Playing With Fire
When the comments on the blogs of Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Philip Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald turn ugly, who should be held accountable? Plus: A Jew-baiter’s lexicon.
Photoillustration: Tablet Magazine; photos: iStockphoto
Last week this column argued that major media organizations were mainstreaming the opinions of anti-Semitic commenters in the hopes of boosting traffic on their websites. Some of my critics mistakenly believed that I was accusing specific journalists and academics—Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Philip Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald—of being anti-Semites. Some also charged that I had smeared these writers by incorrectly holding them accountable for the hate that appears in the comments section of their blogs.
These detractors missed the point of my article, which had nothing to do with the indiscernible beliefs of individuals; rather, I was instead illustrating that these pundits, their audiences, and the major media companies hosting their blogs, are complicit in the common work of mainstreaming the kind of anti-Semitic language, ideas, and discourse that were once confined to extremist hate sites on the far right.
Let’s start with a very recent example: After I contacted Foreign Policy’s Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasser for comment before publication of last week’s column, FP.com quickly excised dozens of the most egregiously anti-Semitic comments that stuck to Walt’s posts. Perhaps they should have also vetted some of the links that Walt himself embeds for the edification of his readers. Consider this recent post where Walt has inserted a link under the name Ariel Sharon, which leads to a 2002 article on the Media Monitors Network website:
The name Safire, as in William Safire of the New York Times, is a name they recognize well at the State Department. He is one of the high priests of Sulzberger’s New York Times empire which has a franchise to dictate terms to the State Department. Of course, it is Safire himself who appears to be taking in dictation work these days from his old pal, Ariel Sharon. Before you read on, note that the Boston Globe is also a publication owned by Sulzberger. Is their a civil war breaking out among the Yiddish Supremacists? Or is Sulzberger trying to deflect some of the damage that is bound to come his way as a result of transforming his media empire into just another corner of the Israeli Lobby? Who cares? Let Sulzberger explain his shadow government’s antics.
With this link Walt shows that he hangs out in the same fetid places as some of his most paranoid commenters. And yet it is true, as some of my critics, including Walt, contend, that he and his colleagues are not responsible for the views of their readers. Walt is not accountable for the rabble that hang on his every word and who feel vindicated by the fact that their dark fantasies about Jews are enhanced by a veneer of academic reasoning from a Harvard professor. Nor can Walt be blamed for the fact that David Duke lauded his work on the Israel lobby’s machinations in pushing the United States to war in Iraq. (“It is quite satisfying,” wrote the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, “to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.”) Even though a sewer follows Walt wherever he goes, he is not that sewer’s keeper.
I did not feel the need to make the case that Walt himself is an anti-Semite. There are plenty of credible voices who have pursued that line of argument. They have made a case that the book he co-authored with John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, was an anti-Semitic tract. Still others equally credible believe that Walt simply flirts with anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan has also been called to account, more than once, for combining his strident, conspiratorial denunciations of Israel, “Jewish neocons,” and “the Israel Lobby,” with his pronounced obsession with circumcision. Even as Glenn Greenwald and Philip Weiss have both been accused of obscuring the plain facts behind their frothing rhetoric about Israel, I never claimed that they were of the hothouse flower variety of anti-Semite known as the self-hating Jew.
Whether or not these bloggers are anti-Semitic is precisely the argument Walt and the rest want to have and precisely the one I do not. Anti-Semitism is an idea held in the mind that finally can only be confirmed—and can always be denied—by the mind holding it. I can no more discern what these bloggers really think about Jews than I can know whether they are thinking about the color blue or green. To get bogged down in this argument deflects attention from the issue that I am interested in here, which is not a mental state, but a process, an activity in which all four men openly engage: Jew-baiting.
Everyone knows that the media is reeling. For instance, New York Times staffers recently took a 5 percent pay cut after a hundred of their colleagues were laid off. And yet, compared to their colleagues at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, both of which have been gutted after sliding into bankruptcy, journalists at the Times are clearly the lucky ones. None of the big media companies has figured out how to make their Internet presence into a profit center that can sustain operations, even as they turn their hallowed brand-names over to opinion bloggers who can generate copy at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional reporting. The Israel, or rather anti-Israel, market is one of the most attractive niche markets in this trade because it taps into a passionate audience that is interested in news and can generate immediate and measurable results—page views, hits, and comments. Even on his best days, Stephen Walt can’t hold a candle to premier sports, shopping, or pornography websites traffic-wise. But he can tap into the prurient passions of a niche market.
If Walt and the others may be acquitted of responsibility for their cesspools, what blame lies with their employers? It is hard to believe that if an author had a written a book, like Walt’s, that had been similarly branded as “nasty,” “paranoid,” and “riddled with errors of fact,” and the book was about, say, African-Americans, or Latinos, or gays—and endorsed by David Duke—that the author would be embraced by the U.S. intelligentsia in the name of open debate. Only their employers know why Walt and the others were hired or remain on staff—the editor of The Atlantic, James Bennet, declined comment through the magazine’s spokesman, while Salon editor Joan Walsh and The Nation Institute’s Taya Kitman did not respond to requests for comment—but it’s not outlandish to imagine that the number of commenters and pageviews these writers’ polemics draw would be a factor. Whether Foreign Policy knew they were getting the public sewer Walt elicits, or just a public intellectual, is unclear. (Foreign Policy’s Susan Glasser did not respond to a request for comment.) What is clear is that they decided to host Walt’s blog, give it prominent billing, and tolerate its commenters.
