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As a media organization that publishes news on conflicts, World at Large has been inundated by a steady stream of press packets from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) since the start of Israel’s early-stage genocide in Gaza.
The press packets speak of the security situation in the Middle East since October 7th, but make not a single mention of the disproportionate number of civilians murdered, starved, or missing, the number of Israeli hostages murdered by the IDF, the number of hospitals or culturally significant non-military targets destroyed, or any mention of the Palestinians at all.
The JINSA acronym includes the word “America,” which is deeply ironic since the deadliest assault on the American homeland since Pearl Harbor came as a consequence of the US providing weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians since 1967. Of the two motives for al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, Israel, and military bases in the Arabian Peninsula stand out as the greatest historical lessons.
Nevertheless, the crowd at JINSA has focused their public relations efforts almost entirely towards Iran, perhaps believing this way the ‘A’ in JINSA can be somewhat made to make sense amid existing party policy on Capitol Hill. Indeed the faculty at JINSA has a notable Neoconservative bent, and features figures like career Neocon Elliot Abrams, a perpetrator of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagen Administration, and George W. Bush Jr.’s choice for head of his Global Democracy Strategy.
Abram’s influence on the calamitous unraveling of American standing in the world cannot be understated. He authored the chapter on the Middle East in the 2000 Blueprint for US Foreign Policy by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) the disastrous working group put together by Neocon PNAC founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that influenced the US to launch 5 major wars, spend itself $20 trillion or more into debt, kill 4.5 million, mostly civilian, Muslims, and tens of thousands of US soldiers. Abram’s motivation is clearly Zionistic, and his advocacy for the liberal application of US military might is superseded only by his advocacy of its use in defense of Israel.
JINSA also counts among their fellows and contributors an alarming number (31) of retired generals and admirals. Another relic from the era when the Neoconservatives commanded the White House and Pentagon is former Ambassador to Turkey and Undersecretary of Defense, Eric Adelman. As an assistant to former Vice President Dick Cheney, he was part of the foreign policy network that hurriedly established the “intelligence” rationales for the US invasion of Iraq, which are of course now known to have all been lies.
Through JINSA, the Neocons survive
Neoconservatism appears only in fits and starts in today’s political establishment, as its legacy has been rightly humiliated. The author of PNAC, William Kristol, who was editor of The Weekly Standard during the Bush years and before, took to the public debate stage in 2022 to defend the legacy of intervention argued for by him, Kagan, Edelman, Abrams, and others.
During a one-and-a-half-hour Oxford Style debate, he was humiliated, unable to sway nearly any section of the audience, and couldn’t say that any of the post-911 interventions had improved US national security conditions. Indeed, he was forced, when pressed for an answer by the audience, to go all the way back to the NATO intervention in Kosovo to stake his word on an effective use of military power.
Through JINSA, men like Abrams and Kristol—relics of a damned era of US foreign policy, are allowed to survive. For example, on February 7th, WaL received a press packet from JINSA advocating the opinions of another Neocon, John Hannah, Cheney’s former National Security Advisor.
By February 7th over 20,000 civilians, the majority women and children, had been killed in Gaza by Israeli violence. As WaL reported, this ancient multi-cultural urban landscape had hundreds of cultural and historic sites bombed and destroyed, and Israel had its defense thrown out at the International Court of Justice by South Africa, who won a case against the Jewish ethno-state that it was knowingly engaging in genocide.
Hannah’s take was that a ceasefire would “supercharge” Iranian narratives and let Hamas get away with the “worst mass-targeting of Jews since the Holocaust”.
Arguing in circles, the press packet states Hannah’s opinion that “Hamas surviving and retaining control of Gaza” is “exactly the endgame that Iran and its proxy armies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen have been fighting for since October 7th”. Hamas was alive and in control of Gaza on October 6th. They had no need to fight for either.
Each individual is free to speculate on the motives for Hamas’ actions on October 7th, but suggesting that they started a war in order to survive a war needs no refutation here. Perhaps they, like 50 other nations that testified with evidence before the ICJ in February, believe that the Palestinians are living in an apartheid state, and the attack was a final straw—a declaration of a two-state solution or death—from the toughest gang in the world’s most famous open-air prison.
