Let’s return to the beginning of our story. Harry Truman, the Doctor Frankenstein of world history, the genitor of the monstrous CIA and of the first nuclear massacre, would also be the U.S. president who supported and recognized the State of Israel ten minutes after its proclamation, on May 15th, 1948. “Truman’s historic act of recognition will remain forever inscribed in golden letters in the 4000-year history of the Jewish people”, the Israeli ambassador would proclaim soon afterward. Truman burst into tears, it’s been said, when in Washington in 1949 the Chief Rabbi of Israel told him that: “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years”. His support for Zionism not only assured Truman a place in the biblical story as a new Cyrus, it also earned him two million dollars to revive his campaign, if one believes a young knowledgeable journalist of the time, John Kennedy. What we know for certain, is that his decision came from the advice of  his campaign manager Clark Clifford, but went against the recommendations of the Secretary of State George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, and finally against the British and their Foreign Minister Ernest Benin. In addition, Truman betrayed the promise made by Roosevelt to King Ibn Saud during a lengthy meeting in February 1945, confirmed on April 5th in a letter to his “Great and good friend”, that “no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews”; “I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people”.

In 1960, presidential candidate John Kennedy also received an offer of financial aid from Abraham Feinberg, representing the Israeli lobby. He summed it up to his friend and journalist Charles Bartlett: “We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy”; Bartlett recalls that Kennedy promised, “if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it”. From 1962 to 1963, he submitted seven bills in an effort to reform the Congressional campaign finance; every one were defeated by the influential groups they sought to curtail. Meanwhile, with the support of the Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, conducted an audit regarding “an increasing number of incidents involving attempts by foreign governments, or their agents, to influence the conduct of American foreign policy by techniques outside normal diplomatic channels”. The Committee insisted that by virtue of its funding coming in through the State of Israel, the American Zionist Council be registered as a “foreign agent” and therefore subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. The investigation would be brought to a halt by the Kennedy assassination and the replacement of his brother by Nicholas Katzenbach. The American Zionist Council escaped foreign agent status by renaming themselves the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Fulbright drew the conclusion on CBS (April 15, 1973): “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. […] The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. — somewhere around 80 percent — are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants, Israel gets”.

Kennedy was determined to prevent Israel from completing its nuclear weapons projects, and had firmly warned Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol that their refusal to open the Dimona site to regular international inspections deeply compromised their much-coveted American support. As we saw, Kennedy’s death freed Israel from any pressure and restriction. Instead, within ten years, Israel could build up enough nuclear bombs to start implementing its own aggressive brand of nuclear deterrence, known as the Samson Option: the paranoid threat of reducing the Middle East and Europe to ashes rather than let the Jews be the victims of a new holocaust, by which is meant a military defeat of Israel. This is exactly how Golda Meir blackmailed Nixon into sending military support to save Israel from an inevitable defeat by Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as journalist Seymour Hersh has documented (The Samson Option, 1991). In 2003, a military expert and historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Martin van Creveld, declared to The Gardian (September 21st) that the Palestinians’ recurrent intifadas will ultimately find only one solution: the « transfer » of all Palestinians out of Palestine, that is, the completion of the ethnic cleansing started in 1948. Concerning the risk of world opposition to that, he added: “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. […] We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under”. 
Kennedy was committed to the right of return of 800,000 Palestinian refugees expelled from their neighborhoods and villages in 1947-48, and on November 20th, 1963, his delegation to the United Nations called for the implementation of Resolution 194 for just that purpose. Kennedy probably never read the outraged reactions of Israel in the newspapers: two days later, he was murdered. The coming to power of Johnson was greeted with relief in Tel Aviv, as evidenced in the Israeli newspaper Yedio Ahoronot: “There is no doubt that, with the accession of Lyndon Johnson, we shall have more opportunity to approach the President directly if we should feel that U.S. policy militates against our vital interests”.

By contrast, the mourning was deep in the Arab world, where the portrait of Kennedy graced many homes. With his disappearance from the world stage, said Nasser, “De Gaulle is the only Western State leader on whose friendship the Arabs who can now depend”. Kennedy had reduced financial aid to Israel, and sent grain to Egypt under the Food for Peace program. In 1965, Johnson would cut aid to Egypt and multiply aid to Israel, which went from $40 million to $71 million, reaching $130 million the following year. While under the Kennedy administration Israel had been authorized the sale of some defensive missile systems, under Johnson more than 70% of their received foreign aid financed the purchase of military equipment, including 250 tanks and 48 Skyhawk offensive aircraft. Conversely, by denying Egypt and Algeria U.S. aid, Johnson forced them to turn to the USSR in their effort to keep up with the arms race, largely initiated by Israel.

