Absolute Power

A certain Lord Acton famously wrote that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This well characterizes the Israel Lobby. As Charles Freeman, whose appointment as intelligence chief was derailed by the Lobby, wrote on 3/10/09, "The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."

An a example of this is The Wall Street Journal (3/11/09) which reported "Critics also attacked a comment in which Mr. Freeman said the Chinese government was too slow to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989." Fareed Zakaria, in interviewing Freeman on CNN's GPS (3/15/09) put up this quote attributed to Freeman: "the response to the mob scene at Tiananmen Square stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership." Freeman then explained that the Lobby had deviously left out the first part of the sentence, which was in fact the subject of the sentence, which makes it clear that Freeman was describing the dominant Chinese views and not his own views.

Freeman told Zakaria that the Israel Lobby, which he prefers to call the Likud Lobby, since it represents the hard right wing views, has a "hammerlock on both public discussion and policy. The objective of their campaign against me was to reinforce that hammerlock, to enforce the taboo against any critical discussion of Israeli policies and what they might mean for Israel's future or the future of the US......" The Lobby acted "to reinforce their veto power over appointments to the government, to ensure that analysis was not value free but pro-Israeli in orientation, and to some extent anti-Arab....."

As Freeman wrote on 3/10/09, he has been under attack "by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction of a foreign country." "It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country..." The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views..." This Lobby is "intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government."