Netanyahu's Fascist Record:
All Roads Lead to Shultz
by Steven Meyer
If supporting the fascist Pinochet coup in Chile with its the death squads, and creating the Cheney/Bush regime which now threatens to blow up Southwest Asia were not enough, George P. Shultz can add another notch to his belt as the man who created and directed Israel's Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.
Dick Cheney, Shultz's thug-in-residence in the Bush Administration, is pushing for Bibi to again become Prime Minister of Israel, so that he can start a war against Syria, in case resistance to a planned war against Iran succeeds.
Netanyahu's net worth to Shultz has been several-fold. As the leading voice of the Likud, he fingered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for assassination to stop the peace process. As Prime Minister, he used the "Clean Break" dossier to bury the Oslo Accords and spark the Intifada, lighting the fire that would start the "Clash of Civilizations." As Israel's Finance Minister, Netanyahu implemented a brutal fascist austerity program which put the final nail in the coffin, burying Israel's once thriving scientific and industrial economy. One of every four Israelis now lives in poverty.
Netanyahu's political career was meteoric, thanks to Shultz and Israel's Ambassador to the United States Moshe Ahrens, who in April 1982 plucked the young travelling salesman for Israel's Rim Furniture company, and placed him in Washington as the Deputy Chief of Mission in the Israeli Embassy. With no diplomatic or political experience whatsoever, Netanyahu's job was to sell a different commodity to the U.S. population and Congress: Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and the subsequent Sabra and Shatila massacres.
Bibi did such a good job, that in February 1983, when Ambassador Ahrens was called back to Israel to become the new Defense Minister after Ariel Sharon was sacked for his role in the Lebanon massacres, Shultz pressured Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to appoint Netanyahu to Ahrens's vacant post as Ambassador!
Shamir refused, but in the interim six months before there was a new appointment, Netanyahu took charge of the embassy. From there Shultz called young Bibi into his State Department Office for a chat.
Shultz shared classified information from the CIA on terrorism in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran with Netanyahu, and as described by authors Ben Caspit and Ilan Kfir in their 1998 book Netanyahu, The Road to Power, Shultz said: "Those terrorists are wild animals and not human beings. I have decided to change American policy towards terrorism.
"Shultz told Netanyahu about the sharp debate between himself and Caspar Weinberger, who opposed the use of American and international force against terrorism...."
Shultz and Pre-emptive Use of Force
Netanyahu and Shultz decided to hold an international conference on terrorism in Washington, D.C., at which Shultz would give the keynote and announce his new policy of pre-emptive use of force. The conference would be hosted by the Jonathan Institute for the International Study of Terrorism, named after Bibi's brother Yoni, who was killed in the Israeli anti-terrorist raid in Entebbe, Uganda. The chairman of the Institute was Benzion Netanyahu, Bibi's father. Ahrens served as Benzion's personal secretary, when the latter chaired the international Revisionist Movement after the death of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
As the story goes, Netanyahu left Shultz's office and set up a meeting with his friend Doug Feith to discuss how to organize the conference. (Feith would be one of the authors of the "Clean Break" document that was written for Netanyahu more than a decade later, when he would become Prime Minister of Israel.)
The Washington conference, held on June 24-27, 1984, was a mega-event. Some 36 experts on terrorism spoke during the four-day conference, including the self-described universal fascist Michael Ledeen, and many others from the U.S. neo-con stable who would later play an essential role in spreading the intelligence lies that were used for the invasion of Iraq.
Shultz's keynote was broadcast live internationally, and it was a foretaste of what he would launch with the Cheney/Bush Administration. "... Can we as a country, can the community of free nations, stand in a purely defensive posture and absorb the blows dealt by terrorists?"
"I think not. From a practical standpoint, a purely passive defense does not provide enough of a deterrent to terrorism and the states that sponsor it. It is time to think long, hard, and seriously about more active means of defense—defense through appropriate preventive or pre-emptive actions against terrorist groups before they strike."
Ironically, Shultz continued: "We will need to strengthen our capabilities in the area of intelligence and quick reaction. Intelligence will be particularly important, since our societies demand that we know with reasonable clarity just what we are doing and against whom we are acting....
"We must face that challenge with realism, determination, and strength of will. I have great faith that we do have such will, and the capability to act decisively against this threat."
At the same conference, Walter Berns, an American Enterprise Institute Scholar and one of Leo Strauss's foremost protégés, who is an expert on Constitutional Law for the Federalist Society, gave a presentation on the "unitary executive" theory of powers in the fight against terrorism.
Netanyahu served as chairman of the conference and gave the opening and closing address. With Shultz's backing and the appropriate media hype, he was made into an instant political star and an overnight expert on terrorism.
