Billionaire Warren Buffett's $4 Billion Israeli Investment

One reason the U.S. Corporate Establishment and its Big Media is still supporting the Israeli war machine’s brutal war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza (in violation of the Nuremberg Trial Accords, the UN Charter and international law) is that many U.S. corporations have invested a lot of money in the Zionist movement’s Israeli economy in recent years. U.S. Billionaire Warren Buffett's investment firm, for example, invested over $4 billion in Militaristic Israel a few years ago.

As the website of the American Israel Investments Associates at http://www.israelgrowth.com/about.html notes:

“With the highest GDP growth (5.2%) of any Western country (2005), Israel has become a very popular market for foreign investors. Warren Buffett’s $4 billion purchase of Iscar, his largest international investment ever, continues a trend that has sent foreign investors running to invest in the dynamic Israeli economy. Global stalwarts such as Johnson and Johnson, Intel, Ebay, Kodak, HP, Cisco, Alcatel, Broadcom, Microsoft, BMC Software, Verifone, and PMC Sierra all purchased Israeli companies in the last year.

“With more companies listed on NASDAQ than any other country except for the United States, Israel is the focus of more and more investor attention.

“Israel has become a destination for all types of investors who seek potentially high returns. Over $1.4 billion of venture capital money was invested in 2005. This ranks Israel second only to the United States in venture capital funding, outranking European and Asian rivals. As the privatization of government companies continues, the large global hedge funds and private equity firms have become very active players, investing billions of dollars in purchasing firms like Bank Leumi (Israel’s second largest bank) and Bezeq (the national phone company)."

Nuclear Israel And Its Special Influence Historically

“In the near term, there is little risk that Iraq’s now dormant nuclear program could lead to the production of nuclear arms or that Iraq could obtain nuclear weapons material clandestinely, because such material does not appear to be available for sale.” (The Undeclared Bomb by Leonard Spector in 1988)

“Israel has `hundreds’ of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, including more than 100 nuclear artillery shells, nuclear landmines in the Golan Heights and hundreds of low-yield neutron warheads.” (The New York Times on Oct. 20, 1991)

Like the transnational oil companies and the government of Kuwait Inc., Nuclear Israel seems, historically, to have a special influence in U.S. political life. One reason for Nuclear Israel’s special historical influence is because its political allies in the United States are willing to spend a lot of money to fund the political campaigns of influential members of the U.S. Congress.

According to the 1990 book, Stealth PACs: How Israel’s American Lobby Seeks To Control U.S. Middle East Policy by Richard Curtis, “the ability to spend more on elections than any other special interest in the United States while remaining virtually invisible to the public, and to evade with impunity the letter and the spirit of the law limiting contributions to congressional candidates, are only two of the `special’ qualities of pro-Israel PACs [political action committees].” Seventy-eight pro-Nuclear Israel PACs, for example, donated more than $5.7 million to 477 candidates for the U.S. Congress during the 1988 U.S. election campaign.

Nuclear Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation that produces nuclear bombs on Middle East soil. At the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona, the Israeli government continued to increase the size of its nuclear weapons arsenal in the 1990s. In his early 1990s book, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Seymour Hersh estimated that the Israeli government possessed 300 nuclear warheads in the early 1990s.

(Downtown 1/15/92)

Obama's Secretary Of State-Designate Husband's Ambassador To Israel In 1990s

A U.S. Ambassador to Israel in the 1990s—former Clinton White House National Security Council Adviser Martin Indyk—apparently represented the special interests of the Militaristic Israeli Establishment before he was named by the husband of Obama Administration Secretary Of State-Designate Hillary Clinton to represent the Democratic Clinton Administration in Israel during the 1990s. As Peace And Its Discontents: Essays On Palestine In The Middle East Peace Process by Professor Edward Said noted:

“Consider…the extraordinary, not to say astonishing presence in the Clinton Administration of one Martin Indyk…An Australian, Indyk was employed by the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a think-tank associated with AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobby, and the Likud Party [of former MIT student Benjamin Netanyahu]. Literally a few days before he was appointed to the National Security Council in early 1993 Indyk was made an American Citizen.”

