Lieberman and
Cheney March In the Footsteps of Joe McCarthy
by Jeffrey
Steinberg
In Nazi
Germany, one of the most feared institutions was the Gestapo, with its vast
network of millions of informants, penetrated into every community, every
workplace, every church and university. Under the control of Herman Goering, and
ultimately, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo is the absolute epitome of
evil, which sent millions to their death or enslavement.
In the United
States, during the 1950s, the image of the Roy Cohn-steered drunken Sen. Joseph
McCarthy, railing, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about "lists" of hundreds of
Communists, infiltrated into the State Department and other agencies of
government, was the moral equivalent of Himmler and Goering's Gestapo.
McCarthyism's body count may have been vastly smaller than that of the Nazi SS
and Gestapo, but the catalogue of ruined and scarred lives spans several
generations. McCarthyism is the ultimate proof that "it can happen here"and it
did.
The New
McCarthyism
When
President Bush nominated John Ashcroft as Attorney General in January 2001,
Lyndon LaRouche warned that Ashcroft would seek the first opportunity to stage a
"Reichstag fire" incident, to impose police-state measures on all Americans, in
a replay of Hitler's Spring 1933 seizure of dictatorial power in Germany.
Despite sufficient votes to block his confirmation, the U.S. Senate confirmed
Ashcroft, when Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) blocked a filibuster. Earlier this
year, Attorney General Ashcroft proved LaRouche 100% right, when he attempted to
establish a nationwide gestapo informant network, under the direct control of
the Justice Department and the FBI, as part of the misnamed "Patriots Act,"
passed in haste by the U.S. Congress following 9/11. When the plans were made
public, the outcry was so great that the program was scrapped.
But now,
under private auspices, in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and in furtherance of the
Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington declaration of civilizational war against
the entire Islamic and Confucian culture of over 2 billion citizens of this
planet, a new McCarthyism is running amok inside the United States.
Its leading
proponents, as in the McCarthyism of the 1950s, are prominent figures in the
political world. One is a serving U.S. Senator and recent Vice Presidential
candidateJoseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). The other is the wife of the Vice
President of the United States and a former head of the National Endowment for
the Humanities, Dr. Lynne Cheney. Together, they founded an overtly McCarthyite
agency, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which, post-9/11,
has launched a vicious campaign of slander and financial warfare against any
academics who dare to challenge the "official" version of the attacks in New
York and Washington. Like their inspiration, Joe McCarthy, they, too, have
compiled a phony list of academics, charged with failing to toe the lying
official line that Osama bin Laden was the author of the 9/11
attacks.
If you dare
to oppose the Cheney-Lieberman war on Iraq and other manifestations of the
neo-conservative brand of universal fascism, then you may soon find yourself in
the cross-hairs of this gang of wanna-be Himmlers and Goerings. If you are an
Arab-American student or professor, or a Middle East scholar, on the campus of
an American university, invaded by this Gestapo, you may find yourself the
victim of hooligan attacks by vigilante squadristi, or the target of a campaign
to have your tenure revoked.
In one recent
instance, Prof. Sami Al-Arian, of the University of Southern Florida in Tampa,
was stripped of his tenured post and fired from the engineering facultyafter
local prosecutors were visited by officials of the Israeli government, who
presented a dossier, purporting that Dr. Al-Arian was a top Palestinian
terrorist. He was charged, in the bogus dossier, of leading terrorist cells in
Egyptat a time when he was obtaining his post-graduate degree in Michiganmany
thousands of miles away from Cairo, Alexandria, or Luxor.
ACTA has now
spawned a veritable alphabet soup of allied agencies, targetting elected
officials, academics, and university students with the same gestapo
venom.
Among the
agencies engaged in this coordinated witch-hunt are: Americans for Victory Over
Terrorism (AVOT), which was launched, post-9/11, by ACTA founder William
Bennett, along with James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, William Barr, and money-bags
Lawrence Kadish; Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, led by Daniel
Pipes, which has created an Internet website, which is recruiting an army of
campus-based informants, charged with ratting out fellow students and teachers
who dare to challenge the "morality" of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
"ethnic cleansing" campaign against the Palestinians; Committee for Accurate
Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a spawn of the right-wing Likudnik
spy agency, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which
targets any U.S. media outlet that dares speak the truth about the events in the
Middle East; honestreporting.com, a parallel organization to CAMERA, which is
run directly from Israel by right-wing circles; and Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI), headed by former Israeli military intelligence Col. Yigal
Carmon and, until recently, by Meyrav Wurmser, which spits out selective
inflammatory articles from the Arabic press, and circulates them to policymakers
and media, to further the "Clash of Civilizations" attack on Islam.
LaRouche
Warns
Lyndon
LaRouche, Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate for the 2004 elections,
has issued a warning about the Cheney-Lieberman gestapo. Some, he noted, will
object to drawing a parallel to Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and McCarthy. However,
the truth must be told, or else we will wake up in America one day, stripped of
all our liberties. This kind of witch-hunt, LaRouche warned, is the first step
toward tyranny. In the early 1930s, the Germans capitulated to the first steps,
and look what they got. Now, people like Joe Lieberman, Lynne Cheney and William
Bennett, are lending their names to the same effort. They are doing it again,
LaRouche warned, but they do not yet have the power to make it stick. Now is the
time to stop the witch-huntbefore it is too late!
'Not Patriotism, But
Fascism'
Indeed,
LaRouche has provided, once again, the dramatic statement of the truth. But he
is, fortunately, not alone.
