by Max Blumenthal
(excerpt by henrymakow.com)
I arrived at the conference after a panel on "the Deep State," featuring James O'Keefe, the co-creator of the infamous ACORN video, and Tim Fitton, Judicial Watch president, had concluded. As I settled into a seat near the back of the Westin's Grand Ballroom, a who's who of the evangelical far right filed into the spacious auditorium.
To my right sat Carol Swain, the African-American Vanderbilt University political science professor who blamed a "devil's brew" of identity politics and multiculturalism for the mainstreaming of white nationalism. Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, was greeting old friends a few rows away.
Nearby, I spotted Star Parker, a self-proclaimed former "welfare cheat," who named her book Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats and recently branded the Democrats "the party of the Antichrist." Frank Gaffney, who has raised millions to conduct an Islamophobic crusade and who helped orchestrate Trump's Muslim travel ban, strode into the ballroom, where he was set to deliver a panel later on alongside a collection of Cold War-era hardliners.
One of the few Catholics present amid the evangelicals was Frank Pavone, a fanatically anti-abortion priest who once filmed himself placing an aborted fetus on an altar while imploring followers to vote for Trump. And then there was Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel and author of the lascivious Starr Report (which was in part drafted by Brett Kavanaugh) arriving at the CNP to hawk his new memoir of the Clinton investigation.
Wondering if I was the only wandering Jew in this evangelical house, I flipped through the CNP membership directory and found Joel Chernoff, leader of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. Messianic Jews are not actual Jews however: they worship Jesus while dressed in traditional Jewish garb, blowing shofars and singing their messiah's praises in Hebrew. Hoping to deepen evangelical support for Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has partnered with Chernoff and his allies in the Alliance for Israel Advocacy to lobby on Capitol Hill against all obstacles to Israel's annexation of the occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Tony Perkins, left, opened the meeting by summoning everyone to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. He emphasized the word "stand" for effect, making a not-so-subtle jibe at the "take a knee" protests against police brutality that have become familiar on NFL sidelines. Besides serving as president of the secretive CNP, the clean-cut, smooth-talking Perkins has previously headed up the Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington, transforming the outfit into a vanguard of the Christian right. Under Perkins, the FRC has become a factory for anti-gay and anti-abortion policies at the state and federal level.
The day before its conference, the CNP distributed a press release explaining that its leadership had chosen to meet in Charlotte to "stand in solidarity with North Carolina over political correctness." This was a reference to a Republican bill introduced into the state legislature in 2016 to override a Charlotte city council ordinance requiring private businesses to maintain gender-neutral bathrooms. (Also among the featured speakers the CNP junketed into town was Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who won a Supreme Court case this year after refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, on religious grounds.)
As the meeting got underway, the excitement surrounding the conflict over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court was palpable. Hand-picked by the right-wing Federalist Society and subsequently accused of sexual assault, Kavanaugh was the hero of the hour. During a session of member introductions, one CNP member announced there would be a private reception the following evening to "toast a glass of beer" for the Bud Light-loving belligerent who the evangelicals devoutly believe will enact their agenda on the court. "I like beer" had become their rallying cry.
NIKKI HALEY
At noon, Haley appeared at the lectern to a roaring ovation. Clad in a matching checkered sports jacket and skirt, the ambassador was flanked on each side by massive flatscreens projecting images of her most glorious moments at the United Nations. One showed her working a crowd of Venezuelan Maduro opposition activists, with a megaphone in hand, on a Manhattan street corner outside the UN General Assembly this September. In another, she was seen standing at the UN Security Council, waving photos of lifeless, shirtless children killed in an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government and making the case for harshly punishing Damascus. Haley wasted little time justifying the Trump Administration's decision to withdraw this year from the UN Human Rights Council. She complained that countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and "the regime in Congo"--which was "burning babies alive and gang-raping their women"--had co-opted the international body to cover up their own abuses.
Though Saudi Arabia had also exploited its membership on the Human Rights Council to shield itself from scrutiny, Haley had hardly anything to say in her speech about the theocratic monarchy. This September, the Saudi government and the United Arab Emirates tried and failed to stop a UN Human Rights Council resolution to extend an investigation into their military assault on Yemen. Their faltering war to oust the Houthi militia from control over the northern half of the country has turned Yemen into the site of the world's worst humanitarian crisis, spawning an epidemic of cholera and plaguing large segments of the population with malnutrition. Haley has gone to excessive lengths to abet the Saudi-UAE military effort, partnering with officials from both countries to brand Iran as the lone source of the crisis.
Last December, inside a hangar at the Joint Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, Haley stood in front of the charred remnants of a ballistic missile fired by the Yemeni Houthi militia at Saudi Arabia's King Khalid Airport, and pointed to this stage prop as evidence of Iranian backing for the Houthis. (A UN panel that investigated the missile found "no evidence as to the identity of [its] broker or supplier.") Seated in the front row were the Saudi and Emirati diplomats, who apparently assisted Haley's presentation by providing the missile hulk to Washington. She went on to join the Saudis and only eleven other nations in opposition to a UN Human Rights Council resolution condemning the "imposition of the death penalty as a sanction for specific forms of conduct, such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations." (Since the apparent assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi columnist for the Washington Post, which has created an international firestorm, Haley has made no statement.)