Less than three months later, Netanyahu was promoted as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations. Two rather well kept secrets accompanied him. The first was that Bibi's posting included Bernard Lewis, the British Intelligence Arab hand who is the father of the "Clash of Civilizations" policy. Lewis, who had spoken at the terrorism conference, joined Netanyahu's UN staff. Second, David Bar-Ilan, who had organized the entire Jonathan Institute conference, and who was a regular contributor to Norman Podhoretz's neo-con Commentary Magazine, became a full-time paid advisor.
Bar-Ilan was critical for Bibi. Netanyahu's major speeches were ghost-written by him, and he served as a go-between for Netanyahu and the powerful conservative Jewish Republicans who would finance Bibi's endeavors. Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, both of whom spoke at the terrorism conference, personally took Bibi under their wing, introducing him to all the leading conservatives, neo-cons, and free-market economic gurus in Shultz's stable.
Shultz continued to promote Netanyahu as an up-and-coming political figure. The two appeared together as main speakers at a Jewish fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in New York months later, where Shultz sang the praises of Netanyahu for changing international policy in dealing with terrorism.
Shultz's Netanyahu project went hand-in-hand with his take-down of the Israeli economy. In 1983, Shultz sent Stanley Fisher, the current chairman of the Bank of Israel, and American Enterprise Institute economist Herb Stein, to Israel as his personal emissaries to launch the "Chicago School" restructuring, which has brought Israel to its knees. As Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Netanyahu would put Israel through the final phases of Shultz's economic recipe of destruction.
Before he left New York and the UN, in 1988, Netanyahu had crafted a plan to return to Israel to take over the leadership of the Likud and become Israel's Prime Minister. By 1996, he had done both.
Shultz and 'Clean Break'
When Netanyahu took office as Prime Minister in 1996, he was handed the infamous "Clean Break" document which was issued by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS). "Clean Break" called for the destruction of the Oslo Accords and regime change in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Internal Revenue Service documents reveal that IASPS is financed by the San Francisco-based Koret Foundation. George Shultz is a key advisor to Koret, which is a mega-funder of the Hoover Institution and many of Shultz's projects.
The same week that IASPS handed Netanyahu the "Clean Break" document, it also provided him with an economic program, "A Jubilee Plan," to further privatize and loot what was left of Israel's economy. The report was authored by former Congressman Jack Kemp, an IASPS trustee, and Alvin Rabushka, a Hoover Institution economic specialist who originated the Flat Tax. These two, along with IASPS director Robert J. Loewenberg, met with Netanyahu to advise him of their plan.
Kemp was a speaker at the Jonathan Institute conference on terrorism, and had befriended Netanyahu while he was UN ambassador, recruiting him to the "Chicago School" of economics.
Koret is also a regular funder of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress (ICSEP), a joint Anglo-American economics think-tank, whose director, Daniel Doron, is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Doron has served as a financial advisor to Netanyahu.
The think-tank has both a British and an American board of advisors. Leading economists on the British side devised Margaret Thatcher's privatizing and austerity economic policy. Neo-con Irving Kristol serves as chairman emeritus of the U.S. Board of Advisors. Other board members include Midge Decter and Judge Abraham Sofaer, a Koret board member who is the George P. Shultz Scholar at the Hoover Institution.
Armed with the double-barrelled input from both think-tanks, Netanyahu gave an interview which was featured on the cover of the January 1997 international edition of Business Week, where he boasted that he was the first Israeli Prime Minister who has the will and determination to enforce the necessary economic reforms and privitazations to transform Israel into a "post-industrial economy."
In 1996, Shultz received the first "Koret Prize" for his role of Gauleiter over the Israeli economy, and he continued to advise Netanyahu on economic and strategic policy throughout Bibi's years as Prime Minister.
Shultz's Koret also funds Commentary Magazine, the American Enterprise Institute, Daniel Pipes's Middle East Forum, and the war-mongering Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI). Koret provided the funds for Condoleezza Rice to become a Hoover Fellow, in 1999, before Shultz placed her as President Bush's National Security Advisor.
Did Shultz Choose Bibi for his Nazi Pedigree?
Why would George Shultz invest his time in promoting the career of a 33-year-old furniture salesman with no political or academic experience? Could it have been Netanyahu's pedigree?
Netanyahu's father Benzion (now deceased), who has been described as Bibi's personal mentor as well as his political advisor, was a supporter of fascism as a young man in Palestine in the 1920s. This was not a passing fad for the elder Netanyahu, for of all the ways to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Israel, in 1998, Benzion chose to commemorate the life of his mentor, self-proclaimed fascist Abba Achimeir, with a special public lecture. At the time, Benzion was an advisor to his son, the Prime Minister.
According to Revisionist archivist Laurence Cramer, Achimeir recruited Benzion Netanyahu to the Brit Habiryonim (the Brotherhood of Hoodlums or Band of Zealots) which was modelled on the Hitler youth and Mussolini's brown shirts. The Brit Habiryonim busted up meetings of their political opponents. For example, Cramer documents that Netanyahu and Achimier lead the disruption of ancient historian Dr. Norman Bentwich, who was giving a lecture at Hebrew University.
