xymphora

From The Bush Beat by Ward Harkavy in the Village Voice, you ought to read "Dual Disloyalty: Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq", the first time I've seen Douglas Feith's radical Zionism expressly connected with his ridiculous views on the Occupied Territories, his advocacy of the war on Iraq (remember he played a key role in creating the lies which led to the war), and his treatment of Arab prisoners in Iraq worse than if they were animals. On Feith's radical Zionism (but to be fair to Feith's father, Betar, his father's group, is much, much more moderate that the extreme Likudnik ideas of Feith, and I don't believe it's fair to slur his father as a 'a founder of Likud', although he was a terrorist against the British and Arabs - at a time when being a terrorist was apparently a good thing! - in the Zionist underground in Palestine in the 1940's):

"Feith is such a radical that he won't even refer to the West Bank as the West Bank — he uses the biblical names Judea and Samaria. And he doesn't even like to say 'occupied territories,' even though they are. In fact, our own government officially refers to them as 'occupied' and freely uses the term 'West Bank.' Just look at the CIA map of Israel above, and you'll see that Gaza and the West Bank are separate from Israel, and each carries an asterisk.

But there's no asterisk attached to Feith's version of Israel. The son of a founder of Likud, he has pursued a radical Zionist policy at the expense of Israel's own Jews, a majority of whom don't favor the settlers."

On allegations that Feith has dual loyalties, to Israel and the United States, a ridiculous charge, as Harkavy points out:

"Does Feith have divided loyalties? That's a common allegation leveled against those neocons and others who seem to put Israel's interests before those of the United States. It's clear, though, that Feith doesn't. His loyalty belongs to Israel and to its extremist politicians like Bibi Netanyahu, for whom he was an adviser."

Israel has absolutely nothing to worry about.

Putting a radical, Arab-hating, Zionist who worked solely for the interests of Israel in charge of promoting the disastrous American attack on Iraq and the subsequent spectacularly inhumane treatment of Arab prisoners is beginning to look like not such a good idea. The treatment of prisoners is so bad that the Pentagon is actually arguing that release of photos of the treatment will so inflame Arab sentiments that it would endanger American troops, and we can lay the blame for this treatment entirely on the Zionist view that Arabs are Untermenschen, and to Feith's personal implementation of this view. The truth is finally starting to appear. You can't insult the Village Voice by calling it part of the mainstream media, but it's close. It won't be long before Americans get to know what the rest of the world has known for years.