THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Senator Earnest Hollings of South Carolina was very angry when he left the United States Senate after over thirty-five years in office.

To show how angry he was, he made a very controversial speech as a senator about the fact that the Israeli Lobby in our country rules American foreign policy.

Just before his speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Hollings had written an article in the May 6, 2004 issue of his home State newspaper, the Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina: "With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country?" he wrote. "The answer: President Bush's policy to secure Israel led by Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer..."

Senator Hollings rose in the U.S. Senate on May 20 to defend this article after he was attacked as an "anti-Semite" by American Zionist organizations for saying that the war in Iraq was not a war to secure America, but instead a war to secure Israel.

"I don't apologize for this column," Hollings said. "I want them to apologize to me for talking about anti-Semitism."

President Bush attacked Iraq "to secure our friend, Israel" and "everybody knows it," Hollings said.

"Nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on", because of "the pressures that we get politically." They know "how to make you tuck tail and run."

"I didn't like to keep it a secret, maybe; but I can tell you now, I will challenge any one of the other 99 Senators to tell us why we are in Iraq, other than what this policy is here. It is an adopted policy, a domino theory of The Project for the New American Century. Everybody knows it..."

"Let's realize we are in real trouble. ... The United States is in trouble. I am going to state what I believe to be the fact. In fact, I believe it very strongly. They just are whistling by on account of the pressures that we get politically. Nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on. ... You can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here."

As one who spent five years as a senior staffer in Congress and who was an appointee of the Reagan Administration, let me tell you that every word Hollings said is common knowledge among those in power in Washington, DC. I will add that every word that Senator Hollings said is common knowledge in the American media.

People tend to think to think of intellectual discourse as a discussion of obscure points of arcane knowledge. But the great advances in thought have actually come from a careful analysis of things that seem obvious to the average person. My favorite example of this is Newtonian physics.

Isaac Newton was a genius, but he began his revolutionary thought by examining something with which every illiterate peasant was thoroughly familiar. While university intellectuals might have noticed gravity when they dropped their pens and had to pick them up, working people for thousands of years had had to carry huge burdens every day.

Everybody knew about gravity. It took the greatest intellectual of all time to analyze this phenomenon. Isaac Newton's genius lay in the fact that he actually noticed gravity and analyzed it in detail as the basis of the nature of our solar system.

People had been dealing with gravity every day for thousands of years. Gravity was certainly not some kind of obscure secret that only intellectuals knew about. It was Newton's ability to take this obvious reality and see its meaning that made him probably the greatest scientific genius in history.

What I have to offer you is on a far humbler level. But one certainly does not have to have the brilliance of an Isaac Newton to make a comment worth your attention.

So let me begin with an observation that is as obvious as Newton's gravity. This is the observation: I am in Teheran making a speech about tyranny in America. At this moment America's media is drumming up hatred for Iran by saying that Iran does not allow people to speak out. Americans are told that our system represents freedom while Iran practices tyranny.

If that is the case, then why is it necessary for people like me to come to Teheran to state what everybody in power in America knows, but which no one is supposed to talk about?

Let me say that I love my own country dearly. Let me add that I am privileged to be an American. Just compare my position to that of others who are here from other countries in the West.

I complain about the fact that in America what I have to say here will be suppressed. Others here from other countries in the West face far greater problems than I do.

In America I could say what I am going to say here without actually being arrested for it. But those who have come here from some other Western countries could face arrest and imprisonment in their own lands for what they say here.

In America a person is economically ruined if he questions the number of Jews who died under Adolf Hitler. But in some nations of Europe he is sent to prison for it.

I am astonished that any conference of intellectuals would not include a denunciation of the fact that the British historian David Irving is spending three years in an Austrian prison for saying that three hundreds thousand Jews were killed by the Nazis rather the required six million.

When I say this I am certainly not telling you anything you do not already know. But when Newton described gravity he certainly was not saying anything that everybody did not already know.

Saying what we all know is a good start when one wants to make an important point.

We from the West are here to make points we cannot make in our own countries. I feel that one person at this conference should analyze this obvious fact in detail. Sometimes we intellectuals can miss a fundamental observation simply because we become fascinated by all the interesting details that we know about. My hope is that there is room here for one person who will examine a point that is obvious to all of us.

No one in the West is allowed to ask why the Jews are allowed to call themselves the Chosen People but Germans are put on trial simply for sound scholarly research on the history of their own people in the Second World War.

Why is it accepted that Jews say they are the people chosen by God Almighty Himself, but a German cannot even conduct research questioning the Jewish Hollywood version of his own people's recent history?

This question is of great intellectual importance. It is also of enormous practical importance at this moment in history.

I was an appointee of the Reagan Administration. Earlier I was a senior staffer on Capitol Hill for the United States House of Representatives working for conservatives. I wrote articles for National Review, which President Reagan described as his favorite magazine. It is the flagship publication for conservatism in America.

I am horrified to find that National Review is leading the war frenzy in America against those who oppose Israeli control of American foreign policy. National Review is saying that my country is supposed to go to war for Israel because we live in freedom. I am here to tell you that we do NOT live in freedom.

George Orwell pointed out in his book 1984 that freedom is simply the right to say that two plus two is four. That is precisely the right we are denied in the West when it comes to Israel and any subject relating to Jews.

