Someone needs to explain to me why this should be an item on Laura Rozen’s Foreign Policy blog on Politico.
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell apologized Tuesday to groups whose entirely lawful events were the subject of regular anti-terrorism reports provided by a Philadelphia-based Israeli-American outfit to state law enforcement agencies, the AP reports:
Apparently, the Pennsylvania homeland security director, James Powers, contracted a firm to collect data on protests in the state. The firm is owned by an American Jew and an Israeli, thus causing Rozen to call it an “Israeli-American outfit”. But the truly damning information, according to Rozen, is this:
A further article on the firm’s website, dated September 2008, states that all of the intelligence information the firm collects in the United States is sent for analysis to Israel. “All of the information ITRR’s staff creates is sent to its monitoring center in Jerusalem, where it is analyzed and verified with other local sources.”
Huh. So a firm built by an Israeli and an American uses employees in Israel to analyze data for potential terrorist threats. Because it’s not like the Israelis have any experience with terrorist threats, or anything. Quick! Alert the media!
Laura Rozen credits Justin Elliott’s Twitter feed. A quick look there shows that Elliott was alerted to this scary story by none other than the vehemently anti-Israel Philip Weiss, in whose eyes Israel can do no right. She also checks LinkedIn for the owners’ bios, and notes that co-founder Michael Perelman lists nothing other than his college degrees and current job. Are we supposed to think he’s a Mossad agent because he chooses not to list much on his LinkedIn profile? Well, then, color me Mossad. I don’t even list my job on my profile.
To recap: A security firm that is jointly owned by an American and an Israeli and uses Israeli expertise to analyze data was hired by the Pennsylvania director of Homeland Security to spy on peaceful protesters. The data is sent to Jerusalem for analysis. And this is a foreign policy matter because…?
The governor of Pennsylvania is so upset over all this that he’s not even considering firing the director of Homeland Security. Don’t you think that should be the angle of the story, Laura? Pennsylvania governor doesn’t care that his DHS spied on peaceful protestors? What’s with the big, scary “Israeli-American outfit” sleight-of-hand?
This isn’t a foreign policy issue. It’s a domestic issue conflated with Israel by a known Israel-hater, and Laura Rozen is fanning the flames.
Look at her CV.
http://www.warandpiece.com/about.html
Don’t be too surprised.
Seen the comments to the post? Jew-haters out in droves, as usual. Nice of her to give them even more fodder for their conspiracies. And yes, I researched her job experience. I think she qualifies for Snoopy’s Assajew Squad.
I got into blogging in part because the MSM was too left wing.
The MSM saw their readership blogging and decided to co-opt bloggers – thinking that blogging was the thing – and hire folks like David Weigel, Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, Nate Silver, Andrew Sullivan and Laura Rozen – and say, “We get it; we’re using bloggers.”
But the reason they lost me as a customer is because they didn’t seriously consider alternatives to their own points of view. To use a favorite (but inaccurate) MSM put down of former President Bush, they were “incurious.”
And of course there’s the bigger problem that Marc Ambinder proudly proclaimed:
The media is going to help the Democratic Party’s national messaging, which is that the GOP is a party full of Christine O’Donnells, a party that wants to take away your Social Security and your right to masturbate.
The MSM are incurious and becoming more and more open about their bias.