By Chris Fry
The Heritage Foundation is a rightwing think-tank that is one of the main authors of the infamous “Project 2025”, a guidebook for Trump to implement the gutting of women’s rights, voting rights, and union rights, to impose extreme austerity on the workers and the poor, and much more.
On October 17 that foundation posted its proposed “Project Esther” as an addendum to Project 2025. With his election, it is highly likely that fascist Trump will implement this 1-to-2-year plan to suppress and ultimately destroy the entire movement to support the Palestinian people in this dark hour of genocidal mass murder in Gaza and now in Lebanon, enabled by the illegal supply to the Netanyahu regime of U.S. bombs and cash.
On November 6, the day after the election, the New York Times Editorial Board opined:
The founders of this country … enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.
Over the next four years, Americans must be cleareyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.
Fine words. But where was this board when students, faculty and campus workers across the country held “camp-ins” at campuses to protest Biden’s supplying bombs to israel, a clear violation of U.S. law, namely the Leahy Act, a 1997 law that prevents the Department of Defense from supplying weapons, training and other assistance to a regime committing “gross violations of human rights?”
Every day the death count in Gaza grows higher and higher, now reaching more than 43,000. Hundreds of thousands are wounded, including children who have lost limbs. Doctors report that they have found dozens of babies with gunshot wounds to the head.
The brave student protestors were clearly exercising their First Amendment rights when they were frequently attacked by school administrators, police and vigilantes for protesting this slaughter.
This silence and outright slander by the corporate media have now enabled the new Trump regime to engage in a full spectrum of fascist repression against any group or individual who protests against this genocide. Here are some of the highlights of the Heritage Foundation’s plan. (HSO refers to any organization supporting the Palestinian People (e.g. Jewish Voice for Peace). HSN refers to any network of these organizations. ES refers to “Desired End States”.):
- ES1: HSO propaganda eradicated from the U.S. education system at all levels.
- ES2: HSOs unable to disseminate propaganda inside the United States.
- ES3: HSOs no longer have access to U.S. open society.
- ES4: HSOs no longer have access to the U.S. economy.
- ES5: HSN loses access to Congress.
- ES6: Executive branch confronts, pursues, and prosecutes HSO legal and criminal violations.
- ES7: HSOs’ communications disrupted.
- ES8: HSOs rendered unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests.
- ES9: U.S. Jewish community (and allies) unified against HSOs.
- ES10: American public broadly united against HSN/HSOs.
- ES11: Critical vulnerabilities exploited.
An effective strategy and campaign focused on the HSN will level a decisive blow against both antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
Einstein called zionists Nazis.
On December 6, 1948 the New York Times published a letter signed by the most important scientist of modern times and one of history’s most important Jewish persons – Dr. Albert Einstein. The letter was also signed by Hannah Arendt and several other Jewish notables.
That letter blasts the zionist “Freedom Party”, under the leadership of Menachim Begin, using such labels as “fascist”, “terrorist” and “Nazi”. That party would become the Likud, which rules israel today under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Its ideology and actions are unchanged.
Einstein was quite familiar with the Nazis. Both his apartment and summer home were broken into by that scum. A Nazi magazine posted his picture with the caption reading that he should be hanged. When he and his family fled Germany, a cash bounty was put on his head.
Einstein’s letter to the Times was written just after the zionist regime took power. It reports the visit by Begin to the U.S. The letter echoes today’s israeli propaganda campaign:
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.
Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
The first of those actions described by the letter is the Freedom Party’s storm troopers, the Irgun, on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin earlier in the year:
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin… On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), [Irgun] terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants – 240 men, women, and children – and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.
This is just one instance within the zionist ethnic cleansing campaign, referred to by the Palestinian people as the “Nakba”, or catastrophe. In a May 2017 article, Al Jazeera reports:
Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.
Einstein’s letter makes it clear that these organizations were not religious and thus not hesitant to attack Jewish residents as well:
During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL[Irgun] and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.
This letter was a noble effort by Einstein and his compatriots to cut off support by the U.S. to these fascists.
But because of israel’s strategic location in or near three continents – Asia, Europe and Africa – U.S. imperialism has not hesitated to stand behind the zionist state, its wars against the Arab countries and its horrible atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The U.S. pushed through the original partitioning of Palestine by the U.N. in 1948. The U.S. was the first to recognize the zionist entity as a nation state, even though that act violated the right of self-determination of the British-colonized residents.
Today, in its never-ending quest for global hegemony, U.S. imperialism is completely satisfied to use the Netanyahu regime and its global settlers as “cannon fodder” to maintain its military dominance over this vital region.
But since the settler-colonialist genocidal war has generated mass outrage in the U.S., the Biden and Harris support of that war is actually enabling Trump’s entire fascist agenda to be used, particularly these plans for harsh and illegal repression against opposition to his continuation of the flow of bombs and cash to Tel Aviv.
And a U.S. threat of war against Iran and China, which has become the primary customer and commodity supplier to the region, is certainly on Trump’s “to do list.”
Project Esther’s can be defeated. But that will take the organized, determined struggle by massive numbers of people to push it back and stop the zionist genocide and the U.S. war against the Arab people.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
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