Friday, January 27, 2012

On Jan 26, 2012 our colleague Walt wrote:
You just can't make this stuff up.

*****

Steven Spielberg To Direct Moses Movie For Warner Bros -- Near Commitment
http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/steven-spielberg-moses-movie-gods-and-kings-warner-bros/

[excerpt]

"Meanwhile this marks the second high-profile film Warner Bros is developing on a seminal Jewish hero. Mel Gibson and Joe Eszterhas are collaborating on their pitch to tell the story of Jewish warrior Judah Maccabee, who teamed with his father and four brothers to lead the Jewish revolt against the Greek-Syrian armies that had conquered Judea in the 2nd century B.C. Gibson has the first option to direct, and he will produce the film through his Icon Productions banner."

*****

Michael Hoffman comments:

It would all be terrific if these movies were all going to be strictly in accord with the Bible, rather than the Talmud.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions on Gibson's proposed movie. First, Hollywood execrates him, especially since his Russian inamorata episode; and second, Maccabees is in the Apocrypha, which Catholics accept as Scripture; but if Gibson embroiders it with Hanukkah folderol then we know he is trying to rehabilitate his reputation with the Sanhedrin. But until that happens, he should be given the benefit of the doubt.

With Spielberg - how will he portray the appearance of the Israelites: with the physiognomy of the Lower East Side, or of Max Von Sydow?

And will his "Moses" movie be a thinly veiled parable of Israeli Zionists vs. evil camel jockeys?

Will he play an occult angle vis a vis the Egyptian magic that is the cradle of the sorcery and superstition of the Kabbalah and Talmud?

In the secret writings of the rabbis their canonical texts are referred to as the "burial place of Moses" (in other words, of the nullification of Mosaic law). So in fact, Moses has nothing to do with Orthodox Judaism except as a billboard falsely advertising the religion's alleged Biblical bona fides.

By the way, we should give credit where credit is due: Spielberg was reasonably fair to the Germans depicted in his schmaltzy World War I film "War Horse.”

***

Thursday, January 26, 2012



Here are the contents of the latest issue of Revisionist History Newsletter 
now being mailed to subscribers

Revisionist History Newsletter no. 60: 

"Freemasons in the American Civil War: A Conspiracy of Preferential Treatment.” 
Hoffman examines the one masonic machination that can't be denied, and the implications of this revisionist history for a new understanding of the role of Freemasons in the War Between the States.

Also: "Auguries of Warfare Inside the Puzzle Palace.” 
Starting with a ritual synchronicity in the upcoming 2012 London Summer Olympics, Hoffman proceeds to put forth his theory concerning, "Operation Bar Kokhba," the code name for the conflict management of a high level faction of British occultism with links to the fourth branch of the British Secret Service.

Plus: The Neocon Legacy in Iraq; Hoover's Indictment of Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War"; Syria's Alawites; A New History of the Volkswagen; The Hammer and the Cross: the Vikings Reconsidered; National Defense Authorization Act in "The Land of the UnFree"; The 2012 Republican Presidential Primary: An Analysis; Israeli Supreme Court Upholds Nazi Law; Correcting myths about the life of Christopher Hitchens; Some Thoughts on the Sinking of the Titanic; and more.

Or save money and Subscribe  - we'll start your subscription with this issue.

The contents of Revisionist History newsletter are not published online and are available only to subscribers and those who purchase individual copies.

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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Atlanta Jewish Times Owner Gets Away with Threat to Assassinate President Obama
By Michael Hoffman 
"You are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies. Yes, you read...correctly. Order a hit on the president in order to preserve Israel's existence."
 --Andrew B. Adler, Owner/Publisher, Atlanta Jewish Times, Jan. 13, 2012 
The Mossad has an arm long enough to be considered a likely candidate for murdering Obama with impunity. Investigative reporter Michael Collins Piper in his book Final Judgment argued persuasively that Mossad was at the center of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is also likely that Mossad has been terror-bombing Iranian scientists and their wives over the past few years. Mossad’s terrorism has generally been applauded and even glorified in the West.
Because of their marketing and public relations savvy, we rarely glimpse what top American Zionists are really thinking. In this case, the Atlanta Jewish Times seems to have goofed and let the murderous Mossad cat out of the bag.
As my friend Stan in Louisiana asked when this story first broke, “What would happen to a gentile owner of a Missoula, Montana newspaper if he had made the same threat against the life of President Obama, although for different reasons?”
Stan and I both know the answer to that one, as I'm sure most of you do: the thunder from the corporate media would be deafening. The Montana goy would be in Secret Service custody right now; a SWAT-team would raid and search his newspaper’s offices and his employees would be sternly interrogated. None of that has befallen Mr. Adler, the Judaic publisher in Atlanta who last week openly advocated having the Israeli Mossad murder the President of the United States.
There are two parts to this news story: the assassination threat itself and, perhaps just as important, the immunity of the Zionist who issued it. 
***