As was the case with Walt’s blog, Weiss’ sponsor must have brought him aboard fully aware of his anti-Israel sentiments (Mondoweiss was hosted by the New York Observer before the Nation Institute), but Greenwald was already on the Salon site before he turned his baleful attention to anti-Zionist polemics, and The Atlantic bought The Daily Dish before Sullivan started ranting about circumcision and the Jews. Unlike the rest, Sullivan doesn’t allow comments, but we still know what his readers think, because he publishes examples of their work. These published emails are scarcely different from the comments published under the posts of Walt, Greenwald, and Weiss, whose arguments serve as a dog-whistle, calling out the pack of haters whose remarks make explicit what was merely hinted at in the original, (usually) more respectable post. The commenters, many of them known to each other from like-minded Internet sites, feed off of each other’s semi-literate rage, elaborating upon their colleagues’ lies, myths, and slanders and serving up anti-Semitic invective. As the Jews, and sometimes non-Jews, arrive on the site to dispute the calumnies, the cyber-sport of Jew-baiting begins, driving up comments and traffic to heretofore-unreachable heights. Even as Sullivan’s technique to summon the mob seems slightly more sophisticated, it still uses a strategy that allows him to walk away with more traffic—he is currently ranked 15th in “standing & influence” in the entire blogosphere—but a little less of the stench.
In his review of The Israel Lobby, Walter Russell Mead explained how Jew-baiting has historically functioned: “Jews are in a double bind: refrain from responding with outrage and the charge becomes accepted as a fact, express utter loathing at the charge and give anti-Semites the opportunity to pose as the victims of a slander campaign by venomous Jews.” For the purposes of driving Internet traffic, it is helpful if Jews respond, but not necessary, as anyone who has waded through the cesspool knows. In this column last week the subject alone, without the rhetorical energies of Walt and company, also brought a record number of comments for this site, thanks to the efforts of commenters migrating from their own safe havens of invective in order to shout down reasoned debate.
To advertising salesmen and advertisers, of course, the subject of any given blog post is presumably immaterial: What matters are the numbers. But is targeting Jews that much more profitable than going after African-Americans or gays and lesbians or women? The answer is simple. People know they can get away with Jew-baiting because history shows that it has been done before and no one did anything to stop it.
***
Jew-baiting is simply one way that the new old media and old new media are trying to find their collective footing in a changing press environment and a bad economy. So, in the interests of sharing my understanding of this successful recipe with my colleagues in the opinion press, these are some notes on how to increase traffic to your struggling website.
The Jew-baiter’s Lexicon
Here are some of the euphemistic catchphrases that will cover your ass with your queasier colleagues in the press corps while announcing to those in the know that your cesspool is open for business, with examples drawn from top anti-Israel blogs:
1. “The Israel lobby”
A conspiracy theory by any other name, the “Israel lobby” has long been invoked to explain unconditional U.S. support for the Jewish state. This conceit hit the mainstream in 2007 with publication of the Walt-Mearsheimer book explaining that a broadly inclusive coalition of U.S. citizens of Jewish descent ranging from the far left to the far right are subverting U.S. foreign policy on behalf of Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer deny that what sounds, looks, and smells like a conspiracy theory about Jewish power is in fact one. Why? Because conspiracies about Jewish power are for anti-Semites, and they, by contrast, are tenured professors at two of the most esteemed universities in the United States, men who are simply trying to explain the mysterious forces that have poisoned the U.S. public so much that it overwhelmingly supports the Jewish state in poll after poll, subverting rational U.S. interests in the Middle East through a uniquely irrational process that is applicable to the behavior of no other state on the planet. That’s why.
Here, for instance, Stephen Walt finds the proof vindicating his claim that it was indeed the Israel lobby that drove the United States to make war on Iraq—Tony Blair says so! The problem however is that Tony Blair said no such thing. Walt not only wrenches Blair’s quote out of context, he also wildly twists the evidence surrounding the run-up to the Iraq war to fit his theory. In Walt’s account, the fact that Israel was vocal in its opposition to the Iraq war, until it eventually fell in line behind the George W. Bush Administration’s democracy-promotion crusade like a good ally, was a feat of astonishing misdirection, which appears to have fooled even Stephen Walt himself (as well as Mearsheimer). By the end, it appears, the United States was taken to war not by the Bush Administration but by a remarkably complete list of nearly every Israeli and American Jewish politician, journalist, activist, and thinker, liberal and conservative alike, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, “Every Israeli politician who Bill Clinton knows … and he knows a lot,” Howard Kohr of AIPAC, Nathan Guttman of The Forward, Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com, John B. Judis of The New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, the Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Mortimer Zuckerman, Matthew Berger of the Jewish Telegraph Agency; Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, executive vice president of the Orthodox Religious Zionists of America; Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism; David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee; Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The Jewish Week; and Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
So how does Jew-baiting work in practice? Let’s look at the comments on this particular post.
