Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | October 16, 2019, Updated: October 22, 2019
Commentary
On Oct. 28, the two most powerful Democratic politicians in the United States, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), will headline the annual conference of J Street—a leftist (and, in reality, anti-Israel) lobbying organization.
Schumer’s presence at the conference is especially significant because he has been long regarded as a pro-Israel voice in the Senate. He regularly speaks at the annual conference of the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—the nemesis of J Street.
Traditional bipartisan support for Israel has been waning for some time as the pro-Palestine left wing of the Democratic Party gains more and more influence. This “fraternizing” with J Street by party leaders will likely send a signal to Israel that Democratic support in the U.S. Congress can no longer be relied upon.
While AIPAC has long worked with both Democrats and Republicans, J Street is an almost exclusively Democratic-focused operation. Its affiliated political action committee, JStreetPAC, raised $5 million for more than 100 Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, according to The Jerusalem Post.
J Street was established in 2007 essentially as a counter to AIPAC. J Street describes itself as “the political home and voice for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans … who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the Jewish people … [advocating] for policies that advance shared US and Israeli interests as well as Jewish and democratic values, leading to a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.”
According to Media Director Jessica Rosenblum, cited in Brown University student newspaper The Brown Daily Herald, J Street “aims to ‘redefine what it means to be pro-Israel’ and marshal American support for a two-state solution.”
According to J Street, to be “pro-Israel” today is to support the “two-state solution”—the partitioning of Israel to create a new independent Palestinian nation within current Israeli borders.
The so-called two-state solution would in fact be tantamount to Israeli national suicide. Depending on the proposed borders (a major sticking point), a new Palestinian state would incorporate nearly a third of Israel’s territory and would include several major cities including Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, and Jenin. It would bring the borders of a potentially hostile foreign power to within a very few miles of Israel’s economic center Tel Aviv and within literal yards of the capital city Jerusalem. It would also bring dozens of Israeli towns and settlements within easy rocket or sniper range.
The “two-state solution” would make Israel almost impossible to defend—which is no doubt the reason it is being pushed so hard by the Jewish nation’s enemies. It is the strategic equivalent of giving Hawaii, Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington to China, or ceding the entire Eastern Seaboard up to the city limits of New York and Washington to Russia.
Israel’s traditional Middle Eastern enemies, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the openly Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, always owed their main loyalties to the former Soviet Union. Fatah, a faction of the PLO, now rules the Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous part of Eastern Israel. Terror group Hamas, which rules the Gaza strip in Southern Israel, is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has deep ties to Soviet-Russian intelligence. Hezbollah, which has often attacked Israel from its bases in neighboring Lebanon, is a front for the Iranian regime, which partially owes its existence to the former Soviet Union and is still closely allied with Moscow.
Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that J Street is heavily penetrated by the U.S. hard-left, most of which is now militantly opposed to the existence of Israel.
Connections
In 2009, late Minnesota Communist Party leader Erwin Marquit traveled to Washington for the first national conference of J Street. Marquit “attended the conference on 26–28 October and participated in lobbying members of the Congress on 29 October. … The guidelines for the lobby stressed Congressional support of Obama,” according to his memoirs. Marquit was also a political ally and financial supporter of hard-left Muslim former Congress member Keith Ellison. J Street endorsed and funded Ellison in his 2016 congressional race.
Members of the J Street advisory board have included:
Stanley Sheinbaum, a wealthy Los Angeles-based philanthropist and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member. Sheinbaum claimed PLO leader Yasser Arafat as a friend and denied that Arafat was a terrorist.
Alan Snitow, a filmmaker and former member of East Bay DSA.
Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the School of Social Science of Princeton University and a member of the DSA.
Maria Echaveste, the former deputy White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. At Stanford University in the 1970s, Echaveste was active in MEChA, a radical socialist group advocating for the return of the U.S. Southwest to Mexico. In May 1975, Echaveste of Students for Equity joined the Alliance for Radical Change, the far-left Iranian Students Association, and the Maoist-leaning Revolutionary Student Brigade to pressure Stanford University trustees to terminate a three-year, $1 million contract to develop a satellite system for National Iranian Radio Television. The communist campaign to economically isolate the regime of the pro-American Shah of Iran contributed to the Islamic revolution of 1978. There are clear parallels to today’s anti-Israel Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment Movement.
