If anyone actually read Salon, I’d care that they pretend this article isn’t about Jews, nor even about the Israel Lobby, but about the Bush policy in the Middle East. Uh-huh.
The touchiest aspect of all is the role played by pro-Israel neoconservatives in laying the groundwork for the Iraq war. Much of the media has been loath to go near this, for obvious and in some ways honorable reasons: It feels a little like “blame the Jews.” But that taboo has faded as it has become clearer that “the Jews” are not the ones being blamed for helping pave the way to war, but a group of powerful neoconservatives, some but not all of them Jewish, who subscribe to the hard-right views of Israel’s Likud Party. This group no more represents “the Jews” than the Shining Path represents “the Peruvians.”
Logic and forthrightness has traditionally taken a back seat to timorous self-censorship when it comes to discussing these matters. But in addition to the war debate, several other watershed events have helped erode the taboo against discussing the power of the Israel lobby. The most important were the publications of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s “The Israel Lobby,” and Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” The overwrought reaction to Mearsheimer and Walt’s piece, ironically, only supported its thesis. Similarly, the opprobrium heaped on Carter only succeeded in making it clear how little room there is for open discussion of these issues in America.
Funny how the article is all about AIPAC and the Israel Lobby, but the second paragraph seems to utterly contradict the first now, doesn’t it? But here we go with the dual loyalty canard:
For all these reasons, a powerful spotlight has been turned on the pro-Israel lobby. And there are signs that increasing numbers of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, are willing to openly question whether it is in America’s national interest for AIPAC, whose positions are well to the right of those held by most American Jews, to wield such disproportionate power over America’s Mideast policies.
Once again, I point you in the direction of Saudi Arabia, whose princes can be seen hand-in-hand with President Bush on his ranch, and looking like they’re giving him his marching orders in a very badly-staged picture from several years ago. But no, that’s not relevant, because, well, Bush isn’t Jewish, or something.
For our next we have a perfect exhibit of what I now call the “make shit up” school of thought.
Why weren’t more American Jews with moderate views on the Middle East stepping forward to challenge AIPAC and its hawkish policies? I asked Rosenberg. Was it because they were afraid of being morally blackmailed — facing the predictable accusations of being self-hating Jews, disloyal to Israel, collaborationist “kapos,” and so on?
“I think the number of people in that group is relatively small,” Rosenberg said. “I think the much larger number are people who are absolutely indifferent. And therefore they’re not susceptible to moral blackmail because they will never hear what AIPAC or the IPF or any of the Israel organizations say. I don’t know what percentage it is, but my guess is that no more than 40 percent of American Jews think about Israel in any way, shape or form. Most of them live their lives, like most people do. So we’re fighting over people who think about it at all, and as I said the single-issue ones tend to be more with AIPAC for now. We’re trying to get the rest. But I do think that as time goes on, with more and more young people, that moral blackmail thing doesn’t work anymore.”
First, make up a statistic. (Interesting fact: 87.9% of all statistics are made up on the spot.) Then, use that made-up statistic as fact, and repeat it often. Soon, the made-up statistic gets bandied about is if you actually conducted a poll of Jews to see if they think about Israel, when, in fact, all you did was make shit up.
Is anyone else getting tired of these “good Jew” articles yet? Because I sure the hell am.
Rosenberg said that long-term demographic trends were working against AIPAC and its fear tactics. The AIPAC leadership, which he described as a “true believer [on Israel] crowd with money,” is “a much older crowd,” he said. “Their children and grandchildren don’t have those views. As we get further from World War II, it’s harder to scare young people into support for Israel. They will support Israel if they believe in Israel and if Israel appeals to them. But those scare tactics, ‘write checks because there’s going to be another Holocaust’ — that’s doesn’t work with the under-60 crowd. The people who demonstrated against the Vietnam war in the ’60s, they’re just not going to buy into the ‘Hitler is coming’ stuff. They’re just too smart for that. I’ve got kids in their 20s — the idea of telling them that America could be a dangerous place for them? They would laugh in my face. That’s ridiculous.”
It isn’t America where the new Hitler is coming, though he will come here if he succeeds in his nuclear goals.
And here, the author’s chilling conclusion. Cue spooky music and shadowy, Jew-shaped silhouette:
We find ourselves in a very strange situation. America’s Mideast policies are in thrall to a powerful Washington lobby that is only able to hold power because it has not been challenged by the people it presumes to speak for. But if enough American Jews were to stand up and say “not in my name,” they could have a decisive impact on America’s disastrous Mideast policies.
Once again, color me especially happy that I cancelled my Salon subscription years ago.
I cannot believe I used to like that rag. Okay, it’s because I started reading it around the time of the Clinton impeachment, and I’m still of the same mind—that he should not have been impeached at all, and that it was an enormous waste of time, money and effort. But I have moved on since then, and it seems that Salon has not.
One last shot: They quote Rosenberg, another of their “good” Jews, on how Israelis think about this whole thing. (It’s from the “make shit up” variety, also the “the plural of anecdote is too data!” school.)