“Bush and Cheney only had to walk down the hall to consult with Israel, considering how many in their cabinet and appointees have dual citizenships with Israel and were already actively involved with the Israeli government… All roads lead to PNAC, AIPAC, JINSA, ZOA, AEI, etc.” says one commenter, leaving out only ZOG in his paranoid alphabet soup. Another writes: “Everybody knows that many (not all) Jewish Americans care more about the security and preservation of the Israeli state than they do about the safety of American citizens.”
A commenter named Jacob, whom the other commenters appear to believe is Jewish, remarks that among other troubling issues with Walt’s argument is that his list of Jews responsible for the war seems to include virtually every public figure in the American Jewish community. Once baited, the mob zeroes in: “Calm down Jacob.” “Stop whining and make your point.” “Stick to the point and ease up on the histrionics.” “[Y]ou are, unfortunately, indicative of the sickness called Zionism that has perverted the Jewish community. It’s time to start to take RESPONSIBILITY for the actions of YOUR community. Get some help, Jacob.”
2. “Neocons”
This is a synonym often used to designate the kind of American Jew who has forced Washington officials to sacrifice U.S. interests, as well as U.S. blood and money, in order to make war on behalf of Israel’s desire to gobble up Muslim and Arab lands. First, the neocons slipped something into the well that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and other policymakers drank from before they made war on Iraq; now the neocons are eager to push the U.S. into a conflict with Iran. If Weiss is to be believed, Washington Times reporter Eli Lake and a bunch of other Jewish journalists with no evident influence on the decision-making process are in fact setting the agenda for the entire Barack Obama Administration. To the Mondoweiss audience, it appears to make perfect sense that the decision on how to deal with the Iranian nuclear program will not be shaped by administration principals like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden but rather by Sen. Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. “[W]ith the neocons and aipac’s plugs in congress/media calling openly for war,” writes one commenter, “and with zionist liberals and fake leftists/progressives demonizing Iran more subtly to pave the way, how much longer before zionism, inc. gets their way on this?”
3. “Good Jews” vs. “Bad Jews”
If you give evidence that you have a problem with all Jews, you’re identifying yourself as an anti-Semite. It’s important then to make a distinction between two kinds of Jews—the “good Jews,” who agree with your conspiratorial views, and the “bad Jews,” who are often referred to with the shorthand term “Likudnik.” John Mearsheimer makes the distinction a bit more baldly, calling the bad Jews the “New Afrikaaners” and the good ones, “righteous Jews,” a cleverly nasty twist on the Jewish concept of the righteous gentile.
“Most American Jews,” writes Andrew Sullivan, “retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities. But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing—that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran—is something else. Something much darker.” In other words, the “Krauthammer/Goldfarb wing” represents the bad Jewish thoughts of U.S. Jewry. As Leon Wieseltier put it in The New Republic, “[Sullivan’s] assumption, in his outburst about ‘the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,’ that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one.”
4. “Conflict of interest”
Stephen Walt coined this phrase himself as a substitute for “dual loyalty,” which as he concedes, “has a regrettable and sordid history, given its origins as a nasty anti-Semitic canard in old Europe.” What he means by conflict of interest is in effect the same thing, but purged of that nasty history. It is not someone’s racial or ethnic background that should exclude them from policy-making roles in the U.S. government, writes Walt, but rather when “an individual’s own activities or statements give independent evidence of strong attachment to a particular foreign country” that they should be excluded from “an influential role in shaping U.S. policy towards that country.” Who qualifies as a source of independent evidence? According to Walt, working at AIPAC, or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is sufficient proof of conflict of interest. That is to say, that the many hundreds of scholars, military officials, and policymakers who have worked at the Washington-based think-tank that reflects the bipartisan Israel-friendly position of the U.S. government should—uniquely—be disqualified from working on U.S. Middle East policy.
Walt claims that he’d have similar concerns about “key figures” “from the American Task Force on Palestine or the National Iranian-American Council.” And yet when President Obama named Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, Walt defended a man reported to have done advocacy work on behalf of Saudi Arabia and to have sat on the advisory board of a state-owned Chinese oil company. As Freeman’s nomination began to unravel, thanks in part to the revelation that a former U.S. diplomat tapped to play a central role in the intelligence community believed U.S. support for the Jewish state was responsible for 9/11, Walt likened criticism of Freeman to McCarthyism, and adduced yet more evidence for the awesome power of the Israel lobby.
5. “No one can criticize Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite.”
This slogan entitles its speaker to slander Israel in any fashion without having to worry about being called an anti-Semite. Walt often makes the claim that critics of Israel are intimidated into silence, despite the fact that The Israel Lobby, published by one of the country’s most prestigious houses and home to 22 Nobel Prize in Literature winners, was widely reviewed in the national media and even hit the New York Times best-seller list. What this statement really means is that Jews control the media.
According to Glenn Greenwald, for the Israel lobby, “The real goal, as always, was to ensure that there is no debate over America’s indescribably self-destructive, blind support for Israeli actions.” Moreover, Greenwald explains, the Israel lobby has overpowered the American legal system: “Not even our Constitution’s First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel’s enemies.”
