When I was in my high school years, I traveled to Washington D.C. with some group. I am not even at this point in my life able to remember who. It may have been with a class, or a 4 H group, or with my BBYO group. I seem to vaguely remember trips to Washington with all of the above. On one such trip, we visited the capitol building. One of the chambers was in session, so we were allowed to watch the Congress Critters go at it from the balcony. Jimmy Carter was President. The debate on the floor was aid to Egypt. We were going to fork over 5 of some iteration of illions of dollars every year to help a nation that was, and still is dripping in oil, and who had attacked Israel several times recently. this seemed to me at the time to be some kind of a sick joke. Years later I learned it was Jimmy Carter’s bright idea to bribe the Egyptians into a truce with Israel. (It is still my contention to this day that Israel got screwed by that deal. It left Israel with a huge problem in the Gaza Strip, as Egypt refused to allow the inhabitants to leave, though at the time all of them not only had Egyptian Citizenship, but also were mostly born in Egypt and had extended families there.) As with all Arab leaders who sign treaties with Israel, Anwar Sadat was killed by his own people.
I have heard much over the years about supposed aid to Israel. The hard core leftists bleat on about how our policies towards Israel are the cause of terrorist acts against the United States. I have heard from this crowd how Israel could not survive without our intervention and our money. I have listened to the asinine argument that the standard of living of the only democracy in the region comes not from the free enterprise system they have set up for themselves, but they are living on the backs of American taxpayers. I have heard the complete baloney argument stated repeatedly that we need to take care of our own problems here at home, rather than supporting the Jews in the Middle East, and that the only reason we do it is because of the powerful Zionist Lobby. Of course, in all of this nonsense, Israel is singled out. Now, on to eviscerating this idiocy.
We need to distinguish between trade and aid. In trade, both sides of the exchange benefit. Wealth is created for both trade partners. Israel buys a lot of fighter jets from the United States. Israel benefits because she is forever surrounded by lunatics who believe that their God of darkness, wishes them to kill all nonbelievers on the planet. They also are not able to stomach a group of nonbelievers living in the middle of their caliphate. They believe that one day even the rocks will begin to talk and tell them that Jews are hiding behind us, so that they may kill all the Jews. The weapons help them avoid that fate. We benefit in the U.S. because the people who manufacture the jets employ people and pay them a very good wage. We also get paid a lot of money for these planes. Israel sells us technology. Cell phones were developed based on Israeli technology, as was Google, NCR, several medications including the Polio vaccination, and literally thousands of other every day products we use, and do not think about. What is dishonest about the hardcore leftist argument is that they are claiming that trade with Israel constitutes aid. In their minds of course, this is only true for Israel. Trade with China is considered trade. When we pump a ton of money into the bat shit crazy Wahhabi controlled Saudi Arabia, it is considered trade, for Oil. What we give to Egypt every year, that is pure foreign Welfare, we get nothing for it, but a dishonest ceasefire. (The Egyptians have been fighting a proxy war with Israel for years via the tunnels into the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian inhabitants there.) Egypt is not the only recipient of the Federal Largess. For our purposes here though, they are the most related to Israel. I have seen several official looking charts, tables, and graphs, which show aid to Israel, and all of them are propaganda and baloney. If you dig behind the numbers, you find that in every instance the Israeli part of the exchange is purposefully ignored. Yes, we buy Israeli debt, much the same way China buys ours. This is also part of financial trade. Israel has been a very credit worthy investment, as they have never missed a payment.
Which brings us to Friday. On Friday, Senator Rand Paul proposed cutting off all foreign aid. I will repeat that, he proposed cutting off all foreign aid. What was reported in the news however, was that he proposed cutting off all aid to Israel. Why the media would report it this way is far more heinous than any supposed anti-semitism of the Paul family. (Rand is also not his father.) Why would the media tell this blatant lie, and do so in such a way as to indict a U.S. Senator, just starting his national political career. Before we get into that, watch the interview with Wolf Blitzer, the one which sparked the nontroversy:
Did you notice that Wolf cherry picked Israel from the statement and when asked, Paul repeated that he would cut off everybody. As an asside, Israel would not be affected in the slightest here. Why, you may ask. Simply put, Israel does not receive aid, they participate in trade. Israel pays back every penny loaned. They invest in our debt. Israel sells us their goods, and she buys ours. This is also not an argument about whether Paul is correct in his thinking, (you would have to have the argument about libertarians, and that is another animal entirely.) This essay is about the dishonest reporting of the media. The goal is twofold here. First, there is the attempt to display and enforce the notion that Israel is benefitting from the public teat. By stating that Israel receives public assistance as a matter of framing the debate, it establishes as fact something which is patently false. CNN gets to look like the good guy by pretending to defend Israel against charges which CNN can pretend are true, and anyhow not their fault for bringing it up, as they can merely state they were just reporting it. An honest reporter would have looked into the situation with Israel and every nation which in fact receives foreign aid. I am particularly angry with Wolf Blitzer here, as he is in fact Jewish. I realize he is merely the live version of Ron Burgandy, mindlessly reading the teleprompter with nary a thought to what he is doing, but the word Israel should have stirred some semblance of a thought in his head. Sadly, it did not. The other goal was to take a newly elected Republican politician, (Paul is an easy target as his dad has a lot of issues on this score,) and paint him as a bigoted anti-semite. Imagine if the headline had read, Paul proposes cutting of all aid to Bolivia. This would not have any where near the same impact, but would have the virtue of being true, maintain the same context, and actually be correct. Bolivia actually receives aid in the context of what we think of when foreign aid is mentioned.
For whatever reason, the media has given up on objectivity long ago. This is a wedge issue created to make conservatives dislike one another. Introducing charges of Racism and Anti-Semitism is nothing new. They can not defeat our ideas in the national debate, so they resort to what is nothing more than an adhominem attack. I am not going to state whether I agree with Paul’s budget cutting ideas. Some of them are spot on, some of them are not. Remember that both Pauls are libertarians who run as Republicans because they know that libertarians do not win elections. I also know that this hit piece was designed to attack Paul personally while not in any way attempting to attack his position. We will see a lot more of this dishonest reporting in the future. I can guarantee you that most of it will come from the left.
To my liberal friends, fight us in the arena of ideas. Leave the strawmen and adhominem attacks at home.
Tags: Media bias
