Jonathan Pollard red, white and blue
Odds are that convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is now in his 29th year in prison only because of thinly camouflaged anti-Semitism. That is the learned opinion of James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Woolsey has said so in interviews to Channel 10, as well as to The Jerusalem Post. He went on the record and without beating around the bush. He thus gave an authoritative voice to what many suspected and hinted at for years.
Woolsey may be the only higher-up in the US security establishment to head-on cite anti-Semitism, but he is not the only one to have called for Pollard’s release on the grounds that he had served an unreasonably and disproportionately long sentence in comparison to the time other spies for US allies spent behind bars.
In many cases the spies from friendly countries were sent up for less than four years, and they didn’t serve the full sentences either. Egyptian Abdelkader Helmy got a three-year-and-10-month sentence. Jean Baynes, who was caught spying on behalf of the Philippines, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years. Spies for Britain and South Africa were each given two years.
After the Woolsey statements, the specter of anti-Jewish prejudice, however denied, can no longer be covered up. The elephant in the room has materialized and come out in full view. Nobody – on either side of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – can continue pretending the issue is not there.
To be sure, this is not the first time Woolsey has charged that Pollard is treated unfairly. In 2012, he wrote a critical letter to The Wall Street Journal where he supplied examples from many other cases in which the convicted spies were released after 10 years.
He emphasized several examples of people who had been convicted of spying for various regimes – Saudi Arabia,Ghana, Ecuador, Egypt, the Philippines and South Korea – all of whom had served or were serving sentences of less than 10 years. “One especially damaging Greek-American spy,Steven Lalas, received a 14-year sentence, just over half of what Pollard has already served,” Woolsey noted two years ago.
He went further: “For those hung up for some reason on the fact that [Pollard] is an American Jew, pretend he’s a Greek – or Korean – or Filipino-American, and free him.”
There is no getting away from it – appreciably lighter punishment was meted to assorted US spies for greater offenses than what Pollard was accused of, including spying that involved tangible and severe security hazards to America.
That Pollard was treated so ultra-harshly by any existing legal yardsticks and the fact that his tribulation is ongoing, despite his age and infirmity, is not just pointlessly cruel. The departure from all precedents in his case smells foul. It is difficult to escape the impression that the only reason Pollard was over-punished and is still denied his freedom is because he is Jewish.
The punishment meted out to Pollard was from the outset scandalous. It was disproportionate in the extreme, principally considering he never put American agents or interests at risk, that he never divulged anything involving America but clued in a fellow democracy about the machinations of its enemies, which happened to have also been America’s enemies.
Although Pollard’s life-term is unparalleled for transferring classified material to an ally, no US administration in nearly three decades countenanced pardoning him – regardless of the fact that Pollard had publicly apologized and expressed remorse.
As the Anti-Defamation League charges, this may be an effort to intimidate American Jewry whose loyalty is forever doubted owing to one anti-Semitic stereotype or another.
Yet thanks to Woolsey, it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain the charade that Pollard deserves excessive and continuing punishment. George Orwell once defined freedom as “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Woolsey served the cause of freedom fearlessly.
Bucking the Trend ... 
OF COURSE Pollard is the second Dreyfus, that has always been clear to EVERYONE, who hadn’t lost his moral compass.
Thank you Mr. Woolsey, for not being afraid to tell the truth !
Pollards treatment highlights the US attitude towards it’s “ally” Israel.
Some people should finally wake up…
And of course, Kerry & Obama are NOT Israels friends !
QUITE THE CONTRARY.
Name a president who was. Bush insisted, just like Carter and Clinton and now obama, that Israel free murderers and surrender land for meaningless guarantees of security. We all do remember “islam means peace, I looked him in his eyes and knew I could trust him” GWB, don’t we?
Yes, it’s always the same dirty game…GWB also invented the infamous “road map” and gave a phony speech before the Knesset…DISGUSTING !
That was the comment I was ready to make.
You hit the nail on the head.
…… and the chances of the USA government (now or in the future) ever admitting to outright antisemitism, let alone disguised antisemitism, are as possible as a cow jumping over the moon. Same applies to the U.K and Europe as well. At least with the Arab world we know what their avowed aims are towards Israel and Jews at large, and furthermore where we stand.
The mistrust of Jews coupled with the antipathy by people (Liberal left wings Jews included) toward Israel make the chances of enduring belief and trust minimality to say the least. The stereo typical impression seems to pass from generation to generation.
The US went nuts over a relatively minor case of espionage (even though the amount of the material was in the thousands of pages.) I don’t know if it was Judenhass or simply a case of an overzealous prosecutor or both. It certainly was an overzealous SecDef. In either case the sentence was a out of balance with the charge, that of passing classified information to be used to the advantage of Israel.
In the end Pollard’s sentence was a shot over Israel’s bow and a show of reassurance to the arab nations. There can be no other reason for Cap Weinberger to have interfered in the manner he did. To me it was and is a clear indication and message that the US is prepared to sacrifice Israel for any number of reasons. I am also pretty sure it was a personal vendetta by whineburger to put an “uppity Jew” in his place. I guess I am naive but I just don’t get how giving Israel secrets about arab military capabilities to a supposed ally in order to defend itself rises to the level of treason as whineburger claimed.
