We tend to think of politics as being a strange animal that behaves irrationally because we see politicians who get elected go on to practice a craft that often seems strange and irrational. In the meantime, however, we ignore the behind-the-scenes stakeholders who play a political game that can be as strange as the one played by the ubiquitous politicians. But if we look closer at what these people do and try to understand the motivation that lurks behind their behavior, we may well understand the logic of it all and cringe at what we see. In truth, these stakeholders are not invisible because they stay behind the scenes, on the contrary they are as visible on the scene as the real politicians but what is invisible about them is what motivates them. When the public does not know they have hidden motives, it does not know they have an agenda, let alone what the agenda is. It is time, therefore, that we all wake up to the fact that a hidden agenda exists, and cringe in unison because the stakes are a lot higher than we ever thought they were.
The collective name given to these people is opinion makers. They are the journalists who express their own opinions or edit those of others. They are the self-described researchers who may be attached to an institution of higher learning -- usually one that is well established and has a sterling reputation in one field or another. And they are the so-called “thinkers” who think inside joints thought to be think tanks but prove most of the time to be closer to a septic tank full of stinking drivel. These, in sum, are the opinion makers whose opinions can turn a superpower into a laughable farce in less than a generation. And you cannot be more generous than that describing these people when you look at America and see how fast and how massively they have managed to shrink it with advice they gave free of charge or advice that was solicited and paid for by the politicians.
One opinion maker that deserves to be highlighted at this time is George Will who was summoned a few weeks ago along with other players to come forward and play an assigned role. The summon came in response to the start of a new drive that seeks to resolve the situation in the Middle East, and George Will wrote a number of articles on the subject. It all began early in August, 2010 when he was invited to go to Israel and sit with Netanyahu, the Prime Minister over there. By August 12, Will had formulated a view of the man, described him as the anti-Obama and wrote the first article under that title. George Will begins the article by mentioning the two photographs he saw hanging in Netanyahu's office. They are that of Theodor Herzl who founded the Zionist movement, and that of Winston Churchill who embraced the movement. As history will eventually show, Herzl was sincere about wanting a homeland for the Jews; Churchill welcomed the idea of seeing a place out of Europe where the Jews can be dumped and gotten rid of. But George Will does not mention these details because if he did, he would have revealed his own motives and his secret agenda.
Then came an article under the title “Netanyahu's Warning” which is about Iran and why America should immolate itself -- more like immolate what is left of itself -- on the altar of Israel's glory, always disguised as Israel's survival. Then came the August 19, 2010 piece under the title: Skip the lecture on Israel's 'risks for peace'. This article is not a real article; it is a catalog of the AIPAC talk points arranged in a way that is tailor-made to impress the American politico-journalistic establishment except for a deviation. I shall not discuss the points raised by Will as I have discussed them on numerous occasions on this website and elsewhere. As for the deviation, it is that you find in the article statements such as this: “Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar” and this: “Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.” In the old days, no conservative ever insulted a Brit or an American to kiss up to the AIPAC crowd but now the trend is getting to be a habit and a fashion among some so-called thinkers. As far as I can tell, it was Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke who began the trend, and George Will is following suit because it fits nicely into his invisible agenda or maybe for another reason that escapes me.
Let us now look at some background. A number of American conservatives, George Will among them, were influenced early in their careers by the ideas of Democratic Senator Henry Jackson who was better known by his nickname Scoop. This man had forged a devil's alliance with the Jewish organizations because they had a falling out with their old communist ally, now their chosen enemy of the day. Reading articles and biographies, I formulated the opinion that Jackson took the stance that he did because his father had come to the United States from Northern Europe where the fear of the Soviet Union was intense and was passed from father to son even in the Diaspora. Considering the Jewish organizations to be the enemies of his enemy, Jackson embraced them along with their ideas and their methods. Some people see the Jackson move as the event that triggered the new conservative movement known as neocon which is made up mostly of liberals who converted to conservatism. Irving Kristol who is officially credited with the founding of this movement has suggested that the conversion actually came about because he and his followers were mugged by their fellow liberals but I believe the conversion came about because these people were of a culture that has been turning coats for millennial. They would have turned the coats whether they were mugged, bugged or hugged, and whether or not Scoop Jackson had ever existed.