6. “Hasbara”
Here’s another new entry in the lexicon, perhaps related to the fact that given the capricious nature of its one-time allies around the world, its virtual isolation from the international community and, of course, the anti-Israel press, Israel has of late devoted more of its human and financial resources to public relations. While it is true that all states engage in a range of activities to make its case to the rest of the world—from public diplomacy to propaganda—and some Middle Eastern countries are famous for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on such efforts, the use of the Hebrew word hasbara (meaning “explanation”) indicates that the Jewish state is engaging in a dark conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in order to justify its crimes. After all, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it still isn’t kosher. Or, as Weiss notes before quoting a writer from The Guardian, “Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?”
“I single out Israel in part because of the lies, because the lobby has gotten away with this since Truman’s day,” writes Weiss. And a commenter responds: “Also because they threaten the livelihoods of those who criticize them.”
7. The Awesome Power of Jewish Mind-Control
Remember that one aspect of The Israel Lobby’s central thesis is that marching orders for the war in Iraq were whispered into the ears of key Bush Administration decision-makers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Rice—by Jews. In this view, because Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were working under Rumsfeld at the Pentagon they must have exercised their mesmeric powers of Jewish mind-control to bend the U.S. government to their will. In a separate example, Andrew Sullivan wrote—with no actual evidence to support his pretty loaded claim—that his arch-nemesis Sarah Palin was being “indoctrinated by Joe Lieberman and AIPAC as we speak.”
What happens if you don’t read the script the Jews have handed you? They’ll silence you, says Walt’s co-author John Mearsheimer. “[T]here’s no accountability for Israel on any issue,” the University of Chicago professor recently told a Washington audience. “If I went to the Middle East, and visited Israel, and I was killed, somebody shot me, do you think there would be any accountability? The Israelis can do almost anything and get away with it.”
One way to avoid the awesome power of the Jews is to link to truth-sites beyond their control, as Stephen Walt does in the example I cite at the beginning of this piece, and allegedly to even more extreme hate sites which will gladly receive readers who might have previously been a little too timid to explore the darkest parts of the web without an escort.
8. I like Jews. I just don’t like Zionists
In rationalizing the excesses of your blogger or his more voluble commenters, explain that they are simply critical of Zionism, which is different from anti-Semitism. Even as Martin Luther King explained that, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism,” this particular trope has become so naturalized that no one will think to ask why Jewish nationalism, among all the varieties of nationalism promoted by the world’s myriad of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, is singled out for opprobrium.
In fact, there is no apparent contradiction in loathing Zionism and at the same time celebrating opposing forms of nationalism. Palestinian national aspirations remind Philip Weiss “of the life-and-death struggle for freedom our brave ancestors experienced during the Revolutionary War.” In Weiss’ view, anyone—like himself, for example—who stands against Israeli aggression and with the resistance partakes of that heroism. In this inversion of reality, it is not Hezbollah and Hamas who use Arab civilians as human shields, but Israel.
9. The uniquely evil evil that is Israel
Here we move from the merely tactical use of loaded vocabulary to the conceptual level. Israel is so extraordinarily beyond the pale that its behavior does not even merit comparison with states like China, which brutally occupies Tibet, or India, which occupies Kashmir, or Poland, which stands on parts of what used to be eastern Germany, or Sri Lanka, which recently extirpated the secessionist Tamil Tiger movement after a brutal three-decades long civil war, or the United States of America, which annihilated the Native American peoples. Indeed, the only states that resemble Israel are Nazi Germany and South Africa’s apartheid regime, neither of which exists any longer. Get it?
Watch the comments section fill to the brim at Mondoweiss when Israelis are likened to Nazis: “It’s not so much the methods but the ideology,” writes commenter “Shingo.” “The racial and ethic supremacy. The belief in maintaining bloodlike purity and opposition to mized [sic] marriages.” Another argues, in response to a different post that, “Israel threatens world peace like no other country.” That’s not quite right, as Weiss explains in the post: “I constantly compare the conflict with the battle over slavery in this country in the 1850s.”
While sweeping and unsubstantiated rhetoric has its place, it is best at times to use a more subtle approach. Consider a recent Robert Mackey post from the New York Times’ Lede Blog, which regularly appears on the front page of the Times website, concerning the story of the Arab man found guilty of rape by deception. Never mind that rape by deception statutes—however stupid they may be—are also on the books in California and Tennessee. Mackey portrays this episode as yet another instance of Jewish supremacism. Perhaps if this were in the print edition of the New York Times, the reporters or their editors might have been obliged by normal reporting standards at the very least to read to the end of the Haaretz piece they link to, which explains that two Jewish Israelis have been sentenced under the same law. But, it’s not a newspaper; it’s a blog.
Gentile Zionist,
Do you use the handle JSLeFanu on Friendfeed?
http://friendfeed.com/jslefanu
What I would like to see is some evidence that Wahhabism has influenced the thinking of John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Philip Weiss, Glenn Greenwald or Jim Lobe. The notion is absurd on its face.
They are all hardcore Americanists, firmly situated within the Western Enlightenment tradition.
Yes the origins of the Neoconservative moment did come from Trotskyite acolytes. Or in my opinion proto-Neocon Leo Strauss (the leading intellectual source of the new conservative 20th century movement). But that’s no here nor there. Things evolve, people change.
