Congressman Thomas Massie sounds so different from the rest, so real! And what guts! I wish he could be president—after he learns to dodge bullets! Here is an excerpt from his Wikipedia page.
In July 2019, Massie was the only Republican among 17 members of Congress to vote against a House resolution opposing efforts to boycott Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
In May 2022, Massie was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against a non-binding resolution denouncing antisemitism and opposition to Israel. Massie tweeted that he voted against the bill because it promoted censorship.
Massie has been outspoken against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its influence on American politics, and in December 2023 tweeted out a meme appearing to contrast Zionism with American patriotism. In May 2024, AIPAC and allied groups announced a $300,000 ad campaign targeting Massie for perceived “anti-Israel views” while not officially endorsing any primary challenger. Massie responded by posting a poll on X asking his followers whether AIPAC should be forced to register as a foreign agent.
Forcing AIPAC to register as foreign agent? Isn’t that what John and Robert Kennedy had tried to do? (Does RFK Jr. even know?).
One interesting episode of the Kennedy’s war against AIPAC happened four months before they lost that war on November 22, 1963: on July 15, 1963, young Congressman Donald Rumsfeld, already acting as a mercenary for Israel, sent a letter to the Attorney General on behalf of the American Zionist Council. The letter reads:
Some thoughtful and valued constituents have expressed their concern to me over a report in the June 28th issue of the Chicago edition of the Wall Street Journal which indicated that the determination by the Justice Department of the question of the registration of the American Zionist Council as an agent of the Israeli Government will depend upon the “risk of offending Jewish opinion in the United States.” / I would greatly appreciate your comments on this statement and also a report as to the policy the Department of Justice will follow in determining this question. / Thank You / Sincerely yours, / Donald Rumsfeld, N.C.
Kennedy’s assassination saved the AZC, which morphed into AIPAC. That was probably not the main motive for the Zionist Coup of Dallas, November 22, 1963. As everyone should know by now, the main issue was Dimona.
Historian Michael Beschloss writes : “Had the President lived, his second term might have seen a serious effort to deprive Israel of the Bomb.”[1] In Ben-Gurion’s mind, the Bomb was a vital necessity for Israel. But as long as he was alive, JFK would never have backed down: global nuclear disarmament was his top priority. It was possible then, and Kennedy was determined not to let the chance pass. “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty,” he said prophetically during a press conference on March 21, 1963.[2]
In 1992, commenting critically on Oliver Stone’s Hollywood motion picture JFK, American Congressman Paul Findley noted in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:
It is interesting — but not surprising — to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned. … on this question, as on almost all others, American reporters and commentators cannot bring themselves to cast Israel in an unfavorable light — despite the obvious fact that Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories.[3]
Findley, who had published in 1989 a book exposing the intimidating power of pro-Israeli groups, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, suggested that Israel had the most to gain in the assassination of President Kennedy.
Three years after Findley’s article, one groundbreaking book filled the gap: Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy (expanded through five editions until 2005). Piper’s work has been mostly ignored by the mainstream of Kennedy assassination research, but the case against Israel is not easy to dismiss, and has attracted the attention of a few scholars. In 2013, historian Martin Sandler mentioned it in his edition of The Letters of John F. Kennedy, as an introduction to Kennedy’s letter to David Ben-Gurion dated May 18, 1963:
author Michael Collins Piper actually accused Israel of the crime. Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing. What is indisputable is that although it was kept out of the eye of both the press and the public, a bitter dispute had developed between Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who believed that his nation’s survival depended on its attaining nuclear capability, and Kennedy, who was vehemently opposed to it. In May 1963, Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion explaining why he was convinced that Israel’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability was a serious threat to world peace.[4]
Sandler also reproduces Ben-Gurion’s response dated May 27, in which the Israeli Prime Minister (and simultaneously Minister of Defence) rejected Kennedy’s demand for a visit by U.S. representatives before 1964, and, while still pretending that research at Dimona was “exclusively for peaceful purposes,” concluded:
While I understand your concern with the prospect of a proliferation of nuclear weapons, we in Israel cannot be blind to the more actual danger now confronting us. I refer to the danger arising from destructive “conventional” weapons in the hands of neighboring governments which openly proclaim their intention to attempt the annihilation of Israel. This is our people’s major anxiety. It is a well-founded anxiety, and I have nothing at this stage to add to my letter of May 12 which is now, as I understand, receiving your active consideration.[5]
In his May-12 letter that he is referring to, Ben-Gurion had assured Kennedy that the Egyptians “want to follow the Nazi example,” and begged: “Mr. President, my people have the right to exist… and this existence is in danger.”[6] The implicit idea was that nuclear deterrence was a matter of life and death for the nation Ben-Gurion had founded. (In that same letter, he had made an unrelated digression about Jordanian King Hussein: “there is always a danger that one single bullet might put an end to his life and regime.”[7])
Kennedy was unimpressed, and on June 15 insisted on an immediate visit “this summer.” The result was unexpected: the next day, Ben-Gurion resigned “for personal reasons.” Sandler comments: “Many believe his resignation was due in great measure to his dispute with Kennedy over Dimona.” He needed plausible deniability for what was coming. As soon as the new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol took office, Kennedy renewed his pressure in his very first letter to him, dated July 5, 1963:
I regret having to add to your burdens so soon after your assumption of office, but I feel the crucial importance of this problem necessitates my taking up with you at this early date certain further considerations … I am sure you will agree that these visits should be as nearly as possible in accord with international standards, thereby resolving all doubts as to the peaceful intent of the Dimona project. As I wrote Mr. Ben-Gurion this Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as the question of Israel’s effort in the nuclear field.[8]
Five months later, Kennedy’s death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program. As historian Stephen Green wrote in Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, published in 1984:
Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program… occurred on November 22: on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. … In the early years of the Johnson administration the Israeli nuclear weapons program was referred to in Washington as “the delicate topic.” Lyndon Johnson’s White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the reactor went critical in early 1964.[9]
Mike Piper had first learned about Kennedy and Ben-Gurion’s conflict over Dimona from Stephen Green’s book, from Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option (1991), and from Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s Dangerous Liaison (1991). In the light of the details added to the story by Avner Cohen (Israel and the Bomb, 1998), and Michael Karpin (The Bomb in the Basement, 2007), and in the light of Ronen Bergman’s recent revelation about the Israeli Deep State’s propensity to assassinate anyone perceived as a threat to national security, especially in matters related to nuclear arms (Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations, 2019), it is not difficult to imagine that David Ben-Gurion, once convinced that Kennedy would never let Israel get the Bomb, and knowing that Johnson would, ordered Kennedy assassinated, an option that had been prepared from 1960, when Israel had managed to force Johnson onto Kennedy’s ticket.
It has been objected that Kennedy alone had no power to stop Israel, and that there was therefore no necessity for Israel to kill him.[10] That is true, but Kennedy was not alone: Khrushchev was as worried as Kennedy about nuclear proliferation. The problem of Dimona cannot be separated from the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War. The real danger for Israel was if the two superpowers joined their effort to thwart Israel’s nuclear ambition. When Khrushchev’s minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 3, 1963 to discuss ways of expanding the Limited Test Ban treaty, Kennedy tasked his Secretary of State Dean Rusk to bring up the issue of Israel’s secret nuke program with Gromyko in his evening meeting at the Soviet Embassy.[11] If Americans and Russians agreed to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, Israel would have had to comply. Gromyko recounts in his Memoirs this last meeting he had with Kennedy, when Kennedy told him:
The fact is, there are two groups of the American population which are not always pleased when relations between our two countries are eased. One group consists of people who are always opposed to improvement for ideological reasons. They are quite a stable contingent. The other group are people “of a particular nationality” [he meant the Jewish lobby, Gromyko comments] who think that always and under all circumstances, the Kremlin will support the Arabs and be an enemy of Israel. This group has effective means for making improvement between our countries very difficult.
