(Originally published on 1/6/06)

Television evangelist Jerry Falwell couldn't resist bragging and finally admitting the truth: he and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu did conspire-at a critical time-to trip up President Bill Clinton and specifically use the pressure of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to force Clinton to abandon pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank.
 
Falwell's confession didn't make national news-as it should have. Instead, the preacher's confession came buried in a lengthy story in the December 2005 issue of Vanity Fair. Entitled "American Rapture" the article (by Craig Unger) described the long-standing and still-flourishing love affair between American dispensationalist evangelicals such as Falwell and the hardline Jewish extremist forces in Israel then under the leadership of Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.
 
The admission by Falwell confirms precisely what this author first revealed in a story published in The Spotlight on February 9, 1998 and later recounted in a lecture before the Arab League's official think tank, the Zayed Centre in Abu Dhabi, in March of 2003.
 
Although, following the lecture at the Zayed Centre, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, a lobby for Israel, denounced as a "bizarre conspiracy theory" the assertion by Falwell that the public unveiling of the Lewinsky affair forced Clinton to pull back on pressuring Israel confirmed exactly what was reported in documented detail in The Spotlight in an international exclusive.
 
Regarding Falwell's recounting of how he worked with Netanyahu in undermining Clinton's pressure on Israel, Vanity Fair reported:
 
On a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before [Netanyahu's] scheduled meeting with Clinton. "I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi [Netanyahu] and he spoke to us that night," recalls Falwell. "It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton." . . . The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. "Bibi told me later," Falwell recalls, "that the next morning Bill Clinton said, 'I know where you were last night." The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal . . . . Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel." (END OF VANITY FAIR EXCERPT)
 
What Falwell did not mention-at least as reported by Vanity Fair-is that his meeting with the Israeli leader took place on the very evening before the mass media in America broke open the Monica Lewinsky scandal with much fanfare. Nor did Falwell mention-as this author pointed out at the time- was that one of Netanyahu's leading American media publicists, neo-conservative power broker, William Kristol, the first American media figure to publicly hint (in the days before the scandal was officially unveiled) that there were forthcoming revelations regarding a White House sex scandal that was about to be unleashed.
 
In addition, this author pointed out that at least six days before the first news of the Lewinsky scandal began breaking in the media at midnight on Tuesday, January 20, 1998, an advertisement appeared in the January 15 edition of the distinguished Washington Jewish Week newspaper accusing President Clinton of having "turned his back on Israel."
 
What made the advertisement so striking was that it used a rear view of President Clinton (first captured on video in 1996) that had never been published but which, in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, became very familiar. It was a view of the president, his back to the camera, clearly taken from the video in which he was seen hugging the soon-to-be infamous Miss Lewinsky when she was in a receiving line at the White House some two years before. This was an image that Miss Lewinsky had bragged about among her associates prior to the time that the scandal broke. So clearly, Clinton's critics among the hard-line pro-Netanyahu forces in the United States-who sponsored the advertisement in question-were already tuned in to the fact of the Lewinsky-Clinton liaison and of the fact that it was soon to be unleashed against the president to undermine him.
 
This author can now reveal, for the first time, that two figures at the very highest level of the Clinton White House were personally given copies of The Spotlight's articles regarding these matters and that, at the time, they quietly acknowledged that the articles were "probably right."
 
The fact that Jerry Falwell's acknowledgment of how the Lewinsky affair was used as a club against Clinton-in tandem with "Bibi" Netanyahu's appearance at the White House, following the meeting with Falwell-was published in Vanity Fair is interesting in and of itself. That magazine is owned by the far-flung publishing empire of the billionaire Newhouse brothers ("Si" and Donald) whom Forbes dubbed the 25th richest family in America and who are known to be generous contributors to the Anti-Defamation League and other elements of the pro-Israel lobby.

http://www.rense.com/general69/col.htm

Editor's note: None of these discoveries should surprise us. But questions remain as to just how Monica Lewinsky obtained the coveted internship in the Oval Office and whether the genesis of the entire affair was simply a gross indiscretion perpetrated solely by Clinton's sordid appetite or something more. - LMB