Abrams wrote in his own bibliography that “strengthening Israel, our major ally in the region, should be the central core of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region”.
Today, JINSA is in the process of lobbying for a US-Israel defense pact, ensuring American boys and girls would go to war in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf. Such a pact would have surely been triggered during the October 7th attack, and would have meant US soldiers likely on the ground in Gaza, thereby implicating the US in a genocide.
Trampling fundamental American freedoms
Another Neocon fearmonger working through JINSA’s well-funded public relations team is Gabriel Norohna, a fellow at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy. Norohna is currently advocating Congress take away Americans’ fundamental human rights of movement and travel.
In a long article for JINSA Norohna argues that the State Department needs to take a comprehensive approach to prevent the taking of US citizens as hostages at the command of foreign governments.
“The United States needs to develop stronger restrictions and disincentives for Americans to travel to countries with an elevated risk of kidnapping and wrongful detention, particularly Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Russia,” wrote Norohna in his bullet points.
Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right not to be constrained by governments. Thousands of American citizens travel to these countries every year for various worthwhile reasons and don’t get kidnapped.
Norohna fearmongers that Americans have been subjected to a 175% increase in kidnapping incidents, but doesn’t mention that the number is 59, and the time horizon is 10 years. That places Americans at the same risk of being kidnapped and wrongfully detained by government agents as one-fifth the risk of being struck by lightning, plus or minus a few victims depending on which year is being averaged, over a 10-year time horizon.
The United States doesn’t interfere with its citizens doing all manner of dangerous activities such as mercenary work, wingsuit skydiving, big wave surfing, free-solo rock climbing, backcountry skiing, or working on fishing vessels in the Bearing Sea. Furthermore, the State Department doesn’t interfere with Americans traveling to countries where the risk of kidnapping is high—but not politically motivated.
Indeed the only reason JINSA fellows are writing about this is because Americans were among the Israeli citizens kidnapped by Hamas. Perhaps Israel should join Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Russia in Norohna’s reckoning.
Of course, what do those four countries—all four being incredibly different kinds of societies—have in common? The United States has tried to destroy them; all in various ways, and rarely directly, but destroy them nonetheless. WaL has reported extensively on the damage American sanctions and election meddling have done in Venezuela. The Syrian Civil War only raged as hotly as it did because of the backing of jihadists called Operation Timber Sycamore. In it, the US took the side of al-Qaeda and similar Wahabi militias against the government in Aleppo.
The relationship with Russia is long and complex, and what is needed in it is more diplomacy, not less—just look at the state of US-Russian relations now that the four major arms control agreements have elapsed or been torn up by men in the White House. Likewise, the relationship with Iran has at some periods been agreeable—such as during the fight against ISIS, when Iranian intelligence and US air power backed up Iraqi militias to complete success in dismantling the so-called caliphate.
US belligerence towards Iran has seen them restart their civilian nuclear program which had been almost completely abandoned during the successful period of the JCPOA, and rather than focus on areas of agreement, every American presidential administration since the Iranian Revolution has sought to impoverish the country with crippling economic sanctions that haven’t changed the behavior of the government one-iota.
The exact same story is true for North Korea—another country mentioned in Norohna’s policy piece. Sanctions that have been reauthorized for decades have achieved nothing of note, and the North Korean nuclear weapon capability is as advanced as it’s ever been, and its state as a pariah has forced it to rely on selling coal and weapons to make money enough to feed its people.
As to Norohna’s piece itself, it argues for a comprehensive and integrated policy to deal with nations that take hostages for political reasons that include taking diplomatic actions against these countries’ diplomats, such as limiting their access to the UN, denying them visas, and impeding their economic activities. It also highlights the need to coordinate with other nations whose nationals have been kidnapped to try and pressure for their release by signing treaties and coordinating with INTERPOL to identify and punish individuals responsible for hostage-taking.
Whatever merits this proposal has to limit hostage taking, the fact remains that JINSA, this bastion of Neoconservatism, represents a spawning pool of the most damaging foreign policies the United States has been exposed to since the Spanish-American War. No key country-to-country relationship has been improved since the Neocons entered politics, and the long-lasting effects of their advocacy, especially on behalf of Israel, continue to cause these relationships to deteriorate today. WaL
