It’s not just Israel that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. American Jewish neocons have been proliferating so many hysterically-Islamophobic campaign outfits in the run-up to the midterm elections, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. There is of course the granddaddy/zaideh of smearmesiters, the Republican Jewish Coalition. In the 2008 election, the RJC and Aish HaTorah mated (in spirit if not in body) and produced the Clarion Fund, which flacked for John McCain. Lately it is touting its new hate-Iran film, the third in an anti-Muslim trilogy. We can expect it to continue the same type of dirty tricks it exploited in the last election, where it spent upwards of $20-million distributing another of its Muslim-hate films to 28-million voters in swing states.
Eli Clifton and I have written about some other anti-Muslim campaign front groups which have proliferated like weeds after a Negev spring flood: Keep Israel Safe was founded by Gary Bauer and Tom Rose, who deserves credit as the Jerusalem Post editor who first moved it to the hard-right political stance it adopted after decades of centrist mediocrity; and Stop Iran Now, an ideologically wholly-owned subsidiary of Citizens United (yes THAT Citizen’s United, whom the Supreme Court offered a green light to spend countless millions smearing Democratic candidates). The chief champion of all these groups is William Kristol and his Weekly Standard, election central for the Likudist neocon movement.
Now we have yet another mushroom sprouting after a spring rain: the Emergency Committee for Israel. The parentage of this cuddly little package is also interesting. Eli Clifton notes that the group was first promoted during a Campbell Brown CNN interview with Noah Pollak, the group’s executive director. Brown is married to Dan Senor, a senior Bush apparatchik and likely major player in 2012 Republican election campaigns.
Pollak is a former assistant editor of the Shalem Center’s publication, Azure. The Center is heavily funded by Las Vegas gambling tycoon, Shelly Adelson, Bibi Netanyahu’s moneyman and funder of the new Israeli daily, Yisrael HaYom (also known unflatteringly as Bibi-ton). Pollak also contributes regularly to Commentary Magazine, the true zaideh of the Jewish neocon movement.
The Committee’s domain, emergencycommitteeforisrael.com, is registered to Margaret Hoover, granddaughter of Depression-era Pres. Herbert Hoover, and a former high-level Bush operative. One hopes she will bring better luck to this enterprise than her grandfather brought to the U.S. economy in 1929 & thereafter. As a consultant for the Republican Israel lobby, she could try a Hoover-era slogan rebutting charges of Israeli starvation of Gaza: “a chicken in every pot.” Maybe she’ll recommend resolving the Palestinian refugee crisis by creating a series of Hoovervilles. No wait, that’s how most Palestinians currently live. She also participated in Rudy Giuliani’s failed presidential campaign, in which Norm Podhoretz was also an advisor who warned Iran was intent on fomenting a world war or something to that effect. The new group’s board includes…you guessed it…Gary Bauer, William Kristol and Rachel Abrams-Dechter-Podhoretz.
If I were Pollak, I’d keep in mind what happens to mushrooms after the rains dry up: they wither and die just as these pro-Israel hate groups will do after November, and after their donors will have thrown good money after bad in funding these useless vanity campaigns which have absolutely no effect on the Jewish vote, which remains solidly Democratic. As a test, we’ll watch the Joe Sestak PA. senate race for which the Committee has produced the hysterical campaign ad featured above.
Ben Smith’s reporting on this story for Politico features this incredible quotation from Kristol in which he actually claims that Aipac’s politics are too liberal (a view shared by the way with Shelly Adelson, if you’ve read his devestating New Yorker profile):
“Then there’s AIPAC, which is a wonderful organization, but one that’s very committed to working with the administration, so they pull some punches publicly.”
Kristol also has the chutzpah to claim he’s modeling his effort as a conservative mirror to J Street. There is of course one major difference between the two: J Street has grassroots support, with tens of thousands of donors and over 100,000 who’ve signed up for its alerts. The Committee has a bunch of cigar-chomping rich Jewish guys pursuing their political vanity project.
Another curious factoid about Pollak: he’s a moderator of a Porsche car forum (and a member for at least ten years). That must be where all the lucre Pollak’s earning from Shelly Adelson and his other Jewish neocon fat cat donors is going: into his Porsche collection. He should keep this concealed from all of his Burlington, VT. neighbors. That, of course is Bernie Saunders country. I don’t imagine there are too many Porsches tooling around Burlington’s streets especially not in those harsh New England winters. I guess it won’t disturb too many of his fellow Jewish neocons that he drives a German car since so many of them are driving Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and the like.
