Queries? Send an E-mail to: 
kennettlove@earthlink.net

June 19, 2004
Ladies & gentlemen, David Irving, Michael Santomauro, good evening.

You don't have to be an anti-Semite to despise and fear Ariel Sharon. You
don't have to be an anti-Semite to perceive that the United States of America has
lost control of its politics to a Jewish lobby that puts Israel's interests
above our own American interests.  That loss would not be of paramount concern
if Israel's interests were the same as – or even vaguely similar to -- our
American interests.  And you don't have to be an anti-Semite to oppose and fear
George W. Bush and the cruel war in Iraq into which he and the neo-cons and the
evangelical fundamentalist Christian cults have led America with lies.


I cite the victory of Zionist Jewish money in the defeat of popular
congressional incumbents in the Alabama and Georgia primaries for the national
elections.  Worse yet, and more recently, I cite the Pavlovian pro-Israel foot-licking
adherence of John Kerrie to the pro-forma platform vows of the Bush
administrations -- father and son -- and the cowardly, continuing congressional caucus
touting their grossly partisan support for Israel against nearly the entire
Muslim world and in defiance of public opinion in Europe and the rest of the
Americas.


Israel's character and policies are criticized and courageously opposed by
many of its Jewish citizens.  But Israel's character and policies are
diametrically opposed to American principles.


1.  Israel is racist.  Its law of return applies only to Jews born of Jewish
mothers.  It is not the only democracy in the middle east because it is not a
democracy.  The Arabs and other non-Jews under Israeli control are second
class citizens at best.  We have abated our racism and we enforce severe laws
against it.

2.  Israel is terrorist.  It was founded on terror.  It applied terror  to
make Arabs flee, across unfixed and non-legal borders, and then declared  them
to have forfeited their property and homes.  Israel confiscated their
possessions after their terrified flight and shot many of them when they tried to
retrieve family jewelry.  They were barred from return in favor of the influx of
Jews. One of Israel's most horrendous acts was the massacre of hundreds of 
women, children, and old men at Deir Yasseen in the course of the war of conquest
which began to escalate in 1947.  The bodies were thrown down the village
well.  The young men were at work in the fields. The UN mediator, Count Folke
Bernadotte, was assassinated while trying to establish borders in accord with the
1947 UN partition of Palestine. The murder was never solved.  Israel never
seriously investigated it.  It was apparently an act of terror to get more
territory for Israel.  Israel proclaimed itself an independent state in 1948 on May
15, as part of Israel's permanent campaign to kill or expel all non-Jews in
Palestine, -- Armenians, Greek orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics among
them -- Sharon led an invasion into Lebanon in 1982 and personally shepherded
the massacre of nearly 1,000 Palestine refugees in the camps of Sabra and
Shatilla outside of Beirut.  Only a few weeks ago a Sharon cabinet minister told the
New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg there were “innocent men among the
Palestinians, but they are collectively guilty; we will have to kill them all.”


This genocidal policy was born in 1897 in the mind of Theodore Herzl, author
of Der Judenstaat [the Jewish State] and the founder of modern political
Zionism.  He used the term “transfer of populations”. That has been a constant
Israeli policy, resembling our own killings and forced relocations of native
Americans.

3.  Israel is theocratic.  Our tradition is to separate church and state. 
Let me insert here that our traditions and our principles are often violated. 
Our president is a born-again evangelical who claims god told him to attack
Saddam Hussein.   He did -- with enormous bunker-busting bombs that inflicted
incalculable “collateral damage”.  An estimated 10,000 Iraqis died, but we have
not counted.

4.  Iraq was targeted at the prompting of the Jewish neo-cons because Iraq,
unlike Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon is still officially at war with Israel.  Iraq
fired missiles at Israel in the gulf war of Bush the father. This war is
pre-emptive, a war of choice, not defense and now we are stuck with it.

5.  Israel is a vigorous, anachronistic colonialist power. The world sees our
“special relationship” with Israel as a partnership in crusading, conquering
colonialism.  We serve Israel as armorer, banker, diplomatic protector, and
relentless vetoer of UN efforts to curb Israel's violations of international
laws.  The UN’s founding charter

in 1945 prohibited using force or the threat of force to acquire territory. 
Just two years later Israel began doing just that in “liberating” Palestine
from hundreds of thousands of  Palestinians in what it called its “war of
liberation” in 1947 – 1948 and in its stunning pre-emptive wars and massacres
against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982.  It seized upon its
triumph in 1967 to occupy the West Bank and Gaza.  They kill and demolish
homes and institutions with appalling heartlessness and insultingly ignore our
timid remonstrances.  They run the special alliance; we don’t. Some alliance! 
They don't bother to make a pretense of loyalty nor even compromise out of
courtesy.  They look the other way when we oppose at nuclear programs in Syria, Nor
th Korea, China, India, and Pakistan.   They made us look the other way while
they built a formidable nuclear and missile armory of their own.  They
corrupted an American citizen named Pollard to steal our secrets for years and
scolded us bitterly for sending him to prison for life instead of letting him
“return” to the Jewish State.


