“Guilt by Association makes treason transparent,” advertises the blurb on the back of this book. And if I were limited to so brief a summary, these are exactly the words I would choose! This book is a many-splendored thing, and I hope in the space of this review to be able to convey the enormous import of this book, and why you need to buy not just a copy for yourself but copies for all your loved ones and for anyone you seek to educate about the threat America's involvement with Israel poses not just to American values, but to our national security and to our survival as a nation.
Yes Israel and its Zionist Fifth Columnists in America are our real national enemy, yes they do “hate our freedom”and our putative ideals, yes they represent a genuine threat to our national security (unlike Iraq, Afghanistan and the myriad other countries towards whom they and their minions have adroitly pointed our guns), and yes they are immensely powerful, but yes, in the end, they too have feet of clay and the basis of their power can be understood and undermined and no, even the Jews themselves are not monolithic in support of racist Israel, as recently attested in the pages of Culture Wars by Israel Adam Shamir (whose roots are Russian-Jewish) and in the recently published, superlative work Overcoming Zionism by American Jewish writer Joel Kovel (in which he identifies the chief culprits as “power Jews” and baldly avers that “Israel does not have a right to exist”), if any proof were needed on this score after the prodigious groundbreaking work of the late, great Israel Shahak (who is frequently cited by Gates – it cannot be stated too often that not every Jew is a Zionist, and not every Zionist is a Jew; and we fail to recognize at our peril that anti-Zionist Jews number among our most important allies, and some non-Jewish Zionist sympathizers turn out to be our most dangerous enemies, especially when we fail to recognize them as such). But the Zionist project is part of a larger criminal conspiracy which is, in fact, an OPEN conspiracy, that bewilders even as it beggars the American body politic. In order to overcome an enemy we must first understand who and what he is, what his purpose is, how he operates. It is the great value of Guilt by Association that it brings out into bold relief the nature, identity, methodology and support system of this nefarious criminal syndicate; what has been “hidden in plain sight” for so long is finally made accessible to any open-minded reader.
This author is quick to pooh-pooh the already classic Walt-Mearsheimer study of the Israeli Lobby as too soft on Israel. While there is no disputing the accuracy of his criticism, we should also consider how much of a watershed event the publication of The Israel Lobby was, and how it paved the way for more radical efforts like this one, which pulls no punches about Israel's perfidy. Despite Jeff Gate's own considerable credentials (author, educator, attorney,financial policy advisor to 35 countries and counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance for seven years), the fact that those two professors made the subject academically respectable certainly has created a wider audience for bolder critics of the “special relationship.” But in strictly political terms, if Walt and Mearsheimer' s work was the icebreaker, Guilt by Association is the magnificent flagship following in its wake.
