I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It’s the 1980s and the height of the violent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American Catholic activists on air. Then he screws these guys to the wall. He asks them what being Irish-Catholic means to them, he grills them about whether they are sending money to the Sinn Fein or the Provisional IRA. He shows us from the inside out why an American interest group feels as passionately as it does, and how it is heating up a hot zone overseas.
But here’s the rest of my fantasy: Matthews does the same thing now, for Jews and Israel. Only this time he isn’t gathering Catholic corner boys like himself, he is gathering neocons at think tanks and publications and White House offices.
Chris Matthews should do this because as he now demonstrates nearly every night, he believes (as I do) that devotion to Israel on the part of socially- and politically-empowered hawkish Jews helped to distort our leaders’ definitions of American interests. He should stop hinting, and put his money down on the counter. Matthews is probably the smartest guy about politics—if not ideas—on air, and if he is holding himself back, it just demonstrates the influence of the Israel lobby. People are afraid to take it on.
Matthews is losing his excuses on this. As it is, night after night, Matthews goes after the Iraq hawks for their deluded Middle East agenda. On Hardball on Friday night he kept shaking his head and saying WHY did they believe this line of nonsense? He seems to have just woken up to the tremendous imposture that Israel-centric right wingers represent
Matthews’s understanding of how policy works is that after 9/11 a group of feverish thinkers, working in conservative magazines and thinktanks, and at Dick Cheney’s elbow, took the Administration’s thinking by storm. As he has said now, these guys were pounding the drum for removing Saddam way back when, and the realists in the first Bush Administration had the wisdom not to do it.
MATTHEWS: They just wanted us to invade Iraq, period? People like Wolfowitz, Feith, people that–the vice-president’s office, the vice-president himself, they just wanted to go in for so many reasons that they just thought up–they couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t going to be nice about it?
General GARD: They were looking for a pretext. They have had long wished for the overthrow of Saddam, regime change in Iraq. Part of a grander plan.
MATTHEWS: And what was the plan? What is their goal? If it wasn’t the true belief in WMD, and it certainly wasn’t the true belief in a nuclear threat, what was their ambition in Mesopotamia?
GARD: It was to get in, establish a presence, develop a democracy, which would be contagious and would, in a sense, neutralize other threats in the area, as they became more democratic.
MATTHEWS: Well, that sounds like Napoleon.
GARD: It sounds like a…
MATTHEWS: That’s what Napoleon did, went around the world, starting wars with every country in Europe, supposedly spreading democracy by gunpowder.
GARD: I’m not supporting it. I opposed it.
MATTHEWS: Well, why did they think this would work?
At times, Matthews has accused this Jacobin mob of trying to make the Middle East safer for Israel. And gone about so foolishly, turning the Middle East into a terror incubator. He’s worried they’re about to double the bet, using Iran.
Then Matthews says that the same deluded thinking has a home in the Democratic party, and is preventing the Dems from being an antiwar party.
MATTHEWS: Here’s where I don’t get it. If 80 percent of the Democratic party, four out of five Democrats, are totally against us even being in Iraq, it’s got to be that one quarter out there, the fund raisers, the more hawkish people. Somebody is putting their thumb on the scale here and stopping Democrats from being Democrats. What is it?
Talk of “fundraisers” is code. Matthews means the Lieberman faction, of hawkish Jews, making up the financial base of the traditional Democratic Party. He should say as much. He should have John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on air tomorrow, to explain how they think the Israel lobby distorted American policy in the Middle East.
But Walt and Mearsheimer are intellectuals. Matthews is a tough guy from the wards. He knows ethnic politics, he knows about human motivation. He should explore the dream of Israel cultivated in liberal American Jews who have never gone there to see the anti-Arab policies. He should explore the shadow of the Holocaust in American Jewish hearts and how it affects their allegiance to Israel.
