One of the best lines in Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons, They Knew They Were Right, is that having been excluded by the old WASP establishment, young Jewish rightwing intellectuals of the 50s-70s burned with outsider resentment. And in the end, when they gained influence (in the administrations of Reagan, Clinton and GWBush) they created a "parallel establishment" in Washington.
Heilbrunn never fleshes this idea out; but it is in essence an idea about money. Scott McConnell, the editor of The American Conservative, has said that "Neoconservatism is a career." The neocons created a wealth of jobs and opportunities for intellectuals in Washington, chiefly at thinktanks–the thinktanks that thunk up the Iraq war.
I bring this up because lately I took a look at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a little-known thinktank in Washington that is a pillar of that parallel establishment. The whole foundation is dedicated to fighting radical Islam and fostering democracy in the Middle East. Its website says that it is defending democracies "under assault by terrorism and militant Islamism." There is very little on the website about Israel, and yet it is plain when you look into the group that support for Israel is at the heart of the group’s creation. In this sense, FDD is like Freedom’s Watch, the Ari Fleischer pro-Iraq war group I have written about. Freedom’s Watch purports to be all about America’s interests, and yet it is plain, even to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which did the first story on the outfit last summer, that its board and staff are chiefly Jewish and that promoting a U.S. foreign policy that joins the U.S. at the hip with Israel in the fight against terrorism, starting with the Palestinians, is the group’s main objective.
I have criticized Freedom’s Watch for not being upfront about this aim. The same charge can be leveled at FDD. Go to the website and the group says it was started after 9/11 by "visionary philanthropists," then gives as its board of directors just three names, Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick. Three gentiles. But if you go to the organization’s latest 990 form, which it filed with the federal government because it is a 501c3 (forms collected by the great guidestar.org) there are more than 20 directors listed, and most of them have a strong Jewish interest.
Among the board members listed for 2005 are Michael Steinhardt, the co-owner of the New Republic who started birthright, the program to send Jewish kids to Israel for free; Roland Arnall, the ambassador to the Netherlands who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Charles Bronfman, who started birthright with Steinhardt; Cheryl Halpern, who has been associated with the Republican Jewish Committee and WINEP, the pro Israel military thinktank; Tony Gelbart, who started Nefesh B’nefesh, an organization that urges American Jews to move to Israel; Larry Mizel, who started a Jewish museum in Denver; Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare and founder of a Jewish museum; and Lindsay Rosenwald, who is identified online as a member of the Republican Jewish Committee.
These are some of those "visionary philanthropists." Of course, there is nothing wrong with these folks taking a part in the political process. What is unkosher is the website’s failure to identify them. Indeed, I see an effort throughout FDD’s online publications to hide the salami. Charles Jacobs, a member of the board of advisers, is listed as the head of the American Anti-Slavery Group, a Darfur organization. There is no mention of the fact that Jacobs started the rightwing David Project, an Israel lobby group on campus, or that he was (according to Wikipedia) associated with CAMERA, another Israel lobbyist. Why doesn’t FDD share this info?
I.e., if the U.S. and Israel really do share interests, and Americans widely support the unwavering alliance (even as apartheid conditions prevail in the West Bank), why don’t the people who care about Israel put it right on the menu when they’re selling foreign policy? Because they fear, as Bill Kristol, an adviser to FDD, said at Yivo, that Americans may abandon Israel post-9/11 and -Iraq.
Now let’s talk about money. The salaries listed in the Form 990 on Guidestar.org are pretty shocking. The writer Claudia Rossett gets $110,000 a year. Walid Phares, anti-Islamist, get $118,000. Joel Mowbray, a columnist based in New York, gets $127,000 a year. Wow. I can tell you, that’s big money for writers. Eleana Gordon, the group’s senior v.p. who does occasional events on women’s rights in Iraq, got $197,500–3 years ago. I bet she’s gotten a raise since then.
Then there’s the group’s vice chairman: Tucker Carlson’s father Richard W. Carlson, a former ambassador. In the 2005 report Carlson made $138,255 as vice chairman and then his company, Tulip Hill Enterprises, got another $385,000 for "radio show and documentary production." Huh. I wonder what they produced.
