Several of us among the incurably curious asked ourselves a simple question: what is anti-Semitism? That it must be written with a capital “S” says a lot.

Then we realized it also morphs. To that feature I can attest. In November 2002, I met a “John Doe” in London who proposed a research challenge. While meeting that challenge, I encountered various versions of anti-Semitism.

A colleague advised against this challenge. First he fretted at the criminal nature of what the research has since confirmed. Then he inquired about my safety. That said a lot.

The colleague was M.I.T. Professor Noam Chomsky. For his criticism of Israeli policy, he was attacked as a self-hating Jew. Were he not Jewish, doubtless he would have been an anti-Semite. For critics of Israel, those are the only two options. He cautioned me:

You’ll get the same thing: anti-Semitic, Holocaust denier, want to kill all the Jews, etc. It doesn’t matter what the facts are. Bear in mind that you are dealing with intellectuals, that is, what we call ‘commissars’ and ‘apparatchiks’ in enemy states.

Is anti-Semitism a geopolitical strategy? If so, for what purpose? Character assassination?

Ten months ago, I met with Professor William Robinson on the University of California Santa Barbara campus. We met soon after he was attacked by the Anti-Defamation League and its network.

Robinson had read Guilt By Association, the first release based on this research. His question mirrored Prof. Chomsky’s concern: “Are they going to kill me?” he asked. Who are They? Those who attack anyone critical of Israeli policy.

Anti-Semitism—A License to Kill?

For his class on globalization, Robinson provided an email link to a photo essay critical of Israeli policy. The essay had been circulating online for weeks. When two students complained to the ADL, its attack troops insisted on Robinson’s removal while its national network urged alumni to threaten the withholding of gifts and bequests to the university.

Word quickly spread among academics nationwide. That time-critical ADL strategy silenced on-campus criticism of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Is it anti-Semitic to suggest that’s how anti-Semitism works?

When the Anti-Defamation League intimidates on a national scale, does anti-Semitism morph into something even more sinister? The Gaza assault killed 1,400, including 400 Palestinian children. That slaughter was scheduled during America’s political and media “down time”—between Christmas 2008 and the January 2009 inaugural of Barack Obama.

Is it anti-Semitic to suggest a strategic motive behind the timing of Israel’s latest savagery?

Then there’s the motive for 911. Is it anti-Semitic to raise that taboo subject? Ask those members of the 911 Commission who objected—successfully—when the chair and vice-chair proposed hearings on the motivation for that high-profile provocation.

Instead, Americans were left to cope with the results of an overwrought reaction to an unexplained mass murder too quickly blamed on “Islamo” fascism. Only now can we see the full costs in blood and treasure of a war waged on fixed intelligence and false pretenses.

The fiscal tab alone is projected to total $3 Trillion. That includes the future costs of military pensions, disabilities, record-level post-traumatic stress, suicides and so forth.

All that money is borrowed, a first for an American war. The interest cost could reach $700 billion. Is it anti-Semitic to mention here that debt is always the prize?

At the end of WWII, the victorious U.S. was home to 50% of the world’s productive power. Our bonds were gilt-edged and remained so for two generations. Now we are widely hated, our credibility is shot, our credit rating is slipping and our economy teeters on a meltdown.

Is it anti-Semitic to ask, “What happened?”

Is it anti-Semitic to report that the so-called “mastermind” behind 911 cited as his motive the U.S.-Israeli relationship?

Would it be anti-Semitic to ask for an accounting of the “but for” costs of this relationship?

But for this “special relationship” what would be the current condition of the U.S.—financially, militarily, diplomatically, geopolitically? Would the computation of those costs be an exercise in anti-Semitism? How about future costs?

Is it Anti-Semitic to call for a New 911 Commission?

America was misled to wage war in Iraq. Who had a relationship with us privileged enough to succeed with such duplicity in plain sight?

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and—importantly—the stable nation state intelligence to deceive us from inside our own government? Is that question anti-Semitic?

We were betrayed. Does that betrayal trace to those who befriended us?

We were defrauded. Does that treason trace to those we were induced to trust?

As counsel to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee (1980-87), I crafted federal tax law governing funds under management. Those funds surged from $800 billion in 1980 to more than $17,000 billion by the spring of 2007.

Those tax policies created a vast pool of “money-on-autopilot.” Today’s consensus belief can be simply put: money should be allowed to pursue more of itself—freely.

The unspoken assumption is that money is smarter than people. That’s the generally accepted truth behind the finance-fixated obsession we now know as “economics.”

Legions of consensus-touting consultants insist that this One True Faith guide lawmaking worldwide. By law, financial freedom became a proxy for personal freedom. Tribunals under the World Trade Organization may yet enforce that worldview globally.

How did such a narrow perspective become a widely agreed-to mindset? How were we induced to set America’s course by those values peculiar to money?

Rather than the civil rights refrain, “Let my people go,” the consensus refrain is “Let my money go.” Were we induced by a subculture within a subculture…within a subculture to freely embrace the very money myopic mindset that now endangers our freedom?

This mindset first surfaced as the “Chicago model” before morphing over decades into the “Washington” consensus.

How were we as a nation induced to brand democracy with a point of view that, by law, displaces those values not denominated in money? Is that an anti-Semitic question?

Shutting Down Debate

Early on in this challenge, I included the noun “Jew” in a Google search. I received in return an automated response from the Anti-Defamation League implying I was an anti-Semite.

Why?

More importantly, how did a Google response appear in my email inbox—automatically—from the Anti-Defamation League?

The ADL network conducts trainings for law enforcement under recently enacted federal hate crimes legislation. By my use of a common noun in an online search, am I now identified in a database as wanting to kill all the Jews?

Mark Yudoff, president of the University of California, could have intervened in the on-campus events that caused Professor Robinson to fear for his life. He declined. Richard Blum, chair of the state’s Board of Regents, could have intervened. He too declined.

Judith Yudoff is the immediate past international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism representing 760 synagogues. Blum’s wife, U. S. Senator Diane Feinstein, chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Is it anti-Semitic to report these facts?

My apologies. Clearly I don’t yet grasp what anti-Semitism is. Thus I throw the challenge to you the reader: what is it? Together perhaps we can sort this out.

Winning wars in the Information Age largely depends on winning the battle for public opinion. Thus the opinion-shaping role of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) when it attacked a high profile California professor for his criticism of Israeli policy in Palestine.

That ADL intimidation campaign successfully chilled debate on campuses nationwide during several time-critical months while a new president, promising the hope of change, reassessed U.S.-Israeli relations. His only change—endorsing more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land—quashed any hope of peace.