There are additional anti-Iran front groups created by the Jewish community, which seem designed to do Israel’s bidding rather than the Republican Party’s. Among them is Stand for Freedom in Iran, purportedly a grassroots community coalition which was in truth incorporated by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. Remember too the 2008 campaign fiasco when the President’s Conference booked Sarah Palin to keynote a UN anti-Iran rally when Ahmadinejad was scheduled to address the world body. That didn’t go over too well with the Obama campaign and most New York Jews, who detested Palin.
Don’t let the facts distract you for one sec.
here is a glimpse of what an educated Muslim women thinks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5HT0yU6L8Q
Just FYI, it’s in the US not the Saudi Kingdom.
I don’t allow anti-Muslim propaganda on this site. If you want to post that anywhere I’m sure it would be a lot more effective posting it on Fresh, where all those taking pot shots at me could view it & have their prejudices reinforced.
Comment Rules
1. Insults, baiting, vulgarity, harassment or abuse directed toward the blog owner or other commenters are not tolerated.
1M. Insults, baiting, vulgarity, harassment or abuse by the moderator of this blog directed toward other commenters are tolerated, allowed and most welcome.
Mr. Silverstien, I was following your lead, you call people names, and you act extremely rude towards those who don’t share your thoughts. And when you can’t come with a good argument you simply end the discussion by eliminating the reply button.
In Hebrew we say on such “עבד כי ימלוך”
As for your reply:
There are two types of people in the world, there are those who do, and there are those who write about doing. Gen. Curtis LeMay was one of those who was given a task, and he completed the task given to him with a great success. Kurt Vonnegut was assigned a much simpler task, and when you don’t share the load of responsibility you have a lot of free time on your hands for higher philosophy. If it was up to your kind, Europe would still be under German occupation to date.
As I stated you don’t know much about Jewish history. on my dad side I am 17 generation Israeli. My relatives were murdered in Hebron in 1926. May you wish to tell me what Ben-Gurion has to do with events that took place 22 years earlier?
And didn’t you just call me a moron? Isn’t it a rude term referring to one’s mental stage? I guess this is as close to playing GOD as you will get. So I’ll ignore this violation of your own rules.
Anyn
The question made you very uncomfortable, why? Why would knowing where someone is from would make you feel very uncomfortable? I’ll be honest and would admit that the reason for asking that question was the Arab sound of her name. Being an Arab everything that had to do with Israeli security would make her feel very uncomfortable, and that was my point. I don’t really care where she is from.
Hasbara
I don’t work for any Israeli office. I am not familiar with argument #1 or argument #2, if you wish I would be very happy if you would share those arguments with me.
Conclusion
This reply is posted under a different thread in violation of your kingdom rules, I doubt you would have the integrity to leave it there, and I suspect that the second you will see the post it will be deleted.
Don’t bother blocking me; I will never again write anything in your blog, you simply don’t worth my time. At best you are a hypocrite, and it shows by the way you moderate your own blog.
As I already stated “עבד כי ימלוך”
It doesn’t bother me a whit that you dislike or disagree w. my comment rules. I didn’t insult you buddy. Your insults came first & I replied in kind. You weren’t “following my lead” you were leading. So let’s get that straight, shall we.
Curis LeMay murdered 25,000 Germans on a single night. Yes, he committed a war crime “with great success.”
It is you who are simple if you think writing a masterpiece or witnessing evil or speaking truth to power are “simple tasks.”
YOU claimed war was forced on Israel. I denied it. That’s what Ben Gurion has to do with it. You might want to keep track of your own arguments a little better.
I wasn’t sure why I was uncomfortable with yr request since I wasn’t sure what motivated it. But I was pretty sure it was an impure request & lo & behold you confirm my worst suspicions. YOu want to try to pigeonhold a reader as Arab so you can dismiss her contribution as that of “an Arab.” And knowing where she’s fr. will allow you to do that.
What a petulant child! You deliberately place yr comment in the wrong thread auf tzu-lochos (“to spite”). Very nice. I think you’re one of the most infantile commenters who’s ever commented here.
People like you don’t usually honor such commitments but it won’t bother me in the least if you do.
