Unwholesome Entanglements
by Jerry Mills, Commentator, American Action Report, Taiwan
Regular Contributor to Vatic Project
http://americanactionreport.blogspot.com/2010/04/unwholesome-entanglements.html
(This is the third of a three-article series. I apologize for its length. It's twice as long as I'd intended and contains half the information I have and had intended to use.)
One of the most oft-quoted sayings of the Post-9/11 Era has been, “Any people who would give up essential liberties to gain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The suggestion is that, by shredding the Bill of Rights and other restraints on governmental power, the American people gained some measure of safety, however small or temporary.
Did the American people experience a net gain in safety? I’m inclined to believe that the opposite has occurred.
Perhaps a more appropriate proverb comes from the late, great character actor Dub Taylor. Describing the work of a con man, he said, “A man with money meets a man with experience. The man with experience gets the money, and the man who had money gets experience."
We all know that many of our freedoms moved toward Washington. At the same time, however, much of America’s sovereignty—and with it, our government’s ability to safeguard our freedoms and our security—moved toward those who had the experience (to use Dub Taylor’s word) to promise the American people (Dub Taylor’s less inexperienced “man with money”) security.
In her 2007 book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein wrote that, since the early 1990’s, Israel has adjusted its economy to accommodate the existence of terrorism. A whopping 60% of Israel’s exports are in the field of security and counter terrorism. As a consequence, the more fear there is of terrorism, the more terrorism boosts Israel’s GDP and the less incentive Israel has for working toward peaceful solutions.
Pages 534 through 559 are a litany of security areas Israel dominates just in the United States. You name it; Israel is in charge of something in that area.
For details, I’ll confine myself to things you can check for yourself in reliable sources on the Internet. I don’t want you to have to take my word for it.
Let’s take telephone records and caller ID for starters. An estimated 98% of all telephone calls in America are routed through an Israeli-owned company called AMDOCS. (Click here.)
Then there’s the anti-virus, anti-spyware program called ZoneAlarm, said to be used by all of the Fortune 100 companies, most of the Fortune 500 companies and countless other companies and individuals throughout the world. What their web site (here) doesn’t tell you is, ZoneAlarm has been owned by the Israeli company Check Point since 2004.
Check Point’s home page doesn’t tell you that either. (Click here.) For that information, you have to go to Check Point’s “About Us” page.here. (Click) That information begs the question, “Is your computer spying on you?
Israel’s penchant for spying on the United States is so well known that anyone reading this article probably doesn’t need a link to be convinced of it. Anyone needing a link probably isn’t reading this article. If you haven’t clicked the link for the AMDOCS remark, please do so, and watch the entire video. (Here it is again.)
This video of a four-part Fox News series reveals that Israeli intelligence had prior knowledge of the September 11, 2001, attacks and failed to give the United States useful information to prevent them from taking place. The most charitable way we can interpret this fact is, Israel felt that protecting their sources and methods was more important than protecting 3,000 American lives.
Sometime since 9/11, somebody may have emailed you a video of some Middle Eastern college students celebrating the 9/11 attacks. If so, that person probably told you that the students were Arabs. No, they weren’t; they were Israelis. At that time, some 200 Israelis posed as art students as they gathered information on hundreds of sensitive American installations.
We must consider as well that Israel profited—politically, militarily, and economically—from the 9/11 attacks. As cynical as it sounds, the Israeli government has already shown that its leaders value personal gain over human lives.
To read the rest of the article, see the American Action Report
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
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