It is impossible to consider the case of Jonathan Pollard without immediately being reminded of the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953 for espionage, charged with having passed Atomic Bomb secrets to America’s WW II Ally, the Soviet Union.
Julius was 35 and Ethel, the Mother of two young children, was 37 at the time they were executed.
The then Deputy Attorney General of the United States William P. Rogers, when later asked about the failure of the indictment of Ethel to extract a full confession from Julius, reportedly said:
“The strategy was to use the death sentence imposed on Ethel to wring a full confession from Julius – in hopes that Ethel’s motherly instincts would trump unconditional loyalty to a noble but discredited cause. What went wrong? She called our bluff”.
(from – Roberts, Sam (June 26, 2008). “Spies and Secrecy”. The New York Times. Retrieved June 27, 2008.)
No confessions were ever obtained from either of the Rosenbergs and in any case the allegations against Ethel Rosenberg were chiefly that she had allegedly typed several pages of notes for her husband.
Had Ethel Rosenberg been of any religion other than Jewish it is inconceivable she would have been sentenced to death in the Electric Chair especially in view of the fact that she had two small children and no relative at the time was willing to accept responsibility for their care.
But Ethel was not a blond, blue eyed, fair complexioned, all American young woman.
She was a “Jew”. And thus children or no children, she had to die.
The following information is relevant:
“At the time, after the publication of an investigative series in The National Guardian and the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, some Americans came to believe both Rosenbergs were innocent or received too harsh a punishment, and a grassroots campaign was started to try to stop the couple’s execution.
“Between the trial and the executions there were widespread protests and claims of anti-Semitism; the charges of anti-Semitism were widely believed abroad, but not among the vast majority in the United States, where the Rosenbergs did not receive any support from mainstream Jewish organizations nor from the American Civil Liberties Union; the ACLU would not acknowledge any violations of civil liberties.
“Marxist (and later Nobel Prize-winning) existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial:
“a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear … you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.”
“Others, including non-Communists such as Jean Cocteau, Albert Einstein and Nobel-Prize-winning physical chemist Harold Urey, as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed America’s Dreyfus affair.
In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L’Humanité:
“The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place.”
The all-black labor union International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest. Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest.
Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.”
It is difficult to imagine that any American President would refuse to spare the life of a young mother with two small children if she were NOT of the Jewish Faith, especially so when it was clear that whatever guilt applied to her husband could hardly be applied to his wife in the remotest equal measure.
But Jews have always received a different type of Justice from non Jews, all throughout recorded history. The examples are countless and would fill volumes.
And then of course, there is the tragic added element regarding how many Jews will often not wish to “get involved” in cases of other Jews for fear of attracting “unwanted attention” to themselves. The old obscenity of deciding to “go along to get along”.
We still have far too many of such types both in America and sadly in Israel itself.
And that idea extends to the world’s most powerful and influential media both in Europe and in the USA as best exemplified by the “vaunted” New York Times where Israel can never do right in any situation.
It is always useful to “Expose the Charade” regardless of how self obvious that charade is and how much it has already been demonstrated over and over again, ad nausea.
As pointed out: “Odds are that convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is now in his 29th year in prison only because of thinly camouflaged anti-Semitism. That is the learned opinion of James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
We must take solace in the fact that occasionally, human beings of real character and integrity will step forward and remind the world of that which it prefers not to hear.
Should we not apply the term “Mensch” to such a man as James Woolsey.
If only there were more such human beings amongst us.
“Had Ethel Rosenberg been of any religion other than Jewish….”. Leave “religion” out of it; it has nothing to do with “religion” and all to do with “blood”. The Nazis did not exempt from extermination those who had been of the Christian faith for generations but had Jewish roots. “Jewish” should be reserved for nationality, since we are a people and not simply a religious group, and our religion would be better referred to as the “Mosaic faith”. Our many enemies in the West, as well as the Arabs, use the “religion” tag in their ongoing strenuous efforts to delegitimise our claim to the Land of Israel.
Many Jews in America know full well that Pollard is a victim of Jew-hate, and resent and despise him because he’s stark evidence of the fact that such Jew-hate still exists, and worse yet, of the fact that they’re too scared to do anything about it, and so pretend he got what he deserved.
…. possibly reminiscent of Jews in Germany in the 20s – not wishing to upset the applecart and be more German than the Germans?
I’m surprised at this comparison of (some) Jewish Americans today with Jews in 1920s Germany. It would be more apposite to compare (many) Jews here in the UK with Jews in pre-Nazi Germany, considering that anti-Semitism is endemic here and has been for centuries.
Sad and terrible; there’s a strong strain of anti-Semitism in America, that’s always been there, especially in places like the U.S. State Department and the DOD. But while it’s always been there
(Remember FDR didn’t want to be perceived as fighting WWII “for the Jews.”), American anti-Semitism has become much worse as a result of Obama being President. Thus anti-Semitism is most visible among Democrat party adherents, and their supporters in the media. And Jewish Obama supporters, like Rep. Eric Cantor, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, don’t help matters any.
Pollard? Better than an even chance that he’ll be incarcerated for the rest of his life.
And I thought the US was supposed to be friendly to Israel and Jews. Who knew?