James Wall: Israel May Be Plotting to Steal U.S. Election

There’s something really pathetic about watching someone sink into uncontrollable paranoia. Take James Wall, the former editor-in-chief (and still contributing editor) of Christian Century. In his retirement, he writes a blog in which he obsesses over Israel, and its control of the U.S. government, American media, etc. In his latest, he starts off with what seems like a typical (if left-leaning) analysis of the presidential election, only to drift around to the subject of his favorite boogeyman:

With less than three months left before voters decide between President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent,  Mitt Romney, Obama has a strong lead in the latest Politico poll figures.

Politico identifies ten swing states that will most likely decide the 2012 election. Obama leads in nine of them: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Romney leads Obama by one percent in the swing state of North Carolina.

Yada, yada, yada. This analysis is almost certainly way off base (for example, the idea that Romney leads in North Carolina by only one point, after Obama won it by less than half a percent in a Democratic wave election, is patently absurd), but hey, everyone has a perspective on the election, and Wall is entitled to his. Before long, however, he heads for the gutter:

The one thing that could seriously halt an Obama landslide would be interference by outside forces. That may well have been the case with the Iranian government in the Carter-Reagan election in 1980.  Whether Republican campaigners made a secret deal with Iran to hold American hostages until after the election, is still hotly debated.

But the fact that the hostage release was timed by Iran to fall on Reagan’s 1981 inauguration day offers strong circumstantial evidence that the Iranians did not want Carter to get any credit for negotiating the hostage release. A release of the hostages prior to the election would have greatly enhanced Carter’s chances of reelection.

Gary Sick’s book, October Surprise, offers strong support to the belief that Reagan’s campaign staff interfered in delicate international matters for their own partisan political reasons.

Actually, Sick’s allegations have been thoroughly discredited by both a House of Representatives investigation (undertaken when the House was still under Democrat control) and by such right-wing media outlets as the Village Voice, Newsweek, and The New Republic. But the only reason to bring this up is to lay the foundation to bring in the Little Satan:

Is Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offering Mitt Romney another October surprise? His bellicose threats to attack Iran would impact the election, even as it set in motion a series of events destructive to the region.

Why would he put the lives of his own citizens in such danger?

One strong reason could be his belief that a Romney victory would return Israel to the glory days of George W. Bush. During his recent fund-raising speech in Jerusalem, Romney said Israel’s culture was “superior” to that of the Palestinians….

Netanyahu enjoyed eight years of his relationship to Republican President George W. Bush, who essentially gave Israel a green light to carry out its plan to take control of what Netanyahu calls Judea and Samaria, but which the international community correctly identifies as the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

With US polls showing the strength of Obama’s lead three months before the election, would Netanyahu dare risk starting a war with Iran which he may think would guarantee a Romney victory?

If that is the thinking in the Netanyahu war cabinet, it is wrong.

Israel’s standing with the American public is not nearly as strong as the Congress, and Israel’s U.S. backers, think it is. Americans are tired of war and they do not like Romney. If Netanyahu attacks Iran over Obama’s objections, there is every reason to believe the American people would reject Israel’s action and stand behind their own president.

As a second-term president,  Obama would be in a strong position to start terminating Israel’s control of the American government.

And there you have it. If Israel attacks Iran before the election, it’s a Zionist plot to steal the American election from Barack Obama. Of course, one has to wonder how Obama is going to “terminat[e] Israel’s control of the American government” in a second term if he wasn’t able to after his big victory in 2008. For that matter, Obama has been the head of that government for the last four years—how does Wall know he isn’t in on the plot?

Wall has been relied upon as a source of “news” and “analysis” by various mainline anti-Israel groups for a while now (the PCUSA’s Israel-Palestine Mission Network, for example, regularly links to his posts on their Twitter site—they linked to this one on Friday). But they buy into his anti-Israel paranoia, so I guess that’s no surprise.