Bush Appoints Cheryl Halpern to UN Post

I sometimes find JTA the source of unintentional humor, sometimes of a slightly dark and clammy variety.  A perfect example is this item noting that George Bush has appointed one of his most loyal Jewish neocon supporters to a senior UN post.  Cheryl Halpern, while she was at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting searched for anti-Semites under every NPR/PBS bed.  Along with the hoch pro-Israel Rep. Brad Sherman, she sought to uproot anti-Israel bias wherever she found it.  And she found it everywhere, infecting the news like a cancer.  Further, she never met a UN program she couldn’t label anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.  It’s people like Cheryl who were responsible–though perhaps indirectly in her case since Ken Tomlinson was more directly the culprit here–for Bill Moyers’ leaving PBS a few years back.

Because of her squelching of speech, a PBS station like KQED actually refused to accept sponsorships from as politely liberal an organization as the New Israel Fund.

I can’t tell if this is merely a reward from Bush to a loyal Jewish pro-Israel toady or a poke in the eye to the incoming Administration.  All I can say is thank God and “goodbye to all that.”  A new day is dawning.

I was a little alarmed by this though:

Halpern, who formerly chaired the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, would serve in the position through September, when the U.N. General Assembly’s 63rd session ends.

Can you imagine how the incoming UN ambassador Susan Rice will feel having this Islamophobic harpy on her staff?  I feel like the guy fighting against Count Dracula in those old Hollywood movies–you can drive a stake through the heart of these old neocons, but they still refuse to die (politically, that is).

If there’s the faintest chance this woman is in her post after January 20th I’ll make it my personal crusade to hound her out of office if that’s at all possible.  I’d like her letter of resignation tomorrow.  But I’ll settle for January 20th.

Thanks for the tip from RM.