Conman, convict, paedophile and a life terminated in circumstances of purported suicide. The list for Jeffrey E. Epstein, figure of cosmic social and political influence in the United States, is long. Trafficking in female flesh for his extensive client list, lubricated by his lover Ghislaine Maxwell, tends to be the crowning feature of most discussions about his sordid legacy. Another shrouded aspect has been neglected.
The fuss about releasing the Epstein files – the slowness with which the US Justice Department is undertaking that task, the erratic nature of its redactions, and what gold nuggets might be found – gives us a chance to examine the Israeli dimension in US politics. In November, Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain of Drop Site News showed the seedier side of that dimension in exposing Epstein’s role in what can be loosely termed the Israeli lobby. This involved a dedicated effort to discredit the work of two scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who had done much to sketch the outlines of the very thing his own conduct affirmed.
Originally commissioned in late 2002 by The Atlantic, the article, written as a working paper, was simply entitled “The Israeli Lobby.” The subject, however, had become heated and worrying to the editors. When the article was ready for publication, the United States was involved in a futile, bloody conflict in Iraq that Mearsheimer and Walt argued was “motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.” The authors were offered a “kill fee” of $10,000 for their consent to pull the piece. “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made,” quipped Mearsheimer in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
The article eventually found a home at the London Review of Books, to be followed in book form, having an immediate, incendiary effect. It notes the Israeli Lobby as an extensive, fanning presence in the American political landscape, comprising think tanks, the muscular American Israel Public Affairs Committee, neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, and journalists with clout. Its aims are clear: “Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential in so far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power.” Hand in hand, Israel and pro-Israel groups in the US had “worked together to shape the administration’s policy toward Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.”
Epstein proceeded to play a role in the campaign against Walt and Mearsheimer. His pro-Israel credentials were impeccable. He had a close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He aided the brokering of various deals for Israeli intelligence and security interests. These included oiling a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia; aiding the creation of a backchannel between Israel and Russia during the Syrian Civil War and facilitating a security agreement between Israel and the West African state of Côte d’Ivoire. He hosted an Israeli intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, on at least three occasions in Manhattan. “He was a dealmaker and a fixer at a very, very elite level,” says Hussain.
One need not bother about the accusation that Epstein might have been in the specific pay of the Israeli intelligence service to show where his allegiances lay. He was a dedicated spear carrier for Israeli interests. In the apoplexy that broke out among members of the lobby to the Walt and Mearsheimer paper, he featured prominently, as emails from his Yahoo! account reveal. Epstein’s specific role in targeting the two scholars came from correspondence obtained by the non-profit whistleblower entity Distributed Denial of Secrets and made available to Drop Site News.
Of interest here is the correspondence between Epstein and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, himself a devoted apologist for Israeli causes. During the first week of April 2006 Dershowitz, who also acted for Epstein in criminal matters, passed on several drafts of his article “Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy” to the financier. That tatty, travesty of a piece accused Walt and Mearsheimer of putting together “little more than a compilation of old, false, and authoritatively discredited charges dressed up in academic garb,” incarnating in modern form the conspiratorial tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
After Epstein’s warm congratulations for the libellous effort, the question of how best to distribute the piece comes to the fore. To a query from Dershowitz’s email address sent by an assistant regarding progress on the matter, Epstein replies: “yes I’ve started.” Here, the vital entrails of the Lobby become clear: Epstein’s relationship with Harvard (donor of sums over $9 million between 1998 and 2008); Epstein as trustee and president of the family financial office of retail mogul and philanthropist Leslie Wexner, himself a donor of almost $20 million to the Kennedy School between 2000 and 2006 via a foundation bearing his name and responsible for a scholar program for visiting Israeli government officials to study a one-year Master’s degree.
The effect of such strategizing was to curb the reach of Walt and Mearsheimer. Scheduled talks were cancelled or readjusted to include a pro-Israeli voice. Mearsheimer, in reacting to the emails, proved characteristically unflappable. “I’m not surprised to see these emails, because Dershowitz and Epstein were close and both have a passionate attachment to Israel.” It will be a frigid comfort for both he and Walt that their thesis on the bewitching influence of the Israeli lobby’s workings has been so profoundly vindicated.
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It remains interesting that the only person to be prosecuted for Epstein’s alleged crimes is Ghislaine Maxwell who is now in low security detention with the prospect of a Presidential pardon not far away.
The ‘client list’ of ‘Johns’ who preyed on these young girls, procured by Epstein and Maxwell, all of a sudden no longer exists and beyond Andrew Mountbatten Windsor there is nobody to prosecute and they won’t get Andrew.
Then we have the alleged suicide of Epstein. A man well able to pay for the best legal defence team in the US all of a sudden commits suicide in an unexplained situation with his close monitoring and constant security unable to explain how he managed to kill himself when he was on the cusp of being bailed and potentially having the charges dismissed.