This ADL silencing strategy offers a microcosm of how the U.S. was induced to war in Iraq based on false intelligence. From the provocation of September 11, 2001 until the invasion of March 2003, war-planners ignored, dismissed or sought to silence anyone critical of the spurious premises offered for war.

Only later did we discover that the intelligence was fixed around a preset agenda. Even now, Americans are unaware that the U.S.-led invasion had long been an Israeli goal.

In similar fashion, an ADL campaign silenced on-campus criticism of Israel’s December 2008 assault on Gaza. At the University of California Santa Barbara, ADL-initiated charges were lodged against sociology Professor William Robinson. The disciplinary action dragged on until June 24^th when 100 professors and 20 department heads demanded an end to all proceedings.

By then the damage was done—to the reputation of Professor Robinson, to academic freedom at the University of California and to national security as this campaign silenced academics countrywide. While Robinson’s reputation can be restored, the damage to national security is irreparable.

Manipulating Thought

The ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles coordinated the assault on Robinson after he shared with students from his globalization website a photo essay critical of Israel. The essay had circulated for weeks on the Internet.

Aaron Ettenberg, a member of the Faculty Senate Charges Committee, collaborated with Santa Barbara Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer who reviled Robinson in the local community and urged—along with the ADL—that he be disciplined by the university for his “anti-Semitic” behavior.

Chancellor Henry Yang was subjected to threats to withhold funding featuring a campaign led by ADL National Director Abe Foxman and Rabbi Marvin Heir from the Wiesenthal Center.

Professor Ettenberg had served the previous two years as president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith, an ADL affiliate. Rabbi Gross-Schaefer was director of the local chapter of Hillel, an on-campus ADL affiliate.

Mark Yudof, president of the University of California, opted not to intervene even as this silencing campaign attracted international attention. Yudof’s wife, Judith, is the immediate past international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism representing 760 synagogues. She is also a director of Hillel.

As with the dominance of Jewish Zionists among neoconservative war-planners, the pro-Israeli bias was all-pervasive. Richard Blum chairs the statewide Board of Regents for the University of California. His wife, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. What was their reaction as this professor was silenced? Silence.

Coincidence or Faith-Based Coordination?

Would a professor and a local rabbi have risked their careers and their reputations absent their confidence that—based on the shared bias of university administrators and government officials—they could intimidate with impunity? Absent such implied support, would this silencing operation have dragged on for so long?

Absent their silence—with its tacit approval—what might have been the impact of campus criticism when Israel’s assault on the captive population of Gaza left 1300 dead, one-third reportedly women and children? Those complicit in this silencing campaign knew the impact on public opinion of student protests against the Vietnam War—particularly on California campuses.

Those concerned about anti-Semitism must explain how this broadly coordinated intimidation campaign was allowed to succeed. In the same way that public opinion was manipulated prior to an invasion that launched the Global War on Terrorism, this campaign sought to deny students the facts required to understand Israel’s role in provoking that terror.

Absent access to facts, how can the U.S. preserve a system of self-governance founded on the premise of informed consent? Without facts, how can national security be protected from those who “fix” intelligence in order to deploy the U.S. military for the interests of a foreign nation?

Unless those complicit are held accountable, how will American youth learn the essential role of free and open debate on topics of direct relevance to their lives?

In a representative system of government, the greatest threat to liberty is manipulation of the facts required for informed citizen participation. Anyone who cherishes freedom should be alarmed at the ongoing success of such manipulation and outraged that its common source traces to a purported ally.

Psychological warfare targets knowledge as a means to manipulate thought, opinion and emotion (the “hearts and minds”) and thereby influence behavior. At the center of such disinformation is the displacement of facts with false beliefs meant to prod decision-making toward a preset goal.

Thus the false reports of Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and so forth. Thus the high profile assault on a high-profile center of learning to silence a professor who threatened to replace manipulated beliefs with confirmed facts.

Where U.S. policies toward Israel are at stake, facts are routinely suppressed to shape debate. Such strategic deceit systematically undermines U.S. national security.

Treason in Plain Sight

Intimidation campaigns have long been a key tool for organized crime and for those whose undisclosed agenda can succeed only when shielded from public scrutiny. Those complicit in such “psy-ops” know their agenda could not prevail in an open debate. They also know that if their treachery is detected they face charges of treason, a capital crime.

That’s why this form of treason instead targets knowledge to corrupt the facts required for informed choice. That focus denies those targeted a meaningful choice while leaving intact the appearance of open debate. Meanwhile the perpetrators seek refuge behind the very freedoms they undermine—freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion.

In this case, pro-Israeli operatives silenced on-campus criticism of Israel while Israel committed dozens of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Evidence of those crimes was depicted in the Internet-posted photo essay that the ADL attacked as “anti-Semitic.”

What was the strategic result? That assault on Gaza marked yet another violent provocation guaranteed to catalyze a violent reaction (aka “terrorism”), adding plausibility to the narrative of “militant Islam.” The result made the U.S. appear guilty by its association with this criminality.

We then compounded our complicity by covering up the facts when the Congress, dominated by the Israel lobby, overwhelmingly approved a resolution portraying as “irredeemably biased” a chronicle of those war crimes in “The Goldstone Report,” a comprehensive account by an eminent Jewish jurist. [See How the Israel Lobby Took Control of U.S. Foreign Policy.]

The U.S. was doubly damaged. We not only discredited ourselves, we also endangered our national security by condoning criminality destined to provoke more violence directed at our troops.

When such psy-ops campaigns are detected, defenders of democracy must fight back by making the perpetrators transparent and their common motivation apparent. This is how Israel wages war on the U.S. from inside the U.S.—by deceiving us to wage its wars and by provoking others to hate us due to our alliance with religious extremists and their apartheid policies.

Duplicity has long been a weapon deployed to “wage war by way of deception.” That’s the operative motto of the Mossad, the intelligence and foreign operations branch of the Jewish nationalists who have dominated Israeli politics since a Christian-Zionist president erred in 1948 by recognizing as a legitimate “state” this enclave of Jewish extremists and ultra-nationalists.

Israel specializes in what the Pentagon calls unconventional warfare. Such warfare is only “unconventional” for the targeted population (us). For militant Zionists, this is how war is waged. When your numbers are few and your ambitions vast, deceit becomes an essential force-multiplier.

In the Information Age, why would anyone expect war to be waged in any way other than by deception? Where else but in plain sight could such warfare be waged?

For freedom to prevail against such psy-ops requires a shift in strategic focus. A robust defense would make this manipulation transparent in real time before deception can work its intended impact on public opinion.

The dominance of pro-Israelis in mainstream media complicates that task. Media complicity was essential to succeed in the deceit that took the U.S. to war and that now seeks to obscure Israeli war crimes.