Funny though, the quote you state, it seems Mr. Schwartz is still a Trotskyite at heart which wouldn’t make a him a true ‘Neocon’ since all the self-avowed ‘Neocons’ from Podhoretz to Kristol have renounce Trostsky.
BTW, Christopher Hitchens was a Trotskyite too and he would not consider himself a Neocon and if you call him one to his face he probably knock you to the ground. Game, set, match.
David,
I didn’t describe Christopher Hitchens as a neocon — I don’t think he is. You are playing on a tennis court against yourself.
Stephen Schwartz, on the other hand, describes himself as a neocon, and I think we can take him at his word. If you have a problem with his self-description, take it up with him.
But you are losing sight of the main line of debate here: I don’t think that Wahhabism has had any influence whatever among the group of intellectuals that Lee Smith singled out for attack. They are all hardcore Americanists in the tradition of Jefferson, Paine, Madison, Franklin, Washington, etc.
Israel (and Zionism) face a much greater challenge from Americanism and the Western Enlightenment tradition than they do from Wahhabism. Deal with it. Get real. Show some Jewish intellectual seriousness for once and stop flailing around.
Nearly all the harsh criticism of the ADL emanating from Jewish circles in recent days has been motivated by Americanism, not Wahhabism. See, for instance, Paul Krugman’s article in the New York Times on the subject, and the commentary which follows.
asherZ,
Provide some examples of American oil industry leaders who been agitating for an American or Israeli war against Iran. Curiously these lobbyists (if you can name them) have had no influence on the American military and intelligence establishments, which have repeatedly expressed their opposition to such a war.
On the other hand, one can easily turn up dozens of statements from neoconservatives and pro-Israel activists agitating for a war against Iran.
How well do you think the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan have gone? Have Americans been net beneficiaries of those wars? How do you think a war against Iran would turn out?
Gentile Zionist
1)”Fools make assumptions”
You are protecting…..
2)”For the rest, Devil’s rage means I have hit the mark in challenging his fabricated self-history”
You are protecting…..again
Lol, do I look angry to you?, I am ridiculing you, its priceless. Besides Shabbos Goy, I know exactly how funny little characters like you operate & what they expect. I won’t give you the pleasure of getting into a pissing contest with you.The name calling game, the slander and the baseless accusations, that’s your cup of tea.
How entertaining the average moron who toils in obscurity.
Googling and data mining the Israel lobby
For those who might need more details about how to use Google to analyze the use of that phrase in mainstream American politics, and in the New York Times in particular:
1. Google [site:nytimes.com "israel lobby"]
http://www.google.com/#q=site:nytimes.com+“israel+lobby”
2. Click on Show Search Tools
3. Click on Timeline
4. Browse the phrase in context from 1969 to the present
5. Zero in on a particular year, say 1975
6. One will notice items like this:
a. 1975: Jun 30, 1975 – While their efforts have not yet approached the effectiveness of the pro-Israel lobby….
b. 1975: Aug 8, 1975 – The Israel Lobby in Washington Is Small and Effective
A small observation: the term “pro-Israel lobby” (instead of the more simple “Israel lobby”) was often used in previous decades in media outlets like the New York Times.
One could perform the same exercise with a wide variety of mainstream publications for this historical period.
Note: Tablet’s forum software doesn’t correctly render this type of URL, which is perfectly legal on Google:
http://www.google.com/#q=site:nytimes.com+“israel+lobby”
A fix would be welcome.
Callie,
Regarding sorted lists — anyone involved with developing data mining methods and technologies deals with sorted lists all the time. In fact, sorted lists are the heart and soul of data mining.
I don’t know what text editor you are using, but I favor Textpad — it can sort long
lists of items in a split second, the blink of an eye. Almost no effort required — just a keystroke or two.
Sorted lists are a method for cutting through huge swathes of messy text to the clear, crisp heart of the matter.
Clearly your mind doesn’t work this way, but don’t presume that others should operate within your mental boundaries.
If you would like to learn more about the list-based approach to information processing in general, take a look into the history of the AI-oriented programming language LISP. Lists rule.
Point 9.
Really comparing China/Tibet to Poland/Germany? Would love to see that.
And of course Americans/natives, at this point I think you have been sipping too much kool-aid.
Your points are defined well, but your inability to state clear examples makes me wonder about your other references you make.
Clearly Sean if you have used the number of times something comes up on Google hits to prove that it exists your basic logic is very flawed. While looking at the Lock Ness moster, why not use that logic to prove the reality of the tooth fairy or the easter bunny?
A peer reviewed journal of internatinal relations would probably be above your reading level since simple lists and sites like Judeofacist are more your cup of tea but you prove nothing.
And you never answered my question, you are playing a game of childhood Candy land with yourself on this thread just talking about your own strawman points.
If the Israel lobby is so powerful why is Gilad Shalit in the situation he is in? My guess is that the vast majority of Americans have never heard of him let alone realize he has not been allowed Red Cross visits since his kidnapping. Why is that?
The silence is deafening. There are lobby groups for Israel. They all have different ideas.
You need some new hobbies. I am sure your friends are getting worried about the obsessive posting online. You might want to get some help from the health center of the college you are at. You really need it!
