Jew World Order

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Trump on Netanyahu

I’d imagine that most people understand there is a sizable gap between the image of U.S. politics we are presented and how things actually work in Washington. Despite all his faults this disconnect was occasionally bridged by Donald Trump, a man who has probably inspired more people to cite that famous ClickHole story than anyone else: “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.”

These insights have not subsided just because Trump lost the election. Axios‘ Barak Ravid has a new book coming out, Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East. This month he’s been publishing some of the book’s revelations at the Axios website.

In April, Trump told Ravid that Netanyahu never actually wanted peace with the Palestinians. Anyone with cursory knowledge of the region knew this but it is refreshing to see someone say it out loud. “I don’t think Bibi ever wanted to make peace,” said Trump. “I think he just tapped us along. Just tap, tap, tap, you know?”

As Ravid points out Trump presented Israel with the most favorable proposal they had seen since the Clinton era, but control of nearly the entire region was simply not enough for the Israeli government. “My whole life is deals,” said Trump. “I’m like one big deal. That’s all I do, so I understand it. And after meeting with Bibi for three minutes … I stopped Bibi in the middle of a sentence. I said, ‘Bibi, you don’t want to make a deal. Do you?’ And he said, ‘Well, uh, uh uh’ — and the fact is, I don’t think Bibi ever wanted to make a deal.”

Trump’s customary self aggrandizing is pretty funny in this case because he went onto torpedo any hope for his deal when his administration declared Jerusalem Israel’s capital and promised to move the embassy there. (“May your house be destroyed,” Mahmoud Abbas said of Trump.) This wasn’t enough for Netanyahu, who used Trump’s plan to push a wider annexation plan in the West Bank. He even unveiled his scheme at a White House ceremony, catching Trump completely off guard. What happens next is a fascinating microcosm of how the “special relationship” works. Here’s Ravid:

• A former senior White House official told me Netanyahu “turned the president into a potted plant with a campaign speech instead of reaching out to the Palestinians.”
• After Netanyahu departed, Trump asked his advisers, “What the hell was that?”
• When Netanyahu announced the annexation plan later that same day, blindsiding the White House, Trump was livid. “I got angry and I stopped it because that was really going too far,” Trump told me in our interview.

Kushner called Friedman into his office and gave him a dressing down, saying this plan was not what the president wanted.

• Kushner then made Friedman cross Pennsylvania Avenue to the Blair House to deliver the bad news to Netanyahu, who was celebrating with his senior advisers.
• Netanyahu tried to fight it, but within 24 hours, both he and Friedman were walking back everything they had said on annexation. Netanyahu blamed “miscommunication.”

Ravid also has some amazing information about how Netanyahu almost killed The Abraham Accords as a result of all this. He apparently wanted three Arab countries, not just the UAE, on board in exchange for withdrawing his annexation plans. Jared Kushner delivered this message to Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer: “Tell Ron that one country is all he’s going to get, and if he doesn’t want it, he can go f**k himself.”

“Then, on Aug. 12, Netanyahu got cold feet,” Ravid explains. “He was considering calling new elections due to a crisis over the budget. With so much up in the air, Dermer told Berkowitz, Netanyahu wasn’t going to sign. Several shouted conversations between Washington and Jerusalem ensued. Friedman, who was already in D.C. for the announcement, was particularly insistent that the deal was done and the Israelis no longer had a choice.”

“Netanyahu eventually backed down.”

Again, pretty instructive stuff when it comes to U.S./Israel.

Trump also told Ravid that Netanyahu “made a terrible mistake” by congratulating Biden after his victory and not embracing right-wing conspiracy theories about the election. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” said Trump. “F**k him.”

Romin Iqbal

There is an absolutely incredible story out of Ohio this week that should definitely be getting a lot more media attention. The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) Columbus chapter fired its executive director, Romin Iqbal, after discovering he allegedly leaked confidential information to an anti-Muslim group. Iqbal has been with the organization since 2006.

“We were shocked and saddened to learn about this betrayal and incredible violation of trust,” said Nabeel Raazi, Columbus-Cincinnati Board Chair for CAIR-Ohio in a statement. “We are now even more committed to defending and protecting Ohio Muslims from the anti-Muslim extremists who will clearly stop at nothing to try to harm us.”

Iqbal sent information to a group called the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which was founded by Islamophobe Steven Emerson. This story gets even wilder. According to CAIR’s National Director Nihad Awad:

The evidence also indicated that Emerson’s hate group was communicating with and providing assistance to Israeli intelligence with the office of then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Let me say that again. The Israeli government was collaborating with an anti-Muslim hate group.

As I said, this story is not getting as much attention as it should but it wouldn’t be surprising if the media largely ignored this angle in forthcoming stories about the situation.

Odds & Ends

🇺🇸 Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent almost 14 years being brutally tortured at Guantánamo Bay prison and was then released without ever facing a charge. He was recently interviewed on Yahoo News’ Skullduggery podcast.

