Here is a nice piece in Haaretz showing how the Shalem Center, a thinktank whose pigeons are now reroosting in the Netanyahu administration, including Michael Oren and Ron Dermer, was heavily funded by neoconservatives so as to keep bad ideas alive. "The institute was founded with the aid of American
Jewish donors, including the Bernstein family, Sheldon Adelson, George
Rohr and Ron Lauder."
I dunno who the Bernstein family is. I think I went to college with George. Nice guy; now a New York financier. Peace, brother. (The contribution button is on the right.)
What is disgraceful about this article–yes, I know; everything is disgraceful today, I'm in that kind of mood, I feel the tail wagging my dog–is that it is actually piecemeal journalism about a scandal of the American discourse, the extent to which the neoconservative policy options that ultimately burned Baghdad and destroyed my country's image in the world were kept afloat by rich donors, generally rightwing pro-Zionist Jews such as Bruce Kovner and Irving Moskowitz, supporters of the American Enterprise Institute, and Sheldon Adelson, who backed the Shalem Center, Natan Scharansky, the Republican Party, and also Douglas Feith when he was at One Jerusalem.
The flow of this international money (yes, I know, a canard) can also be glimpsed in the $96,000-a-year support that Dore Gold, a former Netanyahu aide who has his own thinktank, receives from the American Enterprise Institute as a "scholar." Why Gold is getting this money from an American institute is something I've never been able to figure out.
I suppose this is the sort of scandal we can expect journalists and historians to begin to unravel in five years, when it is safely over (we pray). The disgrace is that the Times and the Washington Post have shown utter indifference to the question. Myself, I did a little bit on it at New York Magazine, but no one ever hired me to do more investigation of the social/intellectual/political/journalistic and financial networks that kept hope alive for the neocons. What the story deserves is a thorough unearthing of the network, or at least one chain of it, going back, say, to '96 when Richard Perle, Feith and David Wurmser, all of whom would turn up later in the Bush Administration, wrote the Clean Break paper for Netanyahu urging him to forget about the peace process and Palestinian sovereignty– and work to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Walt and Mearsheimer of course broached this alarming coincidence, and were smeared as anti-Semites. The difficulty for anyone exploring the matter is that the story really does involve Jewish influence, and even dual loyalty. You can't not address these questions if you are going to be intellectually honest. Doug Feith's former law partner Marc Zell is a religious settler in the Occupied Territories, and also a person with influence during the Bush years. Go figure.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has blabbed on Amy Goodman about "Jewish money" pushing the Iran madness, has also said he would rather run through the streets naked than report on this stuff. And you know why: because if he did, he'd be unpaid. The best unfolding of this conspiracy inside our politics–and yes, it is a conspiracy, in precisely the way that the slave power functioned as a "conspiracy" in American politics in the 1850s, as then-obscure Abraham Lincoln stated when he raised up the Republican Party to smash it– is by Stephen Sniegoski. He too has been smeared and marginalized. I guess we have to wait for Haaretz.
um, "your country's image in the world" was already that of a would-be global dictatorship. Zionism just made it into a maudlin one.
au contraire The disbelief and shock the global community expressed regarding US actions after 9-11 belies your presumption. Empire in the technical sense was and remains a goal on the fringes of the US establishment and its foreign policy community of the far left and right of ultra nationalists. Neocons aren't so much imperialists as they are Israeli firsters who would betray their country for another at the drop of a hat. Their adventurism and use of imperial jingoism was more a tool to broaden their alliance with other factions to lead America into wars for the sake of Israel. The American masses on the other hand were either perplexed or shocked themselves at hearing America being described as an empire. Prior to 9-11 there is nothing in US myth making or its court histories that rudely smacks of US imperialism. The American Zeitgeist is decidedly anti-imperialist and political factions that push imperialism in the US end up defunct as the High Federalists did in 1800, and as dead as the next imperial moment shortly after the Spanish/American War. That's also one major reason among many why Neocons are banished into the wilderness and their name a bad word. The internationalism of realists and progressives is often mistaken for imperialism by people who are too gilded by their ideologies, biases and nativism. Such usually mistake the processes of convergence into international institutions and conventions as markers of imperialism, loss of US sovereignty or the end of the republic. What we have in Obama is an alliance between realists and progressives who are reasserting the multi-internationalist posture of the US. Whether they succeed in this is altogether another question. 8 years of the most diseased US presidency in American history has wrought great systemic damage only now being appreciated and much as yet unknown.
There really should be a political category other than "right-wing" for American/diaspora Jews who are right-wing vis-à-vis Israel and policy revolving around its cause and environs, and extremely socially liberal in their diaspora identity and politics — which really describes the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Some political equivalent of the word hypocrite. rfk: "The internationalism of realists and progressives is often mistaken for imperialism by people who are too gilded by their ideologies, biases and nativism." LOL. How about this instead: The imperialism of Statist "progressives" is often mistaken for internationalism by people too gilded by their ideologies, gullibility and liberal conceit."