Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity
When a UK Prime Minister, such as the Conservative David Cameron, does the work of a foreign power, working for that foreign power and against UK’s democratic ideals, and also against the interests and values (such as equal-rights, and UK’s sovereign independence) which are held by the UK public, then that UK Prime Minister is perpetrating treason, whatever else it might also be called. This has happened, and yet no one pays attention to it: no one is even pointing out that it is treason. (Whether it is, in every sense of the word, we’ll get to, after the story here has been told, but that story must come first; only afterward can it be discussed.)
Following are highlights from the shocking and uncontested (though confusingly written) original Al Jazeera investigative news report published on January 8th, which had mentioned this treachery only in passing (but without calling it that). These excerpts will make clear the severity of what has actually been happening here — and of what is continuing to happen.
I shall add [in brackets] clarificatory adjectives etc., so as to help make instantly clear who is who, in this confusingly written story, and thus speed and ease a reader’s comprehension of the stunning narrative that’s being told here:
8 January 2017, Al Jazeera Investigative Unit
Israel apology after plot against UK politicians
Al Jazeera reveals discussions of Israeli diplomat and UK civil servant to ‘take down’ anti-settlement politicians.
The Israeli embassy has apologised to UK deputy foreign secretary [Conservative] Sir Alan Duncan for comments made by one of its staff members [Mr. Shai Masot] on plans “to take [him [Duncan]] down” due to his [Duncan’s] criticism of Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied [Palestinian] West Bank.
The comments, made by a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy [Mr.] Shai Masot, were secretly captured on film during a six-month undercover operation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, which reveals plots by the Israeli diplomat [Masot] and a British civil servant [Duncan] to destroy the careers of senior politicians [whom Israel wanted to be downed].
In a conversation with Maria Strizzolo, who was then chief of staff to MP [Member of Parliament] Robert Halfon, the deputy chairman of the ruling Conservative Party, [Israel’s Mr.] Masot asked her [the Conservative Strizzolo] if he [Masot] could give her some names of MPs [whom] he [Masot] would suggest she “take down” [on behalf of Israel].
[See it at 2:14 in this video, where his actual phrase was “Can I give you some MPs that I would suggest you take down?”]
Masot named [recommended to Strizzolo] Duncan, who in 2014 said that while he fully supports Israel’s right to exist, he believes [Jewish] settlements on occupied Palestinian land represent an “ever-deepening stain on the face of the globe”. He [Duncan] also likened the situation in Hebron in the occupied West Bank to apartheid…
Strizzolo… revealed that she had a strategy of manipulation to ensure Israel remains at the top of the UK’s foreign policy agenda.
“If at least you can get a small group of MPs that you know you can always rely on, when there is something coming to parliament and you know you brief them, you say: ‘You don’t have to do anything, we are going to give you the speech, we are going to give you all the information, we [the office of MP Robert Halfon] are going to do everything for you’,” she said.
She also advised trying to infiltrate Prime Minister’s Questions, a weekly session in which the leader of the country answers questions from MPs. The debate is televised live.
“If they already have the question to table for PMQs [Prime Minister’s Questions], it’s harder to say: ‘No, no, no, I won’t do it’,” she said.
Strizzolo then boasted how her own efforts once made an immediate effect on the national debate. …
In 2014, she [had] persuaded MP Halfon to question the prime minister in public over three missing teenagers believed to have been kidnapped and murdered “to get a response from the government”, Strizzolo said.
Halfon took the request and called on former prime minister David Cameron to support the Israeli government. …
In response, Cameron promised that Britain would “stand by Israel”.
Cameron there was a pushover for Halfon, who clearly was an agent for Israel. But was this treason only by Halfon, and not also by his boss and fellow-Conservative, Cameron?
To say that Cameron, as the principal decision-maker, who was a pushover for a foreign power’s stooge — the traitor who was acting on behalf of a foreign power — wasn’t himself acting treasonously here, would be to say that, for example, there is no such thing as criminal negligence, which is a criminal liability for failure to have done due diligence in carrying out one’s duties to the public as the nation’s chief of state.
Cameron, not Halfon, was the actual decision-maker here, the responsible party in the matter: as Harry Truman had said of the U.S. Presidency, “The buck stops here.”
This is comparable to the Inspector General of the TARP bailout of the megabanks, Christy Goldsmith Romero, recommending (and the U.S. government ignoring):
A PROPOSAL TO BRING ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE “INSULATED CEO”
I propose that Congress remove the insulation around Wall Street CEOs and other high-level officials by requiring the CEO, CFO and certain other senior executives to sign an annual certification that they have conducted due diligence within their organization and can certify that that there is no criminal conduct or civil fraud in their organization.
But, in the case of a head-of-state — a nation’s CEO — the obligation to do due diligence and to take full responsibility, for everything that one does and says that actually affects the public, and responsibility for the nation’s relationships with other nations: this due-diligence obligation for a head-of-state, is even more severe than it is for a private CEO.
A country that tolerates such negligence or worse (evil intent) from its rulers, cannot be a democracy, because that country’s international relations are being manipulated by a foreign power — placing another nation’s leadership above one’s own. That’s subversion, of the given nation. It is treason, for any public official.
In the United States, the aristocracy are trying to fool the public into believing that the incoming President Donald Trump is such a traitor (‘Russian agent’) (and no evidence has been presented to the public for that, except ‘evidence’ concocted by a former British spy); but in this case involving Israel and the Prime Minister of UK, there is even video of the Israeli agent Masot communicating to Strizzolo, who then communicates to MP Halfon, and who brags that she had formerly communicated to Halfon who then communicated to the Prime Minister, who then acted in accord with the Israeli government’s back-channel instruction. Was it really an “instruction,” though — or was it instead some type of international deal, a trading-of-favors between allied countries? Precisely what favors are being performed by Israel, to UK? Really? And would that secret international agreement — without any democratic approval by the domestic public — be something that a democracy would allow?
