On Israel, Epstein and the elephant

The entire Epstein Island operation was an intelligence mission aimed at entrapping politicians, celebrities, media figures, and decision-makers through sexual blackmail, recruiting them as Israeli agents

Ari Ben-Menashe, former Israeli Intelligence officer (see footnote 1)

*

I’m human: I enjoy a soupçon  of online schadenfreude as much as the next guy. So how could I resist the tsunami of YouTube offerings, mostly short and sensational, on US Attorney General Pam Bondi playing the Karen at the February 11 Senate Hearing on the latest Epstein releases?

Here’s a four and thirty taster:

But schadenfreude’s like junk food. It quickly fills us, then leaves us nutritionally unsated. All the offerings I’ve seen on the Bondi car crash have been heavily edited by Democrat sympathisers who cater to the blue segment of an American public labouring under the delusion their country is a functioning democracy.

As opposed to …

… a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office – Chris Hedges

My fifteen minutes of juvenile glee spent, grown-ups’ hat once more in place, two aspects strike me. I’ve referred to both before but they’ll stand repeating. With a zillion references to things Israeli – many redacted and millions unreleased – corporate media across the West maintain a blackout on the pachyderm while going after the low hanging fruit now being thrown, if you can excuse so atrocious a mix of metaphors and even if you can’t, under a bus.

Hours after I posted this the chap on the left was arrested for misconduct in public office. Britain’s ruling class is ruthless at cauterising what it cannot save.

This despite on the one hand the drain on political and moral capital of supporting a genocide; on the other the fact Jeffrey Epstein not only provided for the decidedly non vanilla appetites of men at the epicentre of power, but was a blackmailer to boot.

He owned those men. And sold their dirty secrets – how can we conclude otherwise, knowing what we do? – to the Mossad … ¹

I do not share the belief – by antisemites, yes, but also by commentators I take seriously, some of them Jewish – that Israel dictates US policy. Those who espouse this notion tell me America fights its wars, a view informed by analyses I say give insufficient agency – see US Neocons & Israel’s far right – to class and empire.

Those forever wars may not be in the interests of ordinary Americans – in fact they never are – but that cannot (validly!) be used as proof that Israel is in the driving seat when those wars can be shown, to anyone willing to prioritise evidence over the mesmerising spin of the planet’s most powerful dreamweaving machinery, to be in the interests of rentier  oligarchs who long ago – with the help of Reagan, Thatcher and Chicago School neoliberalism – offshored industry, recast domestic capitalism in neo-feudal form and, on the back of super-profits from the global south, and FIRE rent extractions at home, amassed riches sufficient to capture government …

In the early civilisations of Sumer a new king would start his reign by cancelling debt. Why? Because interest on debt rises exponentially while wealth production – from which debt is paid – can at best rise logarithmically. The inexorable logic is therefore for power to accrue to a creditor oligarchy. The forgiveness of debt derailed this tendency, but the new king had to be powerful enough to force it through – Broken: the implicit contract between rulers and ruled

… none more so than in the United States, its governance most nakedly for sale to the highest bidder – be it Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Military Industrial Complex or, indeed, the Israel Lobby.

It’s true that last is a smaller player than the others but (a) that’s a relative term – who disputes that AIPAC has deep pockets? – and (b) the Israel Lobby is highly organised. No politician, of red stripe or blue, can aspire to high office while being openly critical of Zionism. ²

AIPAC and its ilk may not have the $trillion coffers of Big Oil and the rest, but its siren call goes beyond dollar and cent calculations to tug at the heart strings of Zionists, Jewish or not, in ways Big Oil can’t.

Again, we needn’t embrace the Israel Rules the US thesis. We just need to recognise two things. One is the power of ‘The Lobby’. The other is that Jeffrey Epstein – with extensive ties to Israeli intelligence and holding damning evidence of dark secrets on the corridors of Western power – was running an industrial scale honey trap.

Over to Cenk Uyghur in twenty-five powerful minutes of dialogue with Maddie Hales.

* * *

1. See this Going Underground interview of a former Israeli intelligence officer, Ari Ben-Menashe, who considers the likelihood of Mossad having Epstein material damaging to Trump, for release should he fall short of Israeli demands over Iran.
2. It’s too early to tell whether pushback against AIPAC funded electoral candidates, in light of Gaza genocide and naked Israeli expansion, is lessening Lobby power. But polling now suggests disenchantment with Israel not only in young Americans but young American Jews. If accurate, the Zionist project sits on a demographic time bomb that might prompt a regime as extreme as Netanyahu’s to bake in its regional supremacy while it can.

   Same day update: this from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, arguing – in contrast to Nel Bonilla – that war between US/Israel and Iran, full on and kinetic, is near certain:

   … support for Israel in the US is declining generationally among Jews. Despite the great political clout of Zionist billionaires, younger Jews, starting in the early 2000s, were just not into Israel. Many came out to protest the genocide before the US got good at cracking down on these demonstrations. So the ability to rely on full bore US support for Israel adventurism in its neighborhood is a waning asset. And that is before factoring in that Trump is a particularly Zionist/evangelical Christian indebted president …

   … she then segues into the subject of this post:

   … Israel likely has leverage over Trump due to possessing kompromat.