In 1956, Americans under Eisenhower had opposed the invasion of the Suez Canal by Israel, France and Britain. In contrast, in June 1967, Johnson would give Israel a “yellow light” for its “preventive” war against Egypt (which would prove a war of annexation); in a letter dated June 3rd, Johnson assured Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol: “I want to protect the territorial integrity of Israel […] and will provide as effective American support as possible to preserve the peace and freedom of your nation and of the area”. Five days later, Israel launched its treacherous attack on the USS Liberty, with the obvious intention of living no one alive to lay the blame on Egypt. Johnson accepted Israel’s spurious “targeting error” explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas ranch. The lesson would not be lost on Israel: the price for failure in a false-flag operation against the United States is non-existent. In fact, failure is impossible, since the Americans take it upon themselves to cover up the crime. Better yet, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on military equipment: weapons and aircrafts (F4-Phantoms) immediately flowed to Tel Aviv. Military sales would reach $600 million in 1971 and $3 billion two years later, making Israel customer number one of the U.S. defense industry.

It was also in 1967, in preparation for the Six Day War, that cooperation between the CIA and the Mossad took on a crucial importance, under the supervision of James Jesus Angleton. During a meeting in Washington on May 30th, 1967, the CIA provided Mossad chief Meir Amit photos taken from satellites and spy planes, which enabled Israel to precisely locate the Egyptian armaments and destroy them within six days. The extent of CIA-Mossad cooperation afterwards is unclear, but one aspect of the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 6th, 1968, strongly suggests a Mossad involvement. How else can we explain the fact that the patsy prepared to adopt the crime was a Palestinian young man allegedly motivated by hatred of Israel? When he was arrested, Sirhan Sirhan had in his pocket a newspaper article about Robert Kennedy’s promise to sell 50 bombers to Israel, if elected. Pages in his diary (of which he would claim no memory) were filled with repetitive words  — as in automatic writing — of anger to RFK for his support — quite reserved in reality — for Israel: “RFK must die, RFK must be killed” —  The assassination of Robert Kennedy appears in “superficial history” (as opposed to “deep history”) as the first act of international terrorism carried out on American soil and motivated by the Palestinian hate for Israel. Such fabrication bears the stamp of Israel. Could it have had something to do with the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israeli army a year earlier, almost to the day, and with Johnson’s willingness to cover it up? The question will probably remain forever unanswered, but what we know of Johnson’s character makes it conceivable that he sold the impunity of Israel in exchange for the murder of his mortal enemy.

The collaboration between the American and Israeli deep states would only be strengthened throughout the 1970s and 80s. Israeli intelligence services played a notably decisive role in the secret negotiations with Iran that allowed the Republicans the win in 1980, and further to illegally arm the Contras with the benefits of the arms sales to Iran. The Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, wanted the elimination of Carter, who put pressure on Israel to create a Palestinian state and the restitution of Sinai to Egypt, as the main Israeli officer involved, Ari Ben-Menashe, explained to the investigative journalist Robert Parry (The Stolen Narrative, 2012). This secret collaboration between Israel and the U.S. under Bush Sr, and its concomitant manipulation of American democracy, would be reactivated again under Bush Jr in 2001.

Ultimately, there is a direct and undeniable causal link between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and September 11th: the conditions for the second would not have materialized if President Kennedy had survived and continued his policy. The Cold War could not have been exploited for Israel’s purely nationalist ends, and imperialist militarism would likely have been restrained. Beyond the simple question of Israel, the Kennedy assassination marks the victory of the corrupting forces of American democracy and world peace. These are the same forces that, thirty-eight years later, orchestrated the September 11th attacks and led the world into a war of civilizations whose wounds will take centuries to heal. The main perpetrators of the Kennedy assassination and September 11th are not the same; but it is likely that the involvement of Bush in the Dallas crime, however small, created the conditions for a complex blackmail of his son and family, forcing Bush Jr. to take the brunt of the responsibility for the September 11th plot and to pursue a pro-Israeli policy of which his father disapproved. The Bush clan was beaten at their own game, albeit by players of a higher league.

From the point of view of social psychology, there are also reasons to believe that the handling and cover-up of September 11th could not have taken place without the mechanisms of propaganda designed to keep the truth about November 22nd hidden. To use a psychoanalytic concept, the Kennedy lie constitutes a kind of “crypt”, a dark and repressed secret working deep within America’s unconscious that made, and makes it vulnerable to other lies. Every lie told creates a further predisposition to lie, not least due to all the lies required to keep the first from exposure, and the crypt deepens as each lie is buried into another. Conversely, the unveiling of a lie threatens to unveil other lies, which is why we still see a fierce desire to perpetuate the lie about the death of Kennedy, which if once ever fully exposed would inevitably lead to the unearthing of the truths about September 11th.

There are also structural parallels between the two cases. The role of the Vice-President is one: Johnson and Cheney were both key players in conspiracies. Though Kennedy had to be murdered for Johnson to take his place, Bush didn’t have to die to let Cheney reign : he was a dummy from the beginning. Another even more important parallel is the role played by a foreign power. From a certain point of view, the Kennedy assassination can be regarded as a partially aborted triangular false flag operation, involving three powers: a foreign government “F” (the anti-Castro Cubans in exile) organizes an attack against an allied and higher power “A” (the United States) under the false flag of a enemy power “E” (the Castro government), in hopes of duping A to fight E its place. From this point of view, the Kennedy assassination is the blueprint for September 11th, a much more successful operation where the triangular structure is even more clearly marked: the ally “A” who suffers the attack is again the United States, while “F” is this time Israel, and the enemy “E” to be fought is the Muslim world, that is to say, the neighbors hostile to Israel. In both cases, the project was developed through a close relationship between the secret services of powers “F” and “A”: in the 1960s, Cuban exiles had woven a fine relationship with the CIA, and beginning with the Presidency Johnson, the Mossad has done much, if not more, of the same.

