All for Israel? Even bribery, disloyalty, and keeping U.S. kids hungry?

President Obama and Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton are publicly bribing Israel to halt settlement construction for 90 days in return for 20 F-35 joint strike fighter aircraft, valued at about $3 billion dollars. In other words, Israel, a gangster-ridden, theocratic sandpit at the far end of the Mediterranean, has demonstrated its ability to extort almost anything it wants, whenever it wants it, from the greatest power the world has ever known.

Indeed, Israel now has a chit worth at least $3 billion dollars it can call in whenever it’s a bit short of U.S. taxpayer money. Netanyahu and his cabinet — with full support from the U.S.-citizen-staffed, Israel-First Fifth Column — can simply make noises every 90-days about building more settlement homes and then sit back and wait for the next bribe to arrive. Who knows, maybe an aircraft carrier or a half-dozen nuclear submarines will be in the next bag of swag demanded by Israel and the Israel-Firsters? Presumably Netanyahu has a pretty long shopping list of material items he wants U.S. citizens to pay for, as well as foreign policy goals for which he wants U.S. troops to fight and die.

Perhaps some order can be put into this process so U.S. taxpayers know how much Washington will send to the doomed-by-the Neocons’-Iraq-war Israeli state before it is washed away by the tide Sunni Salafist mujahideen rolling west from the Gulf and South Asia through Iraq. Why not put that miserable little cur Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) — whose loyalty to Israel over the United States is as lethal to Americans as Anwar al-Awalki’s disloyalty — in charge of the project. President Obama, in a spirit of bipartisanship, can name Rep. Cantor “Czar for bribing Israel and making sure more U.S. troops get killed by Islamists.”

Rep. Cantor should be assigned two tasks in this era of economic distress, one to keep track of the cost of bribing Israel and the other to keep count of the dead U.S. soldiers and Marines that will result therefrom. It’s the least he can do given that he has proven the felony provisions of the Logan Act — meant to protect Americans against being sold out to foreigners by fellow citizens — do not apply to him or other pro-Israel U.S.-citizens who meet privately with Israel’s prime minister and deliver who knows what information and promises from the Israel-First suborned U.S. Congress. (NB: Cantor meets Netanyahu on 10 November 2010 and three days later Obama and Clinton offer Israel 20 F-35 strike-fighter aircraft. Coincidences happen, I guess.)

Beyond the sickening spectacle of Obama and Clinton panting in eagerness to bribe Israel, and the brazen public display of disloyalty by Cantor and other Israel-Firsters — Democrats and Republicans — we also see ol’ “America-will-never-be-at-war-with-Islam” Barack again proving he has lied to the Islamic world. With the F-35 bribe for Israel on the table for inspection, 1.4 billion Muslims will see that Obama’s “Muslim outreach” program, as described in his Cairo and Indonesia speeches, is not genuine and will not slow Washington’s bipartisan ardor for supplying Israel with more and better weapons with which to start wars and kill Muslims.

Obama is a curious man: Extremely well-educated and extraordinarily unable — or unwilling — to see how one of his actions negatively impacts a variety of other U.S. interests. In this case, he does not seem to realize that the war-encouraging substance of his bribe to Israel for the temporarily cessation of settlement construction will look to Muslims much like a U.S. declaration of war on the Islamic world. And that this is the rule not the exception in his behavior is shown by his recent performance in India, where he declared a “strategic partnership” with New Delhi at the cost of driving Pakistan further into Saudi and Chinese hands and making sure that Pakistan’s survival is now tied to the success of those fighting to drive both the U.S.-NATO coalition and India from Afghanistan. At day’s end, perhaps a complete inability to integrate obviously related subjects is an Ivy-League education’s main product.

Finally, the decision by Obama and Clinton to bribe Israel at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $3 billion ought to be juxtaposed with a commercial now playing on U.S. television. The commercial claims 15-percent of American children live in hunger and asks viewers to donate to a fund to be used to eradicate this problem by 2015.

By 2015? Why not in six months? Why not re-appropriate the $6 billion going to Israel ($3 billion annual aid and the F-35s) and the nearly $6 billion that goes to the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, and Egypt and wipe out childhood hunger by mid-2011? I have never believed the Founders even remotely intended the constitution to authorize the federal government to reach into U.S. citizens’ pockets and steal money to give to foreign leaders, many of whom are gangsters, corrupt kings, tyrants, or fundamentally anti-American. Does anyone believe it is possible that the Founders would have supported paying $12 billion to foreign governments at any time, let alone when 15% of American kids are hungry? Maybe someone should ask Obama, Clinton, and Cantor for their views on this issue. Maybe that someone should be a hungry nine-year-old kid.

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.