Monday, August 08, 2005

Big Jewish Contributor Named Ambassador to Netherlands

I have been worried about Jewish influence on the Bush Administration ever since the war in Iraq. The US was not significantly threatened by Iraq, but Israel was. Most of the neo-cons arguing for going to war with Iraq were Jewish: William Kristol, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Adelman, etc. But lots of the big Jewish donors are Democrats: George Soros, for example. Was there big Jewish money behind the Republicans, too? Turns out there was and is: Roland E. Arnall, who was recently named by Bush to be the US Ambassador to the Netherlands, for example, according to the LA Times. Interestingly, one of the pictures accompanying the story on the LA Times web site is of Arnall posing with Jewish Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman.

From the LA Times story, it sounds like Arnall is probably a sleazebag. It says his mortgage company, Ameriquest, used boiler room tactics, bait-and-switch tactics, etc. But he made a lot of money, some of which he apparently gave to George Bush and his Republican colleagues. His main claim to political fame is that he financed the Simon Wiesenthal Center to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

I have been very worried that one origin of the Iraq war was that after 9/11 Jews paid Bush and company to send Christian soldiers to kill Muslims for Israel. That's probably too cynical, but this is some indirect evidence of that motivation.

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