Friday, January 20, 2012

By Michael Hoffman
1. Media Blackout of Ron Paul  in South Carolina
Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, in his jeremiads focuses on the America media as a leading culprit in our national demise.
By way of proving Dr. Roberts’ point, let’s examine  two examples of media bias so flagrant we have to resort to the word chutzpagh to lend it the notoriety it so richly deserves.
Observing the run-up to the South Carolina Republican primary, one has to wonder whether the controversies over Romney’s tax returns and Gingrich’s sex life, with Santorum portrayed as the alternative to these two agents of the Establishment, is not really a contrivance for detracting from the only authentic anti-Establishment, peace candidate in the Republican race, Rep. Ron Paul, who since the New Hampshire primary, has been all but banished to the lower reaches of the System’s darkest memory hole.
The media do not even offer a pretext of objectivity in hammering home their Romney-Gingrich-Santorum triumvirate, wherein Paul doesn’t even exist and isn’t even a factor, despite the fact that Rep. Paul had a better showing in Iowa (where we now find that the caucus voting was subject to fraud) and New Hampshire -- than Gingrich -- who is being touted as the most popular anybody-but-Romney option.
The media are terrified by the prospect of a Paul nomination at the Republican national convention this summer and are pulling out all the stops to deny it to him. The major television networks and the three major national newspapers (USA Today, Wall Street Journal and New York Times) are all owned by corporations who, by boycotting Paul, are influencing and swaying the election just as surely as any of the super-pacs they have so haughtily denounced. 
If Paul does poorly in South Carolina it will be largely due to the blackout aimed at him by the media. The media are tampering with the will of the American people while posing as journalists who love America. Is this not treason?
2. New York Times resolves a Talmudic embarrassment with lies 
Our next case involves a Talmudic embarrassment which the New York Times has ignored for years: the gender segregation of Israeli “Mehadrin” buses, which require Judaic women to move to the back of the bus. Miriam Shear was one of the first activists to protest this outrage and she was ignored by the Times for years. Lately, however, the Hasidic Orthodox Judaics leading the segregated bus campaign clashed with the Modern Orthodox who have close ties to corporate honchos at the New York Times. The Hasidic Orthodox have been spitting on Christians, including priests in Jerusalem for years and the Times has barely reported it.  But when the Hasidim spat at Naama Margolese, a Modern Orthodox Judaic girl, claiming the modest dress she was wearing wasn’t modest enough to suit their particular level of Talmudic fanaticism, the Times sprang into action and publicized the Israeli bus system’s gender segregation policies which degrade women.
There is an inescapable dilemma in such reporting, however: the Hasidim act according to rabbinic halacha as enshrined in the Mishnah and Gemara (“Talmud"), and subsequent texts and responsa issued by rabbinic poskim and gedolim over the centuries.
In other words, exposing the Jim Crow-like dimensions of the “women to the back of the bus” Talmudic culture, simultaneously exposes the Talmud to derision as a misogynist document; a conclusion intolerable to the Times, which has its own in-house reporter (Joseph Berger) charged with writing regular puff pieces upholding the supposed nobility, decency, joy, love and warmth of Orthodox (Talmudic) Judaism.
How to reconcile this contradiction between the ballyhooed Talmudic culture most always portrayed in the pages of the Times as the pinnacle of justice and decency, and the degradation of women displayed by the Hasidim?
With a kind of intellectual dishonesty typical of the most disingenuous pilpulist, on Jan. 19 the Times parsed the moral lesson to be drawn as one that exonerates the Talmud: “Lechery, Immodesty and the Talmud”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/opinion/ultra-orthodox-jews-and-the-modesty-fight.html