A Special Relationship with Fanatics

The Pentagon warned six decades ago that Jewish extremists sought military and economic dominance over the entire Middle East. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Harry Truman:

“All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders. The program is openly admitted by some leaders, and has been privately admitted to United States officials by responsible leaders of the presently dominant Jewish group—The Jewish Agency.”

Other than religious fanatics, who would deny Americans—including college students—the facts required to make informed choices on an issue as critical as taking the U.S. to war in the Middle East? Other than pro-Israeli publishers and broadcast media owners, who would have the motivation to report as “facts” the phony intelligence that was fixed around Israeli goals?

If not Israel and its Zionist advocates—both Christians and Jews—who would have the means, motive, opportunity and, importantly, the stable nation state intelligence required to corrupt the intelligence that took the U.S. to war? Or to silence academic critics just when those who induced the invasion of Iraq intensified their efforts to expand this war to Iran and now Pakistan?

If the behavior described is not treason, what is? If this is treason, why have those complicit not been charged? Is Professor Ettenberg still employed by the university? If so, why? Have rabbis Gross-Schaefer and Heir been dismissed from their positions of influence? If not, why not?

Why hasn’t the ADL’s Abe Foxman been indicted? Did he confer with the Yudoffs during this silencing campaign? Has a federal grand jury been impaneled to consider charges of treason? Foxman was invited to the White House for the October 28^th signing of the ADL’s “model hate crimes” bill. Will that federal legislation now be deployed to lawfully intimidate critics?

Have mainstream publishers and media owners been investigated for their complicity in this national scale fraud on public opinion? If not, why not? Is the Federal Communications Commission moving to revoke the broadcast licenses of those who used the public airwaves to deceive the public?  If not, why not?

Are news reports correct that an investment firm run by Richard Blum made more than $100 million on the rising value of its stock in a top defense contractor? Did his firm also invest in media outlets that sold us this war?

In an irony of epic proportions, ADL’s amendment to federal hate crimes law was tacked onto an appropriations bill for the Department of Defense. Will the ADL now seek to portray as “anti-Semitic” those who document for a long-deceived military the common source of the psy-ops that took U.S. forces to war in the Middle East?

Will those who repeat the Joint Chiefs’ warning about religious fanatics be targeted for federal prosecution? Will allegations of hate be deployed to silence debate? Is treason now lawful?

In unconventional warfare, manipulated beliefs are used to displace inconvenient facts. When waging war by way of deception, false beliefs are an oft-deployed weapon.

Recall Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda? Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories? Iraqi meetings in Prague with Al Qaeda? Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium from Niger?

All these claims were reported as true. All were later proven false or, worse, fabricated. Yet all were widely believed. Only the yellowcake uranium was conceded as bogus before the invasion of Iraq. As the U.S. crafted its response to the provocation of a mass murder on U.S. soil, those widely shared beliefs shaped a consensus to wage war on a nation that had no hand in it.

A similar deception—traceable to the same source—is now working to expand this war to Iran. Based on fast-emerging events, the next conflict could include Pakistan.

The modern battlefield has shifted. Ground warfare is now secondary. Likewise air strikes, combat troops, naval support and even covert operations. Those physical operations are all downstream of information operations. Manipulated beliefs come first. Psyops precede bombs and bullets. Hardware ranks a distant third.

First and foremost are the consensus shapers and thought manipulators who target perceptions and opinions until a critical mass of agreement is reached. Then comes war. Those skilled at such duplicity induced coalition troops to war in Iraq. Knowledge was their target. Manipulate thought and all else was downstream.

Unconventional warfare is waged “upstream” with the assistance of those with the means, motive and opportunity to massage consensus opinion. Where are modern-day battles fought? Not on the ground nor in the air nor on the seas.

The mindset is the primary theater of operations. The first battlefield is the public’s shared field of consciousness. The death and destruction come later.

Deceit is not new to warfare. What’s new is the reach of the technologies—including modern media technologies—that now enable deception on a global scale

Military action remains subordinate to politics. Politics, in turn, are subordinate to those skilled at inducing consensus beliefs. Regardless whether command is civilian or military, decision-making is no better than the information on which decisions depend. That’s why the Israel lobby has long targeted U.S. lawmakers as a strategic force-multiplier by the Israel lobby. [See: “How the Israel Lobby Took Control of U.S. Foreign Policy”]

With lawmaking dependent on information, those skilled at the manipulation of knowledge can operate atop the chain of command. As a system of law reliant on informed choice, democracy can be dislodged in plain sight by those skilled at inducing a shared mindset—a consensus—by manipulating thought, belief and emotion.

Thus the strategic motivation for media dominance by the Masters of Deceit in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, India and other key nations that comprise the “coalition of the willing” induced to invade Iraq. Overlay media ownership with member states of this coalition and a common undisclosed bias becomes apparent.

When coordinated across four key areas, such “Information Operations” can displace informed decision-making with an undisclosed agenda. In retrospect, that systemic duplicity explains how the U.S. was deceived to lead this coalition to war in the Middle East. Here’s a brief look at each area: geopolitical, strategic, operational and tactical.

Duplicity in Plain Sight

The geopolitical realm is where the “framing” of future conflicts often first emerges. The Clash of Civilizations appeared in 1993 as an article in Foreign Affairs. When this premise was published as a book in 1996, more than 100 non-governmental organizations were prepared to promote its thematic conflict-of-opposites.

That agreed-to consensus facilitated the seamless transition from the Cold War to a perpetual Global War on Terrorism. Thus the fate of the post-Cold War “peace dividend.”

This widely shared mindset emerged just as A Clean Break appeared in print with its proposal for removing Saddam Hussein as part of a Colonial Zionist strategy for “securing the realm”—an expanded Greater Israel. Richard Perle, then a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, led the All-Ashkenazi team who prepared that 1996 report for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 2001, Perle became chairman of the Pentagon’s policy board. Strategically, that’s a good example of working “upstream” to frame U.S national security issues around a preset agenda—for a foreign nation. Perle left the Board in February 2004 after 17 years of wielding insider influence. When your numbers are small but your ambitions large, what choice do you have but to wage war by way of deception?

Strategically, to evoke a new global war required a plausible Evil Doer linked to a credible provocation. The branding of the Taliban did not emerge in the “field” until March 2001 with their destruction of the ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan. Widely portrayed in mainstream media as a “cultural Holocaust,” that high-profile deed put Afghanistan’s previously obscure Taliban on a global Top-Ten list as certifiably evil.