Sean poor thing, I looked back at how many times you have posted on this thread alone and its quite alarming. How many other sites are you on doing the same thing?
Why? Is it your job? What are you doing with yourself and your life? Turn off your computer, get a girlfriend, make yourself some dinner, watch a movie.
make a grocery list, walk your dog. Turn it off, its over the top!
Gentile Zionist
Yes indeed, we all know there is some cosmic antisemitic conspiracy, the secular “Euro Left” and the dark armies of
Islamo Fascists have joined hands in their crusade against the Jewish people. Do you also believe in alien abductions?.
The universe is expanding & its is antisemitic…..Lol
Israeli government Classifies it’s Past as Top Secret.
The government of the great leader Bibi is expanding to 70 years the prohibition of secret archives release.
http://tinyurl.com/2bpsx8w (ref: Le Monde,a notorious antisemitic newspaper…)
The Nazis, the antisemitics, the Islamo-Fascists, the secular lefties & everything in between, are going to claim that “they” (the Israelis) have something to hide.
Which is of course ludicrous and antisemitic…
The Islamists have means, motive, and opportunity. Now they have a proxy protagonist in the form of the so-called Americanists: anti-Semites obsessed with the Zionist Lobby and its alleged undue influence on U.S. Foreign policy. Why not cut to the chase and quote from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion about the Jewish plan for world domination?
The issue isn’t whether there is an Israel Lobby but whether it has hijacked American foreign policy regarding Israel and the Middle East. The reality is that our foreign policy has been hijacked by Arab Oil. The petro dollars that are not spent on the upkeep of the palaces of the House of Saud or gifts for the House of Bush are diverted to the Wahhabi schools and their teaching of hate for and the inevitable jihad against the Judaeo-Christian West. Why stop there when you can attack America on the cheap using the anti-Semites in the blogosphere to drive a wedge between the Jewish Left and the Christian Right over the one issue on which they agree — Israel’s right to exist?
Ignorance of the existence of the Wahhabi Lobby and its alliance with their Americanist anti-Semite fellow travelers in the blogosphere is no excuse. You are pawns in their game. To play their game is to commit Judaeo-Christian suicide. Connect the dots and get out of their game.
Sean you posted the same repsonse to me word for word twice. Are you a bot? Its odd. Very odd. Why would someone do that? Clearly its well planned thing you have going on here. Its interesting to see, and some other commenter here wondered if there weren’t people who did this for a living……you so prove Lee’s point.
You never answer anyones questions but just spout the same kind of automated answers again and again like a bot.
To explain further, your comment on my reference to your listing things was word for word done twice in different places. You never answered about Shalit? Why? Did that go off your script?
All of this talk about Israel by the likes of Lee Smith and Andrew Sullivan is so much red herring! The issue at hand – the issue that no one dare raise – is the increasing dominance of American media by the Saudis. Does no one remember the Saudis? Sponsor of the 18th century Wahhabi cult (cousin-in-law to the Taliban and al-Qaeda)? Is it a coincidence that the leading cheerleader for Bombing Iran (the Saudi’s regional rival) is .. FoxNews (7 percent owned by a Saudi prince)? Consider as well the firing of Octavia Nasr by CNN for lamenting the death of a Shi’ite cleric on her Twitter. Who is it that hates the Shia as much as they hate Christians and Jews? the Saudis, that’s who! Continuing to speak of Israel as if that tiny nation far away were some kind of den of intrigue serves but one purpose: to mask the very real evil that is Saudi Arabia, the chief sponsor of terrorism in the mideast (the endless campaign against the Iraqi Shia by Saudi suicide bombers, etc).
Callie.
Your Blog is quite interesting. Nice revisionism history.
Are you for real? Or do you assume most people outside your cocoon do not have basic grasp of XX century history and you are trying to basically rewrite history as it suits you.
“Morality is not an outdated concept”, quite a problematic statement when you play the role of the victim.
But, You are not a dishonest individual, Callie. Calling you dishonest is like saying Hannibal Lecter had an eating disorder. …..
By the way, I have a scoop for you, “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’”, No one takes this crap seriously
“By the way, I have a scoop for you, “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’”, No one takes this crap seriously”
Except of Arabs, fringe left/right wing-nuts and other people in the Third world who know nothing about Jews and Israel. Other than that you are right.
for not of
Callie,
You gave up engaging in substantive discussion and debate days ago — you haven’t answered any of the points in my last posts. If you continue directing vague and insulting comments towards me with no content, I will respond with more evidence demonstrating the reality of the Israel lobby.
Notice this passage from a Dana Milbank article in the Washington Post from July 7, 2010 — he is not referring to the Loch Ness monster, the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy. Milbank (and the Washington Post) are asserting that a unified Israel lobby forced Obama to back off from his confrontation with the Israeli government over settlements:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/06/AR2010070604005.html
BEGIN QUOTE
A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender.
Four months ago, the Obama administration made a politically perilous decision to condemn Israel over a controversial new settlement. THE ISRAEL LOBBY reared up, Netanyahu denounced the administration’s actions, Republican leaders sided with Netanyahu, and Democrats ran for cover.
