Feb 15 2013

The power of the mythical ‘Israel lobby’ on Michael Cohen’s political imagination

‘Comment is Free’ analyst Michael Cohen seems to be cut out of the same ideological cloth as Glenn Greenwald, imputing enormous power to the ‘Israel lobby’ – an evidently quite dangerous network of Americans who are more concerned about the interests of a foreign country than those of the United States.

The lobby’s use of smears and intimidation to coerce the US Congress into towing the pro-Israel line explains, for Cohen and his fellow political travelers at the Guardian, the difficulties Chuck Hagel has experienced during confirmation hearings in the Senate over his nomination to be Defense Secretary.

Cohen, who’s been contributing to CiF since December, 2012, has already penned two piece s at CiF on the Hagel nomination, and the alleged hold the pro-Israel lobby has exerted on the process. And, in his most recent post, ‘Chuck Hagel’s confirmation and the orthodoxy of US debate on Israel‘, Feb. 14, Cohen positively cites the sage analysis of Stephen Walt, who noted that the Hagel row proved ‘the lobby’s iron grip on Congress – an influence which grossly distorts the debate over important foreign policy debates.

Cohen writes the following:

“Part of what is going on here is obviously politics. As Harvard Professor Stephen Walt has repeatedly argued, this is demonstrative of the extraordinary power that the Israel lobby holds over Congress and official Washington.”

Walt, in the Feb. 1 post linked to by Cohen, crows that the Hagel debate proves the wisdom of what he wrote – in a book on the ‘Israel Lobby’ – when he warned “that AIPAC…has an almost unchallenged hold on Congress“.

So, is it true that Hagel’s troubles during the confirmation hearings prove AIPAC’s suffocating control over congress?

Interestingly, Cohen, in the very next line of his CiF essay, does a 180.

“But in the case of Hagel, the strongest pro-Israel lobby, Aipac, has been silent on the nomination.”

So, Cohen, over the course of two consecutive sentences in the same passage, approvingly cites Walt’s argument on AIPAC’s power over the Hagel process, and then makes an admission which completely contradicts Walt’s thesis.

How can an organization which has been “silent on the [Hagel] nomination” concurrently be exercising an “unchallenged hold” on the process?

Since it is uncertain, based on the passage, whether Cohen thoroughly read the short blog post which he cited, my guess is that he’s likely also unaware that Walt has defended John Mearsheimer, the co-author of his book on the Israel lobby, from charges of endorsing antisemitism.

Of course, the “smears” against Mearsheimer are based largely on his endorsement of a quite well-known Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier:

Perhaps critics of the ‘Israel lobby’ would cause pro-Israel Jews a bit less “anguish” if they would not impute such a farcical degree of power to Americans who support the Jewish state and, at the very least, studiously avoid associating with those so clearly compromised by such deep-seated Judeophobic antipathies.

Chas Freeman, “Fifth Columnists” and the ‘Guardian Left’ (cifwatch.com)
The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald again smears pro-Israel American Jews (cifwatch.com)
The stranglehold on the US by one lobby: One minute with Glenn Greenwald (cifwatch.com)
Guardian headline tidies up inconvenient quote by nominee for Defense Secretary (cifwatch.com)

Jan 4 2012

Guardian’s Simon Jenkins suggests Obama’s sanctions against Iran caused by Israel lobby

Simon Jenkins

Writers who chronicle the history and evolution of political thought may one day look back at our era and marvel over the increasing popularity, among presumably “enlightened” progressive voices, of narratives which impute to organized Jewry both immense power and disloyalty – tropes typically associated with traditional right wing Judeophobia.

A case in point is the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, who published an essay at CiF, Jan. 3, “Why is Britain ramping up sanctions against Iran?” – a title meant as a rhetorical question, a vehicle to decipher political phenomena he finds disagreeable in a manner consistent with his biases and lazy intellectual assumptions.

Jenkins introductory passages go beyond merely questioning the wisdom and efficacy of economic sanctions imposed by the US and UK to confront the Iranian nuclear threat, but suggests that any such attempt to coerce Iran is obviously doomed to fail.

Having established what every sane, reasonable person must surely know – that attempts to thwart the Islamist state’s nuclear ambitions, and quest for regional hegemony, will not succeed – Jenkins then pivots to the question of why, precisely, the U.S. has announced new commercial and financial sanctions on Iran:

“President Obama must show America’s pro-Israel lobby that he is tough somewhere in the Middle East.”

Of course, for Jenkins, the U.S. President’s policy towards Iran isn’t the result of in-depth analyses of the situation with his top foreign policy advisers. It also couldn’t possibly be dictated by national security interests, nor reflect the values of the commander-in-chief of the most power country on earth.

But, rather, such a sanctions regime must be the result of pressure exerted by pro-Israel American Jews, which, per Jenkins, represents “belligerence that makes some western leaders vulnerable to the inevitability of war.”

The Israel lobby isn’t merely behind Western sanctions against Iran. They’re prodding an unwilling, feckless American President to a disastrous military confrontation.

Adds Jenkins:

Economic sanctions are coward’s diplomacy. They purport to high moral stance but are merely a low-risk way of bullying the world. The danger is that they encourage militarist lobbies to escalate the steps that lead to open conflict.

Let’s be clear. By “militarist lobbies” he’s referring to organized American Jewry. And, by advancing a canard regarding the injurious effects of such “lobbies” he veers directly into the territory of xenophobia and nativism which he, as a liberal, presumably opposes.

The most prolific paleoconservative and unabashedly antisemitic voice in the U.S., Pat Buchanan, wrote in 2008 that “Israel and its Fifth Column in [Washington , DC] seek to stampede us into war with Iran”.

For the sake of clarity, a “fifth column” refers to a group of people (typically ethnic minorities) who are perceived as clandestinely undermining a larger a nation from within.

When it comes to employing tropes regarding the nefarious influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy, Guardian Left commentators such as Simon Jenkins are increasingly indistinguishable from the those who explicitly advance the classically antisemitic view that Jewish citizens of the U.S. (or other Western countries) are more loyal to Israel than to the interests of their own nations.

That Jenkins could simply be ignorant of the lethal history of this facile narrative about Jewish power is certainly possible.

But, one thing is certain. Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, with Jews representing less than 2% of the American population, it is horribly dispiriting that the charge that organized Jewry is too powerful (and is pushing the United States unwillingly to war) is not only fashionable and respectable but, evidently, considered consistent with “liberal” thought.

Jan 14 2011

462 Guardian readers agree: The pro-Israel lobby is a threat to free speech

Alan Dershowitz’s Jan. 13th CiF column on the use of the term “blood libel” in American political discourse – beyond its usage in the context of the “theologically based false accusations against the Jewish people” - produced an avalanche of hostile comments.

In the essay, Dershowitz defended the use of the term, arguing that, “no ethnic or religious group should claim ownership of language that might silence free speech.”

The following comment by ArseneKnows, received 462 “Recommends.”

My guess is that the irony of complaining about the pro-Israel lobby stifling free speech, while freely posting such an accusation in a paper read by millions of readers, was somehow lost on him.

Beyond that, its almost comical to argue that the pro-Israel lobby silences criticism of Israel in the very newspaper that habitually publishes the most incendiary and unhinged attacks on the Jewish state.

If the Israel lobby indeed attempts to stifle criticism of Israel, then even the most cursory review of the Western and non-Western media (not to mention International bodies such as the UN and UNHRC) – where vitriol directed towards Israel is simply legion – would suggest that “the lobby” is doing a simply horrible job at achieving that objective.