“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” — Henry Kissinger
One of my main points in that article was the extent to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dependent on a coalition that gave important porfolios to political parties with insane ideologies. I instanced Israel Beitenu, the ultra-chauvinist group led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and the religiously orthodox Shas Party, under the spiritual leadership of deranged Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. “Fringe” though they might be, members of such groups hold key ministries, including the ones that dominate the “settlement” process. Since I last wrote about him, Rabbi Yosef has again been to the fore, blaming the calamitous forest fires in northern Israel on the failure of Jews to observe the Sabbath in the proper way. And the country’s interior minister, a Shas member named Eli Yishai, has rejected offers of fire-fighting equipment from Christian organizations, lest they use the opportunity to seduce Jews away to the worship of the Nazarene.
Men with this mentality were offered $3 billion worth of American aid, plus a full range of diplomatic support, in exchange for a one-month suspension of settlement-building, this non-freeze not even to include Jerusalem! And they rejected it as not good enough. It is difficult to say which is the worse national humiliation for the United States: the degraded initial offer or its contemptuous refusal. So I was thinking of demanding that the squalid bargain not be offered again. And then I decided that this would be a waste of a wish or a duplicate of a demand. So, while I am on a roll …
Here’s what should now happen, and let’s see if it does. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last.