Most important, Matthews should put a panel together of influential Jews to ask them about what they did to thwart the Oslo peace process. He should ask Doug Feith why he has a photograph of Herzl on his study wall and how that affects his view of invading Israel’s enemey, Iraq. He should ask Elliott Abrams why he believes that Jews stand apart in every society they live in except Israel—Abrams, Bush’s Middle East adviser! He should ask Irving Moskowitz, a California doctor who funded David Wurmser and Lynne Cheney when they were at the American Enterprise Institute, before they went into the White House together, he should ask Moskowitz why he has funded an illegal colony in the West Bank of the Jordan, thereby helping to turn Israel into an apartheid state and frustrating the hopes of Palestinians and spurring rage across the Arab world. He should ask Bruce Kovner, chairman of the American Enterprise Institute and chairman of Juilliard and part owner of the New York Sun, why his thinktank has paid Israeli rightwinger Dore Gold—who is opposed to Oslo—$96,000 a year as a “scholar” in Jerusalem, and why his newspaper said that people who demonstrated against the Iraq war were guilty of “treason”? He should ask Bernard Lewis about the antisemitic discrimination that he suffered in his early academic career and why he thinks Arabs only respect force. He should ask Kenneth Pollack, the Brookings “liberal” who as much as anyone got us into this war, why he NEVER mentions the occupied territories in his book The Threatening Storm, which presumed to explain Arab rage toward the west even as it said that that invading Iraq was going to be a walk in the park, if we used 250,000 troops. (We used 263,000—so much for the ex-post-facto Democratic argument that Rumsfeld planned it wrong).
Matthews should demonstrate to Americans that not all Jews tried to stand athwart Oslo peace process. He should ask JJ Goldberg why his paper The Forward has editorialized that American Jews should give money for the rebuilding of Lebanon (shocking notion that!). He should ask Henry Siegman why he thinks that Israel and the U.S. should talk to Hamas, as opposed to bombing and imprisoning them.
But he should show how marginalized the Siegmans and the Goldbergs are by the Wurmsers, Cheneys and Kovners and Lewises. He should show who has power and how it is exercised. In short, he should take on this ethnic lobby as straightforwardly as he would have taken on the Irish Catholics during the Troubles. Troubles that were not about to start world war 3.
Phil, knockout piece. I hope someday you won't have to ask Matthews to ask those questions for you but you'll have the kind of podium where you can ask them yourself.
One point, I wonder if we'll ever see a day where the Democratic Party asks tough questions of Israel. The majority of Democrats may agree with you (and with Matthews) about the Israel Lobby's distortion of America's middle east policy but Jewish Americans provide something like 60% of DNC funding. It's going to be a long time, I suspect, before any Democratic presidential candidate takes a tough-love stance with regard to Israel.
More code. eh.
when brooks says elite, he means jews.
when mathews says fundraisers, he means jews.
However there are several strands of your argument,granting the code, that dont match up.
neo-cons and american zionists are identical groups
attacking iraq is good for israel.
Granted neocons are crazy enough they might attack france or bomb the bbc to save israel. But you need to figure out if the broader pro-israel community(including Likud, Sharon etc) wanted the war with iraq.
60%!
All those unions and trial lawyers and prochoice and environmental groups are jewish front groups?
how about a source for that ?
the author is jeffrey blankfort, a jewish-american journalist and pro-palestinian rights activist.
"What distinguishes the pro-Israel PACs from the others is that they disguise their identity to avoid the prying eyes of the media and the public. They do this simply by not mentioning Israel in their name. Thus we have the Northern Californians for Good Government, St. Louisans for Good Government, the Desert Caucus, Hudson Valley PAC, and NATPAC, etc. This has led to them being referred to as stealth PACs by a former State Department official.
Moreover, unlike other PACs, they only contribute to candidates in other states.
For example, the Desert Caucus will send money to congressional candidates or an incumbent Senate or House members in Illinois or New Jersey, based solely on their positions on Israel. This has led critics of the lobby to portray them as Israel Firsters. That is meant to indicate that they are more concerned with the welfare of Israel than they are with that of their fellow Americans.
The way I measured pro-Israel political contributions was to go to the web site of Mother Jones magazine, a pro-Israel liberal monthly. In 1996 and 2000, it compiled lists of the top 400 individual donors to both political parties. What I found was that in 2000, 7 of the top 10 donors, 12 of the top 20, and at least, 125 of the top 250 were Jewish, most of which went to the Democrats. In other words, at least 50% and even higher among the larger contributors. It is an extraordinary figure you realize that Jews make up but 2.3 % of the American population.
The 50% overall figure corresponds to estimates from within the Democratic Party as well as Jewish organizations although some speculate the figure is as high as 70%."
