The speechwriters of the late President Ronald Reagan took
liberty mining what I used to write at the time, so now I take liberty
paraphrasing one of his sayings.
I ask the world – more specifically the American people: Do
you feel safer today than you did sixteen years ago? The answer may vary from
person to person but I am certain that many will say, no they don't feel safer
today. To these people, I say there is one man they can blame, and his name is
Clifford D. May.
The man admits he was given a job to do, he also admits that
things did not work out as well as they should have after many years of labor.
But he does not take responsibility. Instead, he blames someone else, and this
is why those who feel as unsafe today as they did then, or feel less safe,
should place the blame where it belongs; on the shoulders of Clifford May for
failing to do the job he accepted doing but did not deliver.
May wrote an article in which he tells of his involvement in
the events that unfolded after the tragedy of 9/11. The article came under the
title: “Another grim anniversary,” and the subtitle: “The attacks of Sept. 11
changed everything for some but nothing for others,” published on September 5,
2017 in The Washington Times.
He says that just before September 2001, he was doing a
stint at a consultancy when they asked him to do research that would answer a
number of questions regarding the bombing of American assets around the world,
from Beirut in 1983 to Yemen in 2000. He suddenly interrupts this line of
thought to insert a paragraph in which he says this: “Meanwhile, Israel was
being hit by waves of suicide bombers and many people were saying, 'Well, you
know, the Palestinians have grievances.'” He then resumes the line of thought
he abandoned to go on saying this: “They asked me to do a bit of research to
determine whether any attempts were being made to understand what was happening
and to devise policies to effectively defend America ”.
And this is where you begin to understand why Clifford May
failed to do the job he was assigned to do. It is that he was given the task of
doing something for America ,
and he conflated that with Israel .
He concentrated his effort almost exclusively on serving the interests of Israel while pretending it was good for America . In
fact, Clifford May came to my attention in 2012, and I discussed most of the
articles he wrote since that time. I did so more than a 100 times on this
website during the past 5 years. And I don't believe there is more than a
couple of articles in which his main preoccupation was not Israel , and only Israel .
He says that after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers
He goes on to say that the reasons why he accepted the
assignment were more than the 9/11 event. In fact, he had been thinking about
the subject for 22 years before that moment, he says. That's because he was
assigned to cover the 1979 revolution in Iran , and this helped him shape his
views. Another factor was that in response to an incident in Saudi Arabia ,
the government there “lavished billions of dollars on mosques and madrassas
around the world,” he adds. And there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
that same time frame.
Put together, all of these events contributed to the spread
of a global insurgency that sought to destroy America as well as its allies and
the international order, he says. And this is why he started thinking even then
that he should do something. And he wants us to know that.
There is no doubt that in the mind of Clifford May, he has
lived an eventful and fruitful number of decades, albeit at the expense of America 's
taxpayers. But when his supposed accomplishments are seen through the eyes of a
disinterested observer, they appear worse than meager; they appear
counterproductive. This is the sad reality given the messy state in which the
world finds itself today, and America 's
shrinking image in it.