When It’s All About ‘The Benjamins’
Read Time:3 Minute, 25 Second
So it’s “all about the Benjamins,” says Representative Omar, as though an unfathomably complex relationship has only one factor, but that’s what they do: the self righteous, the salesman, the politician, the lobbyist, the cat with canary feathers in his whiskers.
I won’t speculate about a presumption of bias on her part or on mine for that matter, I won’t speculate about how much our military and trade and political support of Saudi Arabia’s criminal regime is about money and profit either. We’ve spent more money on Iraq and Afghanistan than we’ve ever spent on anything including WW II after all. It wasn’t prompted by Israel. We spent a lot of money to rescue Kuwait and Bosnia after all. We did it for many reasons including our concept of the long term national interest flawed or not.
It shouldn’t be necessary to make this personal, and that some cabal of Jews as an evil influence on our government is a lethal argument older than our government by far It’s offensive as much as, and in the same way Minstrel shows, watermelons and pictures of presidents in tribal clothing are racist. But trade, profits, money and stability are what foreign policy is about. “It’s all about the Benjamins” is obviously tautological. Everything to do with money is about money, how much there is and who has it and who does what with it.
Regarding most of the misleading political assertions we suffer through every day, one factor does not multivariate analysis make. Our support of that tiny country began with the Soviet Support of their enemies during the Cold war. It began in part with the desire for some foothold in a strategic area dominated by Russian aid, Russian persecution of Jews, Russian weapons and lust for empire and oil from all directions.
No, it’s far from one thing. It’s complicated. Evangelicals want “the Jews” to go live in Israel because that signals the worldwide destruction of everyone (but them.) It’s not about the money, it’s about Jesus as Godzilla and a New Jerusalem here in the land we took from its inhabitants.
Support for Israel is admittedly a very large piece of the foreign aid pie and questions about that are never out of order, but quantity does not demonstrate illicit motivation or the sinister intrusion of foreign agents. It doesn’t illustrate that anyone has allegiance to a foreign nation – another trope that’s been used against Jews since Rome Burned Jerusalem. Was that a slip of the tongue? Was that evidence of a tongue too loose and misinformed to serve as a representative of all her constituents?
As foreign aid is about money, perhaps Omar has a point, albeit a tautological one as I said, but maintaining some kind of balance of power in an unstable area has a lot to do with it. American self- interest has a lot to do with it. Another war in the Middle East could be a huge disaster for us. Without us and without Israeli nuclear weapons there would be no more Israel and the total and absolute destruction of that little country has been the repeated war cry for a lifetime along with the denialism and distraction that accompany it.
Our policies everywhere ignore human rights violations and all involved can be tarred with the same brush. There’s Israel with it’s questionable settlements and disproportionate retaliations for terrorist acts. There are the people who deliberately put their own in harms way like human sacrifices. There are Russian invasions and terrorist acts that we are ignoring. The outrages of Saudi Arabia and others don’t seem to outrage some who like to be selectively blind.
Our own transgressions are nothing to ignore. That selective outrage is the reason some suspect anti-Semitism here. It’s just hard to ignore nearly a century of death threats, terroristic acts and full scale military assaults when the perpetrators and their sympathizer pretend it’s only about money and hope you won’t talk about tunnel vision.
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I do agree. Are we becoming like the Republicans in looking for “Mavericks” Rebels and Rogues?
I don’t like her, not at all, and it has nothing to do with the Hijab or her Muslim faith. Her arrogance is hurting the party, along with that of her buddy, the infamous “AOC.”