Zionists Underwrite ‘Native Informants’ to Fuel
America’s Wars
by Matt
Wolfson | Feb
11, 2026
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/zionists-underwrite-native-informants-to-fuel-americas-wars/
On the evening of Tuesday, January 13, 2026, ten days
after the Donald Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro, The Wall Street Journal ran
an exclusive report asserting that “the support of the Venezuelan opposition
led by Maria Corina Machado for U.S. action to oust Nicolás Maduro helped President Trump’s
legal case to overthrow him.” The report cited “people familiar with the matter”
who in turn cited redacted portions of a December 23, 2025 opinion from the
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) which the Justice Department had released that
Tuesday afternoon. According to these sources, who had read the redacted
portions of the opinion, an unredacted footnote to “the last
paragraph of Page 6…cites Machado’s comments stating that escalating U.S.
pressure was the ‘only way’ to free Venezuela.” These comments allowed the
Office of Legal Counsel to argue in the actual redacted text
of the last paragraph of Page 6 that “the opposition’s lobbying ‘could be
construed’ as a request by Venezuela’s legitimate government,” namely Machado’s
opposition party, “to depose a usurper in Caracas.” It was this request that
“the Justice Department memo…partly relie[d] on…as a legal justification” to
kidnap Maduro in violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and international law.
What does this mean and why does it matter? From facts
like these, it seems hard to say, and this is not by accident. A problem with
foreign interventions since America became an empire is that the players are
too myriad and our imperial complex too labyrinthine (not to mention too
concealing) for information “from the inside” to be interpretable to the
cursory reader without context. But when it comes to this particular
intervention and the broader networks that pushed it via Machado, there is
plenty of context at hand. Unearthing this context shows that Machado’s
“slipped note” to the OLC was not just a one-off, a helpful hint picked up by
government players to justify a particular course of action. It was part of a
decades-long push from overlapping groups with the interlocked aim of using
America’s resources to affect regime change in their home countries. All of
these groups, what’s more, owe their influence to Zionists.
The reason this broader push is especially important
to understand now is that it has been turbocharged in the second Trump
administration. Foreign operators underwritten by Zionists are urging
interventions not just in Venezuela but in Nigeria and Iran and Cuba to the
ultimate benefit of Israel. Understanding their role may prove crucial in the
coming months to understanding the trajectory of our government’s policies
abroad—who they benefit, who they harm, why they’re happening, and what the
blowback on the rest of us might be.
Among the groups who have prominent members operating
in this way over the last quarter century and longer are Lebanese Americans,
Nigerian Americans, Iranian Americans, Cuban Americans, and Venezuelan
Americans. These groups emigrated relatively (or in Venezuelans’ case very) recently to America in small numbers. A disproportionate number of them are upper-middle
class or elites who benefited from American-backed regimes then left their
countries after Muslim or communist governments overthrew those regimes. They
accessed America thanks to immigration and refugee policies meant to attract foreign elites to service
America’s military corporate complex, and they have paid back their debt to our
empire and benefited in the process. They are active in pushing America’s
government into operations against their home countries’ governments based on
their “specialized” and “inside” knowledge of these countries; and they are
also all connected, directly or at some degree removed, to each other.
If many of these operators call themselves freedom
fighters, there’s a less flattering phrase for them, one supplied most
memorably by the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That term is “native informant”: non-Western imperial operators cut off from their
countrymen who gain status in western capitals via access to academic or media
circles, then gain influence telling imperial operators what they want to hear
about the countries they want to invade. In Said’s brutal rendering, they are
people who speak of America as “an imperial collectivity which, along with
Israel, never does anything wrong.” Said coined the term “native informant” in
April 2003, a month after the W. Bush administration invaded Iraq. He was
describing the Lebanese American academic and Iraq War booster Fouad Ajami,
whom he called one of the few “accredited Middle East experts identified long
ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy”—and Ajami’s
career in many ways sets the model for the native informant breed.
Like Maria Corina Machado in the autumn of 2025,
Ajami’s career culminated in the autumn of 2002 when he supplied an American
presidential administration with the native and expert justification to invade
a sovereign nation. According to a much-cited speech that Vice President Richard B. Cheney gave seven
months before the war:
“…the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami
predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to
erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.’
Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad.
Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was
following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.”
Ajami’s pick-up by Cheney did not come out of nowhere.