Rob Malley, the former special assistant to Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama. Malley’s father, Simon Malley, was a founder of the Egyptian Communist Party and a close associate of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. According to Ed Lasky of the American Thinker: “Simon Malley loathed Israel and … spent countless hours with Yasser Arafat and became a close friend of Arafat.” In 1980, Simon Malley and his family were expelled from France for “political activities which do not correspond with, and even run contrary to, French interests in certain countries,” according to Discover the Networks. An Oct. 3, 1980, United Press International report stated, “[French] Interior Minister Christian Bonnet told the Assembly that some articles written by Malley were ‘genuine appeals to murder foreign chiefs of state.’”
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami also has a radical bent. Ben-Ami was then-President Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser and later served as policy director for leftist Democrat Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Before becoming president of J Street, he was senior vice president at Fenton Communications, a Washington public relations firm notorious for representing communist movements and governments, including Daniel Ortega’s Marxist regime in Nicaragua, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s Marxist-Leninist regime in Grenada, El Salvador’s Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization the FMLN, and the pro-Soviet MPLA regime in Angola.
In 2009, Ben-Ami served on the board of J Street sister organization Americans for Peace Now alongside several radical leftists, including DSA members Jo-Ann Mort, Stanley Sheinbaum, and Michael Walzer.
J Street is unquestionably an enemy of Israel as it is constituted today. The fact that the two highest-ranking Democrats in Congress are scheduled to address the upcoming J Street conference will likely be noted with some concern in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Feature Photo: U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrive at a news briefing after they returned to the Capitol from a White House meeting with President Donald Trump May 22, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
President Barack Obama’s disastrous deal with Iran paves the way for this totalitarian regime to attain nuclear weapons, ones which Iran’s dictators could then aim squarely at the United States, Israel, and our allies. But the complicit media repeatedly join the administration in championing the deal, which both falsely claim is the only viable alternative to war.
In order to stifle opposition to this narrative, the mainstream media have mostly offered the public misleading information and punditry. After an estimated 12,000 people gathered in New York City’s Times Square on July 22 to fight the Iran deal, the media did what they do best in the face of inconvenient truths—marginalize the opposition, or ignore the facts.
“Speakers, including Republican politicians, called on Congress to throw it out, whipping up the crowd that included supporters of right-wing Jewish and evangelical Christian groups,” reported AFP about the Times Square rally. Similarly, the widely distributed Associated Press article reported that “The event…consisted mainly of pro-Israel supporters, though organizers said it represents Americans of all faiths and political convictions.”
In other words, move along, nothing to see here but a bunch of right-wing crazies who want war with Iran. There’s no popular protest against the Iran deal, we are told, and opposition to the deal is not actually bipartisan. Yet notable Democrats who spoke at the rally included liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey.
David Brog, Executive Director, Christians United for Israel
Monica Crowley, Political Commentator
U.S. Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Steven Emerson, Founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Frank Gaffney, Founder of the Center for Security Policy
Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post
Kasim Hafeez, Christians United for Israel’s Outreach Coordinator
Pete Hoekstra, Former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee
Richard Kemp, Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan
Tony LoBianco, Actor and Activist
Herbert I. London, President London Center for Policy Research
Clare M. Lopez, Center for Security Policy
U.S. Navy Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
Kevin McCullough, Radio Host from WMCA and 970 The Answer
Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan District Attorney from 1975 to 2009
George Pataki, former Governor of New York
General Paul Vallely, Chairman of Stand Up America
Col. USA (Ret.) Allen West, former Congressman
Genevieve Wood, The Heritage Foundation
Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report
The New York Times’ decision to report on a minimum wage protest with far fewer attendees, and to splash that article onto the front page, reflects the cursory, feigned ignorance adopted by many in the media about this protest. The thousands of attendees apparently weren’t “enough people to catch the attention of The New York Times, who feature a $15 an hour minimum wage protest of a couple of dozen people on the front page, but not thousands rallying against the Iran deal,” notes Rick Moran for The American Thinker.