Achimier was a political and intellectual leader in Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionist movement, and he authored a column in the Palestine Revisionist newspaper Doar Hayom entitled "From the Desk of a Fascist," in which he sang the praises of Mussolini and Hitler. At that time, the Revisionist press published Mussolini's speeches and ran articles on his corporatist economic policies. Achimier was committed to the principle of the dictator and wanted Jabotinsky to refer to himself as "Il Duce."
Achimeir was a hard-core fascist. According to archival material in the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, Achimeir lamented in 1952, that one of the failings of Revisionists was that they did not succeed in the early 1930s in preventing the association of fascism with anti-Semitism, and this had been one of their main objectives.
Netanyahu's mentor recruited young Zionists to the inner core of the Brit Habiryonim with a tract entitled "The Scroll of the Sicarri." The Sicarri were the Jewish fundamentalists who flourished at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, who armed themselves with daggers (Sica) under their cloaks to assassinate their opponents, both Roman and Jewish.
In early 1934, Achimeir openly called for the assassination of Jewish opponents of Revisionism in a speech in Haifa. Then, in 1935, his paper began a character assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, David Ben Gurion's "Foreign Minister," who was secretly negotiating with leading Arabs and the Emir of Jordan to form a bi-national state, which the Jabotinskyites opposed. After months of targetting, Arlosoroff was gunned down and killed as he walked with his wife on the beach at night.
Netanyahu's mentor Achimeir was arrested as the author of the assassination, along with two of his Brit Habiryonim followers whom Mrs. Arlosoroff identified as the killers. Controversy and judicial technicalities resulted in all three being released. They denied any involvement, claiming that "young Arabs" had killed Arlosoroff during an attempted robbery. Subsequent ballistics tests done years later on the gun that killed British High Commissioner Lord Moyne in Egypt in 1944 (an act carried out by two young members of the Canaanites, an Achimeir-derived group), proved it to be the same gun that killed Arlosoroff. The nascent peace process was now dead.
Netanyahu: Condoner of the Rabin Assassination
Leah Rabin, widow of the assassinated Prime Minister, recalled the Arlosoroff assassination when her husband was felled by the extremist Israeli Yigal Amir. She never accepted the condolences of Bibi Netaynahu, who had set the stage for her husband's assassin, much as Achimeir had done for the Arlosoroff murder.
As the chairman of the Likud and political opposition leader to Rabin, Netanyahu knew of the plot to assassinate Rabin and did nothing to stop it. Moreover, he had taken part in demonstrations calling for the death of her husband. The slain Prime Minister's wife said of Bibi: "Netanyahu was the one who supplied the inspiration to the group of subversives planning the execution, and to the assassin himself." As Caspit and Kfir report, at the beginning of July 1995, Bibi headed a "funeral procession" in which Rabin's coffin and a hangman's noose were borne on high, and shouts of "Death to Rabin" could be heard. For the first time, the slogan was heard "Through blood and fire [a slogan used by Brit Habiryonim] Rabin shall expire."
After the rally, Carmi Gilon, the head of the Israeli internal security police, Shin Bet, briefed Netanyahu on newly gathered intelligence that there was a plot to assassinate Rabin, and he asked him to tone down his public remarks. Netanyahu refused.
As the campaign against Rabin reached its peak in October 1995, Netanyahu went to a mass rally in Ra'anana, and publicly shook hands with the protesters, who were carrying a coffin draped with a black cloth and yelling, "We are burying Prime Minister Rabin." As Caspit and Kfir report, Netanyahu "gave carte blanche—a stamp of kashruth [kosher]—for a future attack on Rabin's life."
When Oslo II was voted up by the Knesset later that month, a mass rally of all Israel's right wing joined forces in Jerusalem's Zion Square. More than 100,000 hysterical fanatics rallied against Rabin, some burning him in effigy. Netanyahu addressed the crowd from the front of the speaker's stage, his hands stroking the huge red letters on the poster which called for "Death to Rabin." As Caspit and Kfir relate, "... [F]or older members of Israeli society, survivors of the Holocaust, this sight brought back memories of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany."
The Imminent Danger
After the March 28 elections in Israel, Bibi could again become Prime Minister, thereby turning Israel into a protential hand grenade for starting a new Mideast war under Shultz's orders. The election polls now show the Likud Party trailing both the Ariel Sharon founded Kadima party and the Labor Party, but these polls mean very little, because most Israeli elections are determined in the last three days before the vote. Moreover, even if the Labor Party were to win, it would still have to form a coalition with another party. If that fails, the initiative to form a government could go either to Ehud Olmert of Kadima, or Netanyahu.
Either way, in a Kadima-Likud coalition, which despite media commentaries is more likely then a Kadima-Labor coalition, Netanyahu could very well end up in the Prime Minister's seat or as number two in the government. If Shultz's other puppet, Dick Cheney, is not out of the White House, this danger become more likely indeed.