In any case, even if there was some secret deal that induced Cameron to fulfill upon Israel’s instruction, that secret treaty (the deal) had not been entered into by the Constitutionally authorized process. This alone would be violation of oath-of-office — on behalf of a foreign power. It would be treason.
Secret deals, unauthorized treaties (in effect), ended up producing World War I. They are exceedingly dangerous. Doing international relations this way is inconsistent with democracy.
But that’s what happened here in UK’s Party on the ‘right’, the Conservatives. However, Israeli attempts at subversion of the UK government happen also in UK’s Party of the ‘left’, Labour; and, the video that was linked-to is devoted primarily to that — to the Labour Party.
Like happens in the United States, the main Party on the ‘left’ is being torn between viewing things mainly in terms of tribal conflicts (‘Palestinians’ versus ‘Jews’), or else viewing things mainly in terms of conflicts between the government and the public — the rulers versus the ruled (irrespective of their ‘tribe’). In Israel, the rulers are, essentially, only the Jews who hold power; and the ruled include many people (the “Palestinians”) who are excluded from many rights that all “Jews” in Israel enjoy. The current leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corben, rejects the Jewish state’s tribal values; and, consequently, he is being called ‘anti-Semitic’ by his opponents, both within and outside his Party. In today’s Israel, to oppose racism is to be ‘anti-Semitic’. A certain type of racism is policy in today’s Israel. Adolf Hitler, a supreme European tribalist, is thus now retrospectively a paragon of Israeli values: tribalism (racism). The current Israeli government is in Hitler’s image, only less consistently, and choosing a different tribe to reward, and a different tribe to punish (and, of course, far less certain than he was of the ultimate morality of their cause, and thus also far less intense about their application of the resulting punishment than he was, in his blinding hatred; but, after all, he was the paragon of bigotry) — differing with him, on those things. The current Israeli government equates nazism (the ideology, not Germany’s particular nazi party) with good, and equality with bad: they say that to be opposed to the current state of Israel is to be an ‘anti-Semite’. And this type of value-system is being worked secretly upon the UK’s government, in Britain’s back rooms, with alien (in particular, Israeli) lobbyists.
That video, which I linked to at its 2:14, continues on for a full 26 minutes, and mainly presents there the conflict within UK’s Labour Party, over these two mutually incompatible views of Israel and the Palestinians: one view, championed by the anti-Tony-Blair and anti-Iraq-War, progressive, new leader of the Labour Party, Corben, is a view which refuses to take sides with Israel against its Palestinians; and the other view, the one which is championed by Israel’s apartheid government, identifies that equalitarian position with “anti-Zionism,” and then promptly identifies ‘anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism’, meaning that every Jew (or at least ones who aren’t themselves ‘anti-Semitic’) endorses the current apartheid Israeli government. This ridiculous lie, equating equalitarianism with ‘anti-Semitism’, assumes that any Israeli who rejects Israel’s current, apartheid, government, hates Jews, instead of hates racists. It’s “Big Brother” thinking: a conviction that bad is good, white is black, up is down, peace is war, etc.
Israel works secretly in America’s back rooms, too. Some people worry that President Trump will be a Russian agent. Some people worry more realistically that he will be an Israeli agent. And some people worry that he will be a Saudi agent (because the royal Saud family hate Iran, and Trump seems to believe that the Saudi royal family, who are Saudi Arabia’s government, are allies not enemies of America, and that Iran is America’s eternal enemy). Others worry whether Trump will be intelligent enough, or even honorable enough, to avoid being any foreign agent at all. But whereas there is strong reason to consider Britain’s David Cameron to have been an Israeli agent, there is no reason, yet, to think that Trump is any foreign agent at all. Only time will tell.
In UK, time already has told the reality on this; and another and much briefer al-Jazeera video, which was posted on January 7th by UK’s Guardian, presents a conversation between Masot and Strizollo, in which Masot tells Strizollo that the Israeli government isn’t satisfied with the extent to which UK’s Conservative Party has silenced the Conservative Foreign Minister Boris Johnson’s insistence upon a “two-state solution”: his insistence upon a situation in which Palestinians will be freed from domination by Israel’s ‘Jews’ — freed from the aristocrats (many of whom live in America, actually) who, in reality, control and determine Israel’s apartheid government.
Yet another brief al-Jazeera video shows that Strizzolo’s immediate response when Masot asked her “Can I give you some MPs that I would suggest you take down?” might have been to think of that assertion — the question he posed — as being an attractive invitation by Israel to, perhaps, help her boss by blackmailing some of his opponents: she said, “Well, I know that if you look hard enough, I’m sure that there is something that they’re trying to hide.” But, whether she was thinking there, of that question as representing Israel’s Mossad, intelligence agency, and what help it might be able to offer to the Conservative cause, isn’t entirely clear. However, this video opened with Masot’s telling Strizzolo that his career-aspiration “is to be the head of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Intelligence Department in Israel — I’m not a career diplomat.” So, maybe it’s in the context of his being an aspiring spy, that she was considering the ways in which she might be able to be of help to both her boss, and also the young and rising Israeli agent who was, perhaps, propositioning her.
Such statecraft, in the seedy real world, was repeatedly condemned by the people who wrote America’s Constitution. They thought of it as being the type of international relations that the nation they were starting should avoid, at all costs. They could hardly imagine that “it comes with the territory” (as the vernacular might phrase the matter).
It’s dangerous to democracy in any country.