I know you’d need an average age difference between generations of under 3.7 years for this claim to be true, as the state of Israel is only 62 years old. Based on those facts, I’m left to conclude you are a liar.
He means his family’s residency in Israel goes back that many generations though of course before 1948 his family would’ve been Palestinian Jews (though don’t tell HIM that, it might disturb him too much).
Mr. SIlverstien, you reply to other users with extreme rudeness.
Your replies are of “argumentum ad hominem” nature. Instead of dealing with claims you deal with people qualities and abilities, you do so throughout your blog (if you wish let me know and I’ll provide you with quotes) To that i was referring by stating i was following you lead. So let’s get that straight shall we?
Don’t twist my words, i never said that writing was a simple task; i simply compered the role Curtis LeMay and Kurt Vonnegut played with the armed forces in WWII. If you need me help with that comparison please let me know, and I will run a brief comparison for you. In general terms Curtis LeMay was a major in 1942 part of the eight air-force. Curtis is most known for establishing the box formation tactics. In August 1944 he was transferred to the Far East Theater and really had nothing to do with the attack on Dresden that took place in February 1945. So I don’t really understand your comment that he killed 25,000 Germans in one night. Would you care to elaborate?
Kurt Vonnegut was a private with the 160 Infantry division. The role he played as a soldier was way simpler to that I was referring. Those who don’t share the load have all the time in the world to criticize others.
May I suggest that prior to taking a shot at the history of the state of Israel; you’ll start by studying your own?
Ben-gurion
I stated that Jews were always murdered in that part of the world, for you the history starts at 1948, for me, I have traced roots all the way back to 1545, all of which never left the territory know known as the state of Israel. Again you are super imposing your idea and thought on other’s words twisting them and getting them out of context. Your friend kalb did even better and called me a liar because he couldn’t comprehend what I was getting to and was too proud to ask (assumptions dear kalb is the mother of all fu..ups)
Anyn,
My question was right on, when someone states “Personally, I find the fact that nuclear heads are stored 45 min. drive from my house much more threatening than what the security spooks come up with.”, I have every reason to ask where that place is? You don’t want to answer you don’t have to.
By the way, I don’t think you will find any missiles armed with nuclear warheads anywhere in the state of Israel, it is your and other speculation that in “kanaf 2” there are such missiles.
My English – I still stand by my statement that I have no issues with utilizing the English language. Of course I never claimed that my English is as eloquent as yours. Being a foreign language to me, I occasionally misspell words or even utilize the wrong grammar. Let me tell you a secret I do so in Hebrew as well. Yet out of respect I come to your house and at least I am making an effort to speak the language, never once I saw you even tried writing in Hebrew @ Fresh, so until you do, don’t talk so loud.
As for my commitment, I have every intention of honoring it, but I had to set the record straight.
I said you wouldn’t be able to honor yr claim to leave the blog & you didn’t. I really don’t care whether you leave or stay. But I knew you just couldn’t resist.
LeMay commanded the carpetbombing campaign against Japan & “only” murdered 80,000 Japanese in a single night. I stand corrected. The Dresden bombing was the responsibility of another U.S. Air Force officer-butcher. My reference to Kurt Vonnegut had nothing to do w. what role he played when he served or what rank he had. It entirely referred to the story he wrote about his experience. He stood witness to the butchery.
He couldn’t comprehend what you were getting at because you yourself misconstrued yr meaning.
Most of Israel lies within 45 mins. of the Sdot Micha base. What would her place of residence tell you? And now that you know she’s an Israeli Jew has that knocked you back on yr ass that a fellow Israeli Jew might feel this way about Israeli nukes?
That’s a nice little fairy tale. Where do you think Israeli stores them? In Turkey? Or are they all on those German submarines patrolling just outside Iranian waters?
Your English is rough. Passable, but rough. Certainly not good enough to attempt to besmirch my mastery of Hebrew. You are perfectly welcome to write yr comments in Hebrew if that is more comfortable to you.
You didn’t say my Hebrew WRITING was poor. You said my comprehension of Hebrew was faulty and it ISN’T. So don’t try to go there.
By the way – I’m a nice Jewish girl from Israel. Anyn is a meaningless nick.
Sorry to disappoint.
Mr. Silverstien
Taking you seriously is an extremely hard thing to do.
