Michael Carmichael has been a professional public affairs consultant, author and broadcaster since 1968. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC's Today Programme, Hardtalk, PM, as well as numerous appearances on ITN, NPR and many European broadcasts examining politics and culture. He can be reached through his website: http://www.planetarymovement.org/
In CounterPunch schrijft hij: 'The DLC and Israel.
Zionist Democrats.
Last week the newly elected Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, visited Washington to meet with George Bush in order to endorse America's plan to attack Iran in his address to Congress. In his strident appeal to Congress, Olmert sought nothing less than to incite war between America and Iran. Prior to his stroke, Ariel Sharon was engaged in fomenting wars between America and Iraq, and he had promised his circle of admirers that he would move Iran into the cross hairs of America at the first opportunity. Olmert is Sharon's political heir, and he has inherited a legacy of incitement and fomentation of wars in the Middle East between America and Islamic nations that are militarily weak and rich in oil.
To coincide with Olmert's visit, the Democratic Leadership Council published a statement celebrating "Zionism" and condemning Islam. If their publication had not come from a man who purports to be a leader of the political opposition to the deeply unpopular right-wing Republican regime one might be inclined to surmise that it had been issued by the so-called Israel Lobby.
In what was meant to be a moving personal account of his fifth trip to Israel, Al From, the founding father and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), defined Zionism as, "a good idea filled with hope." On his journey, Mr. From visited the summit of Mount Hadar where he experienced a moving vision of Israeli 'hope' locked in conflict with Palestinian 'anger.'
Inspired by this romanticized contrast of a black and white rendering of good versus evil, Mr. From witnessed what he described as the, "booms of Palestinian rockets and the Israeli retaliation." From his lofty summit, Mr. From failed to see the mounds of corpses mounting upwards in Israel and Palestine, where four Palestinians are killed for every one Israeli.
Mr. From's account is nothing more nor less than a paean to the Zionist faith that he sees as the force driving the engine of politics and shaping the culture of Israel. Nowhere does Mr. From pretend to deliver a balanced or objective analysis of the state of Israel or its lengthy and violent conflict with the Palestinian people. Quite the contrary, his account is dripping with disdain for Palestine and its people whom he describes as motivated by anger, dispirited and habitually driven to horrific acts of terror and suicide bombing.
Mr. From's reverie on his faith in Zionism occurs against a stark backdrop. The organization that Mr. From leads, the DLC, is clearly on the wane, and the current issue of their magazine carries an appeal for an "entry level Development Assistant" to help them raise much needed funds. That said, to borrow a phrase from cricket, the DLC did have one long and grotesque inning characterized by the consistent loss of elections by its major patron: the Democratic Party which kept following Mr. From's advice to move relentlessly to the right to conform to the demands of his blatantly Zionist agenda: security for Israel as a means of providing security for America or conversely security for America predicated on security for Israel.
For a decade and a half, the DLC dominated the Democratic Party more thoroughly than any pressure group had ever controlled any political party in American history. After ten years of failure to regain the majority in Congress and abject failures in the two previous presidential elections, Governor Howard Dean led a grassroots movement of party activists to reclaim the levers of power for traditional Democratic policies: constitutional democracy, the open society, multilateralism, social welfare, a national health service, national security and homeland security realized through diplomacy rather than by military confrontation and many more substantive and socially progressive policies besides.' Lees verder: http://www.counterpunch.org/carmichael05302006.html
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