The same book also observed in 1995:

“The tragedy is not that peace was achieved but that it was not, even though much of the Western media have celebrated the achievements of what has been called the American `peace process.’

“…Arab views are rarely encountered in the mainstream American media…When reports of torture and killing of Palestinians by Israeli and Palestinian police appear, they are connected with neither the deeply flawed Oslo Accords nor with an Israeli and, behind it, an American policy which has maintained hundreds of Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands, continues to deploy a major army of occupation, intransigently confiscates and builds on Arab land in East Jerusalem (as part of the city’s forced Judaization), and resolutely denies Palestinians true freedom and national self-determination…According to Israeli figures, 70,000 more acres of Palestinian land have been expropriated or designated `security’ areas since September 1993 [as of 1995].”

(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/16/96)

How Militaristic Israel Invaded Gaza In 1956

Former U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Member Barack Obama claimed to be an "anti-war candidate" during his 2008 presidential campaign. But Democratic President-Elect Obama still hasn’t been very eager to condemn the recent invasion of Gaza by the war machine of his militaristic Israeli government political allies in 2009. Yet 2009 is not the only year in which the government of Israel ordered its troops to invade Gaza.

As the Palestine Book Project’s 1977 book, Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People recalled:

“Over 750,000 Palestinians had been driven out of Palestine to create the state of Israel…King Farouk of Egypt took over the administration of the Gaza Strip…

“On May 5, 1951 General Bennike, head of the United Nations Treaty Supervision Organization, reported that Israeli troops had expelled 7,000 Arabs from el-Auja, a demilitarized zone near Egypt, and added the territory to Israel. Nothing was done…Israel’s only offer involving return of Palestinians was to accept 100,000 refugees from the Gaza Strip, if the Strip were added to the state of Israel.

“Palestinians rejected this solution and any other that did not promise the return of their land. In 1950, 25,000 refugees went on a hunger strike against UNRWA, stating they would rather starve than settle outside Palestine…

“…Merchants crossing Beersheeba from the Gaza Strip, their pack animals loaded with rice and sugar, found their centuries-old caravan routes blocked by Israeli troops…Soon many people had fathers and sons, mothers and daughters who had been killed on the Gaza caravan…

“…In 1952 an officers’ coup in Egypt overthrew the corrupt rule of King Farouk. Within two years, Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as the dynamic nationalist leader of Egypt…

“In early February 1955, the Egyptian government tried and hanged three Israeli intelligence agents in Cairo for acts of terrorism. On February 28, Israeli troops attacked a camp in the Gaza Strip and killed 36 Egyptian soldiers. The United Nations condemned the raid, pointing out that there had been no Egyptian border crossing or other military act providing even a pretext for the raid…

“But Nasser would not be intimidated. On July 26, 1956, he nationalized the Suez Canal, a part of Egypt formerly controlled by Britain. Over 125,000 Egyptians had died building the canal for the British Empire…

“…In October 1956, under a secret agreement with Britain and France, Israel invaded…the Gaza Strip…

“…Israel continued to occupy the territory for five months before it reluctantly withdrew. When it left, UN troops were stationed in Gaza…

“In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation had been especially brutal. As the soldiers moved into Gaza, they found a list of fedayeen in an Egyptian administration center. Systematically, they rounded up and executed 250 young Palestinians. Eighty died in a mass execution in a schoolyard.

“Still, during the five long months of Israeli occupation, small groups of Palestinians risked their lives to harass the Israeli soldiers…The seeds of resistance that sprouted in Gaza took root among Palestinians in many Arab countries…”

How Militaristic Israel Invaded Gaza In 1967

Former U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Member Barack Obama claimed to be an "anti-war candidate" during his 2008 presidential campaign. But Democratic President-Elect Obama has not been very eager to condemn the recent invasion of Gaza by the war machine of his militaristic Israeli government political allies in 2009. Yet 2009 is not the first year in which the government of Israel ordered its troops to invade Gaza.

