Opinion Editorials, April 2014

AIPAC Gambling Boss, Financier of the Republican Party,  Sheldon Adelson, May Flee US to Avoid Indictment

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, April 30, 2014

Israel-Firster Zionist and gambling tycoon, Sheldon Hudson

Activists protesting outside an AIPAC policy conference in Washington carry signs highlighting Israel’s apartheid and rights violations.

AIPAC gambling boss may flee US

Press TV, Saturday, April 26, 2014   

By Gordon Duff

Yesterday, federal officials took into custody the reputed partner of gambling boss Sheldon Adelson, the chief financial backer for the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and primary financier for America’s GOP, the Republican Party.

Sources at the Department of Justice say Adelson is accused of laundering $364 million dollars, much of which went into the pockets of politicians in Washington “friendly” to Israel.

If Adelson is indicted, and sources in the Justice Department say this process is well underway, politicians around the US, all Republicans, will be required to return millions in what would then be not only illegal campaign contributions but clearly proof of ties between the GOP and organized crime.

Many of the politicians Adelson has supported on state government level have worked to suppress wages and workers’ rights, blocked regulations protecting consumers from mortgage and investment fraud and supported questionable gambling initiatives.

Adelson’s extremist politics have been a dark stain on the soul of America.

GRAND JURY Sources direct to the investigation tell us that a special grand jury is preparing an indictment against Adelson for a long list of offenses, including but not limited to money laundering, mail and wire fraud and conspiracy.

Adelson, one of the world’s wealthiest men, with massive holdings in Las Vegas and Macao, never turns away from controversy. Adelson enraged the veterans community in the United States when he told an AIPAC audience that he was ashamed of having served in the American military when he felt loyalty only to Israel.

Critical is Adelson’s virtual control of America’s pro-Israel Republican Party. The GOP had hopes of using Adelson cash to gain control of the United States Senate. Analysts predict that were this to happen, America would not only move toward domestic collapse but there is a real possibility that regions of the US would seek to withdraw from the union, seeking an “autonomous zone.”

Adelson and his GOP “employees” have long stated the desire to use nuclear weapons in a preemptory attack on Iran and may well attack Russia and China as well. Though elected officials and, theoretically answerable for their positions, Adelson’s “gang” in Washington regularly promise to bring America to a full-scale war.

Our sources say that federal officials are presenting witness testimony to the grand jury that they believe ties Adelson directly to money laundering.

THE CASE AGAINST “SHELLY” The accusations against Adelson are said to tie to a group of “shell companies” he has used to run online gambling around the world while publicly opposing online gambling. His partner in this endeavor is now in federal custody, said to be in witness protection, and prepared to testify at length to the grand jury that today was reported in an article in the Huffington Post.

Former CIA agent “Chip” Tatum spent many hours with a yet unnamed witness against Adelson. Stories include traveling the world in one of Adelson’s private jets on “business” that the government considers money laundering and racketeering.

We are currently in negotiations with the US Attorney and US Marshals to gain limited access for additional interviews.

WILL SHELLY FLEE? Sources in the US Department of Justice are concerned that Adelson, who has vast holdings in Macao and around the world, will flee the United States rather than face arrest. Justice officials say that Adelson’s arrest is only a matter of time.

However, Adelson though aged and no longer well, has a history of standing up to critics. Adelson also has absolutely no respect for the US government, an organization he has spent millions “buying.”

Sources close to Adelson have told this reporter that he is driven by a profound hatred of President Obama that blinds him to the consequences of his actions. Adelson, unlike the extremist Koch Brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife, wealthy autocrats that finance America’s ultra-right wing GOP, is a real self-made man.

Adelson started with nothing and built a fortune estimated between $50 and $100 billion. Adelson is a strong backer of, not just Israel, but Israel’s most extremist elements. His money doesn’t just buy political favors in the US but influences politics inside Israel as well.

In fact, groups in Israel opposed to his extremist views are working to prevent him from gaining control of Israel’s media, a project Adelson has been working on for some time.

EXPOSING “GANGSTER AMERICA” During the last election, consultants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation brought documentation that showed the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, to be involved in money laundering. Photographs of Romney in Cuba were supplied including one with his mistress, Maria Perez Andropov.