And Administration reluctant to release relevant documents even to the extent of defying congressional orders and then redacting names and narratives evidently to protect the alleged perpetrators including it seems the POTUS.
Very strange !
Dershowitz is an old master of opprobrium. Well versed in the “how dare you!” defense he has the heart of a zionist and the actions of a hasbarist. Seems like attracts like.
More US RW agitprop? Cites two of the three amigos or frenemies in Netanyahu & Trump regimes, but misses the other?
Putin’s regime (for now) and the writer cites Putin/Valdai Club’s & Charles Koch’s John Mearsheimer; another American RWNJ generalist masquerading as centrist geopolitical expert promoting geopolitical ‘realism’ of strong over the weak? Simply eugenics?
Same Mearsheimer has visited Hungary to be given an award by Abbott’s chum PM ‘mini Putin’ Orbán in the land of the anti-semitic Soros conspiracy; cooked up with the help of former Netanyahu aides.
Ditto the Rockefeller linked nut job Jeffrey Sachs, has been given an award by Orbán and also runs PR or protection for the same anti-Ukraine, anti-EU and anti-liberal democratic, corrupt and authoritarian autocrats.
Missed by many ‘tankies’ in Oz several weeks ago Sachs had another….meltdown in Europe, live on Italian tv discussion show.
When he was challenged by a centrist Senator on the former’s comments versus Ukraine; alleged Sachs was a liar in aid of the Kremlin and Sachs did not rebut/counter, but had a visible meltdown…… what have they got on him, and like many adjacent others who crossed over with Epstein?
Couple more tankie tidbits; Israel is 20%+ ethnic Russian & 2018 or ’19 election Netanyahu featured both Putin and Trump in his election campaign.
The Israel lobby and Netanyahu are implicitly linked to both Trump and Putin….and Netanyahu.
Also help from Koch Network’s Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project Esther’ versus Palestine & universities (NYT May ’25).
Putin observes the ensuing and confected chaos by RW MSM and influencers using Project Esther post events in the US, and now Australia……to pummel the centre…..
Only reference in media to Project Esther locally (sits on the Heritage website), has been Dave Milner article from The Shot b4 Xmas (albeit 6 months late); what does it say about our ‘medium’, investigative and analytical skills?
No matter which way one looks at it, no matter ‘who’s up who and who’s paying the rent’, whether it’s sectarian, secular, commercial, academic or raw seeking of power and political ambition, since the year dot matters in the ‘fertile crescent and Levant’ in addition to those in north Africa have dominated the obsessive pursuits of the western hegemons, and to an extent (with different perspectives), Russia.
They have used every device from warrior brutality to psychological coercion and ‘charm offensives’ to obtain supremacy. Whether it be for the old ‘domination of the Mediterranean’ or the old ‘control of the gateway to the east (and south)’, it matters not.
But it still remains an obsession. An obsession that over time became riddled with spite and vengeance, increased by coalitions and affiliations.
Whilst Europe recovered from its self-inflicted wounds, and came to reflect upon its brutalities and stupidities, America’s hubris and self-righteousness grew. Its streams of post-conflict migration burgeoned, assured by its assertion of itself as ‘world’s policeman’. Yet, its naive and problematic Constitution and money-from-anywhere oriented political m.o. made it vulnerable to and driven by powered-up collectives who increasingly narrowed its view to an exceptionalist xenophobia. Which, if cracked through, and worked from the inside would give the successful influencers enormous political power.
It seems reasonable to assert that in the last 60 or so years, that crack-through has happened (on numerous fronts), and has slowly but surely niggled away at America’s puritanical roots, its notions of supremacy, its febrile political system, its focus on money and might, and its increasing paranoia about ‘others’.
Where it may once have at least sufficed with detente, in America, history is readily set aside for the convenience of the currency of bling, so various nigglings have corrupted it politically into self-interested adventurism of a militaristic and coercive nature, frequently exercising criminality and deadly brutality.
Its slippery slide into debt, quantitative easing and domestic poverty has it yet again profoundly polarized and confronted by political blather. So confused has America become, and so constrained by its political febrility, it got itself the Trump-resurrected GOP and all the very worst of the brutal anti-democratic influencers and lobbyists that could bend it and the world to the demise of universal and sustainable peace, equity and amity.
That the political focus of its obsessions and apparently intractable problems are drawn back to the ‘fertile crescent and the Levant’ seems inevitable.
No surprise really, as now it seems they aren’t able to trade their way out of it. Awful for most, but deadly for many.
Clacka, thanx, Now I don’t have to write a similar comment when this one already says it all.
Always real. Can’t get over Binoy Kampmark.
Elsewhere on Socmeeja, Mearsheimer, now getting old, campaigns against the Gaza monstrosity.