"The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men...The Talmud tells the religious man, in effect: If you have a problem, you deal with it. It is the male gaze — the way men look at women — that needs to be desexualized, not women in public. The power to make sure men don’t see women as objects of sexual gratification lies within men’s — and only men’s — control.”  - New York Times, Jan. 19, 2012
The New York newspaper puts forth the notion that the Talmud places the emphasis on controlling lust on the male Judaic. Therefore, with this in mind, the general public is lead to believe that the Hasidim are proceeding against the women victimized based on anti-Talmudic principles!
This is an easily proved, blatantly outrageous lie which depends for its credibility upon the gullibility and ignorance of the goyim as well as those Judaics who are lacking in knowledge of the Talmudic texts.
Compare the New York Times’ abysmal propaganda for the Talmud with Israeli journalist Yossi Sarid’s impassioned and candid cri de coeur against it: “Orthodox Judaism treats women like filthy little things” (Haaretz newspaper, December 30)
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/orthodox-judaism-treats-women-like-filthy-little-things-1.404505
Orthodox Judaism, whether in its “modern” or Hasidic incarnation, is ruled by the Talmud and cognate rabbinic texts. Those texts out-Taliban the Taliban in their sub-cellar denigration of women. The New York Times can’t come clean on this subject because they’ve staked their entire world view on propagating “The Holocaust” and Talmudic (Orthodox) Judaism as planet earth’s two most noble objects of unquestioning veneration and respect. So they lie to protect Talmudic Judaism from any lessening of the aura of supreme worship which the media in America cultivate concerning it. No other religion enjoys this level of protection and camouflage.
These two big deceptions: the blackout of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul over the past week, and the promotion of the Babylonian Talmud as a pro-woman sacred text, are just two examples of the way in which one of the worst, most biased and crooked news media in the world operate, right here in the good ol’ US of A.

***

Michael Hoffman is the defiant and unrepentant author of the books The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians; Judaism Discovered; and Judaism’s Strange Gods. He is a former reporter for the American Contemporary Radio Division of ABC News and the New York bureau of the Associated Press.

*** 

Thursday, January 12, 2012


[Michael Hoffman’s comments are in red]

Adversaries of Iran Said to Be Stepping Up Covert Actions


Mehdi Marizad/Fars News Agency, via Associated Press
A bomb attached to a car killed an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran on Wednesday. The United States condemned the attack.



WASHINGTON — As arguments flare in Israel and the United States about a possible military strike to set back Iran’s nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to current and former American officials and specialists on Iran.
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The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a supervisor at a uranium enrichment plant.

Readers’ Comments

The [terror] campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.
The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon [which "western leaders" and on what evidence?]. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. [No mention that the terror attack wounded Abbasi’s wife].
Iranian officials immediately blamed both Israel and the United States for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base that killed a top general and 16 other people. While American officials deny a role in lethal activities ["Lethal activities"? Why can’t the Times call it terrorism, as they would if a similar attack on an American missile base had occurred?], the United States is believed to engage in other covert efforts against the Iranian nuclear program.
The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks [lethal attacks = euphemism for terrorism], which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.
“The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”
“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbors and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behavior, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,” Mrs. Clinton said.
The Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, writing on Facebook about the attack, said, “I don’t know who took revenge on the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding a tear,” Israeli news media reported. [The world would be expected to shed copious tears if an Israeli scientist had been assassinated by Islamists].
Like the drone strikes that the Obama administration has embraced as a core tactic against Al Qaeda, the multifaceted covert campaign [covert campaign = euphemism for terror campaign] against Iran has appeared to offer an alternative to war [this is quite a stretch: terrorism as an “alternative” to war]. But at most it has slowed, not halted, Iran’s enrichment of uranium, a potential fuel for a nuclear weapon. And some skeptics believe that it may harden Iran’s resolve or set a dangerous precedent for a strategy that could be used against the United States and its allies.
Neither Israeli nor American officials will discuss the covert campaign in any detail, leaving some uncertainty about the perpetrators and their purpose. For instance, Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he believed that at least some of the murdered scientists might have been killed by the Iranian government. [Okay to accuse Iran of this but absolutely discreditable to accuse the US government of being behind the 9/11 attacks] Some of them had shown sympathy for the Iranian opposition, he said, and not all appeared to have been high-ranking experts.
“I think there is reason to doubt the idea that all the hits have been carried out by Israel,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It’s very puzzling that Iranian nuclear scientists, whose movements are likely carefully monitored by the state, can be executed in broad daylight, sometimes in rush-hour traffic, and their culprits never found.”
A more common view, however, is expressed by Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I often get asked when Israel might attack Iran,” Mr. Clawson said. “I say, ‘Two years ago.’ ”
Mr. Clawson said the covert campaign [when Israelis assassinate a scientist it is a “covert campaign;” when Muslims assassinate someone it is terrorism] was far preferable to overt airstrikes by Israel or the United States on suspected Iranian nuclear sites. “Sabotage and assassination is the way to go, if you can do it,” he said. “It doesn’t provoke a nationalist reaction in Iran, which could strengthen the regime. And it allows Iran to climb down if it decides the cost of pursuing a nuclear weapon is too high.”
[“Sabotage and assassination is the way to go” says Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- cheerleading for terrorism!].