I am deeply grateful to IPIS for allowing me to say what I think needs to be said, and what the controlled press in America will not let me say to a mass audience.

How can it be that we come from countries that are rattling sabers in the name of freedom, yet we must come here to speak on a subject that is forbidden in our own countries?

Let me return to Senator Hollings's speech on the complete power of the Israeli Lobby over our Middle Eastern policy. Senator Hollings was not actually imprisoned for his speech, as he may have been in other Western countries that call themselves free, but the outrage at his daring to speak out on what we all know was deafeningly loud.

This gives you an example of how censorship works in America. Before that speech Hollings was one of the darlings of our national liberal media. He was a senator from the very conservative state of South Carolina, yet he became more and more liberal in pursuit of national office. He became a serious contender for the presidential nomination with enormous backing in the liberal media.

But Hollings was angry for a reason that only one who is very much in on American politics can understand. To understand this you must know about the politics of the American South.

States outside the American South change senators, but in the South the tradition has been that a senator serves for decades. No example illustrates this better than the two senators who represented South Carolina during Hollings' generation-long occupancy of his position.

Hollings had been elected in the 1960s, but he did not leave office until 2005. This is a long time. But during that entire period until his last two years he had been the junior senator from South Carolina; the senior senator, Strom Thurmond, served from 1954 to 2003.

Finally in 2003 Ernest Hollings, who was in his late seventies, was no longer the junior senator from South Carolina. But after all those years, after decades of being the junior senator, Hollings had to leave the Senate. The polls showed that he could not run for reelection because he was too liberal for South Carolina.

To put it in plain English, Hollings spent all of his political capital in order to be a pet of the liberal media. When he would most dearly have wanted to run for reelection, he could no longer do so.

Hollings was furious that the national Democratic Party had never rewarded him for deserting his electoral base in order to win favor with the liberal media and the liberals who ran the national party.

He took his revenge by violating the rule Washington insiders live by. He stated what we all know about the Israeli Lobby and are not allowed to say if we want to keep our jobs.

What Hollings said is what all of us who worked in national politics know and are not allowed to say, and it is this: From the point of view of American policy there is only one country in the Middle East, and that country is Israel. The price of oil is talked about all the time but in practical politics it makes no difference at all compared to the welfare of the State of Israel.

No one on Capitol Hill and or in the Administration is supposed to say this. But let me assure you that a person who is so naïve as to seriously believe that anything in the Middle East is important outside of Israel would be considered mentally retarded and no one would hire him for a job on Capitol or an appointment by any presidential administration.

I spent many years in that job market, and that is something I know about.

But Senator Hollings in his fury as his time in Washington was about to end broke the cardinal rule. He SAID what everybody knows. You are supposed to know it, but you are never allowed to say it.

And that is the primary point of this presentation. We are speaking of a country that prides itself on its free speech, but we all know that one is not allowed to say what one knows to be true. The fact that we are not allowed to say what we know to be true is no secret.

Senator Hollings was not arrested for what he said as he might have been in other Western countries that call themselves free. That fact is supposed to prove that America has freedom of speech.

This is the basis of a very destructive myth in America. That myth is that if a person is not arrested for what he says he is free to tell the truth.

I am here to explain at an intellectual forum exactly how censorship really works in the United States. I can tell you that former Senator Hollings will pay dearly for violating the code of silence on Israel.

A man in his late seventies who has faithfully served the Washington establishment for decades receives enormous rewards in the form of high-paying jobs and honors. Those jobs and honors will be few and far between for Mr. Hollings.

Others, before Sen. Hollings, have experienced this punishment for saying what everyone on Capitol Hill knows. Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois, Rep. Pete McCloskey of California, Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Sen. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, Rep. Paul Findley of Illinois, and Rep. Jim Moran of New Jersey.

Rep. Jim Moran said in May of 2004: "If it weren't for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this." (Wash. Times, 3/24/04)

In 1989 former Rep. Findley wrote the book "They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby".

In this book Paul Findley describes the Israel Lobby as "the 700-pound gorilla in Washington." Findley writes: "U.S. policy on the Mid-East is made in Israel, not in Washington." When the Mearsheimer and Walt paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", came out in 2006, Findley told National Public Radio: "You can't imagine how pleased I was. I think I can pose as a foremost expert on the lobby for Israel, because I was the target the last three years I was in Congress."

I was there too. And I was a witness to the truth of what Rep. Paul Findley has written and said about the excessive power of the Israel Lobby. Teddy Kennedy went over there behind the walls his audience would be shot for trying to cross and, in one of his speeches, he POLLED the audience about whether the USSR's defense expenditures were too high. The audience was outraged.

You see, Teddy didn't realize that a People's Peace Loving Democratic Republic is a DICTATORSHIP. His audience was being watched by the Peace-Loving Democratic People's Police, the KGB, and a hand that went up would be a hand that would be in Siberia within weeks.

But no one questioned Teddy's detailed knowledge of how the world works.

Anyway, I already wrote the whole speech and they invited me expenses paid after I sent them the full text. So if they use it, I may be subject to liability for having exported a deadly weapon to Iran. You see liberals were OK in the USSR because the USSR was an enemy of the United States. Iran is an enemy of ISRAEL, and that's SERIOUS.