Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/18/kushner-saudi-arms-deal.html
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Second verse same as the first.
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Are we to believe that a $100B weapons deal was put together since the handover from POTUS Obama and so this is directly because of POTUS Trump?
Is Xeni or the NYT engaging in the age old Jewish financiers trope? In Xeni’s case I’ll give the benifit of the doubt.
You are the only one mentioning his religion here!
Are you suggesting that Kushner, a rich Jewish real-estate magnate from a wealthy Jewish family of real-estate magnates can’t be a financier with dodgy practices?
And thus is above the fray? Why?
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t at once go all Genius because Jewish a la Einstein and Szilard and Feynman and also pretend that the Rothschilds are saintly because rich and only incidentally Jewish.
As depressing as it is there are businessman out there whose business practices are informed / influenced by their religious beliefs and some of those happen to be Jewish. And I certainly wish more of those Jewish business magnates would behave like Soros rather than Lev Leviev. Surely that’s fair comment.
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Do we just set aside a hundred billion dollar arms deal with one of the most repressive regimes in the world as acceptable because, wait, someone involved is Jewish?
Perhaps a need to refocus here. No? Well, back to despair then.
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I would also mention that a lot of the money Bernie Madoff* with was money from Jewish friends and relatives.
Jews are people. Where I differ from @Israel_B is in thinking that they are neither better nor worse than other people. On the other hand, it’s widely believed that property dealers as a class tend to have below average honesty.
The previous example of this - also with the Saudis - was Mark Thatcher’s involvement in a similar British deal when his mother was PM. Mrs. Thatcher was apparently a Methodist. I await with interest someone accusing me of anti-Methodist conspiracy peddling.
*I refuse to apologise for the awful pun.
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Yep. The real-estate magnate seems to be the telling bit.
I have yet to see an example of how you can make billions from other people’s home without shafting those people. One of the most depressing and disheartening aspects of current politics is that we have allowed a system that rewards such profiteering with the highest office in the land.
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My first thought when reading this was that Kushner would not even be allowed in Saudi Arabia (though maybe his relationship to Trump gives him certain dispensation), so it’s a weird bit of dissonance that the Saudis are dealing directly with a Jew. I guess money is the only real religion for people at the top of the economic/political hierarchy, no matter what faith they might claim to hold.
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As you observe, money Trumps everything.
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I admit I don’t know much about the applicable laws, but I don’t see a problem here. What’s the difference between Kushner doing this and Drumpf hiring an agent to do this? OK, so Kushner is not an elected official. Show me the law that says only an elected official can do business with the Saudis. Is there a law that says you have to be elected to represent the US in an arms deal with a foreign country?
What the bleep does Kushner’s religion have to do with anything? Would it be all better if he was Shintoist?
My main thought about this is, how much Lockheed-Martin stock does the traitor in chief own?
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That is most certainly the way the traitor in chief will try to spin it. That ccksck*r has spent his life stealing credit for things he never touched.
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I’m certainly not proud that our country is peddling arms and death for profit to an absolute monarchy which fosters global terrorism, pedophillic sexual slavery, gender apartheid, institutional racism, antisemitism, religious oppression, censorship, homophobia, and mass public executions by beheading.
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If you are on the seller’s side, it usually isn’t too bad if you are getting a decent price and are well represented.
He just skirts the anti-nepotism law by not being directly employed by the US government or getting money from the Treasury.
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Lets not forget they are also financing ISIS as a proxy force against Iranians.
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Who says Arabs hate Jews? Kushner picks up the phone and negotiates the price down.
This was my first thought. I agree that when the Kingdom won’t accept passports with Israeli stamps let alone from a person of Jewish ancestry accepting business via Jared signals that the worship of money above all else is their true religion.
Or perhaps Jared just called under a fake name like his father in law is prone to do.
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I don’t know about the “trope”, but the arms sales seem to be part of a long term negotiation process that predates this administration.
I do think the main point is to keep Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait as the stable major powers in the region. Right now, any power vacuum in the area would quickly be filled by Iran. Any expansion of Iran’s power is a direct threat to the survival of Israel. Not just a threat to Zionism, but a personal threat to each of the 6 million Jews living in Israel.
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Also, because the Kingdom has the cash flow to help keep major US corporations in the black. See airplanes, weapons, security, training, intelligence, command and control centers, and on and on. Every US defense contractor and airplane manufacturer have their dirty little fingers in the Royal sands. They want it stable because they want to make money and keep their stockholders happy.
Oh and yeah, think hotels.
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Iran and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a “Cold War” since 1979. Each trying to “out-Islamicist” each other. It wasn’t until the end of the Soviet Union that much of it became apparent to the rest of the world. The Iran/Iraq War, Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, factional split among Palestinians, Syrian occupation of Lebanon and the Syrian Civil War all can be seen through the lens of both countries using proxies to grab power in the ME.
Israel has been in caught the middle of this since the Oslo Accords melted down in 1997. What few realized at the time was that the Iran/Saudi Cold War was a direct cause for it, playing out through the Fatah/Hamas conflict. Destroying the peace process and leading to civil war with the Palestinians.
See
"Saudi King Khaled however, did not react to the upheaval by cracking down on religious puritans in general, but by giving the ulama and religious conservatives more power over the next decade. He is thought to have believed that "the solution to the religious upheaval was simple - more religion.“First, photographs of women in newspapers were banned, then women on television. Cinemas and music shops were shut down. School curriculum was changed to provide many more hours of religious studies, eliminating classes on subjects like non-Islamic history. Gender segregation was extended “to the humblest coffee shop”. The religious police became more assertive.”
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