This is the character of the "parallel establishment." Conservative gentiles working intimately with conservative Jews to fight radical Islam; and I bet most of the money is Jewish, as most of the money behind Freedom’s Watch is Jewish. The sense I got about the visionary philanthropists is that they are self-made entrepreneurs who made it in the great Jewish leap forward of the meritocracy and service economy. Megarich, like Arnall, who started Ameriquest, a subprime lender, or Bernard Marcus, of Home Depot. A couple others are in biotech.
That leap forward is something I participated in and celebrate. We knocked down the doors that made my parents’ generation justly resentful. But you have to wonder whether Jewish entrepreneurs have not become the leading engines of the American economy. Surely the thinktank economy. I would never single out their Jewishness were it not for the role that wealth is playing in the political process.
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{ 24 comments }
Phil,
Forgive me, for I don't know much about your background, but what exactly did you do to leap forward?
What exactly are trying to say in your last paragraph?
What's democracy got to do with all this?
If they really cared about democracy, they could start in Washington.
Imagine what a difference all that moolah could make if dedicated to a genuinely moral cause.
"Forgive me, for I don't know much about your background, but what exactly did you do to leap forward?"
Phil got married, that's what he did. And he's spent the past few years doing the blog journalist equivalent of painting Jewish stars on the doors of people wealthier than himself.
By the way, Phil, do you know what "hide the salami" means?
Cliff May at FDD and his ilk (especially David Horowitz) in the Neoncon pro-Israel establishment also make a big deal about so-called "academic standards" and supposed inferior scholarship by Israel's detractors. Many of them have cashed in big-time, but remain but frustrated academic wannabes.
But they apparently have no problem with blatant plagiarism by their scholarly associates and "fellows" in the interests of Zionist propaganda.
See here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/klein03142007.html
Neither FDD, FrontPage, nor some academic institutions see anything wrong with the word-for-word recycling of Israeli PR by tenured right-wingers.
"Help The Poor? Edwards Can't Be Bothered"
at Rudely Stamped
Michael Blaine
http://www.rudelystamped.blogspot.com
"That leap forward is something I participated in and celebrate. We knocked down the doors that made my parents' generation justly resentful."
What doors were those, Phil? Was your parents' generation "justly resentful" enough to lie America into the Iraq war in a justified manner? Does their "just resentment" justify the deaths of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis?
Bitter, narcissistic, rejected, megalomaniacs is what I see. But hey, maybe it’s all justified.
From http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/07/assimilation-v-.html
At least AIPAC is a registered lobby, and contributions to AIPAC are not tax deductible. The Israel Project and most of the national level Zionist "educational" organizations and think-tanks are 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, and contributions to them are tax deductible.
In any case while these national organizations and think tanks are an important part of the Israel Lobby, they are not the bulk.
The real Israel Lobby comprises the web of interconnecting innocuous seeming Jewish communal organizations that exert control over public discourse for the sake of pro-Israel political agenda even at the level of book talks at Barnes & Noble (see http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/05/lobby-activities-its-just-frggin-novel_28.html ).
These Jewish communal organizations are all fraudulently claiming 501(c)(3) tax deductible status and are therefore ripping off the treasure for billions of dollars.
Note that if a Catholic church even mentions abortion in an election context, it can lose its status as an organization that can receive tax-deductible contributions.
If the tax code were interpretated fairly and uniformly, practically all Jewish communal organizations would lose their 501(c)(3) tax-deductible status, and contributors to those organizations would have to pay a tremendous amount of back taxes with interest.
Note also that Sheleg misinterprets the issue of state funding of parochial or communal schools. If such schools received state funding, it would decrease the influence of a small cabal of wealthy extremist Zionist billionaires over Jewish education. It is an issue that has been well understood since the time when the Czarist government tried to fund Jewish education in the middle 19th century.
I had a dream about you last night.
I dreamed that I met you outside of the Capital building, that I had yelled your name to get your attention, and that my father, aunt (both deceased), cousins, wife, children, were with me.
