These People Are Fucking Crazeeeeee!

Vanity Fair Dec. 2005 - American "Rapture", by Craig Unger
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Life, LaHaye argues, has always been a battle between good and evil. "The good way has always been called 'God's way,'" he writes, and evil has been the way of man—specifically, the post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment world of art, science, and reason. And, in his view, nothing man has come up with is worse than secular humanism, which he defines as "a Godless, man-centered philosophy" that rejects traditional values and that has "a particular hatred toward Christianity."

"LaHaye writes as if there's a humanist brain trust sitting around reading [American philosopher and educational reformer] John Dewey, trying to figure out ways to destroy Christianity," says Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates and the co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.

In truth, while tens of millions of Americans might accurately be called secular humanists, very few characterize themselves as members of a humanist movement. But to LaHaye that only proves the deviousness of the humanist project. Instead of openly advocating their point of view, he writes, humanists have used the mass media and Hollywood, the government, academia, and organizations such as the A.C.L.U. and NOW to indoctrinate unsuspecting Christians.

As a result, LaHaye argues, good Evangelicals should no longer think of humanists as harmless citizens who happen not to attend church. In The Battle for the Mind, he spells out his political goals: "We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders."

"In LaHaye's world, there are the godly people who are on their way to the Rapture," says Berlet. "And the rest of the world is either complicit with the Antichrist or, worse, actively assisting him. If you really believe in End Times, you are constantly looking for agents of Satan.… [And if] political conflicts are rooted in the idea that your opponent is an agent of the Devil, there is no compromise possible. What decent person would compromise with evil? So that removes it from the democratic process.

"Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation want to roll back the New Deal. LaHaye wants to roll back the Enlightenment."
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[After reading the Vanity Fair article, this article by Justin Raimondo makes even more sense]

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The Lobby: Why is American policy in the Middle East skewed in favor of Israel?
American foreign policy has been weighed down for all too many years by an albatross hung round Uncle Sam's neck, one that distorts our stance especially vis-à-vis Middle Eastern issues and ultimately works against U.S. interests in the region and around the world: that albatross is unconditional support for the state of Israel. Of course, saying this amounts to a hate crime in today's political atmosphere, and it is almost impossible to criticize the Jewish state without being accused of religious bigotry, which is just how Israel's partisans want it. In the halls of Congress and the corridors of power, Israel is above criticism. But not anymore…

Of course, we've been criticizing Israel, and its inordinate influence over American foreign policy, in these pages for quite some time, and we are not alone. On the Right, some conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and The American Conservative magazine, have broken the taboo, and on the Left, too, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, James Petras, and a host of others have refused to be a part of the Israel-can-do-no-wrong consensus. In the intelligence community, Larry Johnson, Philip Giraldi, and James Bamford have been critical of Israel and its amen corner in the U.S., while among academics, Juan Cole has often provided a skeptical view of Israeli government actions and Israel's apologists in the U.S.

In the "mainstream" media, however, and certainly in Washington, D.C., the power of Israel's lobby is unchallenged. This hegemony has now been thoroughly detailed and analyzed in an important study by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, published by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science and a co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, is the leading advocate of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Walt is academic dean of the Kennedy School. Their study, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," [.pdf] starts out with a bang:

"The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?"

This situation, I would submit, has no equivalent in the history of the world. Nation-states are notorious for jealously guarding and pursuing their own interests. Why, then, would the most powerful state on earth abjectly subordinate itself to the influence and even direction of an ally, one that, furthermore, does not reciprocate this altruism?

Answer: the Lobby.
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[Thanks to Spike from the MRR Blog for this link]
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Pro-Israel lobby in U.S. under attack
Two of America's top scholars have published a searing attack on the role and power of Washington's pro-Israel lobby in a British journal, warning that its "decisive" role in fomenting the Iraq war is now being repeated with the threat of action against Iran. And they say that the Lobby is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School, and author of "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy," are leading figures American in academic life.

They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and "has a stranglehold" on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.

And they say that the Lobby works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life.
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