So on Tuesday, Obama, routed and humiliated by his Israeli counterpart, invited Netanyahu back to the White House for what might be called the Oil of Olay Summit: It was all about saving face.
END QUOTE
Perhaps you could write a note the Washington Post complaining about their use of the term “the Israel lobby” which makes repeated references to the Loch Ness monster. I am sure they will be impressed. Good luck.
LazerBeam,
Why are you accusing Americanists of being antisemites? What is antisemitic about Americans revering the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and focusing like a laser beam on the American interest in the making of American foreign policy all around the world?
My main point stands: leading American and European critics of Israel, like Sullivan, Walt, Weiss, Greenwald and Lobe, are not the least bit influenced by Wahhabism. What drives them is a strong commitment to basic American and Western Enlightenment values, and a concern for the American interest on the international stage.
A mention in the paper like that doesn’t make it so Sean. Sorry.
And once again, if the so called Israel Lobby is all powerful why is Shalit not being seen by the Red Cross? Why? You make no sense.
I am not ‘vaguely’ insulting you, I am telling you that you are an obsessed person who needs help.
also elder of ziyon is not my blog its a friends, just thought you all might like to take a look at it.
Callie,
1. Please explain why you disagree with Dana Milbank’s statement: “Four months ago, the Obama administration made a politically perilous decision to condemn Israel over a controversial new settlement. THE ISRAEL LOBBY reared up, Netanyahu denounced the administration’s actions, Republican leaders sided with Netanyahu, and Democrats ran for cover.”
You must at least admit that the use of the term “the Israel lobby” is common in mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And why did Milbank use the expression “politically perilous decision” in the above passage?
2. You keep mentioning Gilad Shalit, like that is supposed to be a big deal of some kind. Americans are dying and suffering grievous injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. There are no conceivable circumstances under which they would *ever* become focused on the Shalit story. The Israel lobby hasn’t tried to push that story among Americans, and never would.
3. The Israel lobby continues to be the only major lobby in American politics that is agitating for a war against Iran that would probably be catastrophic for Americans. It’s a very big story. Americans are going to discuss it, regardless of offenses to your sensibilities.
Callie,
Tips on effective debating:
1. Focus on high quality and carefully documented sources and facts.
2. Don’t engage in personal attacks.
The more you emphasize 1. and de-emphasize 2., the more effective you will be in making whatever points you want to make. I trust you will instill these values of effective communication and writing in the the minds of whatever students you teach. Several memorable professors of mine took care to drill these basic principles into the heads of their charges.
Most of your posts so far would receive failing grades at any first-class graduate school, without exception. They do not even rise to the level of an undergraduate effort.
Sean very funny indeed! You are on a comments board day and night scolding perfect strangers and making nonsensical lists.
Its been enlightening and certainly proves the point of the original author.
Pablo I agree that the Saudi lobby is quite powerful. I know in Afghanistand from speaking with my students they are building ’school’s’ or madrasses all over Afghanistan and Pakistan and now are making serious inroads in East Africa in places like Uganda and Tanzania. Very its discussed very little. I had never thought of that before, you made an excellent point that Fox news does indeed seem focused on that from what I hear. Good point.
Not surprisingly Lee Smith’s argument falls apart before it gets started. The comments of a blog, Smith says,
are the responsibility of the pundits, the audience and the major media companies hosting the blog. Just reading anti-Israeli blogs and their comments makes one complicit in an attempt to destroy Jews and Israel.
The trouble is that the comments to anti-Israeli posts are like all other comments on the web. They are anonymous .
And being anonymous, they can not be said to represent real views. To coin a term, they could be “comment provocateurs.” Anti-Israeli screeds written by pro-Israeli writers so that Lee Smith can write even more pro-Jewish hatred.l
Far fetched? Are we not now living in the age of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe? There’s no doubt there’s going to more to come.where we’re were headed. Keep you’re airplane sickness bag handy.
Not surprisingly Lee Smith’s argument falls apart before it gets started. The comments of a blog, Smith says,
are the responsibility of the pundits, the audience and the major media companies hosting the blog. Just reading anti-Israeli blogs and their comments makes one complicit in an attempt to destroy Jews and Israel.
The trouble is that the comments to anti-Israeli posts are like all other comments on the web. They are anonymous .
And being anonymous, they can not be said to represent real views. To coin a term, they could be “comment provocateurs.” Anti-Israeli screeds written by pro-Israeli writers so that Lee Smith can write even more pro-Jewish hatred.
Far fetched? Are we not now living in the age of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe? There’s no doubt there’s going to more to come. Keep you’re airplane sickness bag handy.
If the ability to get the Obama Administration to back down is a measure of its influence, then the Israel Lobby has the same influence as Andrew Breitbart.
Are ultra-conservatives who advocated for Israel and against the Obama Administration on the settlement expansion issue, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Liz Cheney, also dupes of the Zionist Lobby? If that is so on this issue, how much of the fog they are spewing on other issues is being programmed by the Jews to confuse otherwise clear-thinking Christians? Who can you trust? Where does classic Western anti-Semitism leave off and Wahhabi-influenced Eastern anti-Semitism begin? Can’t tell your friends from your enemies in the anti-Semitic blogosphere? Precisely!
