The Associated Press published a few details on May 28 about LBJ’s “personal and often emotional connection to Israel.” Based on newly released tapes of the president’s conversations, the news agency pointed out that during the Johnson presidency (1963-1969) “the United States became Israel's chief diplomatic ally and primary arms supplier.” LBJ is quoted in one conversation, “"I sure as hell want to be careful and not run out on little Israel."
The news report does little to reveal the full extent of Johnson’s actions on behalf of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Indeed, the title of “Righteous Gentile” is certainly appropriate in the case of the Texan. Most students of the Arab-Israeli conflict can identify Johnson as the president during the 1967 war. But few know about LBJ’s actions to rescue hundreds of endangered Jews 30 years earlier, actions that could have thrown him out of Congress and into jail.
The Texas congressman’s district had only 400 Jews, but clearly the Johnson family’s Christian teachings had given him a strong affinity for Jews and their return to the Holy Land.
Five days after taking office in 1937, LBJ broke with the “Dixiecrats” and supported an immigration bill that would naturalize illegal aliens, mostly Jews from Lithuania and Poland. In 1938, Johnson was told of a young Austrian Jewish musician who was about to be deported from the United States. With an element of subterfuge, LBJ sent him to the U.S. Consulate in Havana to obtain a residency permit. Erich Leinsdorf, the world famous musician and conductor, credited LBJ for saving his live.
Johnson Saved Hundreds of Jews
That same year, LBJ warned a Jewish friend that European Jews faced annihilation. Somehow, Johnson provided him with a pile of signed immigration papers that were used to get 42 Jews out of Warsaw. But that wasn’t enough. According to historian, James M. Smallwood, Congressman Johnson used legal and sometimes illegal methods to smuggle “hundreds of Jews into Texas, using Galveston as the entry port. Enough money could buy false passports and fake visas in Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American countries. … Johnson smuggled boatloads and planeloads of Jews into Texas. He hid them in the Texas National Youth Administration…. Johnson saved at least four or five hundred Jews, possibly more..”
On June 4, 1945, Johnson visited the Dachau concentration camp. According to historian Smallwood, Lady Bird later recalled that “when her husband returned home, he was still shaken, stunned, terrorized, and ‘bursting with an overpowering revulsion and incredulous horror at what he had seen.’”
Click here for an update on LBJ, the Righteous Gentile
As President, Johnson met with Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and undertook
to replace the recalcitrant France as Israel’s principal arms supplier, providing Patton tanks and Skyhawk jets and Phantom jets. (Pictured: Johnson greets Yitzhak Rabin in the Oval office.)
Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin once asked Johnson why the United States supported Israel when there are 80 million Arabs and only three million Israelis. “Because it is right,” responded the straight-shooting Texan.
Another event took place on Johnson’s watch
In 1965, some 100 kilo of highly enriched uranium went missing from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small fuel rod fabrication plant. Although investigated by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other government agencies and inquiring reporters, no trace of the uranium was found. Some investigators suggested that Israel received the enriched uranium. According to a U.S. Air Force report, “In the 1990s when the NUMEC plant was disassembled, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found over 100 kilograms of plutonium in the structural components of the contaminated plant,” casting doubt on the Israel conspiracy theory.
Carter's Big Mouth
P.S. In a recently de-classified memo to President Richard Nixon in 1969, National Security Henry Kissinger discussed the possibility of Israel having nuclear weapons. “There is circumstantial evidence,” Kissinger wrote, “that some fissionable material available for Israel's weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States about 1965," Kissinger wrote. When Jimmy Carter announced this week that Israel had 150 nuclear weapons, he was clearly violating American security policy. Back in 1969, Kissinger expressed the need to keep Israel nuclear issues secret, “While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Lyndon Johnson’s Historical Connection to Israel – Truly a Righteous Gentile
Ain Breira, and There Ain’t No J Street
Democracy is wonderful but sometimes it needs restraints. For years, Israel allowed eve
ry political party that secured one percent of the popular vote to send a representative to the Knesset. The low-priced entry ticket attracted some unusual and unsuccessful parties such as a Marijuana Party, a Taxi Drivers Party, and my favorite, a Convicts Party. You see, in Israel, unlike the United States, convicts do not lose their right to vote. This was truly a unique party where its politicians started their careers in prison.