That pro-minimum wage hike article by the Times was titled, “Push to Lift Minimum Wage Is Now Serious Business,” and featured on page A1 of the July 24 issue. Instead of covering the Iran protest, and doing some genuine reporting on what was happening on their own doorstep, the Times instead featured the widely cited Associated Press article.
Clearly, the media aren’t going to tell the public the truth about the Iran deal—which is actually between the P5+1 nations and Iran—or why people oppose this debacle.
The many speakers at the rally provided compelling insights into why this is such a bad deal, and the video of this three-hour-plus rally can be viewed online. Speaker after speaker explained why this deal with Iran is inherently flawed and should be rejected.
One consistent theme throughout this powerful and emotional rally was urging people to contact their congressmen and women to try to get them to vote against the deal when it comes time for Congress to vote. Congress has 60 days to consider their vote, and that period began on July 20th.
The main focus of the event was on Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Schumer hasn’t committed either way, and is in a difficult position. He hopes and plans to succeed Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as the Senate Minority Leader (and eventually Majority Leader), and wants to be loyal to President Obama, and the party. But this conflicts with his longstanding support for Israel, which strongly opposes this deal.
The message from many of the speakers was that this is a moment of truth for Schumer. It won’t be good enough, they said, to wait until enough Democrats are lined up to assure that President Obama’s anticipated veto won’t be overridden, and then be able to make a safe vote against the deal. This crowd expects Schumer to lead the fight against the Iran nuclear agreement, which may be the only way for Congress to be able to defeat it. Even then, with the United Nations having already voted to lift its sanctions on Iran, based on certain conditions, it may not matter anyway. But it would definitely send a message.
There were too many great speeches to document here. I attended the event to be there in person, and to support my fellow members of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB). Below are the speeches of the six CCB members who spoke there, providing the story that the media refuse to tell.
“The reality is this arrangement, this deal with Iran is the worst negotiation the United States has conducted in history. … This agreement will actually free known terrorists who have killed Americans, Israelis, Europeans, Westerners and Muslims. An agreement that doesn’t give anything to the United States except the fact that it levels the playing field for Iran to dominate the Middle East, equate itself as a superpower, and ultimately become a power that has the ability to destroy all of its neighbors in the Middle East.”
“We stand united in believing that this is a bad agreement for America and the rest of the world, and we stand united knowing that America is strong. And in our history when we see evil we will confront it, contain it, and we will defeat it. … We have never, and we will never, accommodate it.”
“We know what’s in a good agreement, and people and this president say, ‘But it’s all we could get.’ It’s a sign of weakness.”
“This is the simple message that we should be sending to Iran. When Iran stands up and they chant, ‘Death to America!’ all we need to say is, ‘You first!’ … Well let me tell you something, the United States of America is about victors. The United States of America is about champions. The United States of America does not surrender to a bunch of black-robed crazed clerics that want to see us destroyed.”
“This traitorous group traded our national honor. … They humiliated this great nation before our friends, our allies, and most importantly our enemies. This surrender document must be thoroughly rejected by Congress, and then Congress must exercise its authority to start impeaching executive officials, starting with Secretary Kerry and following [with] President Obama for his illegal and unconstitutional acts.
“There’s only one sure way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon capability and that’s with a military strike—and you can take that to the bank.”
“And, oh by the way, we just learned there are two new side deals to this deal with Iran, and those deals have to do with a place called Parchin, where Iran was testing explosives for its nuclear warheads, says the IAEA. And the other one [is] about the ‘possible’ military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs. These two side deals—not going to be made public, not going to be shared with Congress, not going to be shared with the American people or anybody else.”
“The last thing that Iran gets to keep, they’re keeping four American citizens hostages. … Until these hostages are set free we should not be having one word of negotiations with this Iranian regime.”
“I am tired of the deception, I am tired of the lies that come out of the White House and our government. …Let’s stick together, stand up, and kill this deal!”