It reflected briefings Cheney and his Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, along with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, had received from Ajami. Ajami’s availability for
these briefings, in turn, came out of Zionist networks. Ajami was an institutional presence in Washington DC thanks mostly to Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he led the Middle East
Studies program and overlapped with Paul Wolfowitz when Wolfowitz was dean of SAIS. He was a public presence in Washington thanks mostly to The New
Republic magazine, where he was a favored contributor of Martin Peretz, the magazine’s publisher, and Leon Wieseltier, its literary editor. Ajami served the university and
the magazine, which had been founded by members of powerful imperial networks run by WASPs, at a
time when they were being put to the purpose of Zionism and its attendant
priorities: expanding American empire by directing it against enemies of Israel
and for Israel’s allies. These priorities were reflected by Ajami’s backers’
careers.
Peretz, an ardent Zionist, spent the late 1960s agitating to send American forces to help swing
a civil war between Muslim Nigerians and Christian (Biafran) Nigerians for the
Christian side for strategic reasons based on what he saw as shared group
traits. (From Peretz’s memoir: “The majority of Biafrans were from the Igbo
tribe and were well educated, westernized, and Catholic. They had been colonial
Nigeria’s political and intellectual elite, favored by the British. They were
also called ‘the Jews of Africa.’ Now they were being murdered by the new Muslim-dominated
national government.”) Peretz then spent the early 1980s running cover in Washington for Israel’s
invasion of Lebanon in its campaign against Yasser Arafat’s PLO—a campaign
that, like Biafra, inserted Zionists on behalf of Christians against Muslims in what had been an
intra-country conflict. Along with Wieseltier, also a Zionist, Peretz spent the
mid-1980s supporting elements of the
Iran-Contra play to
co-opt Israel’s main rival Iran.
Nine days after September 11, 2001 and five days after
Wolfowitz, a Zionist, made good on a decade of advocacy and urged George W. Bush to attack Iraq—another
play whose ultimate aim was to marginalize Iran and neuter the
Palestinian resistance movement—Peretz and Wieseltier signed onto an open letter along with a number of Zionist veterans of
Iran-Contra urging just such an invasion. Within a few months, preparations
were underway for just such an invasion at the hands of Wolfowitz and “Scooter”
Libby: the Chief of Staff to the Vice President, a Zionist,
a longtime friend of Wolfowitz’s and a close friend of Wieseltier’s who had only recently helped secure a
pardon for the
Jewish Zionist financier Marc Rich, an ally of Jeffrey Epstein’s. (This pardon
was facilitated by both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
by Peretz’s New Republic co-owner and hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt, the founder of the pro-Israel think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at
which Libby later went to work.) Wolfowitz and Libby began pressuring the CIA to support the invasion and secured the help of John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel to
justify it. By 2003, Peretz and Wieseltier were ardently pushing the
invasion in the pages of The New Republic. And Ajami had
entered the White House to consult with Wolfowitz and Libby and Cheney and
Rice.
Ajami’s distinction in these circumstances, as Edward
Said intimated at the time, was being a certified intellectual actually from the
region America wanted to invade. He was born in 1945 in a Lebanese village called Arnoun which he
described to friends as a “rocky hamlet that grew stunted tobacco plants” and a
place where Arab intellectualism never penetrated. He became an American citizen in 1964, where he attended university. By this point, the
fading British Empire and the rising American one were already actively recruiting Arab intellectuals to produce mass media
justifying oil extraction in the Middle East. But, unlike Ajami, these earlier
intellectual recruits were mature thinkers with ongoing acquaintance with their
homelands who produced realistic material turned to the purpose of propaganda.
Ajami, who was younger and left the Middle East, lacked the benefit of maturing
or existing in the region he chose to write about; nor was his work directed to
people who lived there. Instead, from his time at the Eastern Oregon College and the University
of Washington to his time at Princeton and Johns Hopkins and The New
Republic, this son of what he saw as the “stunted” landscape of
Arnoun identified with America, which for him was imperial institutions, and increasingly wrote for audiences of Jewish Zionist elites who were
fairly sure what they wanted to hear.
One result of this perfect circularity between
performer and audience, where the intellectual becomes the kept pet of players
of power and their mutually generated aims and “ideas” substitute for
engagement with ground-level realities, was the embarrassment of 2003. Contrary
to what Cheney via Wolfowitz and Libby called Ajami’s “expert” prediction, the
streets of Basra and Baghdad did not “erupt in joy” after the invasion. The
other result of this circular imperial influence was that these networks didn’t
stop after their failure. They experienced a diminution of political influence
from roughly 2003 to 2025: “Scooter” Libby, for one, was sentenced to prison
for obstruction of justice related to his actions bolstering the case for the
invasion of Iraq, receiving the sentence despite “impassioned” public pleas for
clemency from Ajami and Wieseltier. But they also perpetuated themselves and expanded,
incubating new generations of Zionist operators who in turn incubated a wider
array of native informants to push regime change policies that advance Israel’s
aims. This meant that, when the White House became occupied by a president
interested in resource extraction abroad and staffed and funded by Zionists—namely, Donald Trump in his second
term—these networks were ready to act.