Finally, Israel raised the “threshold” for securing a Knesset seat, but Israel still suffers from a plethora of small parties who often link their coalition support to partisan demands. Too much democracy can distort the public will and public interest – in the United States as well as Israel.
An example of such a distortion took place in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee some 30 years ago. Sen. George McGovern, never known for his affection for Israel, had in
vited two witnesses to testify on Middle East policy. They were seated side-by-side, given equal standing in the august hearing room. One witness was the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the veteran and respected Jewish leader, Rabbi Israel Miller (pictured). Next to him sat a representative of “Breira,” a tiny fringe organization representing a few hundred leftist activists. The flash-in-the-pan organization arose to challenge the traditional pro-Israel consensus of the organized Jewish community, and McGovern sought to inflate their importance and amplify their message.
In Hebrew “breira” means “alternative.” Over the decades, Israel often defended itself against attackers, explaining, “ain breira” – it had no alternative. But along came these activists claiming, as explained by one of its founders, “our desires for an alternative to the intransigence of both the PLO and the several governments of Israel.” Putting Breira into a historical context, Breira was demanding negotiations with the PLO at the same time it was hijacking planes, launching rockets and terrorist raids from Lebanon against Israel’s north, and sending a pistol-packing Arafat to the United Nations.
As described by one of Breira’s chroniclers, the organization “seemed to thrive as an alternative to AIPAC,” and McGovern and some members of the press were eager to grant them that role. “What ultimately did the organization in,” the writer concluded, “were meetings that some of its members held with two Arabs who had ties to the PLO….. When the Jerusalem Post broke the story, Breira was finished.”
Today,
many of the press paeans to the new “J Street Project” read like re-writes of the Breira accolades. The J Street Project, named for a non-existent street in Washington, is the underdog facing the “formidable” AIPAC lobby, according to the New York Times. Quoting one J Street fundraiser, the Times explained “the group’s aim was to undo the notion that ‘AIPAC speaks for American Jews on issues affecting Israel and the Middle East.’” J Street “will try to erode AIPAC's strength,” said a Ha’aretz report. J Street leaders said “the goal is to take on the pro-Israel giants, particularly AIPAC,” the JTA wrote.
Presumably, J Street will attempt to avoid some of Breira’s fatal mistakes. It will “rein in more dovish participants – a concern that led one pro-peace process group, the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), to maintain an arms length relationship with the new group,” according to one account. Billionaire critic of Israel George Soros was involved in “early talks about forming” J Street, according to the National Journal. But he “is reportedly no longer involved, in part, sources say, because of concerns that his participation might be a lightning rod for critics.”
Nevertheless, J Street is almost destined to fail. The straw men they sculpt and fight against do not exist. AIPAC, the organized Jewish community, and American Jews are not opposed to peace nor to a two-state solution. But they did learn the lessons of unrequited concessions to the Palestinians. They do not agree with J Street’s director who echoes the 30-year-old Breira line on the PLO when he says that there should be attempts “to engage Hamas and to find dialogue with them.”
An appeasement lobby will not succeed.
The New Republic’s James Kirchick recently pointed out just how out of touch “the miniscule group of writers and activists involved with J Street” are with the majority of American Jews. “Nearly three-quarters of American Jews” Kirchick wrote, “do not believe that Israel can ‘achieve peace with a Hamas-led, Palestinian government,’ as J Street's founder advocates. … A whopping 82 percent agree with the following statement: ‘The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.’”