A former senior Israeli security official, who would speak of the covert campaign ["covert campaign" again; the NY Times simply will not ever refer to it as terrorism] only in general terms and on the condition of anonymity, said the uncertainty about who was responsible was useful. “It’s not enough to guess,” he said. “You can’t prove it, so you can’t retaliate. When it’s very, very clear who’s behind an attack, the world behaves differently.”
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Timeline: Attacks on Iran’s Nuclear Program

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Readers’ Comments

The former Israeli official noted that Iran carried out many assassinations of enemies, mostly Iranian opposition figures, during the 1980s and 1990s, and had been recently accused of plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington.
“In Arabic, there’s a proverb: If you are shooting, don’t complain about being shot,” he said. But he portrayed the killings and bombings as part of a larger Israeli strategy to prevent all-out war. [Can you believe this: when Israelis kill and bomb it’s part of a peace strategy!].
“I think the cocktail of diplomacy, of sanctions, of covert activity might bring us something,” the former official said. “I think it’s the right policy while we still have time.”
Israel has used assassination as a tool of statecraft since its creation in 1948, historians say, killing dozens [hundreds] of Palestinian and other militants and a small number of foreign scientists [“In Arabic, there’s a proverb: If you are shooting, don’t complain about being shot,”] military officials or people accused of being Holocaust collaborators. [The Times  invokes the 1940s-era “Holocaust" in a report on the Middle East].
But there is no exact precedent for what appears to be the current campaign against Iran, involving Israel and the United States and a broad array of methods.
The assassinations have been carried out primarily by motorcyclists who attach magnetic bombs to the victim’s car, often in heavy traffic, before speeding away.
Iran’s Mehr news agency said Wednesday’s explosion took place on Gol Nabi Street, on Mr. Roshan’s route to work, at 8:20 a.m. The news agency said the scientist, who also taught at a technical university, was deputy director of commercial affairs at the Natanz site, evidently in charge of buying equipment and materials. Two other people were wounded, and one later died in a hospital, Iranian officials said.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, sent a letter of protest to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, blaming “certain foreign quarters” for what he called “terrorist acts”  [the NY Times wouldn’t call them that] aimed at disrupting Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program, under the false assumption that diplomacy alone would not be enough for that purpose.”
The ambassador’s letter complained of sabotage, a possible reference to the Stuxnetcomputer worm, believed to be a joint American-Israeli project, that reportedly led to the destruction in 2010 of about a fifth of the centrifuges Iran uses to enrich uranium. It also said the covert campaign included “a military strike on Iran,” evidently a reference to a mysterious explosion that destroyed much of an Iranian missile base on Nov. 12.
That explosion, which Iran experts say they believe was probably an Israeli effort, killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, who was in charge of Iran’s missile program. Satellite photographs show multiple buildings at the site leveled or heavily damaged.
The C.I.A., according to current and former officials, has repeatedly tried to derail Iran’s uranium enrichment program by covert means, including introducing sabotaged parts into Iran’s supply chain.
In addition, the agency is believed to have encouraged some Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, an effort that came to light in 2010 when a scientist, Shahram Amiri, who had come to the United States, claimed to have been kidnapped by the C.I.A. and returned to Iran. (Press reports say he has since been arrested and tried for treason.) A former deputy defense minister, Ali-Reza Asgari, disappeared while visiting Turkey in 2006 and is widely believed to have defected, possibly to the United States.
William C. Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, said he believed that for the United States even to provide specific intelligence to Israel to help kill an Iranian scientist would violate a longstanding executive order banning assassinations. The legal rationale for drone strikes against terrorist suspects — that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies — would not apply, he said. [Will there be anti-terrorist drone strikes against the Israelis suspected of assassinating Iranian scientists?]
“Under international law, aiding and abetting would be the same as pulling the trigger,” Mr. Banks said. He added, “We would be in a precarious position morally, and the entire world is watching, especially China and Russia.” [Correct. China and Russia don’t want to be lectured on morality by an American government that assists the murder of foreign scientists by Israeli terrorists — oops -- I should say, covert campaigners].
Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia, said he believed that the covert campaign [covert campaign = euphemism for terror campaign] , combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work.
“It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”
Reporting was contributed by Steven Lee Myers from Washington, David E. Sanger from Cairo, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.
***
Hoffman’s Afterword: New York Times reporters in the preceding article observe remarkable, automaton-like conformity to Zionist Newspeak and neocon hubris: neither the US nor its Israeli ally ever engage in terrorism. Israeli assassination is never once described in this report by the New York Times as terror, always with cosmetic weasel words: "lethal activities” and  "covert campaign." This is a textbook example of Orwellian manipulation of language on the part of a newspaper which arrogantly regards itself as the ethical watchdog over the propaganda of other nations and rival publications.
***
Michael Hoffman was the media critic for Willis Carto’s now defunct Washington, D.C. newspaper, The Spotlight.
***
Editor’s Note: Zionists are often exceedingly vigilant and alert for the slightest sign of potential opposition, however remote. Here below is an alarm in the New York newspaper Forward, over the prospect of an “anti-semitic" Ron Paul presidency, which might force the Israelis to make peace instead of war: "Israel can’t be defeated if America is actively behind it. Take that away and Israel is just a middle-sized regional power.” Correct. Under a Paul presidency the Israelis would have to learn to live with their neighbors rather than bombing them; what a frightening prospect. There’s more: elephant-memory recall of former George Herbert Walker Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, along with bigoted racial paranoia over his Arab roots and possible influence on Romney.

