An outfit called PMEI (Pittsburgh Middle East Institute) premiered in 2007 with co-sponsorship with Iran Task Force, a Jewish 'citizen diplomacy' outfit created by Israel's MFA, of a speech by a WINEP member, on the topic, "Iran is a threat to Humanity." The action urged by Iran Task Force was, Urge your state pension fund to divest from Iran.
PMEI's principals are American-Iranian and Jewish-American spouses of principals in an investment firm that does family wealth preservation and management for the wealthiest families in Pennsylvania (according to their website).
PMEI's mission is to form commercial ties between Pittsburgh and Persian Gulf states. PMEI participants include an American design and build company that is helping to design the bridge across the Red Sea between Yemen and Djibouti, and the cities that will be grown on the African and Arab legs of the bridge. The bridge and town creation project is being developed by the binLaden family, who are Yemenis.
PMEI arranged major speeches in Pittsburgh by Madeleine Albright. Albright is head of Board of Directors of NDI, a think tank that enjoys federal funding and that, according to comment by Steve Heydemann, (see :http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/UnrestinEg ) is involved in Yemen.
and
:http://www.ndi.org/board_of_directors
As I connect the dots, I see Jewish and Iranian Americans participating with the Israeli government program of demonizing Iran; impacting the pensions of American citizens in an effort to harm Iran's economy; while Iranian and Jewish principals who represent some of America's wealthiest families engineer financial investment and American involvement in a massive infrastructure project in Africa-Arabia that is spearheaded by the bin Laden family, America's "sworn enemy."
I think it's great that Americans are investing in such a long-term undertaking in Africa-Arabia. Germany is heavily invested in development of railroads on the Arabian peninsula, and the US does well to participate in investment in the region.
What I do not understand --and object to on moral and US Constitutional-patriotic grounds, is the mindset and modus operandi that goes about the project dishonestly, with hateful intents, i.e.. choosing winners and losers, by means of violence, and with disregard for Constitutional principles.
To my mind that reflects a descent to a pre-civilized way of doing business.
As I reflect on a timeline history of the Jewish people, it becomes apparent that the Jewish community in Europe has been 150 years behind the intellectual development of the West: the vast majority of Jewish people in Europe -- especially Hungary and Russia -- were semi-literate merchant-peddlers when Jews were Emancipated in 1780 (see Israel Shahak and Jacob Raisin). In contrast, by 1780, Filangieri and Benjamin Franklin were corresponding on highly sophisticated concepts of creating moral governments and participating with an American colonial political community that was conversant with the writing of the finest thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and the European Enlightenment, the most profound revolution in thinking that has occurred since the "Axial age" in 700 BCE. Those first Americans used those concepts to shape the American Constitutional republic.
In a 1972 speech at University of Chicago, Milton Friedman told his audience of Hillel students that Jews had prospered in capitalist societies because they knew how to find and exploit the loopholes in the laws -- ways to work around government attempts to regulate financial and economic activities.
In a speech to a J Street audience in 2011, Gershom Gorenberg told the audience that the earliest Israeli colonizers (1908-era) acted on the philosophy that rule of law does not apply to them; the only important thing was to build the Jewish state in Palestine. Next, Gorenberg displayed the opinion letter that advised the Israeli government that settlement activities on Palestinian lands were in violation of international law. Israel ignored and continues to ignore that rule of law. Gorenberg emphasized that Israel continues to operate on the belief-in-practice that the rule of law does not apply to Israel.
Israel and Israel's agents and partisans in the US are behaving on the basis of law-of-the-jungle, and seducing -- and blackmailing--Americans to spend American blood and treasure, and subvert America's exquisitely crafted form of civilized Constitutional, rule of law government, in service of sub-civilized predatory economic behavior.
The main point, though it's based on the involvement of Albright's group in removing Salih (a tenuous thread traced from the C Span appearance of Albright's NDI associate Heydemann, and that same thread tied to PMEI, and the PMEI thread tied to the bridge project). Apparently Salih has become unmanageable, in the view of the investors, or perhaps other advantages have been offered by someone not Salih, therefore, Salih must be got gone....As to 18 miles of bridge to link Yemen and Djibouti, sounds like a great idea, especially if you use someone else's money....
---And the connection to the reflection on the differences in legacy of European Jewish approaches to ways of doing business relative to the (idealized) system that American Constitutional rule of law envisioned reflects my Dewey-eyed expectations about how Americans ought to behave, contrasted with the violence-prone and lawless methods that seem to prevail today. No, it is not all the "fault of the Jews;" human nature knows no ethnic-religious bounds. It is remarkable, however, that as Christopher Hedges has observed, the crumbling of America's liberal class -- church, universities, unions, and the Democratic party -- began with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, which is also the period of the rise to major influence on US financial and foreign policy of European Zionists.
I also have lodged in the brain behind those Dewey (or rheumy?) eyes (and lodging on my bookshelf) W. Morgan Shuster's 1911 memoir, "The Strangling of Persia." America USED TO behave more honorably in its international dealings, even with Persia/Iran, and when she did, she was respected and even sought out for assistance and counsel. There is profound irony in Shuster's story: whereas today Stuart Levey's shop is functioning from within the US Treasury Department to attempt to bankrupt Iran, in service of predatory capitalism as created by institutions established in Wilson's era, in 1910, Persia trusted the US above all others and sought out American counsel on how to set up a sound and fair system of state finance. "When America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."
Caroline Glick is completely nuts, but I doubt because of early brain damage....she is a blatant Mossad mouthpiece for utter disinformation....
Besides, I was a bit surprised to find this here. I rarely comment on people's looks, but I simply found it striking.