The Breira historian cited “moderate American Jews” who resigned from Breira 30 years ago. One of them, a rabbi and son-in-law of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, explained in the pages of the Reconstructionist magazine, “There is a serious question whether safe and fairly prosperous American Jews, from their comfortable armchairs in the USA, have the moral right to urge policies upon Israelis which could well involve their lives and the life of the State.”
In the interest of Israeli democracy that’s a statement that many can subscribe to. And frankly, it makes no difference if the “safe and prosperous” American Jews come from the Appeasement Left or the Hard-line Right.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Guest Blogger - Avi Berkowitz
Israel, Jews, Catholics and Evangelicals: A Political Perspective
Last month was a remarkable month in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Pope Benedict XVI visited the 
Park East Synagogue, a modern Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, during his trip to New York City. A few days later, Pastor John Hagee, founder and President of Christians United for Israel, convened a conference of American Evangelicals in Jerusalem in support of Israel’s exclusive right to its eternal capital. As reported in the Jerusalem Post (7/4/08) Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the Chief Rabbi of Efrat, who attended the Jerusalem conference, declared that the rapprochement between Christians and Jews “is one of the miracles of the 20th century.” The Rabbi went on to explain that “the Christianity of Pastor Hagee and most evangelists today, is not the Christianity of persecution, intolerance, and Jew hatred.”
The Rabbi could not be more right, and not just about the Christianity practiced by Pastor Hagee and most of his fellow American evangelicals. After all, Evangelical Christians are part of 
the broader Protestant movement, indeed, its most recent wave, and Protestantism, at least in its post-Lutheran phase, never really indulged in “persecution, intolerance and Jew hatred.” Instead, wherever Protestantism took root, Jews were generally welcome, and more often than not, permitted to build strong and prosperous communities. Such was the case during Protestantism early days, when there was a flourishing Jewish community in the Netherlands, and when Oliver Cromwell invited the Jews back to England. And such, of course, is the case in the United States of America, whose Protestant ethos has made it possible for the Jews to flourish as never before.
To be sure, when it comes to anti-Semitism Protestantism is not a panacea, and its record is far from perfect. One only needs to remember that Germany was also a Protestant country, although rooted, of course, in Lutheranism. And yet, the remarkable affinity between Protestantism and Judaism, or at least between Protestants and Jews, needs to be understood, especially in light of the incontrovertible fact that Christian Zionists in the United States are, in the words of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, “Israel’s best friends in the world.” Baldly stated, should we be concerned that our new best friends come from a tradition that is not only philo-Semitic but also dedicated to proselytizing? Is Christian Zionism a gigantic ruse, calculated to lower our guard in order to ensnare us in yet one more conversion scheme?
The answer to these questions is a resounding no, and here is why. Protestantism is animated by a spirit of sectarianism. At the level of theology, the spirit of sectarianism stimulates endless splits and rifts among the believers, who soon part company from each other, dividing into their own denomination. Between and among the various denominations, there is a healthy spirit of competition but also the capacity for cooperation. In many ways, it is this capacity for cooperation which distinguishes Protestantism from Catholicism. Because Catholicism possesses a universal theology, it has great difficulty managing relationships with members of other faiths.
Now, let us apply Protestantism’s sectarian ethos to the political level. In politics, or at least in modern international politics, the rule of territorial boundaries captures the Protestant spirit of denomination. In the first place, territorial boundaries separate the nations into sovereign states even as they integrate the nations into a single international political system. In other words, not only do territorial boundaries stimulate competition and sometimes even conflict between and among the nations of the world, they also facilitate international cooperation. More to the point, the political history of the United States of America testifies with great eloquence to the connection between the sectarian ethos and the rule of boundaries. After all, during the great Western expansion, driven, of course, by the Protestant ideal of manifest destiny, the American Protestants drew boundary lines around each particular territory that they conquered and pacified, creating, ultimately, 48 separate – and at least until the Civil War – semi-sovereign juridical domains. In this way, the American Protestants aligned their political and territorial accomplishments with their religious ideals.