There are many commonalities between American policies vis-à-vis Cuba and Israel, as shown by Lawrence Davidson in Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest (2009). U.S. policy regarding Cuba is largely due to the influential lobby Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), founded in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa. Canosa explained that he had modeled his organization on AIPAC: “We realized pretty soon that to influence the U.S. political system we must copy [...] the Jewish model, and we became very closely allied with the Jewish lobby and the Jewish movement in Washington”. Mas Canosa was a veteran of the Bay of Pigs motivated by a visceral hatred of Castro and, according to Davidson, had “institutionalized that hatred when he founded the Cuban American National Foundation”. Florida has always been a “swing state” because of a million Cuban exiles, whose majority the CANF can rally relatively at will. Consequently, after Kennedy, without exception all American presidents have maintained the political embargo against Cuba. Clinton, for example, felt obliged to promise during his campaign to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro and Cuba”, and his successor Bush Jr, to “see the end of the Castro régime”. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department, called the embargo “the dumbest policy on the face of the earth”, because it serves the interests of neither the Americans nor the Cubans, and is rather merely the obsession of a powerful lobby. The U.S. policy towards Israel is the exact opposite of unconditional hostility towards Cuba but with the same rigid permanence, and for many of the same electoral reasons. Both policies are as absurd as the other, which is why they are kept mired in convoluted rhetoric and perpetual propaganda. They involve criminal complicity between the secret services, which inevitably degenerate into staging fake or real attacks carried out under false flags. On the side of the Cuban diaspora, the criminal transformation is embodied in Mas Canosa himself, who, according to an investigation by the New York Times, was the origin of the attack on flight 455 from the national company Cubana de Aviacion, on October 6th, 1976: 73 Cuban and Venezuelan passengers would not survive. Among those involved was Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, also formerly of Operation 40 and the assault on the Bay of Pigs, but the U.S. has refused to extradite him to Venezuela for judgment, in violation of the extradition treaty between the two countries. Thus the United States government, who threaten any country protecting terrorists, falls under its own judgment.

The abusive power of pressure groups is nothing other than a symptom of a deeper disease in American democracy. How is it that American democratic institutions, originally designed to allow citizens to be governed by those they deem worthy, have become the opposite: a system that encourages the most corrupt to claw their way to the summit power, and permits anti-democratic forces to govern from behind a shroud? The short answer was given by Iranian President Ahmadinejad on September 26th, 2012, in the form of a rhetorical question: “Can anybody believe that those spending hundreds of millions of dollars on electoral campaigns have the people’s interests at heart?” The power of lobbies is essentially financial, and results from a U.S. electoral system that imposes no limit on campaign financing; writ large, it means that anyone elected, unless benefitting from a huge personal fortune (as was the case with Kennedy), is necessarily bought before ever setting foot in the Oval Office.

But the disease is not only institutional. It’s said that the fish rots from the head, but to a large extent, a democracy gets the leaders it deserves, because it produces its elites through a complex process of selection. To parasite the U.S. politics, Israel exploits a civilizational affinity rooted in the minds of the two peoples, that is to say in their national mythologies. Lyndon Johnson once summarized it well, comparing, before a Jewish audience, “the Jewish pioneers building a home in the desert” to his own ancestors colonizing the New World. What he emphasized, perhaps unintentionally, is the equivalence between the Zionist lie of “a land without people for a people without a land”, which has been used by every denier of the ethnic cleansing, and the Americans’ denial of their own genocidal history. Are not the Palestinians Israel’s Indians? This shared disregard in the national unconscious is accompanied by the same arrogant belief in divine election, summarized in the American mythology by their Manifest Destiny and eloquently expressed by President Woodrow Wilson to justify the United States’ going to war in 1917: “We are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the path of liberty”.

Empathy, which is the experience of human brotherhood, and the only path leading toward peace, comes not from one who believes himself superior by virtue of his race, nationality, ideology or religion. The rhetoric of the “clash of civilizations”, invented today as a ideological tool and replacement for anti-communism, spreads Islamophobic propaganda and seeds a culture of antipathy, or better put, fear, inevitably leading to hatred and war. The neoconservatives, who have appropriated this myth, like to paint the world in a brutal portrait, calling our human relationships relentless fights to the death, and conclude that therefore the first responsibility of any civilization wanting to survive is to construct the highest capability for defense, for aggression, and for maximum destruction. “Creative destruction is our middle name”, said Michael Ledeen in The War against the Terror Masters. “Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. […] they must attack us to survive, just like we must destroy them to advance our historic mission”.

It is thus urgent that we think differently if we hold out hope to build upon these ruins of Empire a “civilization of empathy”; perhaps to begin, should we not admit that the whole of humanity is together a “chosen people”? “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal”.