And that you were with another woman other than your wife, and wore a hat emblazened "new conservative", and said hello but walked away quickly as if to say, "I'm not with them" to enter some hearing, dressed well, handsome, thin with a beautiful redhead on your arm. (I was both jealous and knew that that was impossible and undesirable for me.)
I know it sounds simplistically symbolic, and the leadheads here will pounce on it.
I find it odd that you don't criticize conservatism, and only Jews formerly excluded from conservatism.
That you don't disagree with their conclusions, but only that Jews have some power.
$125,000 for a professional job is similar to a tenured professor, less than a lawyer, much less than an investment analyst.
Probably just barely enough income from their work, to afford a bare bones home outside of New York.
What is the CONTENT of the argument that you disagree with? What policy would you do differently? Why?
The Neocon fundraisers made use of the ethnic Ashkenazi cultural attribute of educational contribution.
Traditionally, wealthy Jews in E. Europe set up kollalim (educations collegia in the Ecclesiastical sense) where students studied on behalf of wealthy merchants, who had neither the time nor skill sets to learn on their own.
The Jewish kollalim seem to be an imitation of the Polish collegia used during the Christianization of Poland.
During the Crusader and Reformation period Collegia were probably instrumental in the establishment of the intellectual domination of Yiddish speakers over Judeo-slavic speakers in E. Europe.
Anyway, when Jews became secularized in the 19th century, they continued the habit of educational giving. In the US Jews have funded many institutes especially since 1947 in ME Studies. Unfortunately from the standpoint of Zionists, once an institute was established at an independent University it would not necessary teach the Zionist narrative.
Hence the development of independent think tanks. There is now an effort to take back Academia via Israel Studies Institutes.
As a consequence, Zionist groups were particularly freaked by Nadia Abu el Haj at Barnard/Columbia because she is for all intents and purposes a Palestinian Arab Jewish and Israel Studies specialist although I am probably the only person that so describes her.
The Jewish Neocon think tanks have also worked hard to wipe out competitors. They worked hard via Jewish contacts and family members at the DOJ to wipe out the Saudi financed Safa group and SAAR charities network, which provided aid to Palestinians and which had associated think tanks.
Such use of gentile power is hardly historical unprecedent. The Misnagdim used the Russian government to attack Hassidim at the beginning of the 19th century. The Jewish political religious elite has also been willing to murder intracommunal competitors as Stanislawski documents in A Murder in Lemberg.
The use of non-Jews as fronts in such activities is hardly uncommon. I have forgotten his name, but as I remember, wealthy Jews paid an important non-Jewish scholar to refute der Talmudjude. The founding generation of American revisionists (nowadays Neocons) liked to use non-Jews as their public face in activities as Rafael Medoff has documented.
Charles Jacobs and the American Anti-Slavery Group, whose basic goal was to debase and corrupt human rights discourse to the point that it could not benefit Palestinians, has used black preacher Gloria White-Hammond as a shill for activities that probably included non-prosecutable fraud in the international charity sector at least according to reports in the Irish Times and the Washington Post.
"Anyway, when Jews became secularized in the 19th century, they continued the habit of educational giving. "
Still an enormous commitment. The contributions to neo-con think-tanks are a proprtionally barely a sliver of the contributions of Jews to independant educational institutions.
RE: "What is the CONTENT of the argument that you disagree with? What policy would you do differently? Why?"
The CONTENT left out, as Phil specifies by examples?
Policy of full representation?
Put it in?
Who wants a flag with some of the stars left out?
