Mailbag; the Cost to Us of Israel; "Greatest Generation" Crap
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(1) 'Fanmail'. Now and then I get noxious emails from fools from hither and yon, not just the thoughtful messages I get from colleagues in Britain, Taiwan, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Let me share one hostile message and my reply.

Canada will never become part of your insane country, We are better in every way without you. except for losing wars in the middle east and asia which you excel at.

Please go fuck yourself with METER stick.

Greg in Calgary

PS. China will probably invade and destroy you within 50 years and when they do I will be happy.

I replied:

IF China attacks North America, it will likely crush Canada before taking on the United States, you fool. You are too stupid to be allowed near a computer, where you might compose idiotic emails that will embarrass you when you grow up. Do not bother intelligent people working for reasonable goals. Canada is a selfish, self-indulgent, self-important nothing in the world that refuses to step up to its responsibilities on this violent and benighted planet. Canadian nationalism is an ugly, ugly vice, and you have been twisted by its ugliness. The sooner Canada vanishes into history like the Republic of Texas, the better both the world and Canadians, who will be freed of the necessity to say stupid things out of envy.

I am very tired of Canadians, who are among the world's most selfish people, pretending moral superiority to us, who have expended hundreds of billions of dollars for others. How many hundreds of billions? See next item.
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(2) U.S. Aid to Israel, Total. I severely underestimated U.S. Government aid to Israel. I figured it had to be about $100 billion in constant dollars. But I found today an official U.S. AID website, the "Greenbook", which "shows a complete historical record of United States' (U.S.) foreign aid to the rest of the world by reporting all loans and grants authorized by the U.S. Government for each fiscal year." In constant dollars, for the entire period 1946-2005, U.S. Government aid to Israel totals $153 billion! That's for a population that has never been greater than 6.25 million, and for most of that period was less than 4 million.
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By contrast, U.S. aid to Egypt (population now 80 million) totaled $94 billion. The entire region "Middle East & North Africa", including Egypt, received $327 billion. For all of Sub-Saharan Africa (751 million people), for the same 60 years, $79 billion. For all of Latin America (pop. 550 million), $119 billion. For all of Asia (not including Israel), 3.9 billion people, $445 billion. For the entire world, $1.647 trillion.
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The population of the Earth is given, by the CIA World Factbook, as 6,602,224,175. Israel, which today has 6,426,679 people (also CIA World Factbook), comprises only 1% of the world's population, but has received 9% of all U.S. aid to this entire starving planet. Israel's per-capita income is $26,200. Why on Earth are they receiving so much as one red cent of foreign aid?
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Only 76% of Israel's population is Jewish (that is, 5 million). If one counts only Israeli Jews, who have received the bulk of the benefits of U.S. aid, the figure is even worse, and not just because its population was starkly smaller, both as an absolute number and as a percentage of the world's population, until very recently. If one were to forget about Israel's Jewish population being much smaller until the last 20 years or so, and figure disbursements on the assumption that Israel's Jews always comprised the same proportion of the world's population as now, 3/4 of 1%, they have received 12X as much, per capita, as people in other parts of the world.
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The disparity, when per-capita income is used as the criterion, is obscenely huge. Look at Sub-Saharan Africa's figure: $105.19 per person over the entire course of 60 years. Israel's tally? $153 billion, divided by 5 million Jews = $30,600 per person! Oh, that's fair. After all, they make $26,200 per year, so they need more than someone who makes $745 a year (the average per capita income for all of Sub-Saharan Africa) to make the same impact on their lives!
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Israel, one country of 193, has received 9% of all U.S. aid for the entire planet for the past six decades. And that's only Governmental aid. It does not count transfers by private entities, such as the United Jewish Appeal, Hadassah, and other charities.
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On December 9, 2002, a columnnist for the Christian Science Monitor wrote that the costs of U.S. support for Israel are even higher than the $153 billion U.S. AID reports. Much, much higher. The tally the Monitor reported includes not just aid to Israel but also costs to the United States that do not flow directly to Israel but are a drain on us due to U.S. support of Israel, such as oil-price increases imposed by Arab oil exporters in retaliation for U.S. offenses.

Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion [in Government grants, Government 'loans' that are actually grants, buyback arrangements, private transfers of funds to Israel, and various collateral costs to our economy in the form of both rewards to Egypt and Jordan for pro-Israel behavior and punishments of the U.S. inflicted by anti-Israel Arabs]. If divided by today's [U.S.] population, that is more than $5,700 per person. * * * [Note: This study appeared before the Iraq war, which was fought at Israel's insistence to make Israel safe from Iraq. So add another $500 billion, and counting. Oddly, altho that column appeared more than a year after the 9/11 attacks, and even tho the U.S. was attacked only because of Israel, the Christian Science Monitor column does not mention 9/11, nor include so much as one cent of the costs to the Nation, either direct or consequential, of those attacks. However, in the same year, 2002, as that column, CBS News estimated that the 9/11 attack would end up costing New York City $95 billion. The Afghanistan war was a direct result of the 9/11 attacks, so all the costs of that war are more or less directly attributable to U.S. support of Israel as well. So will be the costs of implementing the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, and those were estimated in February of this year at $21 billion over the next five years. These additional costs are on the order of $200 billion.]

Adjusting the official aid to 2001 dollars in purchasing power, Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, [Thomas] Stauffer [an economist hired to investigate the matter by the Army War College] reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel. * * *

[U.S. support for Israel also produced the Arab oil embargo of the 70s.] That shortfall in oil deliveries kicked off a deep recession. The US lost $420 billion (in 2001 dollars) of output as a result, Stauffer calculates. And a boost in oil prices cost another $450 billion.

Afraid that Arab nations might use their oil clout again, the US set up a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That has since cost, conservatively, $134 billion, Stauffer reckons. * * *

• US Jewish charities and organizations have remitted grants or bought Israel bonds worth $50 billion to $60 billion. Though private in origin, the money is "a net drain" on the United States economy, says Stauffer.

• Israel uses roughly 40 percent of its $1.8 billion per year in military aid, ostensibly earmarked for purchase of US weapons, to buy Israeli-made hardware. It also has won the right to require the Defense Department or US defense contractors to buy Israeli-made equipment or subsystems, paying 50 to 60 cents on every defense dollar the US gives to Israel.

US help, financial and technical, has enabled Israel to become a major weapons supplier. Weapons make up almost half of Israel's manufactured exports. US defense contractors often resent the buy-Israel [not "Buy American"] requirements and the extra competition subsidized by US taxpayers.

The columnist who wrote that Christian Science Monitor piece, David R. Francis, was attacked by an apparently well-coordinated flood of emails "sometimes using similar phrasing, occasionally employing a rather threatening tone". That had all the earmarks of a Jewish propaganda campaign such as I described here May 19th, in which a tightly organized, tiny Jewish minority tries to make itself appear much larger than it is by virtue of the assumption of a multiplier effect on the part of recipients of complaints — that is, they assume that for every one person who writes to complain, 50, 100, or even more people were offended but did not complain.
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Be not fooled, Christian Science Monitor. The Jews are a tiny, tiny minority, and Radical Zionists an even smaller minority. Believe it or not, a substantial number of American Jews are only grudgingly Zionist. Those who remain here do so because they don't want to live in Israel, don't want to be Israelis but Americans, and actually don't even approve of a tiny, small-minded country that elevates religious identification to the be-all and end-all of one's existence. So why are Radical Zionists so influential in this country? Because they control media and government, and insane "Christian Zionists" control evangelical churches confused about what is Christian and what is Jewish, or who know full well that Christians are not Jews but believe that Jesus can return to Earth only if the world ends in Armageddon, and Israel is the most likely source for a final war of annihilation that will bring Christ back to Earth. They support Israel not to save it but to see it destroyed in the Last Days before Jesus returns. And woe be to Jews who have refused His message once He has returned!
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Oh, and those Israelis who arrested duly elected Palestinian lawmakers today, in flagrant violation of every single principle of U.S. promotion of democracy in the Middle East? They will surely burn in Hell if Jesus does return.
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(3) "Greatest Generation", My Foot! I was ticked off when the anchor of NBC Nightly News yesterday referred to World War II veterans by the idiotic term coined by his predecessor, Tom Brokaw, "The Greatest Generation". So ticked off was I that this morning I sent NBC the following email.

Brian Williams used the odious term "Greatest Generation" to refer to WWII vets last nite. Oh?
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If the Great Depression/World War II generation is "the Greatest Generation", what were the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence, won our independence, and wrote the Constitution– George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and on, and on? What of the generation that kept the Union together in the Civil War – Abraham Lincoln and the hundreds of thousands who fought and died to preserve the Union and abolish slavery? What about the generation that settled the West, won independence for Texas and then added it to the Union, won the Mexican War and added California and the rest of the Southwest to the Union?
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And what of the mess the WWII generation left us, a little thing called the "Cold War" that lasted for 45 years!
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To call any one generation the "greatest" is at best impolitic. But if we are to call any one generation the "greatest", surely the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution are beyond any reasonable doubt our Very Greatest Generation. So far. Cheers.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,434 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:52 AM