In hours of tape recorded meetings, a massive plot under investigation by the Department of Justice was outlined. Ties between major US corporations including one huge retailer and drug cartels were documented. Documents were presented showing Raoul Castro, current Cuban head of state, to provide safe haven for meetings between American officials involved in money laundering and their cartel counterparts.

Dates of visits, outlining flights from Toronto and Vera Cruz to Havana were listed. These interviews are all taped, all secure.

The Adelson case ties directly to the pattern. Those shown to be involved with the Mexican cartels are all prominent “friends of Israel.” All are members of the Republican Party.

What we saw then was a comprehensive case against Romney and other top GOP politicians. However, if what we now see plays out, it will be Adelson, 86 years old, self-made billionaire, that will be the only target.

It is true that Adelson is “the last man standing.” Adelson has virtually promised to spend “whatever it takes” to buy the next two America elections. Has this made Adelson the target? Has the extreme danger of war, which can be credited to extremist elements in the US tied to Adelson, men like Senators Ted Cruz and John McCain, put a “target on Shelly”?

It would take very little to imprison half of America’s government and certainly most of Wall Street. Their crimes are notorious. Most military contractors and oil companies engage in massive fraud as part of their daily business.

When we look at Adelson, Israel’s powerhouse in the US, when we look at the politicians who slavishly bow to his every whim, we wonder. Why does Obama only go after Adelson and never those who have sold their souls to him so openly?

NN

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Chris Christie, other GOP hopefuls betting on mega donor in Vegas

MARCH 27, 2014, 8:30 AM    

 BY STEVE PEOPLES ASSOCIATED PRESS -

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A slate of potential Republican presidential candidates is descending upon Las Vegas to court one of the GOP's most powerful patrons.

Republican super donor Sheldon Adelson is the main attraction for White House hopefuls as the Republican Jewish Coalition begins its annual "spring leadership meeting" Thursday along the city's storied strip, the site of Adelson's Venetian resort hotel and casino.

With an eye on the 2016 presidential contest, prospective candidates and their aides have been aggressively courting such donors for months, but not like this. Already being called "the Sheldon primary," the four-day event features Scotch tastings, private roundtable discussions, and golf and poker tournaments that bring together politicians and some of the GOP's top money men, a powerful list Adelson leads.

The 80-year-old Boston native almost single-handedly bankrolled Newt Gingrich's presidential bid in 2012 before shifting his personal fortune toward Mitt Romney's campaign. Neither Gingrich nor Romney is at this year's gathering, which features prospective presidential contenders including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Other high-profile participants include former Vice President Dick Cheney and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, is also in Las Vegas this week.

The conference, like the increasingly murky world of campaign finance, is shrouded in secrecy.

Adelson rarely speaks publicly. And just one event is open to the media during the four-day gathering: a Saturday meeting with Walker, Christie and Kasich that's expected to feature a question-and-answer session. Attendees have been told that questions this year must be submitted in advance, a break from tradition thought to help protect Christie from embarrassing questions about his recent struggles in New Jersey.

Bush is set to address donors Thursday evening at a private airport hangar.

Adelson, known for his devotion to Israel, is the Republican Jewish Coalition's most influential benefactor. He donated more than $90 million to political candidates and super PACs in the last election cycle. His total donations may never be quantified publicly because various politically active groups that operate as nonprofit organizations don't report the source of their funds.

Several Republican operatives who regularly speak to reporters were reluctant to comment on Adelson and his role in the next presidential contest. Those who did offered general praise of his generosity beyond politics.

Charlie Spies, who led the super PAC that backed Romney in 2012, said Adelson and his wife "are generous philanthropists that back causes ranging from educational to pro-Israel to political. It is often lost in the hype over their political giving that there are schools, museums and nonprofit organizations around the world with the Adelson name on them."

Adelson gave the pro-Romney super PAC $15 million in four months before the last presidential election.

A Walker spokesman offered only a vague explanation when asked why the Wisconsin governor was attending the Las Vegas meeting.

"The governor remains focused on 2014 and sharing his common-sense conservative message with like-minded leaders," Walker campaign spokeswoman Alleigh Marre said.

Adelson is considered one of the 10 richest people in the world, with a net worth exceeding $40 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is also the driving force behind the push to bring the Republican National Convention to Las Vegas in 2016.

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Associated Press writer Scott Bauer in Wisconsin contributed to this report. 