That these think tanks which focus on confronting Jihadism and promoting democracy in the Middle East are funded by donors is the best that could happen to them. That their researchers get half or quarter of what the Government contractors get in Iraq is excellent. That the funding of FDD for example is 0.02% of the funding by Wahabi lobbies and is 0.1% of what Khomeinist lobbies pay to their academics, advocates and bloggers is heroic. That pro-Jihadist Jews are the most expensive "clients" of the Wahabi and Khomeinist lobbies is not surprising. That the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood influenced Qataris and the Iranians have a combined 10 Billion $ dollars operation in the West and in the US to fight American counter terrorism efforts is very telling. Your web activity is just a little shitty effort -obviously paid- on behalf of these Terror forces to target the NGOs that are causing headaches to these regimes, which you represent. And of course having Baathist-paid-agent Johua Landis as one of your main link, uncovers how involved you are with bloody dictator Assad. Last but not least, you must know by now that the readers in the West know that "Islamists" are the radical Jihadists. So when you want to play smart and accuse people of being "anti-Islamist" you are just looking like a fool. Because the majority of Muslims are indeed anti Islamist in as much as the majority of Germans are anti-Nazi. What you should do is to go back to the classroom or ask your Jihadi funders to spend more money on educating you. duhhh..
I think the real point here is that money or jewish money is the fuel that keeps the zionist/neo movement going.
That + the fact that money talks in congress and DC.
Let's have some campaign finance reform and then see how such support the zionist and other special interest groups get then.
Steinhardt is an interesting character — he owns one of the world's largest collections of smuggled antiquities. He bought them from outright gangster/mob smugglers. But he is too high up to be indicted I guess…
And Arnal from Ameriquest–he is a big donor to W and Arnold which may account for his not being indicted for sub-prime mortgagte fraud.
Both men are punks who belong in jail.
Dreams are narcissistic forays into what our subconscious wants from the world.
Witty wants you to abandon what your heart, your eyes, and your conscience have clarified for you, Phil, and draw a line in the sand where HIS Zionist interests need it to be.
Meditate: hope over fear. Fear is a much stronger impulse and doesn't need us, those with our intelligence, our humanity, our voice, to be its useful idiots.
Hope is borne out of progress. Wishing it were the other way around, closing one's eyes real hard, cherry-picking the good parts of the story and ignoring the bad, won't bring any change.
(Obviously Witty is smart enough to know that, and obviously what he desires more closely resembles the status quo. Minus the unattractive parts of the colonization getting noticed by Phil, of course.)
The discontented man finds no easy chair, said Franklin, but Richard has settled comfortably into his: Zionism IS justified, period, by nothing more than his very own fear.
From his "dream" however it appears there's another fear, newly nestled in, keeping him up at night: that he's not being listened to.
"It appears there's another fear, newly nestled in, keeping him up at night: that he's not being listened to."
That's what I thought of, too. :)
But to be fair, I suspect that was not our beloved Richard Witty at all, but a spoof poster. A lot of the "Richard Witty" posts can be read as parodies.
"It appears there's another fear, newly nestled in, keeping him up at night: that he's not being listened to."
That's what I thought of, too. :)
But to be fair, I suspect that was not our beloved Richard Witty at all, but a spoof poster. A lot of the "Richard Witty" posts can be read as parodies.
Hmmm, MM sounds really poetic today.
And David I, if that was a spoof-Richard-Witty, it was a rather good parody. So good that Richard does not even complain.
And we are all leadheads, whatever that means, apart from to a high degree either: opinionated activists or opinionated fascists.
RE: "Because the majority of Muslims are indeed anti Islamist in as much as the majority of Germans are anti-Nazi." So, Goldhagen is aboard? Wouldn't it be interesting for an average lower middle class American, say, to meet an average Palestinian arab in a pub? After a few drinks, how about that dialogue?
It's an awesome amount of money these writers are making off of being shills for Likudism, especially when you remember that Clauda Rosett and Mowbray have other full time jobs. It's really tempting to sell out, when you can triple your salary –especially if you have a family and no other money. I have young underpaid writers where I work–and believe me, the money the Steinhardt types can throw around is tempting to them.
Very impressed by Joaquim Martillo's post –the one on the novelist whose reading was complained about to Barnes and Noble.
And Phil does need to better remember what "hide the salami" means.
Isn't that an Italian joke? I know women who say so.
And let's not forget NY Senator Charles Schumer, who appears on FDD's board of advisors. Four times I've written to him asking about his relationship with the group, and four times he's ignored my request.
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