One wonders if the Americanists of which we speak are truly committed to protecting and defending the U.S. Constitution as a beacon of Western Enlightenment. Or is that code for committed to defending Christian America from all enemies, foreign and domestic, by purging the U.S. of those not fully inculcated in the philosophy and embracing the values of the Western Enlightenment, e.g., those who have rejected Christ and are under the influence of the Torah, Talmud, or the works of Baruch Spinoza?
Not all Americanists are anti-Semites, but all anti-Semites empathize with, if not actively support, the Americanist agenda as it regards the alleged threat posed by the Zionist Lobby. Many commenters seem to enjoy blurring the distinction between unbiased and biased commentary. Sadly, all they are doing is advancing the Wahhabi Lobby agenda by driving a wedge between the Jewish Left and the Christian Right on the one issue on which there is now general agreement– Israel’s right and need to exist.
Follow the Big Oil money trail, and connect the dots. Until you can do that, trust the motives and agenda of no one in the anti-Semitic blogosphere. Using enlightened Western logic, the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
The Israelis are, like the lunatic cult of Scientology they emulate, their own worst enemies. Now they are deporting 400 children born in israel because, as their leader declares, these children of foreign workers threaten the Jewish state’s ‘racial purity.’
People loathe Israel because Israel, to any right thinking human being, has made itself utterly loathsome.
Their tastelessness and stupidity, their clumsy lies, their tiresome howls, of “anti-Semitism” will not change that fact.
Regarding Israel’s decision to deport 400 children of foreign workers with legal work visas but who were not admitted as permanent residents, it has nothing to do with ‘racial purity’ and everything to do with regulating legal immigration. The author of the anti-Semitic screed omits the other relevant fact that 800 children will be allowed to stay if they meet certain criteria. Here’s the rest of the story:
“According to the new criteria, children will be allowed to remain in Israel if their parents entered the country legally, they were born in Israel or arrived in the country before the age of 13 and have lived in Israel for five years continuously, they learned in the Israeli school system in the most recent academic year and are registered to continue their studies in the 2010-2011 year, and they speak Hebrew.”
In other words, if their parents were in Israel legally, even if they were not admitted for permanent residency, and their children, even those not born in Israel, have been integrated into Israeli society, they can stay. If not, not.
Now does the U.S. treat the children of temporary workers born outside the U.S. any better? No. Worse. They are all subject to deportation, and many of them are deported. However, the story is under-reported here, because it makes the U.S. look bad. So, as usual, the anti-Semites are applying a double-standard to Israel. No surpise.
LazerBeam,
By “Americanism,” I am referring not to the crude jingoism of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, John Hagee or Glenn Beck, but to the thoughtful defense of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights by voices like Michael Bloomberg (see his speech on the Park51 controversy) and Glenn Greenwald.
Israel’s problem is that it has formed a close alliance with un-American and anti-American players in American politics — neo-Confederates and white nationalists essentially who have never gotten over losing the Civil War and the institution of slavery. Christian Zionism is an Old Testament cult which is associated mostly with embittered Southern white Christian males who hate our freedoms. In the 19th century, this cultural bloc attempted to destroy the United States of America.
Ethnic nationalism is out of step with the culture and values of all modern Western democracies. Unfortunately, Israel is a stridently ethnic nationalist state. It is increasingly turning to the most reactionary and anti-Enlightenment forces in American and European politics to shore up its dwindling international support.
Israel (and Likud in particular) has done an excellent job of alienating Americans and Europeans from its cause without the need for sinister machinations from the Wahhabi lobby to explain its political decline.
LaserBeam,
BEGIN QUOTE
Israel will expel 400 native-born children of non-Jewish foreign workers to help safeguard the country’s JEWISH IDENTITY….
”On the one hand, this problem is a humanitarian problem, we all feel and understand the hearts of children,” Mr Netanyahu said. ”But on the other hand, there are Zionist considerations and ensuring the JEWISH CHARACTER of the state of Israel.”
END QUOTE
How are Netanyahu’s views any different from those of KKK members who want to ensure the WHITE CHARACTER of the United States or Nazis who want to safeguard the GERMAN IDENTITY of Germany?
Israel is a stridently ethnic nationalist state that is radically out of step with modern Western democracies. It is circling the same drain as the Confederacy and apartheid white South Africa.
Sean McBride
I would love to hear your thoughts on Japanese immigration policy. I’m sure you are just a vicious toward them as are Israel. Right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zyjLyBp64
David,
How is it “vicious” to defend fundamental principles of modern Western democracies and Americanism?
Americanism:
1. checks and balances
2. due process
3. entrepreneurialism
4. ethnic tolerance and diversity
5. free enterprise
6. freedom of assembly
7. freedom of religion
8. freedom of speech
9. government accountability
10. government transparancy
11. individualism
12. meritocracy
13. reason
14. religious tolerance and diversity
15. universalism
And didn’t you take great pride in Michael Bloomberg’s defense of Americanism in his recent speech on the mosque controversy?
Japan’s policies are not presently embroiling Americans in self-destructive trillion dollar wars — I haven’t paid any attention to Japan’s immigration policies. I will try to inform myself about them.
(I hope callie enjoys the list.)