 “I remember one day I almost died because they put me in this fridge,” he explained. “And I’m telling you, like, when I say ‘the fridge,’ people don’t understand this because another detainee did not survive the fridge. He died in the fridge. It was too cold.”

“And I remember this Marine guy, he was like, I was in the fridge and he was pouring water over me and I wore only a thin uniform and I was so cold,” he continued. “But I really wanted him to stop, I wanted to talk. But I couldn’t talk because my lips couldn’t move and my tongue, it was like a stone.”

Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the future of the prison. Despite promises to close the facility, no member of the Biden administration bothered showing up.

Slahi again: “They should take anyone who is alleged of those heinous crimes to court in America and let them face the music. How can you be the leader of the free world if you don’t respect the rule of law?”

🇮🇱 In a conversation with Noam Chomsky, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she received an “extremely serious credible threat” after forcing the Iron Dome vote in the House and was assigned an armored vehicle for travel as a result.

🇺🇸 On Twitter Rep. Ted Deutch celebrated the fact that two oppressive governments have developed a partnership. “Exciting to watch historic visit by Israeli Prime Minister to UAE cementing a new era of cooperation in the Middle East – one that should benefit all,” tweeted the Florida Democrat. “Looking forward to MBZ visit to Israel.”

🇺🇸 From a recent State Department briefing:

QUESTION: Thank you, Jalina. I’m glad you’re taking my question. And happy holidays. I wanted to ask you if you have any comment on the completion of the iron fence around Gaza? It turns it into a real open-air prison. What is your comment on this? I mean, half of the population in Gaza are children, and to be incarcerated with iron walls and electric walls and all these things without any sort of exit or entry, I wonder if you have any comment on this or the – have you issued any statement on this? Thank you.

MS. PORTER: Thanks, Said. So, we have not issued a statement on this, but what I can say broadly speaking is that, of course, advancing equal measures of freedom and dignity is certainly important to the United States, and of course as a means to negotiating a two-state solution. That concludes today’s daily press briefing. Thank you all for joining. I hope you have a great week ahead.

🇵🇸 Calla Walsh is a Massachusetts youth organizer who helped fight for Ed Markey’s reelection. She has a thoughtful piece at our site about becoming disillusioned with electoral politics as a result of the Senator’s position on Palestine.

🇮🇱 AIPAC is launching two bipartisan PACs ahead of the 2022 midterms. They say that these groups will help “to make us more effective in fulfilling our mission in the current political environment.” Translation: the Republicans are doing extreme damage to our brand and the DMFI model looks interesting to us.

🇺🇸 It’s been a strikingly shameless couple of weeks for the Democrats but please spare a thought for the effort of Josh Gottheimer. The New Jersey congressman tried to tack an amendment onto Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Islamophobia bill that would stifle stop any new envoy from criticizing Israel. Just amazing stuff.

But wait, that’s not all. This week Gottheimer also claimed that members of the Working Families Party recently disrupted an event he was attending and yelled “Jew!” at him. There’s one problem: video shows that this never happened.

Ryan Grim breaks down Gottheimer’s lie at The Intercept:

A review of video of the event provided by the Working Families Party suggests that Gottheimer is either lying or appears to have misheard the protesters. As he left an event out a back door, protesters urged him to engage in one of his regular constituent events that he calls “Cup of Joe with Josh,” in lieu of town halls that his constituents have demanded. “This is your Cup of Joe, Josh. This is your Cup of Joe,” yelled Lisa Schwartz of Teaneck, New Jersey. At the time of the protest, Gottheimer was under intense pressure at home and in Washington to get behind Biden’s Build Back Better Act.

“That’s the only time we saw him, and it was so ridiculous, he avoided us like the plague,” Schwartz, a retired social worker, told The Intercept. “We just wanted five minutes of his time.”

“What an outrageous allegation. I’m someone who’s Jewish. If I’d have heard that, I’d have been outraged and would have left right away, and so would most people there. He’s playing the antisemitism card, and it’s vindictive. I can tell you for certain, nothing like that was shouted,” she said.

🎨 Officials in Redmond, Washington asked artists to remove the word “Palestine” from public artwork they created.

“We were instructed to either paint over it, or remove the panel or scratch it out, or else risk the entire art project being removed,” explained artist Omar Sourour in an interview. “We were going to comply, of course, because these are the instructions from the public city-state, but we weren’t happy with the instructions.Rather than ending the night in a celebratory mood, we sort of spent it consoling each other while we vandalized the artwork we spent a month and a half building.”

“It was a very upsetting moment for us,” he continued. “We came to the United States believing — and we still believe in this — it’s a country where you’re free to express yourself, you’re free to express your identity.”

The city has since apologized and the artwork has been restored.

Stay safe out there,

Michael

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