The case in point when it comes to Zionist
underwriting during the second Trump administration is Bari Weiss. Weiss’s
family is tied into Zionist networks via her father Lou’s participation in a nonprofit incubated by the Zionist and
Jeffrey Epstein patron Leslie Wexner, a close ally of Peretz’s New Republic co-owner
Michael Steinhardt. Bari Weiss arrived at Columbia University at 18 and almost immediately became a Zionist
activist, pushing for the
firing of a Palestinian professor with anti-Israel views. After graduation,
she incubated her career at the Zionist magazine Tablet,
whose literary editor (and husband of its founder) David Samuels established his career (in dubious cultural supremacist
fashion) at Peretz’s and Wieseltier’s New
Republic.
After an aborted stint at The New York Times, she used Zionist largesse to first secure the founding of The Free Press
and then its sale to Larry and David Ellison, who also put her in the
editor-in-chief’s chair at CBS News.
Like Peretz and Wieseltier had Wolfowitz and Libby as
Bush White House connections, so too does Weiss have her connections to the
Trump White House: via Larry Ellison, a close ally of Donald Trump’s; and Amy Chua, the law school mentor of J.D. and Usha Vance. She seems to make editorial policy for CBS based on deference to the White House, especially when it comes to
foreign policy and to the Jewish Zionist Stephen Miller. Based on its roster of contributors and its stream of powerful guests, Weiss seems to have made The Free Press into “the”
magazine of the Washington-New York elite; and CBS News still enjoys, for now, its reputation as the gold standard of investigative broadcast
journalism. Against this backdrop of deep Zionist influence, widespread media
clout, and clear White House ties, Weiss’s moves since Donald Trump’s June 2025
strikes on Iran are significant. They seem to amount to a gathering of the
“native informant” clans to push policy through these powerful venues on
Washington DC.
Since June, Weiss hired as an “expert” on CBS H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser and current
Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution, whose director is Condoleezza Rice, who had used Ajami to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Weiss began regularly featuring in The Free Press and on CBS the “superstar”
Iranian dissidents Masih Alinejad and Roya Hakakian, the
latter of whom advocated for regime change in the Joe Biden White House and lent crucial support to lesser-known Iranian exiles’ campaigns to
purge from American academia Iranian scholars who disagree with regime change
in Iran. Weiss also began featuring in The Free Press the Nigerian
scholar Ebenezer Obadare, supporting Donald Trump’s threats of American
intervention on behalf of Christians against Muslims in Nigeria. Starting in
October, Weiss featured Maria Corina Machado three times in two months in The Free Press making the case
for regime change in Venezuela, and, in the aftermath of Maduro’s
kidnapping, on CBS. And Weiss chose to fill Walter Cronkite’s old chair
as CBS’s evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil. A native of the Cuban exile stronghold of Miami,
Dokoupil, in in his first week as CBS anchor, raised eyebrows when he visited the city, “fought back tears” about it, and closed his
broadcast with a paean to Marco Rubio. Rubio is the son of Cuban-Americans opposed to Havana’s government and the
highest-ranking Cuban-American official in American history, who, the week
Dokoupil made his homage, had along with Stephen Miller shepherded the deposition of Nicolas Maduro using justifications
from his longtime contact Maria Corina Machado via the Office of Legal
Counsel.
There is history for all of these players. Like Ajami
in the 1980s and 1990s, these Weiss-supported players’ path to prominence in
the 2010s and 2020s has been paved by Zionists. H.R. McMaster’s entrée to Stanford alongside assuming the Fouad and Michelle Ajami
Senior Fellowship came via an endower whose father was a founding director of Larry Ellison’s Oracle. Alinejad’s and
Hakakian’s Zionist backers range from the American Jewish Committee to the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies to
the Zionist magazine The American Purpose to
the Ajami-founded Association for the Study of the Middle East
and Africa.
