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February 23rd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Until now, the mainstream U.S. media, (with the honorable exception of Bloomberg Business), has not paid enough attention to Dan Gertler, the corrupt Israeli businessman who has drained over $1 billion from the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the most exploited nations on earth.
That mainstream blackout is starting to end. The front page of today’s New York Times has a long, valuable investigative report that explains how days before the end of Donald Trump’s term, U.S. Treasury Department economic sanctions that had hampered Gertler were mysteriously lifted. The report shows how celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, along with “high-powered connections in Israel,” helped get the stiff sanctions rolled back for a year, which gave Gertler “access to money frozen in U.S. banks and allowed him once again to do business with financial institutions worldwide.”
The Times quoted high U.S. government officials, even from the Trump administration, who were angered and stunned by the last-minute move. J. Peter Pham, who had a prominent post in Trump’s State Department, said that DR Congo is “one of the most poverty-stricken nations, with a population that has suffered incredibly over the last several decades, and we have worked to turn that around, so why do this?”
Back in 2017, the U.S. Treasury explained that it imposed tough sanctions because Dan Gertler:
is an international businessman and billionaire who has amassed his fortune through hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). . . As a result, between 2010 and 2012 alone, the DRC reportedly lost over $1.36 billion in revenues. . .”
Today’s Times exposé includes some new tantalizing details. The paper found that Gertler had connections in Israel to “people with ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” including a prominent lawyer named Boaz Ben Zur, “whose client list also includes Mr. Netanyahu.”
Alan Dershowitz’s role in the scandal is not new. Back in 2018, the celebrity pro-Israel lawyer had officially registered to lobby the U.S. government on Gertler’s behalf, and called the corrupt mine owner “a very good person.”
The Times reported that Dershowitz slyly insinuated that Gertler should get a reprieve because he “had been of value to U.S. intelligence agencies.” Pham, the former State Department official, retorted: “The only value to national security that Gertler has comes from him being placed in the box that he was put into with the sanctions.”
Today’s article is a big step forward for the Times, which until now has mostly reported just the minimum about the Dan Gertler scandal. The paper has still done more than the Washington Post, which has only mentioned Dan Gertler twice over the past 13 years — and one of those was a pickup of an excellent 2012 report by Bloomberg Business, where Michael J. Kavanagh and other reporters have distinguished themselves by staying on top of the story.
The high-level support for Gertler by Netanyahu and other top Israelis could undermine the country’s so far partly successful efforts to win friends among Africa’s governments. If Gertler’s mega-corruption becomes even more widely known across the continent, Netanyahu’s diplomatic campaign could stumble.
Maybe the Times Jerusalem bureau could follow up and probe for more details about the Netanyahu-Gertler connection?
The Times report today does have one major weakness, which the paper’s foreign staff could start to fix. You have to wait until the very end before you meet a single Congolese: Jimmy Kande, a leader in the advocacy group Congo Is Not For Sale. Anyone who has visited the country knows there is no shortage of Congolese who are indignant and articulate about how the world has exploited their nation for more than a century. The Times should send one of its Africa correspondents to listen to them.
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