See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/chris-christie-other-gop-hopefuls-betting-on-mega-donor-in-vegas-1.752533#sthash.d6OYKtL1.dpuf

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Republican Presidential Hopefuls Troop to “Sheldon Primary”

Potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates are already courting casino magnate and ‘pro-Israel’ mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.

By Jim Lobe,

 March 26, 2014 

Sheldon Adelson, the multi-billionaire casino mogul, is back in the political news with a front-page article in the Washington Post, a timely reminder of the degree to which top Republican candidates feel compelled to kiss his ring and presumably commit themselves to unswerving devotion to the security of Israel as defined by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The occasion is a convention of the Likudist and Adelson-chaired Republican Jewish Coalition at Adelson’s hotel in Las Vegas, aptly named by the Post’s headline, “Sheldon Primary.”

Worth noting in the article, which reports that Adelson’s net worth is currently estimated at $37.9 billion, is the penultimate paragraph listing some of the other RJC board members who will presumably be in attendance, all of them major donors, including Lewis Eisenberg, Paul Singer, Wayne Berman, and former (Bush-appointed) ambassadors, Sam Fox and Mel Sembler. Honored guests will include Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. (Marsha Cohen had a scoop about this event last week.)

While the Post article cites Adelson’s strong feelings about Israel, it doesn’t really put that fervor into perspective, a perspective that hopefully the weekend’s supplicants will store some where in the back of their minds when they get a one-one with the man. So, for their sake, let’s recap a couple anecdotes indicative of his devotion. First, there’s the case of Newt Gingrich, whose 2012 primary campaign was paid for almost entirely by Adelson’s largess. Asked what motivated his benefactor, Gingrich was quite clear:

He knows I’m very pro Israel. That’s the central value of his life. I mean, he’s very worried that Israel is going to not survive.

And then there’s Adelson’s own words. Speaking to a group in Israel in July 2010, he was video-taped telling his audience:

“I am not Israeli. The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.  It was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF and one of my daughters was in the IDF … our two little boys, one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow, hopefully he’ll come back– his hobby is shooting — and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF,” Adelson said at the event….“All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart.”

Thus, it is the blessing (and financing) of this man that is being sought this weekend by the Republicans who hope to be inaugurated as President of the United States in January 2017.

Jim Lobe blogs about foreign policy at www.lobelog.com.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/republican_presidential_hopefuls_troop_to_sheldon_primary

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'Americans speaking out about “Israelification” of the USA'

Press TV, Atlanta, February 17, 2014 -

The expression “Israeli-Occupied Territories” normally refers to Palestine. But more and more Americans are speaking out about the “Israelification” of the USA – and wondering whether their country, too, is occupied. 

On March 2nd through March 4th, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will hold its annual celebration of Zionist domination of American politics and media. The 2014 AIPAC Policy Conference at the Washington, DC Convention Center will attract thousands of fanatical Zionists – as well as an angry crowd of protestors.

Anti-AIPAC sentiment is spreading throughout all segments of American society. Even the American Jewish community, once a bastion of near-monolithic support for Israel, now includes a rising chorus of anti-Zionist voices.

A Jewish-American woman, Medea Benjamin, is a key force behind Code Pink's “Boycott AIPAC” protests. The Code Pink Activists will protest AIPAC at the Washington, DC Convention Center on Sunday, March 2nd from 8:30 am to 8:30 pm with a special event from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.

Max Blumenthal, son of American Jewish leader and former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, is another prominent critic of the Israelification of America. Blumenthal's book Goliath, a compendium of unpleasant truths about Israel, has rocked the American Jewish community and stimulated debate about whether the next generation of American Jews will turn anti-Zionist.

The expression “Israelification of America” was popularized by one of the USA's top foreign policy experts, Andrew Bacevich of Boston University. Bacevich points out that the US has “stumbled willy-nilly into an Israeli-like condition of perpetual war” with horrific consequences for the US economy and Constitution.

Bacevich's notion of “Israelification” explains the recent American fascination with assassinations and killer drones. In his article “How We Became Israel” Bacevich points out that in the pre-9/11 era, when assassination was illegal in the USA, Israel had already made “targeted assassination...the Israeli way of war.”

Israel was the first to develop and use drones. Now it is the world's largest drone exporter. Today's wildly unconstitutional US drone killings are a symptom of America's enslavement to Zionism.

Bacevich is correct: The US has indeed “become Israel.” But he is wrong about one thing: The US has not “stumbled willy-nilly” into Israelification.