The missing piece in marketing The Clash premise: the mass murder of September 11, 2001. Strongly provoked emotions, as with 9-11, facilitate the displacement of facts with what a targeted mindset can be induced to believe. That process was enhanced by the presence of a pre-staged Evil Doer and pre-staged intelligence that was flawed, false or outright fixed—but nevertheless widely reported as fact by mainstream media.

The capacity to succeed with such an operation is enhanced by the combined presence of: (a) evocation (images of religious extremism), (b) provocation (a mass murder), (c) association (a Doer of Evil), and (d) manipulation—as mainstream media parroted phony intelligence with virtually no investigative journalism.

This psyops campaign was facilitated by plausibly credible political leaders who dutifully read their lines from fear-evoking scripts written by this same insider network of agenda-shapers. That emotional manipulation included not only the “Axis of Evil” framing but also a widely broadcast WMD sound bite: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Mainstream media even reported as credible false accounts of “high-level links” between the secular Iraqi government and the religious fundamentalists of Al Qaeda. Yet anyone familiar with the region knew they despised each other. Truth was not the point. Nor facts. Informed consent was only an obstacle to overcome.

Deception on such a scale required a capacity to sustain a veneer of plausibility and credibility – i.e., believability. Thus the critical role played by mainstream media.

The Power of Association

When waging war on the public’s shared mindset, the power of association is one of the most effective weapons. Thus the potent imagery of the peaceful Buddhas at Bamiyan when associated with destruction, violence and religious extremism.

Thus the ease with which evil doing Al Qaeda extremists were associated in the American mindset with the Taliban – and the evil of 9-11 with known Evil Doer Saddam Hussein even though the intelligence was proven false.

Thus too the associative impact of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 testimony before the U.N. Security Council. His credibility as a globally recognizable military leader (the Powell “brand”) was deployed—as a weapon—to lend the appearance of truth to lies about Iraq’s possession of mobile biological weapons.

Akin to showcasing the celebrity endorsement of a consumer product, this testimonial by a trusted military leader was broadcast worldwide in the lead-up to war. Powell was not the only “mark” in this operation. So were the U.N., the U.S. military and a global public. Both aggressor and aggrieved became casualties of this duplicitous “field-based” warfare. Meanwhile the source of this deception once again faded into the background.

Operationally, by the time the U.S. was induced to invade Iraq, 100-plus Israeli Mossad agents had been operating in Mosul for more than a decade. Soon after the invasion, several moderate clerics were murdered. Their elimination enhanced the capacity to provoke a conflict-of-opposites between long-warring Shias and Sunnis.

That conflict-within-a-conflict helped catalyze an insurgency that converted a clash into a quagmire. That result was mathematically model-able by an Israeli cadre of game theory war-planners. [See: “How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare.”]

As Information Operations proceed at the geopolitical, strategic and operational level, tactical deceit and misdirection provide essential support akin to reserve forces deployed on an as-needed basis. Serial provocations are required to sustain the serial conflicts essential to maintain the faux plausibility of the mega-theme: The Clash.

The recurring use of crises to catalyze and maintain instability should be of immediate concern to Islamabad. A long-standing Indo-Israel alliance may well be coordinating the frequency of violent incidents that continue to strain relationships between nuclear-armed Pakistan and its neighbor Iran.

Reflecting similar tactics, the most recent Israeli assault on Gaza was scheduled between Christmas 2008 and the January 2009 inauguration of a new U.S. commander-in-chief elected on a platform of hope and a promise of change. The timing of that murderous incursion minimized the capacity to criticize. President-elect Obama said nothing.

Meanwhile this serial agent provocateur set the stage with that assault for another delayed reaction from those brutalized by six decades of occupation. And from those in the broader Muslim community outraged at the U.S. for enabling this behavior.

When that reaction emerges—as it will—Tel Aviv will again assert the moral high ground as a perennial victim living in a hostile anti-Semitic neighborhood. By deploying U.S. weaponry, Israeli aggression will again make Americans appear guilty by association—endangering the U.S. while enhancing the plausibility of the narrative: The Clash of Civilizations.

The uncomfortable truth is that the U.S. is guilty—for continuing to condone this treachery—to its own detriment. Meanwhile the only change is in the presidency with no substantive change in U.S.-Israeli policies. And no hope for those most affected by this duplicity—including both the U.S. military and those it was induced to target.

As critics of Israeli policy in Gaza emerged in academia, the Anti-Defamation League and its international network mounted an intimidation campaign to silence a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. By advertising that campaign widely, the ADL silenced thoughtful academics worldwide. [See:  “Treason in Plain Sight?” and “Education: The Ultimate Battlefield” ]

By Way of Deception

To succeed, Information Operations require both deceit and denial of access to the facts required for informed consent. How else can anyone explain the enduring perception that Israel is a democracy? Even now, a majority of Americans believe that Israel is an ally despite more than six decades of nonstop deceit, spying, treachery and ongoing treason.

Any observer of recent events in Pakistan should be concerned at the duplicitous history of those who have an “existential” stake in sustaining The Clash storyline. With any semblance of stability, an investigation will confirm that the intelligence fixed to induce the U.S. to war originated with a transnational network of pro-Israeli operatives.

Democracy assumes that all of us collectively are smarter than any of us individually. Thus the need for an educated electorate informed by an unbiased media providing the facts required to reason together.

Thus too the strategic need to dominate mainstream media by those with an undisclosed bias who are skilled at waging war by way of deception. We now see portrayed in that opinion-shaping domain a world turned inside out where the victim is cast as aggressor and the predator as prey.

The facts in the recent Goldstone Report confirm a need to investigate dozens of Israeli war crimes in Gaza as well as crimes against humanity. Instead of following the facts wherever they lead—consistent with the rule of law—on November 3^rd, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 334-36 in favor of a resolution describing the report as “irredeemably biased” and opposing any further consideration.

That resolution was proposed by Howard Berman, Ashkenazim chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, senior Republican on the panel and also Ashkenazim. Meanwhile Nita Lowey, the Ashkenazim chairwoman of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee warned, by implication, that her colleagues in the Congress would jeopardize funding for their projects if “further consideration” was given to the Goldstone Report.

The House vote came one day before the U.N. General Assembly discussed the report. A day later, on November 5^th, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, a Muslim, killed 13 and wounded 29 preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. Within 24 hours, more than 250 media personnel appeared at Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base, to report on the event.

Many of them framed the event as confirming The Clash premise and even the on-base presence of “Islamo-fascism.” Suggesting the act of a “home-grown terrorist,” Jewish-Zionist Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, called for Congressional hearings into whether the U.S. military could have prevented it.