Chris should confront the neocons,Chaney and even Gingrich ( who when house speaker – his wife wason a Israeli company payroll from 1995 0n) with the factual American-Israel largesse as cited by Mearsheimer and Walt ( who is leaving/losing his post 1 1/2 yrs early – and whose paper was blacklisted in this country and had to be published in London. Ask them if 90+ % of the Islamic hatred of us isnt due to our blind allegiance to Israel??
Ask if the only beneficiaries of the Iraq war werent Israel and Iran at the cost of American lives?
What threat does Hezbollah ( except when we send soldiers to support Israel in the middle east), Hamas, Syria or Iran pose directly to the US.? How are American interests served except for helping Israel for even participating in ME conflicts.
Ask if anyone believes we enter ME negotiationsc with clean hands and not as a negotiating tool of Israel?
Havent we completely replacedour ideals and national interests with the interests of Israel.??
Also since when have we been a proponent of sneal attacks or pre-emptive strikes
i guess you have to be in a small country with little to offer {like oil} to understand how a israeli thinks.the west bank never belong to arabs it was israels who got kicked out a long time ago but never had the world to get it back for us.the U.N gave us some land remember the arabs invaded the next day.isreal needs the U.S and the U.S. needs israel.i am not able to write well to try and convice you of anything all i can say is there is more to the middie east problems then israel ,there is a lot off hate from the muslims directed the west .if israel plays dirty so does everyone else.we us what we have to to stay a live the world doesn't care neither do you.hate bush is ok with me,but we will survive
"Jewish Americans provide something like 60% of DNC funding"
is not the same thing as 60% of the top donors to the DNC are Jewish.
second, I am curious how you knew from a list of donors how they were jewish. I assume you went by name. Thats pretty sloppy for such a dangerous charge.
Is mother jones a pro-israel magazine? I didnt know that.
As for your stealth pacs, I need more evidence than a quote from a guy who is a jewish-american palistinean activist. I mean at least 60% of palistinian rights activists are jewish-americans and they are only 2.5 percentage of the population.
The numbers on this page are based on contributions from PACs, Levin money donors, and individuals giving $200 or more, as reported to the Federal Election Commission.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY
(2004 election cycle)
Top Contributors
Contributor
Total
John Kerry for President
$38,531,588
Friends of Schumer
$2,908,504
Goldman Sachs
$2,267,764
Friends for Harry Reid
$1,680,000
Time Warner
$1,182,328
Friends of John Kerry
$1,000,000
University of California
$949,870
Wyden for Senate
$867,500
John Breaux Senate Cmte
$729,528
Microsoft Corp
$704,702
Menendez for Congress
$585,000
JP Morgan Chase & Co
$579,748
Friends of Barbara Boxer
$574,763
Hoyer for Congress
$572,500
Baron & Budd
$552,423
Simmons Cooper LLC
$545,350
Morgan Stanley
$529,600
Lehman Brothers
$529,100
Viacom Inc
$507,342
Nancy Pelosi for Congress
$495,000
Top Donors to Kerry and Their Contributions to Bush*
Donor
To Kerry
To Bush
Skadden, Arps et al
$105,650
$64,760
Robins, Kaplan et al
$91,750
$4,000
Citigroup Inc
$79,400
$187,500
Piper Rudnick LLP
$77,050
$11,250
Mintz, Levin et al
$72,050
$9,250
Goldman Sachs
$64,750
$282,725
Harvard University
$53,100
$8,250
Hill, Holliday et al
$50,750
$0
Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
$50,250
$69,000
Akin, Gump et al
$43,550
$101,200
Time Warner
$41,950
$63,050
Clifford Law Offices
$41,850
$0
International Profit Assoc
$40,250
$6,000
Morgan Stanley
$40,000
$177,075
Bain Capital
$38,500
$15,500
Hale & Dorr
$37,750
$6,000
UBS Americas
$36,550
$352,850
Holland & Knight
$36,200
$45,549
Sullivan & Cromwell
$32,550
$29,515
Latham & Watkins
$32,500
$50,101
third hand bullshit from Weiss:
"The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates �depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 percent of the money�." un-cited rhetoric from a dis-credited report.
"it was once reported"? no citation?
Typical Weiss crap, inaccurate, undocumented BS
Since when has Chris Mathews been a serious pundit or journalists?
"I wish Chris Mathews…" Give me a break. Chris Mathews is Bill O'Rielly in a dress. His shtick is almost identical. He's an elite who tries to pass off corporate propaganda to the working class and the elderly.