George Will is not a neocon. He is an old conservative with an agenda that was transformed with time but not in the direction of the neocons. Style is another way that he changed; it is the way that he tries to implement the agenda as we can see by analyzing his articles. In addition to listing the AIPAC talk points and the Smart Alec remarks of the two-bit Jewish intellectuals that litter the landscape, he has adopted the Barnes and Kondracke style of insulting the Brits and the Americans to glorify the Israelis and the Jews, something he never did in his previously incarnation. He was then a proud man who persuaded the others of his point of view by relying on the image of the deep thinker he meticulously cultivated about himself. For example, he would give his image a boost every once in a while by injecting into the discussion scientific and mathematical terms that sizzled with incomprehensible vibes in the ears of the other attendees. They were terms like “critical mass” and “asymptotic” and “symmetry” which he used whether or not they meant something in the context of the discussion. But nobody raised an eyebrow perhaps because the ear is the domain of the vibe and not the eye or perhaps the attendees were stunned by the extent of the man's knowledge. But then something happened that changed all that in my view. At first, I did not know what it was except that old George was transforming because I could see that a plethora of new and sizzling terms such as “second derivative” and “inflection point” and “slope of the curve” were coming into vogue and he was not picking up on them. It was like seeing a group of mice invade the floor, and the cat not raise an eyelid or flutter a whisker.
Slowly but surely I began to understand what was happening to the man. It is something that can be seen clearly in the August 29 article whose title is: 'Peace Process' is fiction in the Middle East. Here, George Will begins the article by making this assertion: “...history is cyclical rather than linear...” He then paves the way to amplify on what he said in the previous article and he drops a bombshell. What he does is insult America as a nation by insulting high ranking American officials, naming them by name and making fun of them having shown great respect for the worthless nobodies he met in Israel. Here is the most disgraceful paragraph he wrote; the most disgraceful thing anybody can write: The Obama administration, which seems to consider itself too talented to bother with anything but "comprehensive" solutions to problems, may yet make matters worse by presenting its own plan for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Barack Obama insists that it is "costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure," although he does not say how. Gen. David Petraeus says Israeli-Palestinian tensions "have an enormous effect on the strategic context." As though, were the tensions to subside, the hard men managing Iran's decades-long drive for nuclear weapons would then say, "Oh, well, in that case, let's call the whole thing off."
So I asked myself: What is it that motivates George Will to make him behave this bizarrely? Strangely enough, the answer is that despite the changes he has undergone, his motivation in this regard is what it has always been. He wants to see a place such as Palestine or any other place where the Jews who are there can stay there, and the Jews who are in America can go to because the less of them he sees in America the better he feels. This attitude was stated more or less openly by the hardline conservatives in the past, and everyone had an idiosyncratic way through which to express their sentiment. George Will's way was to speak gleefully about the perceived inability of the Arabs to change the status quo in the Middle East. Now he disparages none other than America itself to make his point -- a massive change in style to express the same motive. And when you understand all this, you see that the assertion he made to the effect that history is cyclical rather than linear, is a wish more than it is an observation based on fact. He likes the status quo and he wants it to stay where it is.
So then, what happened after that? What happened was that Israel and America managed to corner themselves so badly, any solution you can think of will ultimately cause the Jews to emigrate out of Israel, and most certainly head to the United States of America in droves, the nightmare scenario that is most feared by the old conservatives. And this is what made George Will stop gloating about the inability of the Arabs to change the status quo. He could see, in fact, that they have changed the status not by making war as predicted by the good-for-nothing thinkers in America's think tanks but with the vaunted Arab patience and humane approach to solving problems. This time the way has been to make love not war, and the Palestinians did it with a vengeance and have thus altered the demographic landscape of their beloved occupied Palestine. And this is what prompted George Will and the old conservatives who did not convert to the neocon movement to do something else; instead of pointing the defeated finger of recrimination at themselves, they pointed the finger at their leaders including the most revered of their military leaders, David Petraeus, who is considered to have attained the rank of modern hero. And when you think of the time when the conservatives wanted to criminalize the burning of the American flag, you wonder what punishment they feel they ought to be given for urinating the Netanyahu urine all over the Star-Spangled Banner. What a change! What a history!
Since it is folly in the modern era to even contemplate exterminating the Jews as the Nazis tried to do, those who want to get rid of them have what they consider to be a perfect solution -- to dump them in the backyard of someone else. Such a place now exists and it is called Palestine, part of which has been renamed Israel. In essence, therefore, the non-Jewish and mostly Christian followers of the movement called Zionism are a new breed of Nazis that can safely be referred to as neo-Nazi. And George Will who desperately wants the world to think of him as American as baseball is in reality a closet neo-Nazi. Whether or not this denies him being authentic American is for America and the world to decide.