Israel Clears the Bench in Iran Fight

Israel's Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, acting like the coach of a football team, instructed congressional Republicans to "leave everything on the field" in the fight to defeat the international agreement with Iran over its nuclear energy program, a sign of how openly Israel now feels it controls the GOP.

Israel wants the Iran deal killed so it can keep open options for bombing Iran and imposing "regime change." And, immediately after Dermer's locker-room-style pep talk, Republican members of Congress began falling into line, lashing out at Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials who negotiated the agreement reached earlier this month between six world powers and Iran.

All this was remarkable even to The New York Times, which usually looks the other way when Israel flexes its muscles in Official Washington. A Times article by Jonathan Weisman noted the extraordinary image of the Israeli ambassador using sports analogies to rile up Republican congressmen to overturn a key foreign policy initiative of the U.S. president.

"Mr. Dermer's plea -- which is widely expected to be followed by a mail, television and radio assault in Democratic districts during the August recess -- demonstrates the power that the Israeli government and supportive interest groups in Washington maintain over congressional Republicans," Weisman wrote.

Obviously, some of this Republican opposition is driven by a deep-seated animus toward President Barack Obama, but the confidence that Dermer, a one-time aide to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, showed in rallying Republicans to Israel's foreign policy priority of hostility toward Iran reveals the degree to which the GOP as a party now ties its agenda in the Mideast to Israel.

Connections between Republicans and right-wing Israelis have grown tighter since the presidency of George W. Bush who began implementing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy of "regime change" against countries on his enemies list, starting with Iraq in 2003. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War."]

Since then, wealthy Israeli backers, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, have funneled huge sums of money into Republican campaigns. In 2012, Netanyahu virtually endorsed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. And, on March 3, House Speaker Boehner invited Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress that was remarkable in its overt appeal to American lawmakers to embrace Israel's foreign policy regarding Iran -- over the head of the sitting U.S. president.

Clearing the Bench

In its current pull-out-all-the-stops to show who controls the U.S. political/media process, Israel also is throwing other key assets into this high-stakes fight. For instance, Steven Emerson, who has long posed as a professional journalist and then as a terrorism expert, was a featured speaker at a Times Square rally urging not only death to the nuclear deal but death to Iran.

"So now we have the situation that unless Congress acts, I believe ultimately, it's going to be left up to a military strike to take out the Iranian capabilities to take out the world," Emerson told a cheering crowd of a couple of thousand. "If we don't take out Iran, they will take out us. ... Because if you don't your children will never forgive you -- never forgive you for not protecting this country from a holocaust. For not protecting the state of Israel from a holocaust that will occur assuredly just as it did 70 years ago.

"Rarely in our lives do we have an opportunity to change history. Now is the time to do it, and it's your responsibility all of ours, to go do it."

Steve Emerson is interviewed by Jeanine Pirro on Fox News where he claimed that Muslims have terrorized non-Muslims into staying out of Birmingham, Great Britain's second-largest city.
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Earlier this year, Emerson, who has longstanding close ties to right-wing Israeli officials, was caught in a blatant falsehood -- and slur -- about British Muslims. Appearing on Fox News as a "terrorism expert," claimed that Birmingham, England, is now a "Muslim-only city" and that in parts of London "Muslim religious police ... beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn't dress according to religious Muslim attire."

Emerson asserted that Muslim areas have become "no-go zones" for non-Muslims and cited as an example "actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don't go in." Yet, Birmingham, Great Britain's second-largest city of more than one million people, is nearly half Christian, with the Muslim population less than one-quarter and with significant numbers of Sikhs, Hindus, Jews and non-religious.

As Emerson's Muslim-bashing remarks drew criticism from the media watchdog group FAIR and ridicule across the United Kingdom, he acknowledged that his "comments about Birmingham were totally in error" and vowed not to blame someone else for his slander.

"I do not intend to justify or mitigate my mistake by stating that I had relied on other sources because I should have been much more careful," Emerson said in an apparent attempt to do exactly that, shift the blame to some unnamed source for supposedly misleading him. [For more on Emerson's history of distortion, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Sorry Record of a Muslim Basher."]