Obama’s First Appointment Is Son Of Zionist Terrorist

[Richard]

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, November 6, 2008

President elect Barack Obama’s first appointment, Rahm Emanuel, who is set to become chief-of-staff, is the son of a member of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, which was responsible for bombing hotels, marketplaces as well as the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian villagers were slaughtered.

Revelations about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a Weather Underground domestic terrorist, which dogged him during the final weeks of the campaign trail, pale in significance to his selection of Emanuel, whose father, Benjamin M. Emanuel, was an Irgun member.

Irgun has been labeled a terrorist organization by both The New York Times newspaper and by the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry.

Irgun was closely affiliated with the widely feared hardcore terrorist Stern Gang, an organization that carried out assassinations, train bombings and bombed police stations in an attempt to pave the way for unrestricted immigration of Jews into Palestine. Irgun operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948.

Following the ideology of right-wing Revisionist Zionism, Irgun’s doctrine was that, “Every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state”.

This manifested itself by way of terror attacks such as the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people. In 2006, Israelis including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former members of Irgun, attended a 60th anniversary celebration of the bombing organized by the Menachem Begin Centre.

Buses and marketplaces were also a target for Irgun, who were widely chastised for favoring attacks against civilian targets.

The widely condemned Deir Yassin massacre, which occurred in April 1948, involved Irgun working in consort with the Stern Gang and going house to house slaughtering Palestinian villagers. Eyewitness accounts of spies working for mainstream Jewish authorities, such as Meir Pa’il, reported Irgun members running around shooting civilians “full of lust for murder”.

“I saw the horrors that the fighters had created. I saw bodies of women and children, who were murdered in their houses in cold blood by gunfire, with no signs of battle and not as the result of blowing up the houses,” said eyewitness Eliahu Arbel.

“[One body was] a woman who must have been eight months pregnant,” noted Jacques de Reynier, a French-Swiss Representative of the International Red Cross, “He hit in the stomach, with powder burns on her dress indicating she’d been shot point-blank.”.

The son of a man who helped carry out this slaughter has now been selected by Obama to be his chief-of-staff. Cries of “sins of the father” lose their gusto when one considers the fact that, after the 1996 re-election of Bill Clinton, Rahm Emanuel “Was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name.” Sounds like a nice guy.

Rahm Emanuel is also an enthusiastic supporter of the United States Public Service Academy Act, a lobbying group founded in 2006 in order to promote the foundation of an American public service academy modeled on the military academies - a youth corps whose students would be trained in “civilian internship in the armed forces”.

This rings the alarm bells when we recall Obama’s pledge to create a “civilian national security force” that is “just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the U.S. military.

A creepy You Tube video of a brown-shirt style Obama youth brigade chanting and marching military style emerged last month, raising fears about where the messianic cult-like status of Obama’s image could eventually lead.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obamas-first...orist.html

[Richard]

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Obama's chief a closet hawk?

Emanuel's support of Israel, Iraq war could generate White House tension

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: November 07, 2008
3:01 pm Eastern
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

While President-elect Barack Obama and his pick for chief of staff see eye-to-eye on domestic policy, they may find themselves arguing over foreign policy, especially when it comes to Israel, Iraq and Iran.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., who served as a captain in the Israeli army, is surprisingly hawkish when it comes to fighting the war on Islamic terror.

And unlike his new boss, he supported the war in Iraq, although he criticized President Bush for missteps.

Asked in 2005 by late NBC host Tim Russert whether he would have voted to authorize the war knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Emanuel replied yes. (Emanuel was elected to Congress after the authorization vote.)

"I still believe that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, OK?" he added.

In contrast, Obama thinks the U.S. invasion of Iraq was wrong, and he has vowed to withdraw troops from the country within the first six months in office.

When outspoken war critic Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., proposed withdrawing precipitously from Iraq, Emanuel quickly distanced himself from his Democrat colleague.

"Jack Murtha went out and spoke for Jack Murtha," he said.

In his 2006 book, "The Plan," Emanuel devotes a whole chapter to "the War on Terror," in which he asserts that Democrats should not be afraid to "take the fight to the enemy."

"We need to use all the roots of American power to make our country safe," he added.

Among other things, he proposes creating a new domestic counter-terrorism force like Britain's MI5 to protect the homeland.

Emanuel also staunchly believes in Israel's right to exist and is not as conciliatory as Obama on the issue of Palestinian rights.

Both Emanuel's parents are citizens of Israel. His Jerusalem-born father, Benjamin Emanuel, fought for Israel's independence, even helping smuggle guns to the Israeli underground. He later served as a medic in the 1948 Israeli battle for independence.

Records show that a charity Rahm Emanuel and his wife set up in Chicago gave nearly $25,000 to the Anshe Emet synagogue and school attended by his children.

However, colleagues say Emanuel is still a liberal when it comes to domestic policy. He and Obama are in alignment on left-wing policy ideas, ranging from universal health care to mandatory youth service.

