Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta condemned on
Sunday the exploding beeper attack on Hezbollah terrorists, referring to the
attack—widely thought to be the work of the Israeli Mossad—as “terrorism.”
“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of
terrorism,” said Panetta, someone who’s been around in Washington for a long
time. In addition to having served as SecDef under Obama,
Panetta served as director of the CIA, also under Obama, and was White House
chief of staff under Clinton.
It’s never good when someone with Panetta’s CVs denounces an
ally. Characterizing as “terror” a targeted attack on Hezbollah terrorists, however,
is nothing short of evil.
Panetta, while speaking with CBS, said he feared that
terrorism is “going right into the supply chain.”
“And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it
makes people ask the question: ‘What the hell is next?'” added Panetta, who
also said that “This is a tactic that has repercussions. And we really don’t
know what those repercussions are going to be. The forces of war are largely in
control right now.”
“I think it’s going to be very important for the nations of
the world to have a serious discussion about whether or not this is an area
that everybody has to focus on, because if they don’t try to deal with it now,
mark my word, it is the battlefield of the future,” said Panetta.
It’s not the first time Panetta has trashed Israel this year.
In April, after the accidental deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid
workers in Gaza during an Israeli airstrike, Panetta, without waiting for an investigation
to be conducted said it was “not surprising” that the aid workers were killed,
because “the Israelis usually fire and
then ask questions.”
I would posit that Panetta has selective blindness induced
by Jew-hatred. He ignores the fact that 80,000 Israelis have been evacuated due
to incessant Hezbollah rocket attacks on their homes in the north since October
8. These are facts of which Panetta would be well aware, being who he is, and
who he knows in Washington. Panetta knows that Hezbollah has been attacking
Israel all along, and that tens of thousands of Israelis cannot go home. The
only way then, to understand his characterization of an ally’s actions as terror
is that he is a very evil man who really hates Jews.
Likewise, Panetta ignores the events that led to the deaths of the WCK aid
workers, namely the pogroms of October 7th in which Jews were brutalized; the women
gang-raped and beheaded; babies burned alive, and captives taken, stolen away from
their families and kept in damp, cramped tunnels where there is no oxygen to
breathe, and no food to eat. The accidental WCK aid worker deaths were the
regrettable collateral damage that is inevitable in war—a war that began when
Hamas broke the ceasefire its ceasefire with Israel on October 7th and visited
mass atrocities on innocent Israeli civilians, including pregnant women and infants.
A war that continues because Hamas refuses to cease fire.
Panetta knows all of this. Yet he pretends that Israel is
the aggressor: “The Israelis usually fire and then ask questions.”
Then again, castigating the Jews and the Jewish State is an
old Washington tradition. Panetta is not the first secretary of defense to
denounce the Jews and Israel. That distinction goes to James Forrestal, who was
not only the first U.S. secretary of defense, but in fact held that position in
1948, the year of Israel’s founding. Forrestal was known to be against
Partition, and really—against having anything to do with the Jews and their
state. The Jews knew it, too. They felt his hatred.
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| First U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal held the office from 1947-1949 under President Harry Truman |
A 1951 JTA piece appeared to confirm what had been all too apparent to the Jews; that James Forrestal hated them. Some excerpts (full pdf below):
Forrestal Diaries Reveal Late Secretary’s Rabid Anti-Zionism, Disregard For U. S. Jews
New York , ( JTA)—Publication this week of extracts of the diaries kept by the late James Forrestal as Secretary of Defense revealed part of the story of the bitter fight within the United States Government on Palestine policy during the crucial days during which the United Nations was debating the fate of the Holy Land.
Forrestal, the diaries disclose, was intensely active in the question and his activities, according to Walter Millis and E. S. Duffield, editors of the diaries, “sprang from bottom from his sense of the immense strategic significance of the Middle East. They took the form of seeking to “lift the Jewish-Palestine question of politics . . .
. . . That Forrestal felt intensely on the Palestine question is shown in his diaries. He complained bitterly that Democratic Party policy on the issue was dictated by the fact that Jews were large contributors to the party campaign funds and he went so far as to charge that the Zionists were putting their Palestine interest above the security of the United States. . .
. . . Forrestal noted a conversation with the then Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett whom he quoted as saying that he had never in his life been subject to as much pressure as he had been in the three days prior to the General Assembly vote. He [said that] the zeal and activity of the Jews had almost resulted in defeating the objectives they were after.
Under date of Feb. 3, 1948, Forrestal noted a meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., in which the Defense Secretary charged the Zionists with subordinating the national security of the United States. “I was forced to repeat to him what I said to Sen. McGrath in response to the latter’s observation that our failure to go along with the Zionist [sic] might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California — that T thought that it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States,” the diary noted.
Already in 1947, the Jews had known that in Forrestal, they'd had a powerful enemy in Washington. But Truman didn’t get along with him either, and eventually, in 1949, Truman compelled Forrestal to resign.
No doubt it was the ignominy of this forced dismissal that led to the decline in Forrestal’s mental state. Depressed and in need of treatment, the former secretary of defense was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital.* It was there that James Forrestal decided to end his evil little, piddly little, Jew-hating life by jumping out a window on the sixteenth floor.
*Known today as the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
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