As the Palestine Book Project’s 1977 book, Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People, recalled:

“On Monday morning, June 5, 1967, Moshe Dayan ordered the attack. Flying low to evade Egyptian radar, Israeli planes headed for Egypt’s airfields. The Israelis destroyed the entire Egyptian air force while it was still on the ground…Yet for twenty-four hours after the attack, the Voice of America broadcast unceasingly that Egypt had invaded Israel. It was a version of the war many Americans never questioned.

“Without air cover Egyptian troops in the Sinai desert were vulnerable targets. Thousands of Egyptian soldiers were killed or wounded. Using the shield of Mirage jets, Israeli tank brigades pushed through the desert with lightning speed, despite some fierce fighting in the Gaza Strip by Palestinians…

“By the end of the war, Israel had captured Syria’s Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai and Gaza, and Jordan’s West Bank. In six days, Israeli territory had tripled in size. A million more Palestinians—those in the West Bank and Gaza—were now under Israeli occupation…

“Israel’s triumph took 35,000 Arab lives and 600 Israeli lives. Many of the Arabs who died were civilians…

“In the summer nights following the June War, Israeli tanks and jeeps prowled the streets of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers frequently stopped Palestinians for rough questioning. Any hint of defiance could lead to further questioning behind the closed doors of the nearest prison. The first Israelis to move into the occupied territories were the prison officials, the military administrators, and the Shin Beth—the Israeli secret intelligence service. Their job was to seek out any possible Palestinian resistance and eliminate it…

“Israel planned to break the Palestinians’ will to fight by harsh repression of all political activity….The Israelis not only outlawed political activity, but also attacked Palestinian economic and social institutions. They shut down Arab banks, schools and hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza, replacing them with Israeli institutions…

“Israel planned to keep the rest of the population in line by a combination of force and the creation of a colonial mentality among the people. Schoolteachers in the West Bank and Gaza were forced to teach Palestinian children courses that glorified the history of Israel and belittled Arab culture. Teachers who protested were fired…

“The crowded refugee camps of Gaza were largely isolated from outside reporters and contacts. There the Israeli drive to create a passive population took its most brutal form. Heavily-armed Israeli patrols descended on the camps and cities and rounded up people indiscriminately. In one such roundup in late 1967, Israeli soldiers forced two thousand men to lie half-submerged in a lake for twenty-four hours during a storm. Other `troublemakers’ were exiled to concentration camps in the Sinai Desert. Still, Israeli soldiers rarely dared to leave their jeeps as they patrolled Gaza. Wires stretched across the road at windshield level often caused their jeeps to screech to a halt. In 1968, 200 women defied a law forbidding demonstrations and marched on Gaza prison, demanding the release of 2,000 Palestinian prisoners….”

Geraldo Rivera's Historic Mossad Link?

Prior to being hired by WABC-TV in Manhattan—and then sent by ABC to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism for a crash course in television journalism in 1970—tabloid TV journalist Geraldo Rivera worked as a lawyer for a late 1960s Puerto Rican radical activist group, the Young Lords. But, ironically, in 1980 Rivera apparently began to produce anti-Palestinian documentaries in collaboration with the Militaristic Israeli government’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. As Rivera wrote in his 1991 book, Exposing Myself:

“I returned to Lebanon a year later [in 1980] again by way of Israel to produce an hour-long special entitled `The Unholy War.’ This…piece was sparked by one of the newest members of the Geraldo unit, a…producer from Washington, D.C. named Barbara Newman. A veteran of National Public Radio, Barbara had extensive contacts with the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence arm, and we had been kicking around…ideas for a story making use of those connections….The Israeli consulate offered to cooperate with us…We were given tremendous access, inside the Mossad, inside top secret radar installations, and inside Israeli Defense Forces headquarters, both in Tel Aviv and up north, in Haifa.