In the post I am replying to you claim that Curtis LeMay killed 25K Germans on one night. Yet below you claim he killed 80,000 Japanese in one day, both claims on the same web page.
I can go on and on, but it is really pointless. You make your own facts as you go along
Having the ability to write is part of language comprehension; if I would have to guess I would assume you are using Google translate quite a bit.
All the best.
Don’t be a fool. And you again need to brush up your English comprehension. I FIRST said in my post he commanded the Allied bombing at Dresden. A commenter corrected me & noted he commanded the Allied bombing of Japan & killed 80,000 Japanese in a single bombing. Did you miss all that?
Au contraire my friend. LeMay refined the techniques & created a massive killing machine which culminated in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
and one last thing, Curtis LeMay didn’t invent / develop / influenced carpet bombing. it was introduced by actually the Italians between the first and second world Wars, upgraded by the Spanish (with German Cooperation) during the Spanish civil war, and adopted as a strategy by “bomber Harris”.
Curtis LeMay’s contribution to mass murder by air was his realization that Japanese cities were easily burned. The Tokyo firebomb raid was his idea–he had B-29’s stripped of their defensive weaponry so they could carry more bombs and sent them in at night loaded with incendiaries and set fire to 16 square miles of Tokyo. The figure of 80,000 dead is a conservative estimate–some say it was over 100,000.
If you read enough about the Korean War you will come across his handiwork there as well. At one point he said (exaggerating somewhat) that the air force had demolished virtually every town in North and South Korea. There may have been more people killed by American air raids in Korea than in Japan and Germany combined, but it depends on whose guestimates you believe. Bruce Cumings is one historian who talks a fair amount of the carnage America inflicted on Korean civilians in that war, though the NYT just had a story on this in the Saturday paper.
One last thing about Spyker’s hero Curtis LeMay–he’s commonly thought to be the inspiration behind one of the crazy generals in “Dr. Strangelove”.
link
Curtis LeMay was a butcher, but he didn’t bomb Dresden, as you seem to be implying with the Vonnegut reference. He bombed Tokyo and killed maybe 80,000 people there.
Sorry, I knew he was involved w. a carpetbombing campaign & thought it was Dresden. I guess he was more “successful” than the Dresden bombers who “only” killed 25,000.
Okay, now I’m confused–I thought it was Spiker who first brought up Vonnegut and LeMay. Not that it matters. Spiker seems to admire LeMay, which is odd.
Let me understand – I wrote that the base is 45 min. from my house, does it really matter in what direction?
You don’t have to believe me, but if you take a look at the map you’ll see that there are many in my position.
I don’t think that they keep the missiles armed, but they do keep the war heads somewhere and given the location of bases reputed to store war heads, that somewhere sounds pretty close to civilian population.
That is dangerous in my book.
If the Israeli government doesn’t want its citizens worrying about such things, maybe it should just say where these WMD are stored and get the fiasco over with?
@Richard
Lets put it this way…..
If we were living under German rule now ….you would not be living.
If you were living under japanese rule now….you may well be censored.
And if the Pope wore a yarmulke, he’d be a rabbi (oh wait–he does!).
Is there any truth to the claim that Sestak raised money for an organization which the the FBI called a front group for Hamas? I’m guessing that it as false as the absurd suggestion that Israel’s blockade of Gaza isn’t collective punishment of Gazan civilians.
Also, on the topic of Jewish people driving German cars, see here.
Neo-con war propagnda barrage may be meeting serious resistance in the mainstream media.
THE AARP Bulletin just ran the following article praising the Iran health care sytem and comparing it favorably to the care lower income Americans receive.
http://www.aarp.org/health/doctors-hospitals/info-06-2010/iranian_cure_for_thedeltas_blues.html
RE: “The new group’s board includes…you guessed it…Gary Bauer…” – R.S.
MY COMMENT: I just love Gary Bauer. He’s so cute. Like a little teddy bear. Well, maybe not so little…but short and pudgy*. And that rhapsodic little voice of his. He truly is the “total package”. He’s absolutely “to die for”. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranian deaths it would take to quench his perverse bloodlust.
* Bauer and Kristol would make such a cute couple. What a shame that Kristol is straight.