Interviewed in Palestine, the grandfather of U.S.-born and educated psychiatrist Nidal Hasan spoke of his grandson’s love of the U.S. and said simply, “America made him what he is.” While that comment hardly excuses this conduct, that poignant statement includes a point that Americans find difficult to contemplate. Yet we also found it uncomfortable to consider that the U.S.-Israeli relationship was a key motivation behind 9-11 and other attacks on Americans and American facilities.

The Goldstone Report called for an investigation of facts suggesting criminal conduct both by Israelis and Palestinians. Written by an eminent South African Jewish jurist, Richard Goldstone’s daughter conceded that her father’s findings would have been far harsher had he not been a Zionist.

Yet even the possibility that unfavorable facts could seep into the “field” required that the Israel lobby unleash its compliant Congressional forces in a litmus test of legislative loyalty—regardless of the facts. Or, indeed, because of the facts. It’s difficult to imagine a vote more clearly indicative of how a pro-Israeli bias has corrupted the rule of law.

Other disturbing facts also posed a danger of gaining traction, including a November 5th report that the International Atomic Energy Agency found “nothing to be worried about” in Iran’s recently revealed uranium enrichment site. That fact was preemptively displaced from the “field” the day before with reports of a well-timed Israeli boarding of a ship in international waters where weapons were found that were allegedly bound for Iran-supported Hezbollah.

When waging field-based warfare, timing is everything. That’s particularly the case when, as here, a belief-manipulating adversary is faced with the greatest danger of its six decade life: facts that conflict with the narrative required to sustain The Clash storyline.

Best Story Wins

With consensus beliefs the upstream target, democracy becomes the downstream casualty. When manipulated beliefs displace facts, the rule of law degenerates into a faith-based parody of self-governance. To protect the informed consent essential to freedom requires that those waging war on the public’s shared mindset become transparent so that those complicit can be made apparent.

How old is this form or warfare? Answer: How long has behavior been manipulated with beliefs? How long has faith been deployed to displace facts? The form of warfare is ancient; only the means are modern.

Upstream warfare and strategic deceit are only “unconventional” for the target. For Jewish extremists, such duplicity is business-as-usual.

This analysis describes how warfare is waged in plain sight in the Information Age. Without the complicity of mainstream media, this deceit could not have succeeded on such a scale.

In the Information Age, duplicity is how treason can be taken to scale—in plain view and, to date, with legal impunity—both in the U.S. and in the coalition member nations whose citizens were also targeted by those chronicled in this account.

The common source of this deceit remains little known either to the American public or the people in those nations the U.S. led to war. Here in the U.S., the tattered remnants of our system of informed consent are held hostage by this media-induced duplicity—and by legislators more inclined to protect their personal interests than the national interest.

There lies the strategic role for online media free of conspiracy theories that obscure the analytical clarity required to wage this battle with confidence. What’s described here is warfare being waged on knowledge by an enemy within. Liberty faces no greater danger than those targeting its foundation of informed consent.

What has been made of the U.S. due to our “special relationship” with this extremist enclave is not the form of governance to which our civilian and military leaders swore their allegiance. With our civilian leadership compromised by the Israel lobby, to whom do U.S. military leaders owe their allegiance—to this latest in a series of corrupted presidencies or to the people whose freedom they took an oath to protect from all enemies, both foreign and domestic?

Despite appearances, it is not America that is at war in the Middle East but Americans loyal to this nation who were sent to war by a foreign government imbedded inside what remains of “our” government.

With trans-generational premeditation, Ashkenazim elites and extremists lured the U.S. into an entangled alliance in order to manipulate Americans to wage their expansionist wars and to secure their “realm.” Only as the common source of this treason became transparent could those complicit now be held accountable.

For Americans to restore the fact-based rule of law requires sustained pressure from abroad. Our true allies will hold us accountable for what we allowed these extremists to do in our name. As the how of this treason becomes transparent, we Americans will see as our true enemies those who enabled this duplicity—to our long-term detriment. The best way to befriend us is to hold us true to the values we espouse.

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

– George Santayana

How quickly we forget. With the Inquisition still fresh in memory, America’s Founders embraced democracy as a means to protect liberty from the manipulations of faith. That’s why facts were enshrined at the core of self-governance grounded in the rule of law. The duplicity at the heart of the U.S.-Israeli relationship puts that founding principle at risk.

For seven terrifying centuries, heretics were punished under canon law. In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was condemned for “grave suspicion of heresy” when he showed that the Sun—not the crown—was the center of the universe despite what the King’s subjects—with help from the Church—had been induced to believe.

With the merger of church and state in the 4^th Century Roman Empire, anyone daring to dispute papal authority—by challenging with facts the One True Faith—was condemned as both a heretic and an enemy of the state. That practice continues in modern times.

The New Heretics are those few who challenge America’s faith in its “special relationship” with an extremist enclave granted nation state recognition in 1948 by a Christian-Zionist president, Harry Truman. Critics of this enclave invite condemnation as “anti-Semites,” a modern form of social excommunication.

Defenders of the Zionist Faithful were forced to become more vigilant in monitoring this heresy after Israeli troops used U.S.-provided arms and munitions to kill more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, one-third of them reportedly children.

That well-timed attack, planned for more than a year, was scheduled between Christmas and the January 20^th presidential inaugural. Within 48 hours of ending its assault, Israel had dispatched an army of bloggers to counter anti-Zionist websites. By early February, the Anti-Defamation League was bemoaning a “pandemic of anti-Semitism.” The massacre fueled outrage worldwide even as the ADL portrayed that anger as “anti-Semitism.”

By early March, Israeli policy was being described as a threat to international peace and security, a violation of international human rights and a crime against humanity. By associating the U.S.—its ally—with this behavior, the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship” fueled anti-American hatred, fanned the flames of extremism and set the stage for more terrorism. Meanwhile a wave of modern-day excommunications swept college campuses:

• At Hampshire College in Massachusetts, students urged the school to divest from firms whose operations support the Israeli occupation of Palestine. When Israeli policies were compared to apartheid-era South Africa, Zionist Law Professor Alan Dershowitz condemned the students as “rabidly anti-Israel” (enemies of the state).
• At Canada’s Ottawa College, Students Against Israeli Apartheid were prohibited from displaying a poster condemning Zionist policies that president Jimmy Carter had already condemned in his 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
• At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor William Robinson (Jewish) was attacked as an anti-Semite in an ADL-coordinated silencing campaign. His heresy: sharing with students a photo-essay critical of Israeli policy that had circulated for weeks online. [See “Treason in Plain Sight?”: intifada-palestine.com/2009/07/03/treason-in-plain-sight/and “The ADL Thought Police:”: aljazeera.com/news/articles/42/The_ADL_thought_police.html]

Media-Manipulated Mindsets

Meanwhile Pope Benedict XVI attacked an Argentine cleric whose excommunication he had lifted. As head of the Roman Catholic Church, Benedict claimed he was unaware that Bishop Richard Williamson had challenged key facts of the Holocaust. When condemned by the Pontiff, Williamson apologized. The Vatican insisted he recant, a concept lifted directly from the Inquisition.

