The Tennessee Waltz: The American Right and its Dance With Ariel Sharon

The December 30, 2002 edition of The New American is further developing evidence that thinking members of the American Right Wing are beginning a closer appraisal and re-examination of an endless Tennessee Waltz with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his cadre of AIPAC activists and Christian televangelists in the United States.

In its December 30th "Insider Report," The New American duly notes that , "By far, the largest beneficiary of U. S. foreign aid is the socialist government of Israel. . .In a presentation on Middle East policy commissioned by the U. S. Army War College, economist Thomas Stauffer estimated that since 1973--the year of the most recent full-scale Arab-Israeli war--aid to Israel has cost the U. S. about $1.6 trillion, or about $5,700 per American. This amounts to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War."

Last month's announcements about Israeli officials entering the White House to request $4 billion in additional military aid and $8 billion in loan guarantees are now apocalyptically compounded by today's report by Richard Sale, United Press International's Intelligence Correspondent, that Israel is "embarking upon a more aggressive approach to the war on terror that will include staging targeting killings in the United States and other friendly countries." Sale informs his readers that the accounts provided by Israeli intelligence sources are corroborated by "more than a half dozen U. S. foreign policy and intelligence officials in interviews with UPI."

American conservatives conversant with Washington's Farewell Address dictum about "friendship with all, entangling alliances with none," and the Jeffersonian commitment to the rights of the individual vis a vis the State as embodied in due process of law, may well question the implications of a continued Waltz with Ariel Sharon, and the endgame fast approaching.

Since when has the American Right officially embraced the notion of the moral acceptability of foreign-sanctioned assassinations within the borders of the United States? Or a never ending cesspool of foreign aid to a regime in perpetual violation of international law? What are the implications of the wholesale ownership of the American Executive and Legislative Branches by the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)? To what extent is George W. Bush's impending war with Saddam Hussein really driven by both the Israeli lobby and American/British oil consortiums? Are the interests of the average American well served by being placed in the crossfire of a Jewish-Islamic War now imported into the American homeland? Can the Constitutionally enumerated inalienable rights of the individual granted by Divine Providence, not the Total State, survive the burgeoning National Security States of Bush and Ashcroft, Sharon and Meir Dagan? And can Mr. Bush's War on Terror maintain any degree of moral or philsophical credibility in his nefarious alliance with the mastermind of Sabra and Chatila, who now adds the venue of the continental United States to the playing fields of southern Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza?

The deafening silence of the American political and media establishment to these questions is matched only by the approaching drumbeats of yet another foreign war, an increase in perpetual fear in the collective viscera of the populus, a dawning awareness that the Nation has indeed been here before, only to arrive again.

And how this American conservative yearns for the day when the Old Republic might come again.

(Mark Dankof is a Lutheran pastor, a correspondent for News and Views at GoOff.com, and a past candidate for the United States Senate in the State of Delaware with the Constitution Party. His news and commentary site, Mark Dankof's America, may be accessed at http://www.MarkDankof.com)


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