More on Freedom’s Watch, the pro-war group with an unspoken Israel agenda that mouthpiece Ari Fleischer warns may spend $250 million this election cycle so as to be the moveon.org of the right:
–From mediatransparency: "The idea for Freedom’s Watch was ‘hatched,’ according to Congresspedia,
in March 2007 at the ‘winter meeting’ of the Republican Jewish
Coalition (RJC) in Manalapan, Florida…
The RJC was described in 2005 as ‘a big money pro-Israel lobby group
linking Jewish-American neoconservatives to the Christian Right and
Israel’s Likud government.’"–From Bernard Avishai: Freedom’s Watch’s big backer, Sheldon Adelson, the third richest man in America, has exhibited a type of dual citizenship, using his money to try and sway Israeli politics to hard right positions: "Jerusalem is for world Jews, the peace process is for appeasers, and
Israelis who condemn settlements are needlessly washing dirty linen in
public." Concludes Avishai, "Israelis seem to take for granted that American Jewish philanthropists
will be, not citizens of their Hebrew-speaking democracy, but something
like super-delegates to an international Jewish convention."
Imagine for a moment that the religious right was bankrolling a conservative moveon.org that was spending gazillions on ads all over the country; the media would be all over it, and stem-cellers and gay-rightsers would be wringing their hands. Well, Freedom’s Watch has a religious agenda. But the closest the Washington Post can come to speaking of this agenda is to say, tepidly, in the 500th paragraph of a lengthy story on the group: "Many in Freedom Watch’s donor base… have always been strong supporters of Israel. The group’s initial ad blitz in defense of Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq came naturally out of those interests." Our journalism is broken.