Reporter J.J. Goldberg fears that Romney will "need Paul not to mount a third-party run, as he did in 1988. An independent Ron Paul campaign would guarantee Obama’s reelection...Romney will need to appease Paul with...promises of administration positions for his allies. A stronger Romney could simply ignore Paul’s surge. But Romney isn’t strong...”

Ron Paul is a populist in touch with the foreign policy thinking of many Americans, while hawkish Zionists (and that includes all of the other Republican candidates) are out to lunch on foreign policy. One of Goldberg’s charges against Sununu is that he described the 1967 Israeli attack on the naval ship U.S.S. Liberty as “vicious and unprovoked.” This was also the view of America's highest ranking naval officer, Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the sailors who were on board the U.S.S. Liberty and witnessed the brazen Zionist massacre. Was Admiral Moorer “anti-semitic”?

Personally I don’t think Mr. Goldberg has much to worry about. If Ron Paul fades in the primaries in the South under withering fire from the Establishment media, Romney can ignore him; and a third party run by Paul could seriously undermine his Republican son Rand’s future in the U.S. Senate. As for Romney himself, no Zionist need be anxious over his supposed tepid allegiance to the Israeli lobby. Romney called on Sununu in order to build his New Hampshire political base, not to begin to craft an even-handed, peace-loving foreign policy in the Middle East. Romney is the quintessential opportunist and no president of that stripe has ever significantly bucked the media influence and Congressional power of The Lobby, and that includes George H.W. Bush.

Mr. Goldberg’s column is intended to stoke the fires of an even more intense Ron Paul incineration on the part of Zionist media executives. Hopefully they will overplay their hand and the American people will see the degree to which Paul scares the pants off the covert terrorism-industrial complex which continues to bog us down in useless, wastrel foreign wars while making America more enemies around the world.

Calling the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty a “mistake” is all we need to know about the truthfulness and objectivity of J.J. Goldberg.

Watch What You Wish For, GOP
Ron Paul Could Wind Up As Man Behind Mitt's Curtain

By J.J. Goldberg
Forward | January 12, 2012

Now that the New Hampshire GOP primary results are in, pro-Israel Republicans might want to sit back, take a deep breath and do some long, hard thinking. As much as they’d like to see President Obama booted from the White House next fall, they’d be wise to be careful what they wish for. Especially if they were watching television on victory night.

The operating assumption on the pro-Israel right — and, to be fair, in a healthy chunk of the center — is that Obama is no friend of the Jewish state. If Israel’s vulnerability keeps you awake at night, it’s natural to want a president who knows how to back our friends and oppose our enemies. That’s certainly how the Republican field presents itself, with the obvious exception of Ron Paul. The narrowing of the field, therefore, has to be a welcome thing for opponents of Obama.