And not everyone believes Emanuel is as hawkish as he appears.

As a then-Clinton aide, "Emanuel is the one who forced Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin to shake terrorist Yasser Arafat's hand at the White House, a most disgusting moment," opined columnist Debbie Schlussel on her blog.

She also noted that Emanuel's mother, Marsha, is an anti-war protester.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=80411

[Richard]

Is Obama Screwing His Base with Rahm Emanuel Selection?

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet
Posted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 9, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106189/

I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama's remarkable victory for a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the president-elect chose as his chief of staff -- perhaps the most powerful single position in any administration -- Rahm Emanuel, one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.

The chief of staff essentially acts as the president's gatekeeper, determining with whom he has access for advice and analysis. Obama is known as a good listener who has been open to hearing from and considering the perspectives of those on the Left as well as those with a more centrist to conservative perspective. How much access he will actually have as president to more progressive voices, however, is now seriously in question.

Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away from its more liberal and progressive base. Numbering only 58 members out of 236 Democrats in the current House of Representatives, the NDC has worked closely with its Republican colleagues in pushing through and passing such legislation as those providing President Bush with "fast-track" trade authority in order to bypass efforts by labor, environmentalists and other public interest groups to promote fairer trade policy.

Emanuel began his political career as a senior adviser and chief fundraiser for the successful 1989 Chicago mayoral campaign of Richard M. Daley to seize back City Hall from reformists who had challenged the corrupt political machine of this father, Richard J. Daley. Emanuel later became a senior adviser to Bill Clinton at the White House from 1993 to 1998, serving as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and then Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy, and was credited with playing a major role in shifting the Clinton administration's foreign and domestic policy agenda to the right. Emanuel was the single most important official involved in pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the bill ending Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Clinton's draconian crime bill, among other legislation.

Leaving the administration in 1998, Emanuel worked as an investment banker in Chicago, where he amassed an $18 million fortune in less than three years prior to being elected to Congress.

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since 2004, Emanuel has promoted pro-war and pro-business center-right candidates against anti-war and pro-labor candidates in the primaries, pouring millions of dollars of donations from Democrats across the country into the campaigns of his favored conservative minions to defeat more progressive challengers.

Emanuel was a major supporter of the Iraq War resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he was the only one of nine Democratic members of Congress from Illinois who backed granting Bush this unprecedented authority to invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to the United States at the time. Even more disturbingly, when asked by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" whether he would have voted to authorize the invasion "knowing that there are no weapons of mass destruction," Emanuel answered that he indeed would have done so, effectively acknowledging that his support for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire. Not surprisingly, he has also voted with the Republicans in support of unconditional funding to continue the Iraq War and has consistently opposed efforts by other Democrats to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from that country and related Congressional efforts to end the war.

At a time of record budget deficits, Emanuel has been a passionate supporter of increased spending for the Pentagon and has resisted efforts by fellow Democrats to trim excesses in the Bush administration's bloated military budget. For example, he has repeatedly voted against amendments to cut funding for Bush's dangerously destabilizing missile defense and even voted against an amendment to identify unnecessary Pentagon spending by examining the need, relevance and cost of Cold War weapons systems designed to fight the former Soviet Union.

A major hawk regarding Iran, Emanuel has also voted against Democratic efforts to prevent the Bush administration from launching military action against that country and has joined the administration in exaggerated claims about Iran's alleged nuclear threat. He is not opposed to nuclear proliferation if it involves U.S. allies, however. Emanuel has consistently voted against a series of Democratic amendments that would have strengthened safeguards in the Bush administration's nuclear cooperation agreement with India to prevent U.S. assistance from supporting India's nuclear weapons program.

Emanuel is also a prominent hawk regarding Israel, attacking the Bush administration from the right for criticizing Israel's assassination policies and other human rights abuses. He was also a prominent supporter of Israel's 2006 attacks on Lebanon, even challenging the credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups that reported Israeli violations of international humanitarian law. Emanuel's father had emigrated from Israel in the 1950s, where he had been a member of the terrorist group Irgun, which had been responsible for a series of terrorist attacks against Palestinian and British civilians in mandatory Palestine during the 1940s. Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s.

It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama's selection of Emanuel is to those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more progressive direction. It's easy to see it as nothing less than a slap in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as vice president. (See my articles "Biden's Foreign Policy 'Experience'" and "Biden, Iraq, and Obama's Betrayal.")

However, this does not necessarily mean that Obama as president will pursue nothing better than a Clintonesque center-right agenda. Someone with Obama's intelligence, knowledge and leadership qualities need not be unduly restricted by the influence of his chief of staff as less able presidents have. At the same time, this shocking appointment of Emanuel is illustrative of the need for the progressive base that brought him to power to not celebrate too long and to refocus our energies into pushing hard to ensure that the change Obama promised is something we really can believe in.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/106189/