Israel, of course, is a sovereign state, albeit one whose boundaries have not yet achieved international recognition. As such, from the Protestant perspective, our community, the Jews of Israel, is different from any other Jewish community with whom Protestants, or indeed, Protestantism, has previously interacted. In some respects, we have the political status of being a legitimate “denomination.” And beyond that, we are the genuine inheritors of a legitimate religious alternative to the faith which they uphold. Either way, from their point of view, our community is safely ensconced within its proper territorial boundaries and must be respected for its belief code. And who knows. Maybe, with their help, those proper territorial boundaries will be extended all the way to the Biblical borderlines.
Rabbi Dr. Avi Berkowitz teaches at Young Judaea Year Course in Jerusalem and is the Rabbi of Bet Knesset Ma'ayan in Efrat.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Prouty and Spinelli Verdicts: A Fine, a Commendation, and a Walk
The verdicts are in from Federal Court on former FBI and CIA agent Nada Nadime Prouty and her roommate (and one-time sister-in-law) Marine Corps Capt. Samar Spinelli. The two Lebanese citizens were involved in citizenship fraud. Prouty also peeked into secret files on Hizbullah.
Prouty: No jail time, $975 fines and fees, and no deportation (the Feds requested no deportation because she knows too much about American intelligence agencies).
Spinelli: No jail time and a $500 fine.
Federal Judge Avern Cohn blasted media coverage of the case and added that the women had served their country (the U.S.) with distinction. Bloggers, including this one, pegged her as a potential Hizbullah mole.
As usual, the best coverage of the case is David Ashenfelter's in the Detroit Free Press.
On Zero Population Growth, Condi & Condoms
THE JERUSALEM POST
Take your favorite houseplant and do something stupid: put it in the freezer. Within two hours it will be irreversibly dead.
Like plants, human communities and families grow, flower, reproduce and spread their roots. Unless someone does something stupid and attempts to "freeze" them.
On May 2, four ministers of the "Quartet" - comprised of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and representatives from Russia, the United Nations and the European Union - expressed "deep concern at continuing settlement activity and called on Israel to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth."
housing in the Gush Etzion town of Efrat. They do not give any dispensation to Jerusalem's new neighborhoods. They are opposed to construction in settlement population centers despite President Bush's assurances of April 14, 2004 when he wrote: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949 [the 1967 lines]." How serious is that Bush commitment? National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley admitted in a January briefing that Bush's 2004 letter was aimed at helping prime minister Ariel Sharon win domestic approval for the Gaza withdrawal. "The president obviously still stands by that letter of April 2004, but you need to look at it, obviously, in the context of which it was issued," he said. Is the "context" of 2004 different from the context of 2008?
The Quartet makes clear that the "natural growth" of Jewish communities is taboo. That means Zero Population
Growth, or even negative population growth. It is a call for no new apartments for growing families and no construction of health clinics, kindergartens or schools. What would that mean for the ultra-Orthodox Jews in the burgeoning West Bank towns of Betar Illit and Kiryat Sefer, where children under 17 comprise two-thirds of the population? The "knitted kipa" national religious communities are not too far behind in the size of their families. Shas politicians could never accept such a diktat. How does the Quartet plan to stop the natural growth of these Jewish communities? With procreation police? Campaigns advocating birth control? "Sorry," the religious Jews will respond, "we gave at the ovens." In their case, ZPG stands for "Zionist Population Growth."
Large families mean larger apartments. Married children mean a demand for nearby housing. The ultra-Orthodox community of Mea She'arim was visited recently by US Ambassador Richard Jones, who showed just how much he was out of touch with his audience when he expressed concern "about where things are built in Jerusalem... Sometimes people do have to move to a different location. They cannot always stay close to their families." Would an American ambassador ever make such a statement in an Arab society where sons traditionally stay close to their fathers and clans?
To use a rabbinic term, the restriction is a gezera (decree) that the community cannot bear.
