More on Zionist Jew Douglas Feith

Douglas Feith - Zionist Jew and agent of Israel

Douglas Feith has been described as "an extreme hard-line pro-Likud hawk" -- see this article about Feith.

Douglas Feith has a right-wing Zionist background. In Poland in the 1930s, Feith's father, Dalck Feith, was active in Betar, the youth wing of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement founded by Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky which, in the 1930s, formed an alliance with Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy. (As a result of this alliance, a training school for Betar's maritime division was established at the Italian naval base of Civitavecchia, functioning between 1934 and 1937 and producing 153 graduates, many of whom later went on to senior positions in the Israeli navy.)

In November 1997, Dalck Feith and Douglas Feith were the Guests of Honor at the 100th anniversary dinner of the Zionist Organization of America, in New York City, a dinner where the featured speakers included Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, the father of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and David Bar-Illan, senior spokesman for Prime Minister Netanyahu. (See this press release.)

Opinion, July 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info
The Neocons: Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith

By Richard H. Curtiss

Special to Arab News

As the third-ranking member of the Defense Department, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith is one of the most important members of the Bush administration. Interestingly, he not only is an extreme hard-line Zionist, but he comes by it honestly.

His Austrian-born father, Dalck Feith, was a member of Betar in the 1930s, in Poland. Betar was the youth movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had denounced as “Vladimir Hitler.” When Jabotinsky died in 1940 he was replaced by Menachem Begin.

Dalck Feith later joined the Zionist underground in British mandate Palestine, where he became one of Betar’s fiercest combatants in the year before Israeli independence. He moved to the United States during World War II, and joined the US Merchant Marine.

His son Douglas, born and raised in Philadelphia, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning a law degree (also magna cum laude) from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Feith initially worked for the government in 1981, when, during the first Reagan administration, he served on the White House National Security staff under Richard Allen. Shortly thereafter, Allen was forced to resign, and was replaced by William Clark. Feith was promptly fired from his post, allegedly on charges of bias toward and involvement with Israel.

During Reagan’s second term, Feith resurfaced as part of Richard Perle’s team at the Pentagon. Perle is a notorious Cold War hawk and a pro-Israel neoconservative hard-liner, widely known as the “Prince of Darkness” by friend and foe alike. Another colleague at the time was Steven Bryen, who later had to resign on charges that he had leaked classified material to Israel. The FBI was prepared to indict Bryen on charges of espionage, but Bryan’s cohorts in the Justice Department delayed the indictment until the statute of limitations had expired.

In the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, Feith was a member of the National Security Council (NSC), before shifting to the Department of Defense, where he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy, as well as special counsel to Richard Perle.

When the elder Bush was not re-elected, Feith set up his own law practice, Feith & Zell. According to James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, in 1989 Feith registered International Advisers Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey. IAI’s purpose was to “promote the objective of US-Turkish defense industrial cooperation.”

In official documents filed with the US Department of Justice, Feith is listed as IAI’s chief executive officer and its only stockholder. Perle was listed as the group’s single highest paid consultant, earning $48,000 a year. Feith himself earned $60,000 yearly, and his law firm, Feith and Zell, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from IAI.

During the six years that Feith and IAI were registered as foreign agents for the government of Turkey, Feith and a number of individuals serving as staff and receiving payments from IAI were making tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to both pro-Israel PACs and to pro-Israel senators and congressmen.

One pro-Israel PAC, the Washington Political Action Committee — to which Feith contributed $3,500 — just happened to be headed by Morris Amitay, former AIPAC official and one of the earliest members of IAI. Two of the largest recipients of the PAC’s largesse were Sen. Robert Packwood (R-OR) and Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN).

Perle and Feith later teamed up to represent another foreign entity, the government of Bosnia. According to Richard Holbrooke, the principal US negotiator at the Dayton peace talks, the two men worked for and advised the Bosnians during the talks — but did not register with the Department of Justice as foreign agents are required to do. Feith and Perle lobbied on behalf of Bosnia and against the Greek-American and Armenian-American lobbies.

In the mid-1990s Feith represented 41 members of Congress in a suit against then-President Bill Clinton. Feith argued that Clinton was violating a 1995 law requiring increased funding for missile defense programs. Interestingly, Feith refused to reveal the sources of funding for the suit.

As a member of the inner circles of the George W. Bush administration, Feith, along with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, are receiving strong criticism for their performance in postwar Iraq.

The troika currently is being blamed for making no serious preparations to assume important postwar duties such as maintaining security and providing water, electricity and Iraq’s other infrastructure needs. In addition, there even seems to be deliberate sabotage. The Financial Times predicted on June 26 that at least one Defense Department player will have to take the blame for the Iraqi chaos, and guessed Feith would take the fall.

Feith can be bitingly sarcastic. Following one of his lengthy and contemptuous statements during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) cut off the exchange by saying, “That is a smart-ass comment.”

