The other day Saif Ammous analogized the Zionist project to a British Christian coming to the U.S. and solving the country's problems by making it Christian. Ralph Seliger then criticized the analogy. Now Ammous is responding:Ralph Seliger is unfortunately engaging in an entirely predictable and typical Zionist debate tactic: "pretend you're not smart enough to understand the question, it'll go away.' I will nonetheless indulge him and elaborate slowly for him my argument, so that ...

Another juicy quote from that Telegraph piece about Sarah Palin's education that I mentioned yesterday: A former Republican White House official, who now works at the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of Washington neoconservatism, admitted: "She's bright and she's a blank page. She's going places and it's worth going there with her."Asked if he sees her as a "project", the former official said: "Your word, not mine, but I wouldn't disagree with the sentiment."How come ...

More than two years ago the New York Review of Books published a piece by Michael Massing that began: "Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations?' in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force as 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,' [published in the London Review of Books in March 2006], by professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard ...

"Obsession,' the fear-mongering movie produced by a Canadian-Israeli that suggests that Islam is trying to defeat the west and it's 1938 all over again, costs $14.95 from its website. But it is being distributed free in copies of the New York Times, as an insert paid for by the Clarion Fund, ye olde shadowy front. Says the Charlotte News and Observer, which has also distributed the film: The DVD has already been inserted into copies ...

Sarah Palin gave a scary answer to Charlie Gibson on Israel, saying she supported Israel's prerogative to attack Iran, and under his questioning said in a rote way, three times, that the U.S. has no right to "second guess" Israel's decision. Chris Matthews seemed angry about this tonight on Hardball, questioning whether it was in the national interest. Then asked whether AIPAC had drafted her answer. Pat Buchanan pointed out that the answer goes against ...

Two nights ago I went to a friend's 50th birthday on Long Island and stayed at the house of my wife's dear friend, Virginia Reath. In the morning I grazed her book collection, found a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Reality Sandwiches given to Virginia by a friend on her 17th birthday back in the 70s. Virginia's from an old Protestant family. I think she's related to Pocahontas and the Mayflower. Yet she's a freethinker in ...

Strict application of the Israel lobby theory would not have predicted Sarah Palin. Romney, Lieberman, anybody but. Palin's an unknown quantity and she likes to buck lobbyists. Culturally she's not tight with Jews; I wonder how many she's even met. I don't think Lieberman's well-heeled friends will be fond of her. So why not throw out the theory? For a few reasons. McCain is long since answered for. He went to Sderot and Jerusalem with ...

Jerusalem Post has a piece on Israel's coming demographic crisis: not enough Jews want to move to Israel. The Knesset has a committee on aliyah, or Jewish immigration, and one of the members seeks a "mental revolution" in aliyah. [S]ignificantly increasing aliya - or at least creating a deeper connection between Israel and the Diaspora - will require a new effort. "The Zionists said Israel is the only place in the world to which Jews ...

Andrew Bacevich had a good piece in the most forward-thinking op-ed page in the country, the LA Times, that talked openly about the Isr**l l*bby and which urged neocons to repent of their Iraq invasion error: McCain's national security team features a strong neoconservative presence, including pundits such as Max Boot and Robert Kagan, along with hawkish Washington insiders such as Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. All figured prominently among advocates of invading Iraq; none ...

McCain's surrogates, including Georgia boy Randy Scheunemann, are attacking Obama adviser Dan Kurtzer for visiting Syria to try and advance the Israel-Syria talks re the Golan. It's amazing that the neocon agenda still gets such a pass in American politics. A shame that someone as intelligent and sensible as Samantha Power is railroaded. And a tragedy that Rob Malley, who emerges from Aaron David Miller's book The Much Too Promised Land as seasoned and fair, ...

In the comments to my recent post on Antisemites being on my side of these issues, Richard Witty said that I had failed to demonstrate journalistic "due diligence" and had indulged in a "prejudicial journalistic exercise" in reporting from Hebron after a tour there with Breaking the Silence and not getting the other side of the story. Richard--what's the other side of the story? I invite you to defend the behavior of the landgrabbing racist ...

I just saw George Bush on the Olympics deploring the violence in Georgia and Russia, saying that he told Putin things must return to the "status quo ante" of August 6. Though he had trouble with "status quo ante." The Israelis are said to be on the Georgians' side... Debkafile, a site with Israeli intelligence sources, reports that Israeli advisers are aiding the Georgians to hold on to the breakaway provinces. 1000 advisers, says this ...

I just saw the "60 Minutes" piece on the Israeli Air Force and I'm stunned. The piece had the feel of pure propaganda. It was all about the mighty air force, with acrobatics, macho pilots, cool missiles and cockpit footage of the bombing of the Osirak reactor back in '81. Bob Simon, the correspondent, and his interviewees, repeated standard Israeli self-justification: Israel is a tiny country in a tough neighborhood, Israel's first losing war will ...

Jon Powers is an Iraq war veteran running for Congress in Buffalo as a Democrat. On his campaign website, the former army captain damns the administration's Middle East strategy: It is a choice between politicians who send other people’s sons and daughters to war without demanding accountability from government and someone who lived the consequences of Washington’s bad judgment as a soldier in Iraq. It is a choice between a Washington culture that puts the ...

Only in Haaretz. By Zeev Sternhell: The real reason for the settlements...was occupying the land... [R]ight and left were partners to the act. The nationalist-messianist fervor and the desire to end the War of Independence merged into the momentum for occupation: The entire right and most of the left - We have returned to the land of the Judges and the kings of the Davidian dynasty, said defense minister Moshe Dayan emotionally in the summer ...

I was making lunch and only caught about ten minutes of Bill Kristol's speech at the Young America's Foundation yesterday. But this is a blog, and ten minutes is enough for a post. I was surprised by how backward-looking and rueful Kristol seemed about the whole conservative enterprise. No one could have anticipated our victories, he said. We didn't really know which way history was going, we just committed and said what was right. Whittaker ...

One of my gurus is Nancy Horn, a therapist who lives in Central Pennsylvania and understands Israel/Palestine as well as anyone. She didn't like what I said today about Bruce Ivins (where I basically convicted him ex posthumo of the anthrax crimes). I'm going to provide our dialogue below. Nancy gets the last word. One comment ahead of time. The left wing blogosphere seems to have seized on this case as an American David Kelly--the ...

The old Israel lobby continues to delaminate. Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg attacked Eric Cantor, the possible veep choice of McCain, for distorting a statement that Obama made. The attack is of a piece with Goldberg's important article attacking the Israel lobby in May, in which Goldberg, echoing Olmert, said that it was now or never for the two-state solution, and then came out against the Sheldon Adelsons of the world, the one-Jerusalem and Eretz Israel crowd--Eric ...

David Zucker is a movie producer who once demonstrated against the Vietnam War. Lately he's gone way right--the predictable way stations were 9/11, the Republican Jewish Committee, and Ahmadinejad--and making a movie, American Carol, that seeks to make fun of the left. The only problem is that as this tortuously long Weekly Standard cover article by Cheney amanuensis Stephen Hayes makes clear, the movie isn't that funny. James Baker recast as Neville Chamberlain. And a ...

I'm still reelin and rockin from Joe Klein's statement/confession that Jewish neoconservatives made the Iraq war happen. Of course the key word in it is Jewish. That's what's got the Foxmans and Commentary bloggers so upset. Because the essential understanding Klein offers is that the neoconservative ideas for Iraq have a Jewish origin, and are caught up with the Zionist religion that has overtaken the American Jewish mind in the last 60 years (including the ...