Critics suspect this early February dispute was meant to distract attention from the carnage in Gaza and create sympathy for Israel by evoking memories of the Holocaust. No media outlet mentioned that this German Pope, the first since 1523, previously led the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a direct descendant of the Church’s 16^th century tribunal, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition.

The fiercest condemnation of the bishop’s reluctance to recant came not from Rome but from Angela Merkel in Berlin who was elected German Chancellor in 2005. No media outlet mentioned that in 2003 Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired control of ProSiebenSat.1, Germany’s second largest broadcaster.

While wielding a major opinion-shaping media outlet during Merkel’s ascendancy as Germany’s first female chancellor, Saban described himself as an “Israeli-American” and “a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Steve Rattner, Saban’s financial adviser, explained the motive for his media acquisition: “He thinks Germany is critical to Israel.” Rattner re-emerged as president Barack Obama’s auto industry “car czar” before resigning in mid-July due to a pension fund scandal.

To put these media-dependent developments in historical perspective requires a grasp of how—in the Information Age—warfare is waged not on a traditional battlefield but in the shared field of consciousness. In the public’s shared mindset—where consensus opinions are created, shaped and sustained—facts are routinely displaced with what “the mark” can be induced to believe.

That’s why national security agencies must monitor media czars such as Saban who is candid about using his influence to advance Zionist goals. In June 2006, a Saban-led group acquired Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S. With Latinos the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S., Univision is critical to Israel’s ability to sustain its control of U.S. foreign policy. Univision is the fifth largest television network in the U.S., reaching 98% of Spanish-speaking households through 62 television stations, 90 affiliate stations and more than 2,000 cable affiliates. [See “How the Israel lobby took control of U.S. foreign policy.”: www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=124829&d=24&m=7&y=2009]

For a system of self-governance reliant on informed consent, it is difficult to overstate the threat to democracy when policy-making is filtered through the pro-Israeli bias of media-owning Zionists. In addition to emerging as a reliable EU advocate for Israeli policies, Merkel threatened to arrest Williamson for Holocaust denial on a EU-wide warrant. A search of her phone records would doubtless uncover a discussion with a key supporter, Haim Saban.

Zionists and the lawmakers they groom are well positioned to advance a modern-day Inquisition—as when Bishop Williamson simultaneously faced arrest in Europe and expulsion from Argentina, the site of a seminary he directed and home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America.

The People In Between

In October 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates coined a generic phrase to describe the most perilous combatants when waging what he called “unconventional warfare.” A former C.I.A. Director, he portrayed this enemy as “the people in between.” Between Galileo and the facts was Church doctrine deployed to displace science with beliefs or, in modern-day parlance, with consensus opinion. Between the German people and the ballot box was Haim Saban for whom the election of Angela Merkel was critical to Israel. Next is Univision.

To gain credence (believability) for the displacement of facts with beliefs requires that the public’s shared mental environment be fed a steady diet of supportive impressions. Thus the agenda-advancing assistance when “unrelated” events emerge in the same timeframe to reinforce the intended orthodoxy. For example, following the Israeli assault on Gaza, news reports in February included several high profile accounts, including:

• The suspension of U.K. diplomat Rowan Laxton for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks while riding an exercise bike in a London gymnasium.
• Reports of police protection provided in Dubai to Andy Ram, an Israeli tennis star, reinforcing the media-induced narrative that Israelis were at risk.
• A White House announcement that the Obama administration would attend a planning session for a 2009 World Conference Against Racism but may boycott it.

These narrative-advancing impressions were reinforced by the release in 2008 of eight Holocaust-themed films, including The Reader starring Kate Winslet who received a high profile Academy Award for best actress in a leading role. She even joked about the influence wielded by pro-Israelis in Hollywood and popular culture. In a 2005 filming of Extras, a comedy series in which she played herself, an actor congratulated her on her role in a Holocaust-related film, to which she responded:

“I don’t think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It’s like, how many have there been? We get it. It was grim. Move on. No, I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, [you're] guaranteed an Oscar. I’ve been nominated four times—never won. The whole world is going, ‘Why hasn’t Winslet won one?’ That’s it. That’s why I’m doing it. Schindler’s bloody List. The Pianist. Oscars coming out of their ass!”

Duplicity – From Antiquity to Modernity

Framers of the U.S. Constitution viewed democracy as a form of governance that resides not in a royal court or the papacy but in a mindset shared by its participants. Where else could self-governance reside? Thus the key role envisioned for media as an “in-between” domain essential to convey the facts required for informed consent. Absent widespread access to unbiased information, liberty would succumb to the exploitation of those skilled at preying on ignorance and beliefs. On that key point, the Framers were proven correct.

Thus the perils when those who mean to live free rely on media with an undisclosed bias. It is precisely such “people in between” that routinely displace facts with what an unsuspecting public (“the mark”) can be deceived to believe. In an Information Age, such fraudulent behavior is not akin to treason, that agenda-advancing duplicity is treason. Haim Saban is unusual only in conceding the pro-Israeli bias he brings to his media operations.

This duplicitous modus operandi works the same in modernity as in antiquity. The impact on informed consent is identical regardless whether the media-enabled deceit is a false belief in Iraqi WMD, a consensus faith in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets, or a shared opinion that this Zionist enclave is a democracy and an ally rather than what the oft-recurring fact patterns confirm: an enemy within.

Such treachery is at least as old as the use of canon law to silence critics of Church doctrine. The only modern component of this deceitful craft is the global reach of contemporary media and its capacity to manipulate minds and emotions on an unprecedented scale.

A 1578 handbook for inquisitors explained that its harsh penalties were “for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” The New Heretics chronicle the costs of the U.S.-Israel relationship in blood, treasure, insecurity and credibility. Those who yearn for freedom from such manipulation can no longer afford America’s entangled alliance with an extremist enclave notorious for waging war by way of deception

When sociology Professor William Robinson stared down the Anti-Defamation League, it looked like a victory for academic freedom. Yet was it? Robinson was portrayed as an anti-Semite because he sent an email to students featuring a photo essay critical of Israel that had circulated online for weeks. While University of California administrators dallied, the ADL and its international network turned up the heat—signaling academics worldwide they could be next.

