- Television evangelist Jerry Falwell couldn't resist bragging
and finally admitting the truth: he and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
"Bibi" Netanyahu did conspire-at a critical time-to trip up President
Bill Clinton and specifically use the pressure of the Monica Lewinsky sex
scandal to force Clinton to abandon pressure on Israel to withdraw from
the occupied West Bank.
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- Falwell's confession didn't make national news-as it
should have. Instead, the preacher's confession came buried in a lengthy
story in the December 2005 issue of Vanity Fair. Entitled "American
Rapture" the article (by Craig Unger) described the long-standing
and still-flourishing love affair between American dispensationalist evangelicals
such as Falwell and the hardline Jewish extremist forces in Israel then
under the leadership of Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.
-
- The admission by Falwell confirms precisely what this
author first revealed in a story published in The Spotlight on February
9, 1998 and later recounted in a lecture before the Arab League's official
think tank, the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, in March of 2003.
-
- Although, following the lecture at the Zayed Centre,
the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, a lobby for Israel, denounced
as a "bizarre conspiracy theory" the assertion by Falwell that
the public unveiling of the Lewinsky affair forced Clinton to pull back
on pressuring Israel confirmed exactly what was reported in documented
detail in The Spotlight in an international exclusive.
-
- Regarding Falwell's recounting of how he worked with
Netanyahu in undermining Clinton's pressure on Israel, Vanity Fair reported:
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- On a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1998, Netanyahu hooked
up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before [Netanyahu's]
scheduled meeting with Clinton. "I put together 1,000 people or so
to meet with Bibi [Netanyahu] and he spoke to us that night," recalls
Falwell. "It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton."
. . . The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. "Bibi
told me later," Falwell recalls, "that the next morning Bill
Clinton said, 'I know where you were last night." The pressure was
really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was during the
Monica Lewinsky scandal . . . . Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated
the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming
during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel." (END
OF VANITY FAIR EXCERPT)
-
- What Falwell did not mention-at least as reported by
Vanity Fair-is that his meeting with the Israeli leader took place on the
very evening before the mass media in America broke open the Monica Lewinsky
scandal with much fanfare. Nor did Falwell mention-as this author pointed
out at the time- was that one of Netanyahu's leading American media publicists,
neo-conservative power broker, William Kristol, the first American media
figure to publicly hint (in the days before the scandal was officially
unveiled) that there were forthcoming revelations regarding a White House
sex scandal that was about to be unleashed.
-
- In addition, this author pointed out that at least six
days before the first news of the Lewinsky scandal began breaking in the
media at midnight on Tuesday, January 20, 1998, an advertisement appeared
in the January 15 edition of the distinguished Washington Jewish Week newspaper
accusing President Clinton of having "turned his back on Israel."
-
- What made the advertisement so striking was that it used
a rear view of President Clinton (first captured on video in 1996) that
had never been published but which, in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal,
became very familiar. It was a view of the president, his back to the camera,
clearly taken from the video in which he was seen hugging the soon-to-be
infamous Miss Lewinsky when she was in a receiving line at the White House
some two years before. This was an image that Miss Lewinsky had bragged
about among her associates prior to the time that the scandal broke. So
clearly, Clinton's critics among the hard-line pro-Netanyahu forces in
the United States-who sponsored the advertisement in question-were already
tuned in to the fact of the Lewinsky-Clinton liaison and of the fact that
it was soon to be unleashed against the president to undermine him.
-
- This author can now reveal, for the first time, that
two figures at the very highest level of the Clinton White House were personally
given copies of The Spotlight's articles regarding these matters and that,
at the time, they quietly acknowledged that the articles were "probably
right."
-
- The fact that Jerry Falwell's acknowledgment of how the
Lewinsky affair was used as a club against Clinton-in tandem with "Bibi"
Netanyahu's appearance at the White House, following the meeting with Falwell-was
published in Vanity Fair is interesting in and of itself. That magazine
is owned by the far-flung publishing empire of the billionaire Newhouse
brothers ("Si" and Donald) whom Forbes dubbed the 25th richest
family in America and who are known to be generous contributors to the
Anti-Defamation League and other elements of the pro-Israel lobby. --
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