Ebenezer Obadare’s American career as a public intellectual was launched at the
Council on Foreign Relations during the tenure of the Zionist Richard N. Haas. Maria Corina Machado has close ties to Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and her longtime ally Marco Rubio is a longtime ally of American Zionists. And Tony Doukopil is a committed Jewish Zionist: an adult convert to Judaism before his first
marriage to a Jewish Zionist (and, at his first wife’s request, an
experiencer of adult circumcision, which he wrote about, wincingly, for The New Republic) who has
been accused of bias in his past coverage of Israel.
The seemingly “mainstream” operators all frame their
public arguments for regime changes in their respective nations much like Fouad
Ajami framed the invasion of Iraq, on terms popularized by “liberal America” as
it’s been arbitered since 1945 by WASPs and then Zionists: tolerance, secularism, human rights. Their institutional credentials seem to make them
impartial arbiters, or “experts.” Their apparently impartial verdicts at The
Free Press or CBS can easily be picked up, as Maria Corina Machado’s have
actually been picked up, by the White House to legally or ideologically justify
invasions. But nowhere in these framings do significant engagement with words
like “sovereignty” or “constitutional republicanism” or “majoritarian
democracy” appear: anything alluding to the will of actual people in an actual
nation and their right to resolve their problems internally and collectively.
Their framings, in other words, run on the logic of empire, which erases
sovereignty in the name of resource extraction and, in practice, relies on
supporters or beneficiaries of authoritarian government. Even
more to the point, their success runs on access to empire: informal
intersections between elite academic and media and nonprofit networks on one
hand and America’s government on the other—Zionist-arbitered networks existing
in plain sight that we cannot see because we don’t know where to look.
These networks’ longevity, and their informality, and
their somewhat hidden character became clear to me from knowing native
informants up close and personally in my years living in New York working with
Zionists. This happened in part through a score of visits to an apartment near
Riverside Park on the Upper West Side owned by Michelle Ajami: the widow of
Fouad Ajami and the bearer, after his death in 2014, of both his ideological
flame and, in retrospect more unsettlingly, of many of his political operations
in America and abroad. I was in my twenties and respectful of the well-known
guests, among them Masih Alinejad, whom Michelle Ajami invited for afternoon
gatherings of six or seven people to discuss the state of the world, even as I
was increasingly skeptical about the fact that none of their interests seemed
actually American. What I missed, at the time and for a long time afterwards,
was that these gatherings I eventually exited on social terms were not mainly
social gatherings. They were strategic ones: circulation points, much as
earlier New York addresses had been circulation points for earlier foreign
networks, for native informants in America.
A few other locations I ended up frequenting were
circulation points, too. One was a particular institute at Columbia University
not far from Michelle Ajami’s address where I met Roya Hakakian via a mutual
friend. Another was a townhouse in the West Village in Lower Manhattan owned by
a Jewish Zionist supporter of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, where
denizens of Michelle Ajami’s would pass through after sedate afternoons off
Morningside Park for raucous evenings off Sixth Avenue. The people who frequented
these locations were fellows at and founders of foreign policy nonprofits and
freelance or staff journalists for Zionist publications and businessmen en
route from the Middle East attending to unstated interests in America. These
New York gathering spaces were their secure stop-offs. There, they traded
information with each other and shared their views with establishment players
from The Washington Post and The New York Times and
the Brookings Institution, before they fanned out the next day to Steve
Bannon’s townhouse in Washington or to the Hoover Institution at Stanford or to
the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado or to the United Nations in New York to
advance their agenda.
Their advancement of their agenda has only become more
aggressive in the years since I left the native informant beat. As I finished
writing this piece I saw a Wall Street journal op-ed by an
acquaintance of mine from gatherings at the West Village townhouse, an op-ed that began widely circulating online in the days that followed. Titled “A Fractured Iran Might Not Be So Bad,” it
was a proposal to “help secession happen” in Iran, based on the
argument that the borders of the territory holding one of the world’s ancient
civilizations are “artificial” and that a U.S.-backed partition would help ward
off incursions by Russia and China. If this proposal is taken up by the White
House, my old acquaintance, a native of the Middle East, might suddenly assume
the role Fouad Ajami occupied in 2002 and Maria Corina Machado in 2025: the
native justifier for an imperial dream. All of which is to say, the operators
of the native informant cohort are still among us, and more influential than
ever before. They are hungry from their years in the wilderness. They are eager
for tangible influence. And they are poised, if all goes as they hope these
next three years of Donald Trump, to use their dubious “native” legitimacy and
their Zionist-arranged access to power to help expand American and Israeli
ethnic supremacist empire to the detriment of citizens in America and the
world.