In their 1967 war they ambushed our electronic surveillance ship, the
“Liberty”, in broad daylight with aircraft guns and bombs, motor torpedo boats, even
a submarine, crippling the ship and killing some 35 of its crew and wounding
dozens more.  Israel pressed the day-long attack in the face of oversize
American flags and radio identifications and may-days. Israel has given no
explanation or expression of regret

and has balked inquiry into the incident. And so have we.  President Johnson
called off a rescue sortie by the sixth fleet. Survivors of the “liberty”
attack have stubbornly sought to learn the reasons why.  It is time we ended the
“special relationship”. It hasn't even a name or agreement to govern its
conduct. 

President George Washington warned against such a special alliance in his
farewell address, saying:

“the nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual
fondness is in some degree a slave. ... sympathy for the favorite nation,
facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real
common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays
the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter
without adequate inducement or justification.”

..."in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the
truly enlightened and independent patriot.  How many opportunities  do they
afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to
mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! ... real
patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected 
and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of
the people to surrender their interests.”


President Truman in 1947 broke the 150-year-old spell of president
Washington's warning against entangling alliances by launching the Marshall plan of aid
for Western Europe and the Truman Doctrine to block communist influence in
Greece and Turkey.


Israel is touchy about its “legitimate right to exist”, citing most
frequently the story of god's covenant with Abram, later Abraham, made before Abram
had departed from ur of the Chaldees, his ancestral birthplace in what is now
Iraq.  The story begins with god's promise of his favor for Abram and his
descendants (genesis 12 passim):


“now the lord had said to Abram, get thee out of thy country, ... unto a land
that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, ...”  when
Abram had reached Canaan, north of Palestine, god appeared to him again and said:
“unto thy seed will I give this land.”  There was no mention of a covenant
until genesis 15:18, when the lord said to Abram: “unto thy seed have I given
this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the River Euphrates.”


The story has god giving land and other promises to Abram right and left. 
The details differed widely from promise to promise.  Years later Joshua, the
first conqueror of Palestine, quoted a surprisingly frank admission from god:


“I have given you a land for which ye did not labor, and cities which ye
built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and olive yards which ye planted
not do ye eat.”


I suggest that these stories came down in recitations from the days of
mythology, all of it folklore, through centuries when Zeus and Venus and Athena were
as real as Jehovah and Noah or Abraham or Moses – “an ancient time” as E.l.
Doctorow put it, “when no distinction was possible between fact and fiction,
...  as in homer. As in genesis.”


Both parties to a covenant must be alive at the signing.  When I covenanted
to buy an apartment in New York while I was in Egypt covering the 1973 war for
ABC my lawyer told me later that the deal was delayed until he thought to
listen to a radio to hear my live broadcast.


The Muslims, although abraham appears as Ibrahim in the qur’an, reject the
idea that the covenant has any legal standing giving the Jews any right to
trespass on the land of the Canaanites or the Palestinians or the Lebanese or the
Syrians and the Egyptians.  There is no independent evidence that Abraham ever
existed, ever crossed the line between mythology and history.  So the
Abrahamic covenant has no firm basis in law.  Perhaps in tradition.


And the brutal colonialist conduct of Israel is certainly not an acceptable
underpinning for a “legitimate right to exist”.  Our reputation in the world
has been tarred and feathered by our total and uncomplaining support of
Israel's illegal occupation of nearly all of Palestine.

===========

Queries? Send an E-mail to: 
kennettlove@earthlink.net

Biographical Sketch

Kennett Love was born on August 17, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri. He served
from 1943-1946 as a United States Navy pilot during World War II. Like many GIs,
Love returned to school after the war and received a Bachelor of Arts degree
from Columbia College in 1948. He began his career as a writer and a
journalist in 1948 by working as a reporter for the Hudson Dispatch, in Union City, New
Jersey. Love served as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, between
1948 and 1962. His assignments included coverage of activities in the Middle
East, East Africa, West Africa and Europe. Love was an eight-time winner of the
Publisher's Writing Prize. He served in Ethiopia, Morocco, Tunisia and
training centers in the United States as a Planner Evaluator for the Peace Corps
between 1963 and 1964. Love was an associate professor at Princeton University's
School of Oriental Studies from 1964 to 1968. Between 1971-1973 he was a
professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, and served as a Cairo
correspondent for ABC News. In 1974 Love began to pursue a career as a free
lance writer, editor and photographer. For the past two years he has engaged in
research and interviews for a history of the 1953 coup in Iran. Love's major
published work is the 'Suez: The Twice Fought War. He has produced many
articles, reviews, broadcasts and taken photographs which have appeared nationally
and internationally.

See Kennett Love Papers:
http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/kennlove
.html


+++++++
"Deep down, I believe that a little anti-Semitism is a good thing for the
Jews - reminds us who we are." --Jay Lefkowitz (NYT Magazine. Feb.12, 1995. Page
65). Jay Lefkowitz is now Deputy assistant to the President for Domestic
Policy. A sick man! Don't you think?
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