NORTH CAROLINA - Oddly enough, but not surprisingly, I had a bit of an altercation this past week with one Josh Block on Twitter. I hurled a condemnation at a post of his, and he hurled one back at me and called me an “anti-Semite” and a bit more. To his invective, I did not respond, recalling British play writer George Bernard Shaw who wrote decades ago that tangling with pigs was bound to be unproductive and that pigs actually LIKE a fight, that fighting with them gives them pleasure.

 Who is Block, or should I say “Blockhead”? Well, he is CEO and president of an organization called The Israel Project, based in Washington and Jerusalem, that is a lobbying organization providing pro-Zionist talking points to the public and to journalists aimed at giving people a “more positive public face” to Israel. Block formerly worked for several hawkish, pro-Zionist lobby groups in the U.S. including AIPAC.

Given headlines around the world claiming that Saudi Arabia under Muhammad bin Salman had carried out the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen who was writing for the Washington Post, Block was going whole hog, literally, to try to exonerate the theocratic dictatorship over the apparent murder of Khashoggi.

 Block tweeted that Khashoggi was “a radical Islamic terrorist who was close to Osama bin Laden, ISIS, and Hamas who wanted to overthrow the Saudi ruling royals who oppose both Sunni terrorists, sponsored by Turkey and Qatar, as well as Iran’s Shia terrorist armies and allies.”

Block is about as twisted as anyone can be, so let’s just make a few honest, valid points. 

First of all, Khashoggi was by all accounts a Saudi patriot and as far as Arab journalists go, which could be debatable as a general matter anyway, a good one for decades. He was quite liked by colleagues at the very “establishment” and largely pro-Israel Washington Post, for one thing. His last column for the paper, printed I think after his disappearance, focused almost exclusively on his insistence that the Arab world, and especially Saudi Arabia, promote a free press, or at least a much freer one than has been witnessed in many years. 

Another point must be that, even if it has not been trumpeted in the Western media, Saudi Arabia has funded “terrorists”, Sunni terrorists, like no other Arab country, particularly of late in Syria, and Israel (and the U.S.) has also funded and supported terrorists with arms and money, including al-Qaeda (however it may have been renamed) as well as ISIS – all with the aim to topple Assad in Syria and other alleged “enemies” of chaos in the Mideast.

 Israel has frequently sheltered ISIS and other terrorists with other organizations near the Golan, and given medical attention to those in need of it. As for the U.S., Trump and even Obama aided ISIS repeatedly in Syria – all the while falsely claiming that the U.S. was IN Syria to destroy ISIS. In fact, were it not for Iran and Russia and of course the Syrian army, ISIS would still be rampaging, and what remnants of ISIS that still remain in Syria, well, they are sheltered to some extent near U.S. troops in the east of that country.

In any event, it’s a positive that some in the U.S. Congress are condemning MBS and Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi’s murder, and also at least hinting about a need to cut at least some ties to the Saudis and even, possibly, withdrawing support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

One big obstacle is that the Saudis could threaten the so-called “Petrodollar” in retaliation and also dump further arms purchases from the U.S. But don’t expect much from the Trump Administration in this respect unless pressure is augmented by world opinion. Trump has been careening back and forth between condemnation of the current Saudi leadership and trying to cast blame for the murder on some alleged “rogue” Saudi elements or individuals in an effort to exonerate MBS.

As for aggressive Jewish/Zionists lobbyists like Josh Block, their primary concern in trashing Khashoggi and lying about him and virtually suggesting that he deserved to be murdered, is all tied up with the Zionist desire for the U.S. to lead a war on Iran – which could not be started or executed without the full support and participation of Saudi Arabia.

 Because, simply, it would hardly look at all good for the Israelis and the U.S. alone to launch a military attack on Iran. World condemnation would be off the charts and could well end U.S. and Zionist aggressions in future. The Khashoggi matter, if it does result in real condemnation of the Saudis and MBS by the U.S., severely disrupts those in Israel and the U.S. Neocons who have been pushing for a war on Iran.

As for MBS himself, he is not and never has been a serious social (or any other kind of) reformer. Anyone who spends a billion dollars on a yacht and a palace or something in Europe is frankly not worthy of respect on that alone. It was almost funny this week to hear New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who was charmed by MBS and wrote glowingly about alleged “reforms” MBS was going to institute, struggling to defend himself in light of the apparent fact of the murder of a well-known Arab journalist who worked at the primary rival of the New York Times. People like Friedman and others of his ilk, apologists for Israeli criminality, should live in infamy.