- * On
Dec. 20, 2001, the Hartford Advocate published a scathing editorial,
headlined "Joe McCarthy Lieberman?" which read, in part: "When Republican Sen.
Joseph McCarthy stood in front of Congress, Feb. 20, 1950, and for six hours
rifled through old State Department dossiers claiming he had proof that 81
State Department employees were Communists, it guaranteed for all time that he
would be remembered as an enemy of the time-honored American tradition of free
speech and free association. Similarly Lieberman, who sits on the advisory
board of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which released a report
that criticizes universities for evidence of anti-Americanism during the
current war in Afghanistan, may be enhancing his chances of being remembered
by posterity as the Censorship King."
- A week
earlier, responding to the same "list" of academics practicing
"anti-Americanism," the San Jose Mercury News published an op-ed by
Prof. Roberto J. Gonzalez of San Jose State University, headlined "Lynne
Cheney-Joe Lieberman Group Puts Out a Blacklist." The professor charged that
"an aggressive attack on freedom has been launched upon America's college
campuses. Its perpetrators seek the elimination of ideas and activities that
place Sept. 11 in historical context, or critique the so-called war on
terrorism." Citing the ACTA report, "Defending Civilization: How Our
Universities Are Failing America," Professor Gonzalez wrote: "Although the
council's stated objectives include the protection of academic freedom, the
report resembles a blacklist. In a chilling use of doublespeak, it affirms the
right of professors to speak out, yet condemns those who have attempted to
give context to Sept. 11, encourage critical thinking, or share knowledge
about other cultures. Faculty are accused of being 'short on patriotism' for
attempting to give students the analytical tools they need to become informed
citizens."
Indeed, the ACTA
report named 40 prominent academics and cited 117 purported "incidents" of
"anti-Americanism. In one instance, ACTA attacked the president of Wesleyan
University in Middletown, Connecticut, for having circulated an open letter
warning that "disparities and injustices" in American society can spawn hatred
and violence.
Gonzalez concluded
that "the report represents a kind of academic terrorism designed to strike
fear into the other academics by making examples of respected professors....
This is not patriotism, but fascism.... The targetting of scholars who
participate in civic debates might signal the emergence of a new McCarthyism
directed at the academy. Before it escalates into a full-blown witch-hunt in
the name of 'defending civilization,' faculty, students, and citizens should
speak out against these acts of academic terrorism."
- On Dec.
14, 2001, the National Catholic Reporter editorialized against "A
'Defense' That Civilization Can Do Without." "It is difficult," the editorial
began, "to tell exactly what Lynne V. Cheney, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and
others who constitute the American Council of Trustees and Alumni are trying
to accomplish with their project.... The title is as overblown as the
sentiment that drives the effort: No one should ask questions of the American
war effort." The editorial concluded with a stern warning: "It would be
absurd, indeed, if this 'report' were not indicative of a dangerous fervor
stalking the country, a fervor intolerant of questions and dependent on
ignorance of recent history."
- On March
15, 2002, Jim Lobe warned, in the online publication Foreign Policy in
Focus, that "The War on Dissent Widens." Lobe, who has written a series
of well-researched exposés of the Paul Wolfowitz-Lewis Libby-Richard Perle
neo-conservative cabal inside the Bush Administration, targetted the ACTA
spawn, Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, which had published a full-page
New York Times advertisement on March 10, attacking "radical Islam"
and an amorphous "enemy within" which "promulgates their agenda of 'blame
America first.' " AVOT extended their blacklist beyond academe, naming a
number of leading elected officials and prominent editorialists as enemies
within. Among the targets: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who dared to
criticize President Bush for "going crazy" with the authority to go after
terrorists; former President Jimmy Carter, who attacked G.W.'s "axis of evil"
formula as "overly simplistic and counter-productive"; Rep. Dennis Kucinich
(D-Ohio), who accused the President of "cancelling, in effect, the First,
Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments"; American Prospect
editor Robert Kuttner, for criticizing "Bush's dismal domestic policies" and
his "dubious notion of permanent war"; and Lewis Lapham, the respected editor
of Harper's magazine, who reminded his readers that, during the
1990s, the United States had engaged in terror tactics in the Balkans and in
Iraq.
Lapham responded to the AVOT assault by denouncing Bennett as a
"wrong-headed jingo" who launched AVOT as a "front organization for the hard
neo-con right," which has gained tremendous power inside the Bush Pentagon and
in the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney. "This is the war-monger crowd,"
he charged, noting that AVOT gurus Bennett and Gaffney were signators to an
open letter to President Bush, issued within days of the 9/11 attack,
demanding that the United States not only bomb Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to
oblivion, but also launch war on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the
Palestinian Authority.
At the Washington,
D.C. press conference launching AVOT, Frank Gaffney, who was investigated in
the 1980s as a suspected co-conspirator of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American
convicted of espionage for Israel, mustered up his best Joe McCarthy
imitation, ranting to the small audience that any criticism of the Bush
Administration's conduct of the war could be "interpreted in such a way as to
hurt national resolve ... [and] embolden the enemy." He urged, "We must pay
special attention to friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt whose ongoing use of
media are creating problems for our allies"an obvious reference to Israel.
Weeks after the press conference, Ariel Sharon ordered the full-scale Israeli
Defense Forces invasion of the West Bank, which, by the admission of Sharon's
spokesman Ra'anan Gissen, was explicitly modelled on the Nazi massacre of the
Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in the Spring of
1943.
In the crazed
world of ACTA and AVOT, a criticism of Sharon's Nazi actions is tantamount to
treason against America.
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