It looked like progress when the faculty at UC Santa Barbara urged “changes in procedures to avoid improprieties and abuses in the future….” But was it? By then the ADL campaign had created the intended chilling effect. This silencing campaign was featured news for five time-critical months while a newly elected U.S. president was reassessing U.S.-Israeli relations. How can anyone calculate the full extent of the damage—not only to Robinson’s reputation and to the stature of the University of California but also to national security?

So where’s the victory? Clearly Robinson deserves acclaim for resisting pressure as the ADL deployed its most seasoned operatives, including Marvin Heir, a rabbi at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Only an investigation can identify who mobilized the donor community that threatened UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang with the withdrawal of funds.

What was the motivation for this high profile intimidation campaign? Was the ADL driven simply by the discomfort that two students voiced on their receipt of his email criticizing Israeli policy? Or did the ADL network have its sights on a broader strategic goal?

Facts have since proven it was largely pro-Israelis who fixed the intelligence that manipulated the U.S. to invade Iraq. That same network has now mobilized to expand that war to Iran. A key barrier: the global condemnation of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. How does Tel Aviv limit the public relations fallout? On what leverage points should Israel focus to contain the censure while continuing to obscure Israel and pro-Israelis as the common source of this manipulation?

Aiding An Enemy Within?

The Founders faced a similar challenge during the Revolutionary War. How could they distinguish patriots from those loyal to a foreign nation? Knowing the vast risks that accompany betrayal, they lowered the evidentiary standard for treason. Guilt still required proof beyond a reasonable doubt but a conviction only required evidence of “adhering” to an enemy or giving them “aid and comfort.” To remove all doubt about the gravity of this capital offense, they even included those relaxed standards in Article III of the U.S. Constitution.

Fast-forward two centuries to the Information Age and consider the challenge of distinguishing friend from foe. With a new president sworn into office on a platform promising change, how should Tel Aviv continue to conceal the fact that it was pro-Israelis who deceived the U.S. to wage war in Iraq for the expansionist goals of Greater Israel?

During the Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Barack Obama promised no change in U.S.-Israeli relations. But that pledge was made while he and Hillary Clinton were vying for the pro-Israeli vote. What about now—particularly now that he knows Israel scheduled its assault on Gaza between Christmas and the Obama inaugural—knowing that interval would ensure Tel Aviv could operate largely free of official criticism?

Campaigning for president is one thing. Serving as commander in chief is another. What became of the prospects for change after this professor of constitutional law took a constitutional oath that obliged him to defend the U.S. from all enemies—both foreign and domestic?

Based on the success of pro-Israelis in inducing the U.S. to invade Iraq, how does this international network best expand this war to Iran? To succeed again, how can Tel Aviv best control the risk that facts unhelpful to its agenda find their way into the marketplace of ideas?

How about this for a psyops strategy: launch an intimidation campaign on a high-profile campus and portray a critic as an anti-Semite for sharing photos that had been circulating for weeks on the Internet. Then threaten his job, smear his reputation, put him in fear of his physical safety and threaten to withhold critical funding. Then see if on-campus critics still dare to speak out.

While the Faculty Senate should be commended for its stance, one must ask: what took so long? And what will be done to ensure that never again is a professor on any University of California campus subjected to such abuse with the complicity of university administrators? What steps will be taken to ensure this conduct does not recur on campuses nationwide?

Where was UC President Mark Yudof as this intimidation campaign progressed with such well-timed success? What role was played by the pro-Israeli bias of his wife, Judith, the immediate past president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism representing 760 synagogues?

Where was the Board of Regents while this silencing campaign advanced between the invasion of Gaza and President Obama’s White House meeting with Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Did Board of Regents chairman Richard Blum harbor an undisclosed bias that precluded him shutting down this ADL operation? How about his wife, pro-Israeli U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee? What role did bias play in a community-wide smear campaign led by Arthur Gross-Schaefer, a Santa Barbara rabbi?

Was this only an offense against a courageous professor who fought on while university administrators retreated? Or was this assault more strategic? The Faculty Senate cannot on its own correct these wrongs because key offenders remain beyond their reach. What they can—and must—do is dismiss any faculty member complicit in this operation, condemn any university administrator who failed to act promptly and rebuke complicit operatives in the community.

The reputation of Prof. Robinson was only grist for the same mill that churned out the phony intelligence required to induce the U.S. to war in Iraq. That same network of deceit now seeks to catalyze war with Iran. Robinson was not the target. His reputation was collateral damage. The target was the mindset of academics that—because of this assault—hesitated to criticize Israel.

Until steps are taken to deter future offenses, these psychological operations (psyops) will continue and the reputation of the U.S. will continue to be collateral damage. Most ominous of all, those who wage war “by way of deception” (the motto of the Israeli Mossad) will continue to displace the facts on which self-governance depends. Progress must be measured by how many educators grasp that what was done to one could be done to all.

All were alleged true but later proven false or, worse, fabricated. Yet all were widely believed. In combination, those beliefs induced a consensus to wage war in Iraq in response to a mass murder on U.S. soil.

The battlefield has shifted. Ground warfare is secondary. Likewise for airstrikes, naval support and covert operations. Physical operations are all downstream of information operations. False beliefs come first. Psyops precede missiles, and bombs. Hardware ranks a distant third. Foremost are the consensus shapers who manipulate perceptions until a critical mass of phony intelligence is reached. Then comes war.

People are preeminent. Wars are won by those skilled at creating consensus opinions. Where is modern-day warfare waged? Not on the ground; nor in the air or on the seas. The shared mindset is this combatant’s theater of operations. Their battlefield is the shared field of consciousness. Deceit is not new to warfare. What’s new is the technology that enables psyops on a global scale.

The military remains subordinate to politics. But politics are subordinate to those skilled at manipulating consensus beliefs. Decision-making is no better than the information on which decisions depend. Likewise for decision-makers. That’s why U.S. lawmakers have long been targeted by the Israel lobby. [See: “How the Israel Lobby Took Control of the Congress”]

With law-making dependent on information, these mindset manipulators can operate atop the chain of command. In a system of law reliant on informed choice, self-governance can readily be replaced in plain sight by manipulated beliefs and consensus opinions. Thus the motivation for media dominance by Zionists in the U.S., Canada, Germany and elsewhere.

When waged across four key areas, such “Information Operations” can displace democratic lawmaking with a predetermined agenda. Here’s a quick look at each area: geopolitical, strategic, operational and tactical..

Duplicity in Plain Sight

The geopolitical realm is where the “framing” of future conflicts first emerges. The Clash of Civilizations first appeared in 1993 as an article in Foreign Affairs. Three years later, when this thematic framing emerged as a book, more than 100 NGOs were prepared to promote its conflict-of-opposites theme as a sequel to the Cold War—and a prequel to a “global war on terrorism.” That consensus belief emerged just as A Clean Break appeared with its proposal to “secure the realm” (Israel) by removing Saddam Hussein.

