Speaking together at the Israeli-American Council Summit on Saturday, billionaire Zionist megadonors Miriam Adelson and Haim Saban strongly implied that they are engaged in some extremely shady activities to manipulate the US government in advancement of Israeli interests.
There’s a guy I follow on Twitter named Chris Menahan who’s always posting clips from Zionist events which might otherwise go unnoticed, frequently turning up jarring admissions from pro-Israel operatives who tend to loosen their lips a bit when addressing an audience of like-minded individuals. I recently cited a clip he spotted featuring former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz decrying the way social media has allowed the public to view evidence of Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Menahan has spotlighted some very revealing moments from Adelson and Saban, both of whom are dual US-Israeli citizens, and both of whom have provided funding to the Israeli-American Council (IAC). In 2014, The Nation’s MJ Rosenberg wrote that Saban and Miriam Adelson’s late husband Sheldon were using influence operations like the IAC to become “the Koch brothers on Israel.”
Here’s a transcript of a very revealing interaction between Adelson and event host Shawn Evenhaim:
Evenhaim: Miri, you and Sheldon created a lot of relationships over the years with politicians, at the state level, and especially at the federal level. I want you to share with everyone why is it so important and how you do it, and again, writing cheques is a part of it, but there is more than writing just cheques so, how do you do it?
Adelson: Shawn, can you allow me not to answer?
Evenhaim (shrugs): You choose!
Adelson: I want to be truthful and there are so many things that I don’t want to talk about.
Evenhaim: Yeah, I mean we don’t want specifics but that’s okay.
Miriam Adelson is here admitting that in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars that she and Sheldon are known to have poured into the political campaigns of Donald Trump and other Republican politicians, they have also been manipulating US politics behind the scenes in ways that she would prefer to keep secret from the public. Presumably because it would cause a significant scandal if the public ever found out.
Trump, for the record, has repeatedly admitted that he provided political favors to Israel at the urging of the Adelsons during his first term, saying he moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and legitimized the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights in order to please them.
And please them he did. He must have, because Miriam Adelson donated another $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign to help him become president again. And now he’s spent the first year of his administration bombing Iran and Yemen, working to take control of Gaza, and aggressively stomping out criticism of Israel in the United States.
Back in 2020, before all these blatant admissions, musician Roger Waters was smeared as an antisemite by the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups for saying that Sheldon Adelson was using his wealth to exert influence over US politics.
Saban was even more guarded about his political operations than Adelson in his response to the same question from Evenhaim:
“I want to be cautious how I’m saying… (Pause) It’s a system that we did not create. It’s a system that’s in place. It’s a legal system and we just play within the system. And that’s it! I mean it’s really quite simple. If you support a politician, you, under normal circumstances, should have access to be able to share opinions and try to help them see your point of view. That’s what access grants you, and the contribution and the financial support grants you the access, sooooo… I mean…. (shrugs) those that give more have more access and those that give less have less access. It’s a simple math. Trust me.”
Haim Saban, whose campaign donations focus on the other side of the aisle with Democratic Party funding, has famously said “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” In 2022 AIPAC’s superpac cited Saban’s financial clout to argue that deviating from support for Israel would cost the Democrats critical funding, saying “Our activist donors, who include one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party, are focused on ensuring that we have a U.S. Congress that, like President Biden, supports a vibrant and robust relationship with our democratic ally, Israel.”
As with Adelson, we can surmise that Saban said he wanted to be “cautious” how he described his influence operations because it would cause a major scandal if the American people understood what he’s been up to.
Some people will look at these clips and claim it’s antisemitic to even share them. Others will look at them and cite them as evidence that the world is ruled by Jews. For me they’re just evidence that the world is ruled by wealthy sociopaths, and that western democracy is an illusion.
I mean, you really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the sham of American democracy than this. Two billionaires from supposedly opposite political parties publicly admitting that they use their obscene wealth to manipulate US politics to advance the military and geopolitical agendas of a foreign state on the other side of the planet.
And as Saban said, it’s all legal. Corruption is legal in the United States of America. Plutocrats are allowed to leverage their fortunes to manipulate the US government using campaign funding and lobbying for the advancement of their personal, financial, and ideological agendas. If you have a few million dollars to spare you can use them to make criminal charges go away, to roll back environmental regulations or worker protections which hurt the profit margins of your business, or even to get military explosives shipped to a foreign government for use in an ongoing genocide.
And it’s all being done with complete disregard for the will of the electorate. The American people have no control over what their government does under the current political system. They vote for one oligarchic puppet, then they vote for the oligarchic puppet in the other party when that doesn’t work out, going back and forth without realizing that at no point are they changing the actual power structure under which they live.
That power structure is called plutocracy. That’s only real political system the United States has.
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Caitlin Johnstone 