ALSO SEE:New Neocon Israeli Propaganda Outfit Run By Opponent of Two State Solution, By Matt Duss, Think Progress, 07/13/10
…Gary Bauer opposes the creation of a Palestinian state. Here’s what Bauer said in a speech several years ago: “God granted the Land of Israel to the Jewish people and there is an absolute ban on giving it away to another people.”…
…ThinkProgress contacted Bauer to see if it was still his position that the creation of a Palestinian state was a violation of The Lord’s “absolute ban” against dividing the land. Bauer’s press representative Kristi Hamrick said that Mr. Bauer “declines the opportunity to comment” on this. Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Michael Goldfarb, an adviser to the Emergency Committee, told him that the group doesn’t have a position on the creation of a Palestinian state.
ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://thinkprogress.org/2010/07/13/gary-bauer-emergency-committee/
P.S. “For a really good time”, see Kristol Blew Persuasion, By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 07/11/10
LINK – http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/ideas/archive/2010/07/kristol-blew-persuasion/59507/
MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT:
Tommy James & the Shondells, Crystal Blue Persuasion (VIDEO, 03:52) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeYUR4mud_M
RE: “The new group’s board includes…you guessed it…Gary Bauer, William Kristol and Rachel Abrams.” – R.S.
SEE: Rachel Podhoretz Decter Abrams’s Gay Problem — And Ours ~ By Daniel Luban, LobeLog.com, 07/14/10
(excerpts)…One figure who has received less attention is the group’s fourth principal, Rachel Abrams — wife of Elliott Abrams, daughter of Midge Decter, stepdaughter of Norman Podhoretz. This is a shame, because she is almost certainly the craziest of the lot.
I must confess that when I began reading her blog, I was primarily looking for evidence of her Revisionist Zionism. And, to be sure, such evidence is not in short supply — e.g. this poetic ode to the Israeli landscape, which concludes “I know why we cannot let go of any part of this land.” She also constantly adopts the argot of the Israeli settler movement by referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”. Her sympathy for the settlers is not terribly surprising; the only question is how much it is shared by her husband, who as the Bush administration’s top Middle East advisor was supposedly in charge of implementing a two-state solution. Certainly, Elliott Abrams’s disastrous tenure at the National Security Council raised the strong suspicion that he was doing everything he could to destroy the possibility of a viable Palestinian state…
…But as I continued reading Rachel Abrams’s writings, what jumped out at me was not so much her predictably crazy views about Israel, but her strange obsession with (and apparent hostility to) homosexuality. This first jumped out at me in her response to Peter Beinart’s New York Review of Books essay, a long rant in which Abrams pretends to write in Beinart’s voice. While most of her Beinart “parody” is devoted to accusations that he is insufficiently devoted to the state of Israel, a large chunk of it is spent on rather bizarre and gratuitous insinuations that Beinart is gay. Thus she has fake-Beinart complaining, about a focus group of Jewish students, that “an insufficient number were gay and too many were broads,” and espousing his support for “open debate that of course excludes those who would advance anti-feminist or anti-gay or pro-Israel argument”. (It’s striking that she equates “pro-Israel” with “anti-feminist” and “anti-gay” arguments.) Then she has fake-Beinart condemning Orthodox Jews for homophobia before defensively reasserting his own heterosexuality: “they condemn gays, though I want to reassert that I have children,” a trope that she repeats throughout the piece. One has to wonder why she is so intent to insist that Beinart is gay, as if this fact would have any relevance whatsoever to the content of his piece.
I was initially inclined to dismiss Abrams’s homophobic attack on Beinart as simply a failed and sophomoric attempt at humor, but the more of her writing I read, the more I noticed that this strange obsession with homosexuality seems to be a recurring feature of it. For instance, in a post claiming that Christopher Hitchens is “giving homosexuality a bad name,” and professing disinterest in the sexual pasts of “old Tory buggers,” Abrams writes…
ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://www.lobelog.com/rachel-abrams-gay-problem/
I can only hope that most people who read this blog understand that Silverstein, (isn’t it funny how anti-semites love to using Silver or Goldstein as their nom de plume?) is the epitome of an ignorant person on so many levels.
This man takes out his frustrations on an easy target, that beleaguered nation of people called the Jews. Jews have a survival instinct like any other humans and yet they have been treated like the odd girl out at a 3 girl sleepover party – for millennium.
Eventually that girl moves on and finds better friends and the other two girls are left boring each other to death….
No, not my pseudonym (do you even know what a nom de plume is?), my real name.