Strategically, to evoke a war requires a plausible Evil Doer and a credible provocation. The global branding of the Taliban emerged in the “field” in March 2001 with destruction of the ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan. Widely portrayed as a “cultural Holocaust,” that high-profile act put Afghanistan’s previously obscure Taliban on everyone’s list as certifiably evil. The missing piece: the mass murder of September 11, 2001.

Strongly provoked emotions facilitate the displacement of facts with what “the mark” can be induced to believe—particularly in the presence of Evil Doer pre-staging. The combination of (a) evocation (religious extremism), (b) provocation (911) and (c) association (the Axis of Evil) enhanced the capacity to deceive—fueled by false reports of Iraqi WMD and even ties between the secular Saddam and the fundamentalists of Al Qaeda (they detested each other).

When waging war on the public’s shared mindset, the power of association is one of the most effective weapons. Thus the potent imagery of the peaceful Buddhas at Bamiyan destroyed by violent extremists. Thus too the associative impact of Colin Powell’s appearance at the U.N. Security Council when his credibility was deployed—like a weapon—to spread lies about Iraq’s biological weapons. Not only was Powell “the mark” – so were the U.N. and the U.S.

Operationally, by the time the U.S. was induced to invade Iraq, 100-plus Israeli Mossad agents had been operating in Mosul for more than a decade. Soon after the invasion, several moderate clerics were murdered, enhancing the capacity to provoke a conflict-of-opposites between extremist Shias and more moderate Sunnis, a key to evoking the destabilizing insurgency.

As Information Operations proceed at the geopolitical, strategic and operational level, tactical deceit and misdirection provide key support. A recent provocation—the invasion of Gaza—was scheduled by Tel Aviv between Christmas and the inauguration of a U.S. President who promised change. That timing ensured minimal capacity to criticize.
As critics of Israeli policy emerged in universities, the Anti-Defamation League and its international network mounted an intimidation campaign on a high-profile campus that silenced academics worldwide. [See: “Treason in Plain Sight?”]

To succeed, Information Operations require both deceit and denial of access to the facts required for informed consent. How else can anyone explain the perception that the Zionist state is a democracy—and even an ally?

Democracy assumes that all of us collectively are smarter than any of us individually. Thus the need for an unbiased media to provide the facts with which we can reason together. Thus, in turn, the need for pro-Israeli dominance of mainstream media by those skilled at waging war by way of deception. Thus what we now see portrayed in that domain: a world turned inside out where the aggressor is portrayed as victim and the predator as prey.

With consensus beliefs the upstream target, democracy becomes the downstream casualty. To protect the informed consent essential to liberty requires that those waging war on our shared mindset be made transparent. This method of warfare is ancient; only the means are modern.

The common source of this duplicity remains unknown to the public. There lies the strategic role for online media unadorned by conspiracy theories that obscure the clarity required to wage this battle with confidence.

The success of this silencing tactic on a university campus offers a microcosm of how a similar shared bias induced the U.S. to wage war in Iraq based on false intelligence fixed around a pro-Israeli agenda. From late 2001 until March 2003, pro-Israeli war-planners dismissed—or sought to discredit—anyone critical of intelligence fixed around the pre-determined goal of invading Iraq, a strategy long sought by those favoring the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.

At the University of California Santa Barbara, proceedings against sociology Professor William Robinson dragged on until 100 professors and 20 department heads demanded they end. The intimidation campaign spanned the time from the Israeli attack on Gaza to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House. Not until June 24th did university administrators terminate all proceedings. By then, the damage was done—not just to the reputation of Robinson and the University of California but also to national security.

The ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center attacked Robinson after he posted on his website a photo essay critical of Israeli policy that had circulated for weeks on the Internet. In this case, Aaron Ettenberg, a member of the Faculty Senate Charges Committee, collaborated with Santa Barbara rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer who reviled Robinson locally and urged—along with the ADL—that he be disciplined for this “anti-Semitic” conduct.

With the exception of Chancellor Henry Yang, everyone involved was Jewish, including Robinson. At the urging of the rabbi, ADL President Abe Foxman and ADL’s nationwide network, Dr. Yang was intimidated with threats to withhold university funding. Ettenberg had served the previous two years as president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith, an ADL affiliate. Gross-Schaefer was director of the local chapter of Hillel, another ADL affiliate.

Mark Yudof, president of the University of California, opted not to intervene. His wife, Judith, is the immediate past international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism representing 760 synagogues. She is also a director of Hillel, the Jewish youth organization. As with the dominance of pro-Israelis among war-planners, the bias does not stop there. The chairman of the Board of Regents is Richard Blum whose wife, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, serves as the pro-Israeli, pro-war chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The relevant question is this: Would a faculty member and a rabbi have risked their careers and their reputations absent their confidence that—based on the shared background and bias of senior university administrators—they could operate with impunity? Absent such support, would this ADL-directed operation have dragged on for five months?

Those genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism must explain how this intimidation campaign was allowed to succeed. In the same way that facts were denied a deceived American public in the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, this silencing campaign sought to deny students the facts required to understand the role of Israel in world affairs. Absent access to facts, how can an informed populace preserve a system of self-governance? There is no greater threat to a free people.

Attempts to suppress debate where U.S. policies toward Israel are at stake cut to the core of how national security has been compromised by this entangled alliance. All Americans, including Jewish-Americans, must ensure that those complicit in such conduct are held accountable. And that those targeted are celebrated when, as here, they demonstrate the courage and fortitude to defend academic freedom under pressure from such multi-faceted, well-coordinated assaults.

Intimidation campaigns have long been critical to those whose operations can succeed only when protected from public scrutiny. Where, as here, pro-Israeli operatives seek to silence on-campus critics of a foreign nation, defenders of this nation’s security must fight back by making this behavior transparent and its motives apparent.

Duplicity remains a weapon routinely deployed by those instructed by Tel Aviv to “wage war by way of deception” (the motto of the Israeli Mossad). In the Information Age, why would anyone expect war to be waged in any other way? To prevail in such warfare, a shift in focus is required to make treason transparent before it works its intended impact on public opinion.

Other than an enemy within, who would seek to deny Americans—including college students—the facts needed to make informed choices, especially on an issue as critical as waging war in the Middle East? If not Israel and its advocates, who else would seek to silence critics of Israeli policy just as those who induced the U.S. to war in Iraq intensify their efforts to expand this conflict to Iran? If the behavior described is not treason, what is?