This is the most important political post I've done in a while, so listen up.
Joe Bodell is a progressive reporter in Minnesota, and Jewish. On Wikileaks recently, he explored a list of former Senator Norm Coleman's financial contributors, evidently provided by Coleman's campaign, and examined the "Source" column for the contributors, which indicates how they came to the campaign. About 20,000 of 50,000 contributors, Bodell reports, are Jews identified as "gopjew_091307" in the source column. Look for yourself at that spreadsheet. The list of gopjew's in a column on the right begins most of the way down. And the contributors are from California, Pennyslvania, New York, New Jersey, not just Minnesota.
Bodell wrote up his findings in this post called, appropriately, "Coleman's database: lots and lots of Jewish names." He speculated that the source of the list was the neoconservative Republican Jewish Coalition:
Earlier this year, after he was shuffled out of the Senate once his
term officially expired, Coleman accepted a role with the Republican
Jewish Coalition, which very well could be the source of the
"gopjew_091307" source list in the first place. There's no way to know
for sure.
American Jewish political lobby could make for a very powerful special
interest arrangement for a former Senator.
Here's my interpretation: It's a good bet that over half the $22 million raised by Coleman's opponent, Al Franken, came from Jews, too. Because authoritative accounts accept the estimate that 50-60 percent of the money going to Democrats is from Jews. Franken and Coleman are both Jews. 13 out of 100 senators are Jewish. Jews make up maybe 2 percent of the U.S. population. But we are engines of the financial strength of the country, let alone the media.
All these facts add up to a simple truth about American political life: Jews are a powerful constituency; and as my website continually affirms, There is not diversity in Jewish political life with respect to Israel/Palestine. There is actually not that much difference between neocons and the "liberal" Jewish camp, which explains why the Gaza assault won the support of Jews 3-1 at the same time as Democrats generally were against it by about 3-2. When the chips are down, Jews are for Israel, as that liberal Alan Dershowitz has said, because Israel is their "secular religion." There are many many exceptions to this orthodoxy, especially among the young. But we are not represented and we don't get paying jobs.
This explains that at the height of their bitter dispute, Franken and Coleman (who is himself a former Democrat; I remember him back in St. Paul) joined in approving the Gaza slaughter. It explains Obama's silence on the Gaza horror, for the same reason: He cannot alienate Jewish money, which is hawkish on Israel. Or as Seymour Hersh said on Democracy Now a year or so back, re the push to bomb Iran, it's all about "Jewish money." And Obama wasn't worried about Sheldon Adelson or the Republican Jewish Coalition neocon money; he was worried about Democratic Jewish money, the Lieberman/Steve Grossman/Lester Crown cohort, which might as well be neocon on Israel.
J Street, which was so brave on Gaza, is changing this; but it's a slow process.
It is common for really smart Jewish journalists to make their careers by exposing the Christian right. I did so myself back when. Michelle Goldberg did a book on Christian fundamentalist ideas, excoriating the evangelical Christians for their effect on gay rights, abortion policy, you name it. Goldberg is smart and very articulate; I bet that's a good book. But again I'd note that when Walt and Mearsheimer presumed to discuss the role of Jewish neoconservatives in pushing the Iraq war, Goldberg attacked them on Salon, in essence saying the oil companies pulled the trigger, and the scholars were touching on a "horribly sensitive" issue.
The media justifies its refusal to look at Jewish power because of the Holocaust. The refusal is not just hypocritical–again, we talk about Christian power in the media all the time–it's clotheslining the political discourse on one of the most important foreign-policy issues of our time. I find this journalistically demoralizing. I help produce this website for the same reason I got into journalism, because I found the democratic tradition in journalism in this country so inspiring in speaking truth to power, from Jacob Riis to Ida Tarbell to I.F. Stone to Bob Woodward (the prototype version anyway). Admittedly, in midlife, oedipal energies ebbing, I find investigative journalism wearying and predictable; but the essential character of the profession from which I've made my living is democratic: it is to describe the workings of power to the people. Good journalists trust Americans to discuss horribly sensitive issues without violence. Let's take that chance again.
P.S. Thanks to a commenter, I believe "frizzled," for bringing my attention to the Bodell story.