Time magazine is out with a colorful and glossy “Inside the New Cuba” special edition, featuring smiling Cuban kids wearing Communist garb on the cover. Page 64 has a photo showing “Cuban fans” holding up “their national flag” at a baseball game. It turns out that the really happy Cubans are those who have been defecting from the island “paradise,” as Time magazine calls the prison camp country.
Credit goes to Christine Rousselle of Townhall.com for covering these defections. They seem to be developing into a regular feature, with Rousselle providing regular updates about additional defections.
So far, eight players from the Cuban men’s field hockey team, four rowers from the Cuban national team, and two members of the Cuban soccer team have defected.
The defections completely undercut the chapter of the special Time magazine issue on Cuba that is titled, “The Big League Next Door,” which speculates that normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba could “stop Cuba’s top talent from fleeing…” This chapter is written by Robert Siegel, senior host of National Public Radio, and Eyder Peralta, an NPR reporter.
Washington Nationals infielder Yunel Escobar defected from Cuba when he was 21. The Washington Post covered his story in a May 7 article, noting:
Escobar’s love of baseball was fueled by television broadcasts and video games, both forbidden in Cuba. He paid to watch MLB games and favorite players such as Alex Rodriguez, Roberto Alomar, Omar Vizquel and fellow Cuban Livan Hernandez on a TV with a hush-hush antenna at a friend’s house. He also grew to love Ken Griffey Jr. because of a video game he played often in secret. A friend had smuggled in a console and charged the equivalent of 50 cents per hour to play.
The entire story is worth reading and there are many touching moments, such as the story of when Escobar spent two days at an immigration detention center in Miami “and kissed the ground when he was released.”
These are the immigrants we should welcome, since they have developed an appreciation of the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. They want to enjoy and celebrate American freedom, not distort and transform the country into a Third World welfare state of cheap labor for corporations and paid-for votes for the Democratic Party.
In the Time magazine version of Cuba, we are told in the section, “Scenes from the Revolution,” that Fidel Castro “promised to clean up the government, restore democracy and civil liberties, and promote social justice.” Nothing is said about whether he fulfilled those promises.
By contrast, we are told that his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, was a “ruthless dictator” who ran a system characterized by “economic and social inequality and a corrupt government.” The implication is that Castro changed all of that for the better.
A caption on a page of pictures of Cuban cowboys on the communist island informs us that “Before Castro nationalized all farms, almost three quarters of Cuba’s arable lands was owned by fewer than 3,000 individuals and corporations, many of them American, while most farmworkers were renters.” One of the Cuban cowboys proclaims, “It is no longer of Communism or no Communism. It belongs to us.”
You mean communism works after all? That seems to be the message of this special Time magazine Cuba edition.
It’s completely absurd but this is what passes for serious journalism. It reminds me of the old Ronald Reagan joke, reportedly told to Mikhail Gorbachev, about two men walking down a street in Moscow, when one asks, “Is this pure communism? Have we passed through the stage of socialism and reached pure communism? The other replies, “Hell, no. It’s gonna get a lot worse.”
Ben Lewis wrote an article, “Hammer & tickle,” noting that “Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy.”
These days, Oleg Atbashian makes fun of the Marxists and their apologists on a regular basis, on his “People’s Cube” website. One of his latest offerings is the new poster featuring the “Rebel without a gender.” The People’s Cube proclaims, “Che is dead, long live Conchita: a new rebel icon.”
His tribute to the Museum of Communism in Prague is a lot of laughs, as he displays some of the posters from the old communist days, such as the one announcing that communist women would have burnt their bras like their sisters in the West, “if there were any in the shops.”
Another communist poster said: “Sometimes there was no toilet paper in the shops. Luckily there was not much food, either.”
Meanwhile, believe it or not, the comedian Jack Black is being featured in a video campaign from the group Global Zero to sell the Iranian nuclear deal. He previously starred in such films as “Shallow Hal,” “School of Rock,” “Nacho Libre,” and the Kung Fu Panda films.
A comedian as the face of the Iranian nuclear deal? This is where the laughing begins to die down.
The Iranians and their Russian sponsors are the ones laughing at us now.
So are the Cuban Communists.
They may lose some people through defections, but they get an embassy on American soil where they can base their spies and recruit agents inside the U.S. government.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