If you’re accustomed to voting for Democrats, it’s probably a relief to see Mitt Romney emerge as the clear front-runner, given his background as a pro-choice Massachusetts moderate. Conservative Republicans still suspect he has adopted their language for marketing purposes and remains at heart the liberal he was in the Massachusetts governor’s mansion. If so, that should help disaffected Democrats feel comfortable with him.

After New Hampshire, though, the picture is getting a bit murkier. True, Romney appears all but unbeatable. He’s won twin victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, a one-two punch that no non-incumbent Republican has ever achieved before. None of his rivals seems even remotely positioned to overtake him.

On the other hand, he remains a weak favorite, disliked by his party’s powerful evangelical and conservative wings. The fact that he couldn’t break the 40% mark in New Hampshire, right on his home turf, after four years of nonstop campaigning, suggests he’s going to remain the candidate of last resort right up to the convention. A lot of Republicans just don’t like him.

Which brings us back to Ron Paul. Romney’s weakness gives Paul an unexpected measure of clout. For all his eccentricity, he’s been the surprise of the campaign, electrifying crowds of adoring young enthusiasts and crusty independents who’ve never followed politics before. His impressive showings, a strong third-place in Iowa and second-place in New Hampshire, prove he has the strength to stay in the race racking up delegates until the end. He’ll come to the convention in Tampa next summer well positioned to make demands.

Romney will ultimately win the nomination. Republicans will decide they have no alternative. To win the general election, though, he’ll need some enthusiasm from the party base. He’ll need his defeated rivals to bring their followers around and unite behind him. Most acutely, he’ll need Paul not to mount a third-party run, as he did in 1988. An independent Ron Paul campaign would guarantee Obama’s reelection.

In other words, Romney will need to appease Paul with platform planks and perhaps promises of administration positions for his allies. A stronger Romney could simply ignore Paul’s surge. But Romney isn’t strong.

Paul claims he’s neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel. He’s just wary of foreign entanglements. There’s evidence to the contrary, and it’s been well reported: The former aide who says he’s heard Paul say he wished Israel didn’t exist. The extremist and racist newsletters. Paul’s private mutterings aren’t the real problem, though. The problem is his unabashed isolationism. Should he gain real influence, his policy positions would directly endanger Israel. They would broadcast to Israel’s enemies that it no longer enjoys the umbrella of American protection. Remember, that’s the real importance of financial aid to Israel, and of a muscular American foreign policy. Israel can’t be defeated if America is actively behind it. Take that away and Israel is just a middle-sized regional power.

In the end, of course, it’s presidents that make foreign policy. A Romney White House would reflect the personal convictions of Mitt Romney. Whatever those turn out to be.

This is what made primary night television coverage so unsettling: the reminders that we don’t really know what Romney believes, and he may have no intention of telling us until he’s inaugurated.

Of all those reminders, the most chilling was the appearance of former New Hampshire governor John Sununu as a Romney spokesman. For those with long memories, it harkened back to the 1988 election, when Sununu was Republican candidate George H.W. Bush’s national campaign manager. Pro-Israel hawks were beating the drum for Bush that year, warning that Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was a threat to Israel because Jesse Jackson was prominent in his party. Bush was Israel’s true friend, they said.

Nobody paid much attention to Sununu until after Election Day, even though the press was reporting some alarming facts about him (I remember, because I wrote the stories). One of the highest-ranking Lebanese Americans in national politics — and the only one then active in Arab-American community affairs — Sununu was also the only one of the 50 governors who refused to sign a 1987 proclamation saluting the 90th anniversary of Zionism and calling on the United Nations to rescind its Zionism-racism resolution. His reasoning was that governors shouldn’t dabble in foreign affairs — though he’d issued proclamations honoring Bastille Day and saluting Polish freedom on Pulaski Day. In 1988 he issued a proclamation honoring the veterans of the U.S.S. Liberty, an American naval vessel mistakenly attacked by Israeli jets in June 1967, causing 34 deaths. Sununu called the attack “vicious and unprovoked.”

Bush’s Jewish supporters insisted Sununu’s views didn’t reflect Bush’s. When word came out that Sununu was to be White House chief of staff, they said he wouldn’t be involved in Middle East policy. They said Bush was a devoted friend of Israel. Then we found out he wasn’t.

We hadn’t seen much of Sununu lately, until Romney went and found him. Or they found each other.

E-mail for J.J. Goldberg: goldberg@forward.com

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