“After about a month…we had assembled a terrific story; we needed only a capper, another hook to tie our loose ends together. It came to us courtesy of a high-ranking Israeli intelligence official. I did not name him in the resulting air-piece, and I will not name him here, but he was the undisputed spy master. Ruthlessly…he ran the Mossad’s counter-terrorism efforts in Israel and overseas…”

The son of a woman named Lilly Friedman and a Republic weapons production plant worker named Allen Cruz Rivera, tabloid TV journalist Rivera grew up in the suburban town of West Babylon, Long Island and attended the New York State Maritime College, the University of Arizona, Brooklyn Law School and the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960s before being hired by WABC-TV. In addition to receiving over $1 million per year from the Tribune media conglomerate from his syndicated tabloid TV show in the early 1990s, Rivera also then owned a small weekly New Jersey newspaper—The Two River Times—and lived in Monmouth County, New Jersey, by the Navesink River. In his 1991 autobiography, Rivera noted that “I now commute into Manhattan either by ferry, helicopter, or during Summer, by my own speed boat, which I christened Bubbba/Jersey.”

Coincidentally, Rivera rarely talked about either the Israeli military’s nuclear weapons arsenal or Dimona nuclear bomb factory, the imprisonment of Mordechai Vanunu or the Israeli government’s human rights violations on the West Bank or in Gaza on his tabloid TV talk show in the early 1990s.

(Downtown 6/23/93)

Columbia University President Opposed Academic Boycott Of Militaristic Israel's Universities In 2007

As the Stop The Wall website (www.stopthewall.org) notes in its boycott section:

“The academic boycott calls upon universities, academic institutions, students, and scholars to stop cooperation with their Israeli counterparts. Israeli academic institutions and scholars are not only instrumental in perpetuating and teaching Israeli racist and colonial ideologies and repressing internal dissent, but these institutions are also places where the theories, plans, and projects of Israeli Occupation and Apartheid are elaborated and intellectually supported. The academic boycott asks the student movements and the international academic community to take up their responsibility as intellectual leaders to uphold and promote the ideals of justice, freedom, and equality and to oppose colonial apartheid policies such as those inflicted upon the Palestinian people. Academia can never be “neutral”; academics need to choose between supporting the status quo or being part of a movement to promote social change and justice.”

But on June 12, 2007, Washington Post Company board member and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said:

“…I am profoundly disturbed by the recent vote by Britain’s new University and College Union to advance a boycott against Israeli academic institutions. …At Columbia I am proud to say that we embrace Israeli scholars and universities that the UCU is now all too eager to isolate….Therefore, if the British UCU is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy, then it should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish. Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education.”

Yet as the Stop The Wall website’s boycott section reveals:

“Noted Israeli historian and University of Haifa Professor Ilan Pappe has estimated that only 100 out of 9,000 Israeli academics have `raised their voice against the occupation,' and some of those 100 are in danger of losing their jobs because of their stated political positions. (Quotation from www.inminds.com).

“Over the last 50 years, during which Israel has committed incessant crimes against the Palestinian population, no clear opposition has come from Israeli universities…. Instead, Israeli academic institutions have continued to maintain their strong ties with the state’s political and military elite through close cooperation, developing research, strategies, and projects for the oppression of the Palestinian people…..

“The Palestinian population, as well as other political opponents of Israeli state ideology, cannot see these institutions as anything but instruments for perpetuating discrimination and apartheid rule…. Israeli academics who support the boycott understand and accept this as a temporary personal inconvenience that is incomparable with the systematic suffering of the Palestinian people.

“At this very moment, Israel is destroying the Palestinian academy and educational system as a whole through closures, the targeting of students and professors, and the denial of access to educational facilities through the construction of the Apartheid Wall and other forms of Bantustanization of the Palestinian people. At such a moment, safeguarding an Israeli academy that is supportive of these crimes is not supporting intellectual freedom, but rather supporting its destruction.”

Coincidentally, the apparent supporters of Israeli militarism in the Middle East who sit on the board of trustees of tax-exempt, "non-profit" Columbia University paid Washington Post Company board member and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger an annual salary of over $1.4 million during the 2006-2007 academic year.