Gromyko understood that Kennedy was talking of “the Jewish lobby,” and added that when he heard of Kennedy’s murder, “it was that talk on the White House terrace that came into my mind—what he had said about there being opponents to his policy.”[12]
Beyond the nuclear issue, the nascent cooperation between Kennedy and Khrushchev towards détente and nuclear disarmament presented a distressing threat to Israel: their common support of Israel’s greatest foe, Egypt. As the standard bearer of anti-colonialism, the Soviet Union was a natural supporter of Arab nationalism and of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in particular. So was the United States under Kennedy. As historian Philip Muehlenbeck documents in Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders: “While the Eisenhower administration had sought to isolate Nasser and reduce his influence through building up Saudi Arabia’s King Saud as a conservative rival to the Egyptian president, the Kennedy administration pursued the exact opposite strategy.”[13]
Understandably, Israelis grew increasingly distressed at the sight of both Russia and America supporting their most fearful foe, and panicked at the prospect of the Middle East becoming the very place were the U.S. and the USSR would finally come to terms and end the Cold War, at Israel’s expense. This point is well made by author Salvador Astucia in Opium Lords: Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination (2002, in pdf here):
Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had stronger ties with Egyptian President Nasser than with Israel. Their befriending of Nasser, a living icon symbolizing Arab unity, was a signal to Israel that both superpowers had more interest in the Arab world than in Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish homeland, let alone its expansion into neighboring Arab territories.[14]
“In short,” writes Astucia, “détente would mark the beginning of the end for Israel as a world power because neither superpower had a strategic interest in Israel.”[15] Like Khrushchev, Kennedy had committed himself to support U.N. Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees, to which Ben-Gurion had reacted with a letter to be circulated among Jewish-American leaders, stating: “Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser’s missiles and his Soviet MIGs. … Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.”[16] And fight they did.
It is today widely accepted that Johnson’s presidency inaugurated the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel. In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2009, we read that, “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy With Israel’s Policies.”
Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his. … Not only was he personally a strong supporter of the Jewish state but he had a number of high officials, advisers and friends who shared his view. … These officials occupied such high offices as the ambassador to the United Nations, the head of the National Security Council and the number two post at the State Department. … So pervasive was the influence of Israel’s supporters during Johnson’s tenure that CIA Director Richard Helms believed there was no important U.S. secret affecting Israel that the Israeli government did not know about in this period.[17]
Things only got worse since then. When John F. Kennedy took office, he famously said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Fifty-one years later, it seems that every candidate to the presidency is saying: “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for Israel.”
Find out more in my book, The Unspoken Kennedy Truth, or in my film, Israel & the Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers.
[1] Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, HarperCollins, 1991, p. 649. McGeorge Bundy’s own book, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, Vintage Books, 1988, is disappointing on this issue. Bundy notes on the Dimona crisis, p. 510: “I do not recall discussing the matter with Lyndon Johnson.”
[2] Audio file on JFK Library: www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-169.aspx
[3] Quoted in Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., 2005, p. 63.
[4] Martin Sandler, The Letters of John F. Kennedy, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, p. 333. Listen to Sandler here on this topic here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4547313/user-clip-jfk-gurion-mossad-dimona
[5] Sandler, The Letters of John F. Kennedy, pp. 335-338.
[6] Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, Columbia UP, 1998, pp. 109 and 14; Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 121.
[7] Monika Wiesak, America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John’F. Kennedy, self-published, 2022, p. 214.
[8] Sandler, The Letters of John F. Kennedy, pp. 340-341.
[9] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.
[10] For example, Jim DeBrossse, See No Evil: The JFK Assassination and the U.S. Media, TrineDay Press, 2018, p. 150: “But could JFK have prevented a nuclear-armed Israel? Perhaps not, not when Israel had a decisive start at Dimona by 1963, and an iron-willed determination to see it through. But there can be little doubt that Kennedy, up to the moment of his death, intended to try.”
[11] Michael Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 646-649.
[12] Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs, Doubleday, 1989, pp. 181-182 (first published by Arrow Books under the title Memories).
[13] Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012, p. 122.
[14] Salvador Astucia, Opium Lords: Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination, Dsharpwriter, 2002, p. 11.
[15] Astucia, Opium Lords, p. 5.
[16] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51.
[17] Donald Neff, “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy With Israel’s Policies,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 1996, page 96, reposted in 2009.
Chapter 8 in From Yahweh to Zion, was the first solid connection of the Kennedy assassination to Israel. This essay further reinforces it.
Loved your closing remark:
"every candidate to the presidency is saying: “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for Israel.”
We’ll see if they really declassify those docs.
So Americans can understand one for all that 9/11 is another gift from Mossad and Israel and the real enemy of Americans are not Blacks, Arabs, Hispanic, Mexicans, but Israel Jews.