So why did Israel's leaders accept such a decree?
Compare those leaders with two gentlemen very dear to me who passed away last
week. Joseph Black, my father-in-law, made aliya at the age of 92 and moved into our home in Efrat. (Is that defined as "natural growth?") When he died at the age of 97, we were comforted by his six grandchildren (our children) and seven great-grandchildren, all of whom live in relatively new homes nearby. Our neighbor, Ernie Alexander, died at age 85 while we were still sitting shiva. His tribe numbers some 60 children, grandchildren and their offspring. Virtually all live in Israel, and most live "over the Green Line." They prove that "natural growth" is an irrepressible and irresistible force.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Fascinating and Thought-Provoking Article:
Why Israel Is the World's Happiest Country
"Spengler" is the pen name of a columnist published in The Asia Times. He is a conservative writer with an incredible grasp of theology and history. Who is he? What is his nationality, religion, occupation? Nobody knows. But some of his essays, such as this one, are extraordinary. I don't want to run afoul of copyright laws, so I present here only a few excerpts. Click on the title for the full article:
Why Israel Is the World's Happiest Country
By Spengler
Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the state of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth at the 60th anniversary of its founding. It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands. But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation....
Can it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations, and the only nation persuaded that it was summoned into history for God's service, consists of individuals who appear to love life more than any other people? As a simple index of life-preference, I plot the fertility rate ver
sus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries, that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone, positioned in the upper-left-hand-quadrant, or life-loving, portion of the chart....
In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life.....
Israel is surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves in order to destroy it. "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders. Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms. The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an elusive goal in the region....
In the modern world, where fertility reflects choice rather than compulsion, the choice to raise children expresses love of life. The high birthrate in Arab countries still bound by tradition does not stand comparison to Israeli fertility, by far the highest in the modern world. The faith of Israelis is unique. Jews sailed to Palestine as an act of faith, to build a state against enormous odds and in the face of hostile encirclement, joking, "You don't have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps."...
My suspicion is that Israel's happiness is entirely unique. It is fashionable these days to speculate about the end of Israel, and Israel's strategic position presents scant cause for optimism. Israel's future depends on the Israelis. During 2,000 years of exile, Jews remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism because they liked being Jewish.... If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them. I do not know whether they will succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the world will lose a unique gauge of the human capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot conceive of a sadder event.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Update on Possible Hizbullah Mole:
Despite Guilty Plea, Will She Get Off with a Slap of the Hand?
Since November 2007, this blog has been following the security ramifications of Nadia Nadime Prouty’s arrest. The Lebanese national fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship and used it to secure employment in the FBI and CIA. Her two sisters also obtained citizenship through sham marriages, and one later married a Detroit restaurateur suspected of fundraising for Hizbullah. He fled to Lebanon before his arrest.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, NNP pleaded guilty at the time to “charges of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship, which she later used to gain employment at the FBI and CIA; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hizbullah; and conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Prouty’s sentence will be handed down on May 13.
Last week, in an effort to knock down Prouty’s sentence to probation, her lawyer presented to a federal judge a pre-sentencing memo detailing some of her activities in the CIA and FBI. He claimed that she was involved in the investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 and the investigation of the assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan in 2002. The next year, the lawyer claimed, she joined the CIA and worked in Baghdad. His memo also reveals that Prouty worked in Islamabad Pakistan as a legal attaché.
Imagine the access NNP had to top-secret intel working in the FBI and CIA headquarters and then in the various epicenters of Islamic terror.
According to Detroit Free Press reporter, David Ashenfelter, who has been following the case from its start, Prouty “likely will be allowed to stay in the U.S. because of the jobs she held at the FBI and CIA, authorities said.” Read Ashenfelter’s “Fake citizen worked on major terror cases.”
Despite her confessing to accessing files on Hizbullah and her family ties to a Hizbullah fundraiser, NNP could get off and her deportation could be cancelled. Amazing.
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