A fable by the 17th. Century French poet Jean de Lafontaine titled "The Crow and the Fox" teaches us this lesson: Let it be known that every flatterer lives at the expense of those who listen to him. Thus, if you are a Neocon laboring to milk America for the benefit of Israel, you work to cut off America’s relation with those who refuse to bow to Israel even if they are good for America, and you promote America’s relation with those who suck up to Israel even if they are toxic to America.
You achieve all this by singing the praises of the American leaders, describing them as the perfect democratic things who need no allies except the few that the Neocons will take the trouble to choose for them. Thus, like the fox of Lafontaine who tricked the crow by praising his plumage and got him to drop the cheese in his beak, you trick those leaders into delivering to Israel what they would not deliver to the homeless in their own country, the hungry and the least healthy among their masses.
Regarded as a sucker born with the tendency to accept every sweet lie that the Neocons whisper in your ear, you believe in the fantasy world they shape for you and you live by their rule until one day the world comes crushing down on you and reality hits you in the face. You hate yourself for being this idiotic during all these years and you look for a way out of the hole you got yourself into, the hole in which you labored to milk the people of America for the glory of Israel and her shameless supporters inside America.
Getting hit in the face with reality and waking up from a dream-like fantasy is something that happens on occasion to the most careless of human beings and there is a lesson to be learned here which is not different from that of Lafontaine. What follows is a situation I witnessed long ago so let me tell you about it before I go any further.
Students in their late teens and early twenties like to brag about everything. One student I had in my school eons ago so annoyed his schoolmates when he bragged about being a connoisseur of sound that they asked for my help to test him out. I thought I should not get involved in something like this but was so intrigued by the idea myself that I did not give an outright no for answer. Instead, I asked the students to give me time to think about the matter and this answer of mine had its own consequence.
The students took my reluctance as a hopeful sign and they decided to speed up my decision process by making the student in question participate in his own entrapment. I do not know what they said to him but he came to me a little later on and he initiated a discussion on the difference in sound quality between the technology of solid state and that of the vacuum tube. I agreed with him that the tube was superior to solid state with the caveat that I was not a connoisseur of sound myself. As if on cue the student bragged about being an expert in this field and said he will submit to any sort of test that I or someone else would devise so as to prove his claim once and for all.
I called the group of students that thought of the idea in the first place and asked them to design a test. They did and it was a simple test to carry out in practice. The students took advantage of the fact that the South Koreans were beginning to make themselves known around the world for the home entertainment products they were making and were able to sell at a very low price. Among these products was an expensive looking sound system they sold at a cheap price, one that was given the impressive Anglo-Saxon name of Lloyd.
One student brought a Lloyd to the school while another brought a German model whose name escapes me now. The latter looked less impressive than the first but sold at a higher price. In the absence of the bragging student, the two systems were set up side by side one early morning and were tested back to back. I could not discern the difference in the quality of sound between the pair but some students claimed they did and they designated the German system as the better of the two.
When the student in question arrived at the school, the other students told him nothing about the origin of the two units and played a tape for him on one system and then the other. The student in question chose the Korean Lloyd as having a higher quality of sound.
They blindfolded the braggart and played a number of tapes on one system and then the other, and they asked him to choose between the two. His choices turned out to be random. And then they played a tape on the same unit back to back and asked him to guess which unit sounded better. Not knowing he was tricked, he chose randomly. They removed the blindfold and showed him the result of the test and he could not believe his eyes but was humbled enough by the experience that he began to act with a little more humility than ever before.
Finally, they showed him the purchase bill which indicated both the make and the cheap price of the Lloyd at which point he expressed an unusual fury. It was clear that the fury was directed against himself for believing in his own fantasy and for always paying a high price for the products he purchased when other products of equal quality were selling at a lower price. You see, dear friend, that boy had been his own Neocon for a long time, and when he woke up that day, he saw the world of his imagination crumble around him.
Likewise, the Americans antagonized the Arab people and those who stood by them in the mistaken belief that America will obtain the oil she needs at the price she will dictate. The Neocons and those who came before them had planted this fantasy in the head of the American leaders whom the Neocons had corrupted for the purpose of softening those very same heads. And so, like the crow of Lafontaine, they opened their beak to sing the song of a false democracy they thought was the pride of their system and dropped the most prized of their possessions.
What they dropped was nothing less than the American wellbeing which is sometimes referred to as an American cheese. It was what the forefathers had labored hard to produce and to hand over to the generations that came after them. But when the cheese hit the ground, it was the neo con artists and their Israeli allies who pounced on it and feasted with it to their hearts’ content. And then it became clear by the end of this orgy that nothing was left for the American people, not even a crumb for the leaders who made this whole calamity a possible thing.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse and America spent all that she possessed in the futile attempt to rob the Arabs of what she could have bought at a fraction of what she spent on the misguided adventure. And while this was happening, as if to scrape the bottom of the barrel, the same crowd that got America into the bottomless pit got busy siphoning off the nation’s credit and all her reserves. Now America is waking up to the reality that the Neocons handed to her in Baghdad and in Lower Manhattan the same bitter dish that the British Empire was handed in Suez - the loss of her great power status.
Someone in America will undoubtedly hate themselves for teaming up with the Neocons as did the bragging student I had in my school and did the British and the French who teamed up with Israel to embark on the Suez adventure. But the ordinary people of America will not want to stop at the simple act of remorse and self hate but will want accountability and will demand to see the head of the culprits not only roll out of a job but roll their way to the jailhouses of the nation.
And as always, when a scandal of this magnitude explodes in America, the culprits will prove to be of the kind that call themselves friends of Israel, and the money will have been channeled not to support some social program or cultural institution as claimed by the Neocons but to cleanse the Palestinian homeland of its Palestinian owners at the hands of a Zionist regime that is as bloodthirsty as this planet has ever witnessed.