by James M. Wall

Your heart has to go out to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Last weekend Christie went to Las Vegas to roll the dice in the “kiss Sheldon Adelson’s ring”, Republican primary.

One of four Republicans who may enter the real presidential primaries for the 2016 nomination, Christie stumbled in Las Vegas.

Halfway through his public address to the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a convenient cover event for Adelson’s ring-kissing primary, Christie uttered a huge Zionist “no no”.

Here is a poor guy doing his best to pivot from the grime and scandal of New Jersey politics to the sunny environs of Nevada, where he wanted to do nothing more than display his deep and abiding love for Israel.

Such a pivot should have been a welcome and easy transition for a man who has spent months fighting public and legal attacks over Bridgegate, “a scandal about a traffic jam”.

Desperate to connect to his Jewish audience, and of course, to kiss the ring of Zionist Casino Oligarch Adelson, Christie looked back fondly to a 2012 trip he made with his family to Israel.

Did  he not know? Had he not heard? A governor who has displayed considerable obfuscation skills while denying involvement in his staff’s possible use of a bridge barrier to punish a political opponent, Christie slipped up on this one, big time:

“I took a helicopter ride from the occupied territories across and just felt personally how extraordinary that was to understand, the military risk that Israel faces every day.”

His helicopter journey with his family was standard political jargon for his audience, except, that is, for one major “oops”.

Politics 101: “Occupied territories” is a term that aspiring politicos should never, ever use, when addressing a Zionist audience.

In the real world, as the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) documents, there is ample support for use of the term occupation:

In July 2004, while ruling that the wall Israel is building in the West Bank is illegal, the International Court of Justice also deemed Israel’s settlement enterprise to be in contravention of international law, and the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem to be under Israeli military occupation.

In 2005, Israel’s own Supreme Court also judged the West Bank to be under “belligerent occupation” by Israel.

In 2003, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, known as a political hardliner and godfather of the settlement movement, stated “You cannot like the word, but what is happening is an occupation – to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. I believe that is a terrible thing for Israel and for the Palestinians.”

Always against such realities, colonialists create their own reality by controlling language to describe the land they seize.

Native Americans have the correct term for such control: “a forked tongue”.

The Urban Dictionary defines “forked tongue”:

A person who says one thing and does another as defined by Native Americans describing the first Illegal Aliens, the Anglo-Saxons breaking promises and treaties, with a snakes tongue for them taking their land by force with no compensation and forcing them to live in inhospitable areas like Oklahoma which Indians avoided before the advent of reservations.

Christie’s staff failed to provide their boss with a “forked tongue” Zionist dictionary.

Christie must have heard the ripples of disapproval and surprise that came from his National Jewish Coalition audience.  He then heard enough from his staff to rush over and apologize to Adelson.

The casino oligarch has yet to name his preferred 2016 Republican presidential candidate.

Who can say, the Christie apology for inadvertently speaking the truth, may turn out to be the apology that wins him the Adelson primary.

Adelson, who is chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp., a casino and resort operating firm, has two major passions: Israel and casino gambling, especially Israel.

With these passions in mind, according to Media Matters, he reportedly spent nearly $150 million in an effort to influence the 2012 presidential election with donations to a super PAC aligned with Mitt Romney and other outside groups.

“Before switching allegiance to Romney, Adelson had donated millions to Newt Gingrich. He has also given generously in the past to super PACs associated with a variety of Republican politicians, including Scott Walker, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, and Eric Cantor.”

Looking ahead to the 2016 Republican primaries, at Las Vegas, Adelson had private talks with Gov. Christie (R-NJ), Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Gov. John Kasich (R-OH), and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. (Pictured here).

Another possible presidential aspirant, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, was a no-show to the Las Vegas RJC event.

Time magazine offers this explanation for his absence:

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is hard at work laying the groundwork for an almost certain presidential campaign in 2016, but as he broadens his support among libertarian and younger voters, there’s a budding counter campaign to take him down if he becomes a threat to actually win the nomination.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) meeting in Las Vegas this weekend, Paul was nowhere to be found, but his presence was felt in the form of a straw man — and frequent worry. Speaker after speaker, from former Florida governor Jeb Bush to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, laid into Paul’s more isolationist views on foreign policy.

They never mentioned the lawmaker by name, but the message came across loud and clear.

What was clear in Las Vegas, is that a presidential aspirant cannot possibly be blessed by Adelson unless he/she demonstrates a willingness for the U.S. to engage militarily in those places dictated by Israel.

Rashid Khalidi makes this point in his careful examination of the way in which U.S. policy makers have worked to give Israel what Israel demands.

In his book, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, Khalidi examines what he terms the “construct” of the “peace process”:

The construct is and was always designed by its Israeli architects (and their American subcontractors) to be an impermeable barrier against true Palestinian emancipation, rather than a route in that direction.

Thus, this construct does not, cannot, and is expressly meant not to address the roots of the conflict, which lie in the unending subjugation of the Palestinians, and their refusal to accept their lot.  

We should not be surprised: all of these elements are inextricably bound to a scheme originally devised by Menachem Begin to avoid such emancipation, and to ensure permanent Israeli control of, and settlement in, the occupied territories, the core of what Begin called ‘Eretz israel.’

Khalidi’s book is essential reading and rereading, as the 2016 presidential campaign begins.

If just one candidate of either party emerges and openly articulates the extent to which U.S. political leaders have served as “brokers of deceit”, that candidate deserves our attention

An unlikely development, of course, but strange things have emerged in political campaigns. Who could have anticipated that a “railsplitter” from Illinois would free the slaves near the end of the American Civil War.

The time has come for this nation to break from its Middle East policies, which are, in Khalidi’s words, “designed by its Israeli architects and their American subcontractors”.

George Washington warned us: “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils”.

Those evils were much in evidence in the Sheldon Adelson Las Vegas primary.

The picture of Governor Christie (at top) appeared in Politico. It is by Getty . The pictures of the four presidential aspirants who attended the Las Vegas event, are from Bloomberg News.