This weekend the Times did a piece on Freedom’s Watch, the new pro-war advocacy group. Once again it left out the Jewish angle, that the leaders of the group are rightwing Jews (one of whom has given $60 million to the anti-intermarriage Zionist birthright program). The Washington Post also ignored this angle. Only the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was able to call a spade a spade: "Pro-Surge group is Almost All Jewish." (And I will write about it in the forthcoming American Conservative.)
Last night’s ’60 Minutes’ had two good pieces involving the
troubled black family: a profile of angry fatherless Clarence
Thomas, and a profile of QB Vince Young, also fatherless. In
both pieces, sociological issues were prominent. Compare that to
the ’60’ piece on Alan Greenspan a couple weeks back. Greenspan’s story contains great sociological Jewish themes, from his early love for Ayn Rand, to his globalism, to his social arrival with the Clinton administration. These ideas went completely undeveloped.
I know why these themes aren’t addressed in the mainstream press. The Freedom’s Watch story raises the untouchable fact that neoconservative Jews spearheaded the Iraq war. Greenspan’s rise speaks to issues of Jewish power in American society. These topics are verboten. Understandably: antisemites talked about international Jewish influence in the Russia of pogroms, and in Hitler’s Germany.
The problem is that these are great, important stories about how our society works right now. They are also obvious: and so mainstream journalists are generating a credibility gap among intelligent readers by failing to write about them. When Leslie Gelb wrote in the Times last week that Walt and Mearsheimer are completely wet, but yes, the Israel lobby is the most important factor in American foreign policy toward Israel, readers have a right to ask, Why hasn’t the Times been covering the lobby? 60 Minutes’ refusal to cover Walt and Mearsheimer’s book seems to me inexcusable. When leftwing journalists say the war was about oil, it is using its brainpower to delude itself about the Israel angle.
There are notable exceptions. Lately James Morris sent me the following quotation from Eric Alterman in which Alterman is wonderfully straightforward about Jewish wealth:
AIPAC is pushing us to war with Iran. AIPAC is the reason that no Democrats are coming out strongly
against war with Iran. AIPAC’s funding is extremely wealthy American Jews and AIPAC is pushing for war with Iran.
So, when people go to Democratic politicians and they say "listen, I
don’t want you gettin’ out in front and opposing war with Iran, particularly since you have national aspirations," they don’t say it in the New York Times.
James Morris is an interesting case. He has become obsessed with the degree to which the tail is wagging
the dog, and he is indefatigable on talk shows and the net, pressing
his belief that rightwing Jewish forces are driving foreign policy. (I first saw him at an American Enterprise Institute panel a couple years ago, when he angrily questioned Richard Perle and ($96,000-a-year-unlisted-"scholar") Dore Gold about Israel’s role in our foreign policy). Some of Morris’s approach makes me a little uncomfortable, but his larger point is journalistically incontrovertible: These are important stories, they are not being covered.
The failure to do this work has to do with memories of the Holocaust. And so in the end this issue is about the construction of Jewish identity. Iraq is a burning wreck, and there are plans to go after Iran? How selfish is it to focus on our historical hurt, when there is so much suffering at the doorstep.