Rosenberg said that one of the best things American Jews can do to educate themselves about Israel is to read the Israeli press, which routinely prints pieces far more harshly critical of Israel than anything found in the American media. “If people who don’t follow the situation closely started to read the Israeli press, started to read Haaretz, they’d realize how much debate there is there, and how many people feel terribly about what’s happened to the Palestinians, and how many people are determined to break out of this situation,” Rosenberg said. “And they’d realize that Israelis in general feel that the rhetoric of American Jewish organizations is about as outdated as the last century. It says nothing to Israelis. They laugh at that kind of rhetoric. If American Jews saw what the debate is like there, that would make Israel more popular.
What Rosenberg fails to admit, and what Salon evidently doesn’t want to know, is that Ha’aretz is one of the smallest, least-read papers in Israel. The largest? The parent company of Ynet, Yedioth Ahronoth, is the largest-circulation newspaper in Israel. Not that circulation is necessarily proof of authority, but if one is lamenting AIPAC as being non-representative of the Jewish point of view on Israel, one might want to point out that Ha’aretz is not representative of the Israeli point of view, either.
But hey. Why let facts get in the way of your argument?
I’m amazed that Salon and Slate used to be my go-to online media sources.
But I still miss Suck.
I can honestly say I have rarely gone to Salon or Slate. I prefer LGF, Jawa Report, MEMRI and Atlas Shrugged to get my news.
Any article that cites Philip Weiss as an exemplar of Jewish thought automatically qualifies as laugable. Weiss loathes Israel because it gets in the way of his version of Judaism – which is all about gefilte fish and bagels.
Of course this article is written by Gary Kamaiya, so I’d expect nothing less. The misrepresentation of the AJC article they cite also suggests that both Kamaiya and Weiss either have reading comprehension problems and/or are dishonest. You can decide.
One should also mention that much of the Israeli press is as unbiased as the Daily Kos, Cindy Sheehan, Jane Fonda, Goerge Soros, George Galloway, and that ilk.
I knew just from your excerpt that Gary Kamiya wrote that article. He’s an unreconstructed “Israel Bad/Palestinians Good” hack. He’s pretty much the main reason I stopped reading Salon.
Salon, in the very beginning, was an irreverent, counter-culture e-zine clearly written by a motley crew of sexually obsessed adolescents fuelled by copious amounts of espresso. You could almost see the spiked hair, tatoos and nose rings. It was actually fun to read.
Somewhere along the line they decided they had to be Responsible, Grown Up Journalists and promptly went off the rails. Probably had to do with their corporate sponsorship.
But we need to face some facts: in the US, Jews are considered White People of Privilege. To be socially and politcally acceptable to the Left, which consists almost exclusively of said White People of Privilege, you have to prove that you are a class, and especially a “race”, enemy. It is therefore impossible for a Jew to care about Am Israel because they are fellow Jews and be a member in good standing of the Left. People of Color can identify with their own people and they are prasied by the Left because they are “authentic”. But Jews can’t do that and get away with it because being Jewish is, for some reason, not on the list of acceptable or chic ethnicities (because we are, supposedly, no longer oppressed). For the Left, Israel is a cat’s paw of American hegemony rather than a Jewish state that is there because the Jews, as Jews, wanted it and needed it. It can’t be seen as something organically Jewish, it can only be seen as an agent of American imperialsim. Therefore, to prove his or her credentials, a Jew on the Left must dafka reject Israel and side with the Arabs. Otherwise he or she is a (shudder!) “Zionist”.
Interestingly enough, Kamiya and I were in the same class (Class of ’70) at Berkeley High. I’ve moved on, but he’s obviously still there.
And, yeah Suck absolutely ruled. It was a total bummer when they went away.
I miss Spy magazine, too.
Sorry, meant to say “class traitor”, not “class enemy”.
Carefully skewed definitions: neoconservative, neoconservatives as subscribing to the hard-right views of Israel’s Likud Party, neoconservatives as the moral equivalent of the Peruvian “Shining Path”.
Neoconservatives were originally ex-leftists who rebelled against the left’s increasing fecklessness. They are not robotic rightists, they are pragmatists.
The Likud is the lineal descendent of Jabotinsky, the original rightist Zionist. Binyamin Netanyahu’s father was Jabotinsky’s secretary.
The Likud is a diverse political party, not a guerrilla terorist orgnization.
Amazing that we have to say these things, but the Meanstreak Media is determined to distort, even when they don’t need to. Why don’t they simply accept that different people have different views, and instead of smearing the opposition, educate their audience about their own program?
Ahh … no program …
MJ Rosenberg occasionally has a column in the Jerusalem Post. He is as unreadable as Frank Rich of the New York Times.
Meanstreak Media. LOL, I love that phrase.
The article isn’t anti-Semitic (and I think it’s kind of nasty to suggest it is), but Kamaiya clearly holds the lefty conceit that “brave” voices of dissent are being crushed by right-wing forces in the media and political scene. People criticize the pro-Israel lobby all the time, but among progessives AIPAC has acquired a reputation worthy of Keyser Soze. (AIPAC is hardly the only group to hold such a reputation – the anti-Castro lobby and the Oil Industry are also regarded as nefarious and all-powerful.)