There was nothing random or unplanned about the Zionist coup d'état of September 11th, 2001 which imposed near-total Zionist control on America. According to Stanley Hilton and Francis Boyle – both of whom studied beside neoconservative guru Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago during the 1960s – Strauss and his disciples, including roommates and Strauss intimates Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, were even then planning to impose a sort of Zio-Nazi fascism on America through a 9/11 style event.

One neoconservative Zio-Nazi, Edward Luttwak, actually wrote a doctoral dissertation outlining the Straussian plan to overthrow democracy through a 9/11-style stealth coup d'état. Luttwak's dissertation was published in 1968 as Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. Italian journalist Mauricio Blondet, in his book September 11th: A Coup d'État (2002) explains that the neoconservatives used Luttwak's Coup d'État as their step-by-step guide to staging 9/11.

Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated 9/11 with the ecstatic outburst: “It's very good!” Then-Israeli-Prime-Minister Ariel Sharon crowed: “We Jews control America, and the Americans know it!” (Israeli spy agency) Mossad kingpin Mike Harari allegedly boasted of orchestrating 9/11 at the celebratory party he threw in Bangkok, Thailand, immediately after the attack on America, according to eyewitness Dmitri Khalezov.

The famous “dancing Israeli” Mossad agents openly celebrated the success of the 9/11 operation. They shared high-fives and took pictures of each other flicking cigarette lighters in front of the burning and then exploding Twin Towers.

But these and other Zionist celebrations of the 9/11 coup d'état were premature. While the Zionists achieved their near-term goals – beginning with a US attempt to destroy “seven countries in five years” on behalf of Greater Israel – they inadvertently provoked a backlash that will eventually sweep Zionism into the proverbial dustbin of history.

That backlash began just a few days after 9/11, when US Army Col. Donn de Grand-Pré and fellow military officers met to formulate a response to the 9/11 coup d'état. These patriotic American officers began a process that continues today at the US military and intelligence community's voice of 9/11 truth, the on-line publication Veterans Today.

The disastrous failure of the 9/11 wars-for-Israel has created an anti-Zionist backlash. Though the Zionists try to ruin the careers and reputations of anyone who questions 9/11 or Zionism, they are finding it more and more difficult to build an “Occupation Wall of Silence” around these topics.

A few years ago, when professors like Steven Jones spoke out about 9/11, or journalists like Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez criticized Zionist domination of the media, they could be driven from their jobs. This year, when Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll questioned 9/11, nobody suggested firing him...and Carroll went on to win the Super Bowl.

For two decades AIPAC never lost a political battle. During the past year it has already lost two: Its attempt to trigger a US bombing of Syria, and its push for new nuclear-deal-killing sanctions on Iran.

In both cases, the Zionist-dominated media could not convince Americans to support yet another war-for-Israel.

The rise of the internet-based alternative media has made the Zionist death-grip on mainstream media increasingly irrelevant. The Zionist thought-policemen are panicking.

One leading Zionist thought-policeman, Mark Gardner, recently blasted the celebrity photographer Rankin for discussing who controls the media: "It's allegations about Jewish power over the media that distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of racism. Rankin may well not be an anti-Semite, in which case he should learn not to spread the stink of anti-Semitic claims about Jews running the media and Hollywood.”

Why is it “anti-Semitic stink” to tell the truth? As Joel Stein explained in his L.A. Times article “Who runs Hollywood? C'mon” – and as everyone in Hollywood knows – “Jews totally run Hollywood.” Stein's article names the big Hollywood power brokers and notes that virtually all are Jewish.

The same is true, in less extreme fashion, of the whole US mainstream media, including the big TV, magazine, and newspaper franchises. Former New York Times reporter Philip Weiss, now a leading blogger on Middle East issues, lays it out in his article “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”

But perhaps we should be calling the people who dominate American media “Zionists,” not “Jews.” Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a tribal political project. Most of the media-controllers are not religious. They are, however, devoted to their “Jewish state” in Occupied Palestine.

As Americans continue to lose confidence in the mainstream media, they will increasingly turn to alternative sources. And those sources, precisely because they are trying to provide an alternative to the mainstream, will continue to chip away at the Zionist occupation of the American mind.

So if you want to protest AIPAC's faltering death-grip on America, do it this year. There is no telling how many more years AIPAC, and the Zionist entity it represents, will still be in business. HRB/HRB

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org.

editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org