Haley avoided mentioning her special relationship with Saudi Arabia at the CNP, focusing instead on her relentless one-woman campaign to protect another Middle Eastern country from scrutiny for its serial human rights abuses. The state of Israel had been condemned in scores of UN resolutions over the years, she complained, while Iran had been reprimanded just nine times. Withdrawing from the Human Rights Council was the least America could do to uphold its duty to protect Israel, she said, inspiring gales of applause from the crowd. She earned more roars of approval when she touted the Trump Administration's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move that drove a nail into the coffin of the US-led process to establish a Palestinian state. The applause reached its peak when Haley boasted of the pivotal role she played in cutting off American aid to millions of destitute Palestinian refugees through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). I looked over at Gaffney, the veteran anti-Islam activist, and saw an ecstatic grin cross his face as Haley described the cuts.
A diplomat who was present for several meetings with members of Trump's foreign policy team over UN-related matters told me that Haley formed a personal vendetta when the General Assembly voted to condemn Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. "The US will be taking names," Haley rumbled before the December vote, vowing to punish nations that defied her boss. She then moved in to strangle the UNRWA, pushing for heavy cuts in US funding to the agency. In doing so, she appeared to be courting support from one of the most influential donors to the Republican Party. Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire confidant of Netanyahu who contributed $5 million to Trump's inauguration, had been the largest donor to the 527 political organizations that Haley formed while serving as South Carolina's governor, with $250,000 in 2016. Her legacy of pro-Israel rabble-rousing at the United Nations virtually guaranteed that Adelson's beneficence would continue and will likely expand if she embarks on a presidential run.
Haley's choice of aides at the United Nations offered another indication that she saw the high-profile diplomatic post as a springboard to the White House. Her top advisor at the United Nations was not a foreign policy expert but a veteran Republican consultant from her home state named Jon Lerner. A former adviser to Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a neoconservative darling, Lerner identified his mentor as Arthur Finkelstein, the notoriously cutthroat Republican operative who advised Netanyahu's 1996 run for Israeli prime minister and helped him cobble together his 2013 right-wing governing coalition.
Haley's lonely fight against Israel's enemies was calculated to appeal not only to the Likudnik GOP donors who saw the self-proclaimed Jewish state as their fortified home, but also to the evangelicals who viewed the country as a landing pad for the Messiah. These included Tim LaHaye, a CNP veteran who coauthored the best-selling Left Behind series: Armageddon fantasy novels that identify the UN secretary-general as the Antichrist. If the admiring treatment Haley received from the CNP was any indication, she could count on support from rapture-ready pastors across the country, along with the flock of grassroots Republicans they shepherd to the polls each election day.
Not long after Haley left the auditorium, I was ejected from the CNP's conference on the personal orders of its president, the eagle-eyed Tony Perkins. He recognized me because I have written about him in articles and in my book Republican Gomorrah. In the lobby, Perkins explained to me that the meeting was forbidden to members of the media, and especially to me. He had apparently not forgotten the article I published in 2005 that reported his signing of a check for $82,500 to David Duke--former Ku Klux Klan leader and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate--to purchase Duke's mailing list on behalf of another GOP campaign. Perkins objected stringently to my reporting, but when I asked him to explain what I had gotten wrong, he said nothing of substance.
That night, I was on a plane back to Washington. Five days later, Haley was back in town as well--to announce her resignation at a surprise White House press conference beside Trump. "We hate to lose you," Trump said to Haley. "But hopefully you'll be coming back at some point. In maybe a different capacity. You can have your pick."
I found a fascinating thread behind Cohn in the last few days.
The Liberty League apparently wanted to install Hugh Johnson, a protégée of Bernard Baruch. Baruch was basically responsible for giving birth to the American Military-Industrial Complex when he headed the WIB during WWII, where he met Johnson. Baruch prevailed upon FDR to appoint Johnson to head the National Recovery Association, which basically legalized cartelization.
But the "heart" of the MIC was the American Security Council, of which Baruch was a member. The ASC was a successor organization to the America First Committee.
Baruch also financed the American Jewish League Against Communism, which was founded by Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, who had ties with the White Citizens Councils and got Cohn appointed to assist McCarthy.
The AJLAC included all the leading "anti-communist" Jews, and they went on to assist William F. Buckley (Skull and Bones, Knight of Malta, and agent of the CIA) found the National Review. Most of them also had ties to the JBS.
All the fascists behind McCarthy were all connected to the AFC, ASC, AJLAC, and the JBS.
And Benard Baruch's grandfather Kuttner Baruch was a member of the KKK. That's consistent with all these "anti-communist" Jews and their association with white supremacists, and proponents of a "Jewish" conspiracy.
Brabantian said (October 23, 2018):
Erdogan has for a long time been the ally and sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood was temporarily in power in Egypt after Morsi was elected by Egyptians, but the Brotherhood was set back when Morsi was removed from power by Egypt's al-Sisi, who had a Moroccan Jewish mother from a family connected to ben Gurion's Israeli government. Al-Sisi was an apparent Mossad plant in the Egyptian high command, and now Egypt's ruler:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/16/al-sisi-jew/
The brutal Wahhabi Saudi rulers, disliked by many common Arabs, are now being pushed into contempt by the Muslim Brotherhood populist Erdogan, ready to take the mantle of Sunni Arab leadership for himself and the Brotherhood. The Khashoggi killing may have been allowed and fostered, specifically to enable the Muslim Brotherhood come-back in the Levant as the leading political vehicle amongst Sunnis.