According to Neo-Conservative pundits, there seem to be Good Muslims and Bad Muslims, and who gets what label depends on who Muslim insurgents are attacking.

While the Kristols, Safires, and Podhoretzes shed copious crocodile tears over the plight of well-armed KLA "freedom fighters" and Chechen rebels, they inevitably cheer every Israeli effort to gun down rock-throwing Palestinian Arabs. That the neo-cons are hardly consistent in their affected sympathies is hardly surprising, after all, these are the same "experts" whose duplicitous prattle informed us that Kurdish rebels in Turkey were "terrorists" while Kurdish rebels fighting for the exact same cause (an independent Kurdistan) in Iraq were heroic "freedom fighters." The hypocrisy over the Kurds was so blatant that almost anybody could see through it, while the seemingly schizophrenic attitude of the neos to Muslim "freedom fighters" in Kosovo and Chechnya versus "terrorists" in Israel is a little more subtle.

Basically, Yugoslavia was chosen to be Israel's whipping boy by the neo-cons. It is well known that Israel is central to the neo-con agenda, this fanatically "Israel First" attitude that lead the late Russell Kirk and others to quip that the neoconservativess seem to believe that Tel Aviv, not Washington, is America's capital.

Since by their definition Israel can do no wrong and America's security interests can and should be sidestepped whenever Israel's interests are at stake, reality demands a little damage control. While the neocons insist that Israel is of vital strategic interest to the United States and that protecting and subsidizing Israel is tactically equivalent to defending the US itself, reality dictates otherwise, and as a result, little adjustments have to be made.

It is readily apparent that US aid to Israel comes at a huge cost to America. After all, it is Arab nations, not Israel, that provide us with oil, and it should be remembered that America's support of Israel has lead to oil crises when Arab oil nations decide to cut us off in protest. Furthermore, the majority of Arab and Muslim hostility towards the US and the West is due to America's support for Israel and the Zionist cause, regardless of how often the neocons repeat incantations about how "the Arabs hate us because we are free, not because we support Israel."

If it weren't for US military and economic aid to Israel, it is no great stretch to argue that there would be no Arab bombings of US military bases or embassies, no Bin Laden, and no efforts by Iraq or Iran to curry favor with China or Russia. On a more timely note, there would have been no attack on the USS Cole, and the lives of our sailors would have been spared.

This leaves the neo-cons in quite a predicament. On the one hand, these scribbling shysters like to pose as "patriots" who love America, and yet they are more than happy to support policies which harm their country when Israel, the nation of their true love and loyalty is threatened. This calls for a little two-faced damage control. Thus, we get William Safire wailing about Russian "genocide" against Chechens, and Bill Kristol burbling repetitively about the plight of Kosovar Albanians and Bosnians. Their hope is that by having America champion the cause of Albanian and Bosnian Muslims, the Arab world will forgive, or at least overlook, all of Israel's excesses.

Hence, Yugoslavia came to play the role of whipping boy for Israel. The Serbs would be beaten for Israel's misbehavior, for like the princes of yesteryear, it was unthinkable that Sacred Cow Israel could ever be punished. Within months of the Kosovo "crisis," we heard such gems about "crushing Serb skulls" from Bill Kristol, together with all the saccharine, sticky moralisms about "human rights" and the evils of "ultra-nationalism."

When the bombs dropped over Belgrade, nobody cheered louder than the Born-Again Zionist neo-cons. The more brutally Yugoslavia was bombed, they hoped, the more pro-Israeli activities they (and the Washington functionaries on both sides of the aisle who all too often capitulate to the demands of neocon think tanks) could get away with in the future. In the back of their minds, the Kristols, the Kagans, the Goldbergs, the Podhoretzes, the Kampelmans, and the Safires sat back contentedly thinking, "Ah, the next time our friends in Israel shoot some Arab kids throwing rocks, we can bring up how we rescued their Muslim brethren from the evil Milosevic."

Though this game may seem pervese beyond belief to any sane individual, it makes perfect sense in light of neo-con priorities. A neutral, objective individual would say that the natural way to deal with potential Arab hostility would be for America to remain neutral in the Middle East, and similarly, demand neutrality in the Balkans. But the neo-cons have a mission as apologists and cheerleaders for Israel, and the possibility of disengaging from our alliance with Tel Aviv is not even an option that can be entertained. Once this is realised, the fact that neo-cons pretend to "feel the pain" of the alle ged sufferings of Albanians and Bosnians starts to make more sense.

US aid to Israel, therefore, has implications which go far beyond our role in the Middle East. How much longer will America and the rest of the world have to pay for the annual tribute we pay to Tel Aviv?