The only difference is that Bill O'Rielly pretends to be an independent, and Chris Mathews pretends to be a Democrat…
But you need to figure out if the broader pro-israel community(including Likud, Sharon etc) wanted the war with iraq.
Not only is it inarguable that removing the state seen as another state's greatest regional threat is an absolute strategic benefit to that other state (something they'd be willing to accept consequences to accomplish), but Bibi Netanyahu and other extreme right-wing Zionists wrote a paper at an Israeli think tank in the 70s explicitly calling for a US proxy war to neutralize Iraq. The goal, and Kissinger later pointed how obvious this was, was to capitalize on the new nature of Arab nationalism and exploit sectarian lines, reducing the rival to Balkanized statelets. Your excuses are getting to be so bad they're just for in-house. For Jews to imagine anyone takes their more lurid party lines seriously any more is worse than some extreme right-wing PRC official trying to assure the diplomatic world that no Chinese or Korean or Phillipine people whatsoever would be the slightest bit happy if their old buddy Japan disapeered one day.
Who else besides Chris Matthews should cover this story? Why place all the onus on the Christian?
Of course, unfortunately there are not many Jewish TV News types.
Of course it is inconceivable that Wolf Blitzer would do anything like this. Did Ted Koppel ever cover it? I doubt it. Does he still have a platform?
Surely there are many Jewish News directors whom we could ask to research the issue.
I once suggested by email to Frontline that they cover this issue. But no response and, I would say, in their brave coverage of the middle east the missing issue of the Jewish Lobby in the US is painfully apparent.
Mohammed, the 7th century founder of Islam, once signed a 10-year peace treaty with the enemy Arabian tribe of Koreish. However, after only two years into the treaty, Mohammed's military position improved whereupon he tore up this "Hudibiyya" Agreement" and slaughtered the Koreishites. The Middle East today is littered with inter-Arab peace treaties, alliances and friendship accords, not one of which has ever prevented a war. This Law of Hudibiyya dates back to Muhammad and states clearly that "Muslims are permitted to lie and break agreements with non-Muslims." According to this precept, Arabs view an enemy�s readiness for peace as a weakness to be exploited. Violation of any signed accord they sign with infidels (or even fellow Muslims) is "business as usual" as soon as it becomes advantageous to do so.
If a member of the PA (Palestinian Authority), or any Arab on the street were to compare the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and the Palestinian people to the Hudibiyya Agreement, he would be suggesting that the treaty were only a temporary truce. Speaking to a rally of his Fatah movement stated on November 16, 1998 "When we chose the peace of the brave [the Oslo and Wye Accords], we chose it with trust in the Prophet who agreed to the Treaty of Hudibiyya…" On numerous previous occasions (and certainly to be continued in the future), both Arafat and other senior PA officials have assured Arab audiences that their treaties with Israel are only "temporary truces" rather than genuine, permanent peace agreements.
And so while Israeli negotiators go to great pains to dot every "i" and cross every "t" and footnote every minute detail [eg. the Camp David Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty and the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Agreement] with the expectation that the document was as meaningful to their Arab negotiators as it was to them, the Arabs knew all along that their non-compliance would be tolerated. After all, it was their tradition to say anything AND sign anything, knowing full well that, by custom, culture and habit, that they could and usually did walk away from treaties when it suited their purposes.
Mr. Jared Kushner, do yourself, your wallet and your readers a favor- get some real content in your blogs
Jordanian Television (September 13, 1995)
"Since we cannot defeat Israel in war we do this in stages. We take any and
every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there,
and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can
get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel." Yasser Arafat, speaking abou the Oslo Accord
I am somebody who is extremely dissapointed with the way American Jews have rallied behind Israel's savage bombardment of Lebanon and apologized for Israel's oppression of Palestinians. However, a couple of points need to be made:
(1) Not all Jews prioritize Israel. Many liberal Jews care far more about issues like abortion rights, the enviroment, separation of church and state, etc., than Israel.
(2)Even among Jews who do place high priority on Israel, views about Iraq are far from unanimous. Given the instability the Iraq war has spread throughout the Mideast and the boost it's given Iran, it's far from clear that invading Iraq helped Israel. Like the rest of the country, Jews are increasingly turning against the invasion of Iraq
(3) The failure of Democrats to call for even a timetable for withdrawal probably has a lot less to do with Jewish DNC funders than with a fear of looking "weak" and "soft on terrorism".