Friday, November 13, 2026
From Ian:
The 'Israel controls America' myth has a long history - and an antisemitic foundation
The 'Israel controls America' myth has a long history - and an antisemitic foundation
Run the test anywhere else. In 1950, North Korea threatened South Korea’s existence and America’s only indirectly. Harry S. Truman sent troops, and nearly 37,000 Americans died. No one accused Syngman Rhee of controlling the White House.Trump says US antisemitism at levels ‘like Germany in 1938’
In 1990, Kuwait’s exiled rulers bankrolled a public relations campaign through Hill & Knowlton. It put a teenage girl before a congressional caucus with a story about Iraqi soldiers tearing babies from incubators. She turned out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, and the story collapsed. That was a foreign government trying to manipulate Congress toward war, on the record. Kuwait never became a “puppet master.” It got a liberation and a thank-you.
Today, American planners openly debate fighting China over Taiwan. The island’s survival matters far more to Taipei than to Topeka or Peoria. No one claims Taiwan controls Congress.
So here is the rule of every alliance in modern American history. The senior, more powerful partner leads. The junior partner follows, lobbies, flatters, and sometimes tries to manipulate, and gets called a client, a beneficiary, or a poodle. Blair was the poodle. Rhee was the client. Kuwait was the beneficiary.
Israel is the only exception. Only with the Jewish state does the far smaller and weaker partner become the “master” and the superpower become the “dog.” No fact explains that reversal. Israel’s population is less than 3% of America’s, and its economy is about 2% the size of America’s. Its air force flies American jets, and its arsenal relies heavily on American munitions. The only thing that can turn the weaker ally into the hidden hand is the belief that Jews wield secret, outsized power over governments.
That belief has a name. The IHRA definition of antisemitism lists it explicitly: the myth of Jews collectively controlling governments. The people repeating “Israel’s war” would never apply the same standard to Britain, Kuwait, South Korea, or Taiwan. Take away the double standard and their argument has nothing left.
Their argument also erases America’s own grievance. Iran made itself America’s enemy without Israel. It held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Its Hezbollah proxy killed 241 American service members in Beirut in 1983. The State Department attributes over 600 American troop deaths in Iraq to Iranian-backed militias. Iranian agents plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington in 2011, and American prosecutors have charged IRGC operatives in plots against John Bolton and President Donald Trump.
“Death to America” was never a translation error. America had its own reasons to fight, written in its own soldiers’ blood.
And Israel has done what no “puppet master” would. For 75 years, from 1948 through October 2023, it fought every war without a single American combat soldier beside it.
Americans are free to argue that this war was a mistake, badly managed, or too costly. Those are real debates. “Israel made us do it” is not one of them. It is Henry Ford’s newspaper and Lindbergh’s speech, reprinted for a new audience with a podcast microphone. The “poodle” never holds the leash. Anyone who insists this one does isn’t describing Israel. He’s describing what he believes about “the Jews.”
US President Donald Trump said Thursday that antisemitism in the United States was at levels “like Germany in 1938,” at the beginning of the Holocaust.Brendan O'Neill: The nauseating hypocrisy of Greta Thunberg
The president was asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt about the recent rise in antisemitism in the US and what his administration was doing to combat it.
“I’m amazed to see it,” Trump said. “This is like Germany in 1938 or whatever. It’s, like, crazy what’s going on. When you look at the attacks on people, the racial attacks and the attacks, they’re, I guess, 57 percent on Jewish people, and you wouldn’t believe it.”
FBI statistics show that Jews were targeted in 63% of all religion-based hate crimes in the United States last year, down from 70% in 2024.
Trump spoke days after the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” the Nazi pogrom of 1938 widely seen as a turning point in the persecution of Jews and a prelude to the Holocaust. By then, Jews had already been stripped of their citizenship and subjected to severe restrictions, boycotts and discrimination by Adolf Hitler’s regime.
On the eve of the anniversary, pro-Palestinian activists in Philadelphia held a bicycle ride promoting a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses they accused of complicity in Israeli military actions. Jewish groups in the city called the event blatantly antisemitic, citing both its timing and its focus on Jewish-owned businesses. Organizers said the timing was coincidental.
Those silly kids. Don’t they know that blubbing over polar bears is so 2019? The Current Thing is hating Israel. The ‘evil’ that now keeps pampered eco-saints like Greta awake at night is not global warming – it’s the Jewish State. The diminutive doom-mongerer long ago switched her narcissistic dread from CO2 to Zionism, trading her yellow rain mac for a designer keffiyeh, and her caterwauling about climate for the headier thrill of screaming blue murder about Israel. Get with the programme, children: the Jewish nation is now the demon that stalks the fever dreams of the young and self-righteous.
Thunberg hasn’t entirely ditched the eco-apocalypse nonsense. She still warbles about rising seas and stolen childhoods every now and then. She might no longer have spasms of infantile fury, howling ‘How dare you!’ at politicians who loved being told off by a smug teen, but she still does the green schtik. She’s currently at COP 31 in Turkey, wanging on about how the planet is being ‘killed’. How interesting that she boycotts Israel but is happy to hang out in a state that mercilessly persecutes the Kurds.
Yet the striking thing about St Greta’s pontificating at COP is how tired and even pantomime it sounds. It feels like she’s going through the motions, singing the old songs for the titillation of fiftysomething Guardianistas. The end of the world just isn’t where it’s at anymore. The end of Israel, on the other hand, the scrubbing from the map of that most demonic entity – now that will get the luxury-belief mob frothing with righteous ecstasy. Over the past three years, virtually all of them, in creepy sync, shifted from weeping over End Times to fuming over the Jewish nation.
Thunberg is now far more likely to be spotted on a boat of seafaring narcissists heading for Gaza than she is outside a parliamentary building yapping about eco-doom. She used to yelp ‘Stop oil’ – now she cries ‘Crush Zionism’. These people once wanted to keep fossil fuels buried – now they want to bury Jewish nationhood, which is all that Zionism means. She isn’t alone. If you’ve ever wondered why the ponces of Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain (remember them?!) are no longer making life miserable for working-class motorists, it’s because they, too, have switched their privileged ire to Israel. They, too, have converted from the bourgeois cult of climate rapture to the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia.
Look at Palestine Action (RIP). Many of those time-rich bozos who cut the fences of Israeli-owned business while shrieking about Zionism in cut-glass accents came from the privileged green movement. Like Greta, the Moan of Arc of greenism, they aren’t actually wedded to a particular cause – they’re just addicted to apocalypse. They crave the cheap thrill of standing up to some monstrous, planet-consuming bogeyman. Last week it was industry, this week it’s Israel. Their mercenary opportunism would be funny if it wasn’t for the fact that their new religion of Ziophobia – ‘Crush Zionism!’ – has created huge hardship for world Jewry.
We really do need a reckoning with the eco-hysteria of the past 10 years. These people told us humanity was doomed. They said billions would die. In 2018 Greta said ‘all of humanity’ will be wiped out if we don’t ‘stop using fossil fuels’ within five years. Five years later, she casually deleted that Nostradamus-lite bollocks. So intense was the doom and dread pumped into public life that kids started to suffer from eco-anxiety. Yet now they’ve all moved on. Now they’re all in the Med saying ‘Israel is evil’. Now it’s mainly Gaza these white saviours want to rescue from the monstrous forces of capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, yada yada. To stoke global fear and then shrug it off is irresponsible in the extreme. What’s more, given their End Times blather was clearly bullshit, why should we believe a word they say about Israel?
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