Tomorrow, J Street will be celebrating its merger with Brit Tzedek and the launch of its local grassroots initiative with meetings all over the U.S. The main event will be held at Penn Hillel and will be videocast all over the country to the other gatherings. It will feature J Street director, Jeremy Ben Ami. For the loony Israel lobby right, it’s too much to bear. Not only is J Street going from strength to strength, a university Hillel is hosting the traitors.
That mobilized the forces of ZOA and Z Street (what dya think the “Z” stands for?) into a full bore stalking expedition. Not to be outdone, they’re scheduling not one, but TWO counter meetings at Penn Hillel which are deliberately timed to compete (that’s called stalking). It’s going to be something like biur chometz in which they’ll go through the building with a fine-tooth comb ridding it of any bit of J Street defilement. Maybe they’ll even host an exorcism if they feel the building has been mortally compromised.
Penn Hillel has been under such assault that it felt compelled to release a statement explaining its decision to offer a rental space to J Street.
You can see the graphic for the Z Street event displayed here, which will feature former Aipac hack, Mitchell Bard, author of the Jewish Virtual Pro-Israel Library. Bard also directs the ACE program which funds pro-Israel academic positions on willing campuses thanks to the help of the Schusterman Foundation, which also pays Mitch a cool 125G’s for his trouble.
The ZOA has brought one of its staff hit men to conduct a full bore witch hunt entitled, Is J Street Bad for Israel? The question mark seems superfluous. This event is co-sponsored by Hillel while the J Street event is not. But the mere idea of J Street inside a Jewish building seems to have the loony right in fits of apoplexy.
Many Jewish peace activists chuckle at the antics of lunatics like Mort Klein who has been shrying about left wing Jewish perfidy for decades. But the truth is that Klein and ZOA have the support of the cream of the Jewish fat-cat funding world. If you review this press release you’ll see that no less than Ronald Lauder, Mort Zuckerman and James Tisch will headline this year’s fundraising dinner. Itamar Marcus, former Israeli intelligence officer and current director of the Palestinian media smear outfit, Palestine Media Watch, will also be honored with an award actually named after Ben Hecht (!) for his hatchet work.
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Itamar Marcus, now there’s a blast from the past! It was good old Itamar who created a website devoted to some of the most dishonest bull**** known to man about the allegedly horribly anti-Semitic Palestinian textbooks. A group of us regularly shredded him on it. Don’t remember the name of the site now, and don’t know whether it is still up – probably is – but it was pretty brazen to say the least.
You mean the CMIP? They’re still there, though renamed: http://www.impact-se.org
Content is still the same old, same old.
Yes, that’s it. The incredibly weirdly and deceptively named Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace. Sounds impressive, but what does it even mean? It was an amazing collection of unattributed quotes and gross mistranslations from mostly unnamed alleged Palestinian textbooks. Made MEMRI look fair, balanced, and honest.
It must be the one I mentioned, Palestine Media Watch I think it’s called. Awful stuff. Did you know that he & Hillary Clinton did a joint press conference in Congress a few yrs ago on that very subject. I wrote about it too here.
I recall Hillary doing something in which she spouted some completely uninformed, richly hasbaristic nonsense about hate being taught in the Palestinian schools or something like that. Actually, I completely lost what little interest I had in her when she bowed to pressure from Jewish groups and made a PR event out of returning Muslim contributions to her senatorial campaign, publicly spitting in the face of supporters simply because they happened to be the wrong religion. I wouldn’t vote for her for anything ever. I’d stay home first.
I lived and worked in Philadelphia, Mort Klein’s home turf for more than 20 years. One of the most disturbing aspects is that he works together with the mainstream – as you point you the right wing event is co-sponsored by Hilel – while the “liberals” in the mainstream are prepared to let the progressive folk be marginalized. Here in Jerusalem as everyone is so shocked by the vicious attack on the New Israel Fund, it is pretty depressing to hear that the right wing in the States has so much money and support in the mainstream Jewish community.
New Israel Fund and J Street are hardly radical organizations.
J-Street, AIPAC, ZOA, Z-Street. Call them what you will, but in the end they are all for segregation. J-Street just feels guiltier about it.
Alan, I have to agree with you. For the most part J-Street exemplifies the nice, liberal American Zionist mindset. They are fully indoctrinated in the Zionist ideology, and yet unlike right wingers, capable of feeling guilt, and desperate to make themselves feel better about their inability to relinquish the ideology that has caused so much tragedy and trouble for so many. They are the political activist counterparts of the nice, humanitarian Zionists who salve their consciences by patronizingly “dialoging with Arabs”, which really means trying to educate Arabs to simultaneously understand Jewish superiority and angst with the goal of getting them to see eye-to-eye with them on the innate goodness of Zionism and Israel.
I understand where those feelings come from and I have my own set of disagreements with J Street. But I think you’re being unduly harsh. Not because I don’t think criticism of J St. is waranted (I’ve levelled my share of criticism myself). It’s just that working fr. within the Jewish community, one has a clearer sense of what is possible and what will label you as beyond the Pale. I think Jews who are progressive on the IP issue are always walking a tightrope. Yes, one can locate oneself outside the Jewish community & have a position that is ideologically pure and have no impact on that community. Or one can identity with the community while maintaining one’s differences with it. That’s very hard to do.
The ZOA’s rhetorical question, “is J Street bad for Israel?” may even deserved to be asked – as long as the premise is that not everyone is talking about the same “Israel”. J Street is (hopefully) bad for the ZOA’s Israel and the Israel as it really exists right now, and why shouldn’t it be? What is bad for Israel is good for Israel, that’s simply the nature of dialectics.