Both Dalck and Douglas Feith have been heaped with honors over the years, both in Philadelphia and in American Jewish circles. Dalck Feith, for example, was given the Zionist Organization of America’s centennial award for his lifetime of service to Israel and to the Jewish people. The right-wing ZOA, which opposes any peace in Palestine and Israel also gave Douglas J. Feith the prestigious Lewis J. Brandeis award at the same 1997 awards dinner.

Dalck Feith, who became a distinguished business leader and philanthropist in Philadelphia, has served as general chairman of the Federation Allied Jewish Appeal of Philadelphia and a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He has been honored for his good works by numerous prominent institutions and organizations, including Brandeis University, Hebrew University and Israel Bonds. He and his wife, Rose, the parents of three children, reside in Elkins Park, PA.

Their son Douglas has received the Department of Defense’s highest civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service Award. A prolific author, he has written essays on Israel and other subjects which have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Commentary and elsewhere. An essay on Winston Churchill, Zionism and Palestine (1904-1922) has just been published in the book Churchill as Peacemaker, Cambridge University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Douglas Feith is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also is a director of the Center for Security Policy, an officer of the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, and a director of the Foundation for Jewish Studies. He and his wife, Yana, reside in Maryland with their four children.

(Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.)

"He [Douglas Feith] opposed the Camp David Agreements because they meant that Israel would give up 'Judea and Samaria', as he refers to the West Bank."

IT SEEMS that there is a little more to the story (of the Pentagon's new special office for spreading disinformation) than The New York Times (February 19, 2002) saw fit to print.

The NYT noted that the new Office of Strategic Influence would be under General Simon P. Worden and that Worden, in turn, will report to one Mr. Douglas J. Feith who, it says, is under Secretary of Defense for policy, and a man with whom Worden has close ties.

Feith, it seems has some interesting ties of his own, as reported in Arabic by the Beirut newspaper as-Safir yesterday, February 20, 2002. Writing up the New York Times story for his Arabic readers the Beirut paper's veteran Washington correspondent, Hisham Milhem, supplemented it with the following information:

"What the New York Times didn't say about the background of Douglas Feith, the person politically in charge of implementing the plan, is that he is among the most intense partisans of Israel in the administration of President Bush. He opposed the Camp David Agreements because they meant that Israel would give up 'Judea and Samaria' as he refers to the West Bank.
"He claims that the Palestinians do not constitute a people in the recognized sense of the word, and that Jordan should be their homeland. Feith rejects what he considers the 'claims' of the Arabs that the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Palestinians who have no homeland. He claims, rather, that inasmuch as the Arabs reject Zionism that an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories will not solve the conflict.

"In the eighties and nineties Feith expressed criticism of any American policies that could be interpreted as pressure on Israel. One example of this was his criticism of President Bush, senior, when he withheld guarantees for loans to Israel, and because his administration put pressure on the government of Itzhak Shamir to participate in the Madrid Conference. Feith advised Washington to demand that the Arabs 'abandon the principle of land for peace' claiming that this principle will lead to the breakup of Israel in stages.

"Feith also demanded that the West Bank and Gaza no longer be described as representing 20 percent of Palestine as delineated under the British Mandate, because, he claimed, it is Jordan that represents 80 percent of 'Palestine' in accordance with the British Mandate.

"Feith rejected the Oslo, Hebron, and Wye Plantation Agreements. He described Oslo as an agreement that would lead to unilateral Israeli concessions and inflate Palestinian expectations. Notably, he objected to the Hebron and Wye River Agreements, despite the fact that these agreements were signed by Benjamin Netanyahu whom Feith supports and to whom he has given political counsel. Feith, together with Richard Perle, a former Defense Department official, are among the most prominent supporters of Israel in Washington. (He works currently as an adviser to the Defense Department, though he is not considered an employee of it).

"Feith and Perle prepared a political plan for the new Israeli Prime Minister in 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu. Feith formerly worked with Perle in the Defense Department. Among proposals tabled by Feith and Perle were 'total withdrawal from the peace process,' and a reemphasis of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza through a rejection of the principle of 'land for peace.'

"Feith is considered one of the most prominent supporters of an attack on Iraq and the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein. He also calls for punitive measures against Syria to compel it to pull its military forces out of Lebanon.

"Before joining the Defense Department last year, most of the work done by the legal office founded by Feith in Washington was limited to representing Israeli companies and interests, in particular representing Israeli companies that manufacture Israeli weapons, especially those that undertake joint ventures with American militiary aircraft and rocket manufacturers.

"In 1989 Feith registered a consulting company that he headed with the Justice Department as an agent of the Turkish government in order to strengthen military ties between Washington and Ankara. This step was interpreted in the Turkish press, however, as of great importance because it reinforced Turkish relations with the 'Jewish Lobby' in Washington."

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