Michael Kinsley
The sharpest intelligence I ever encountered as a journalist, Mike Kinsley, former editor of the New Republic, writing at Bloomberg about Zionist orthodoxy in the establishment:
In the 1980s and 1990s I worked at the New Republic, a fervently pro-Zionist publication. Many’s the night I worked late editing articles I wasn’t sure I agreed with, offering yet one more reason why a Palestinian state was unthinkable. These days the position of Jews in the U.S. and in Israel seems to be something like a resigned shrug. The Palestinians want a state? Two chunks of unconnected territory, one of them controlled by religious maniacs prone to violence, the other ruled by the political heirs of Yasser Arafat? OK, let them have a state, if we can settle other issues like borders and refugees. See how they like it.
The revelation in that is that Kinsley had great autonomy befitting his top-notch ability to reason. Yet: he deferred to militants. Out of some degree of Jewish identification, I venture. Next let’s hear from former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan.
From Ben Smith’s piece on the divisions inside the Democratic Party-linked thinktank, Center for American Progress. He makes a similar point:
The seams sometimes show in the organization, however. Podesta, who recently stepped down from his longtime position as CAP’s president, “always wanted to stay out of Israel stuff from the beginning, because it’s a no-win issue for them,” a liberal Israel policy thinker and CAP ally said. “They’re obviously a progressive place, but if you want to attract a mainstream Clinton, New Democrat milieu, you can’t really do real progressive Israel stuff.”
Note: neither of these excerpts is about Christian Zionists (I wonder if Andrew Sullivan even knows any Christian Zionists, when he says that they are the basis of the special relationship). These stories are about establishment liberal organizations, and they are the reason I insist on talking about Jewish identity. I’ve often said that preventing a Palestinian state from emerging since the U.N. promised one to indigenous Arabs in 1947 has been an American Jewish achievement. We have never wanted to hear about Palestinian self-determination, and we’re sitting at the door.
Philip, We are all a product of our past and maturity can only come from a universal view of the interests of humanity as a whole. You have spent your life trying to recover your humanity from the spirit destroying ideology of Zionism and alert the world to its danger. Having grown up in a Protestant, fundamentalist evangelical home, I have spent my life trying to recover my humanity from the spirit destroying ideology of Christian Zionism and to alert the world to the danger to humanity that this ideology represents. The truth is, that we are both right. Each of these ideologies has their sphere of influence and together they represent an immediate danger to the planet in their denial of the reality of our situation.
We must go deeper, however, and recognize the backing that corporate interests and the financial community give to Zionism and the fostering of sectarian divisions in the Middle East in the interests of the long used method by colonial powers of dividing and conquering the people in an area they wish to exploit.
The two links below illustrate what I mean:
This video from Democracy Now is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen recently of the consequences of the U.S. colonization of Iraq:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/16/iraqi_womens_activist_rebuffs_us_claims
This recent video of Norman Finkelstein deals directly with the influence of “the Lobby” on U.S. foreign policy. The relevant part of the video begins at 32:30:
http://podcast.lannan.org/2011/12/14/norman-finkelstein-with-chris-hedges-conversation-6-december-2011-video/
If this man is as you say, Phil, and thus a man of great intelligence, it’s a sad and disturbing case: great intelligence yoked to a media arm in the service of propaganda. That makes him among the most dangerous sort.
And contemptible, too. Cowardice pure and simple is one thing; the man could have simply left the profession if he feared retribution.
Instead he became a collaborator, a willing executioner–of character, of policy analysis, and ultimately of real people.
Sickening and sad.
Has a great and thinking man found a place to publish what he really thinks, and if you ask him, “And now tell us what you really think,” does he vastly and ever-so-cogently come out with a very different position?
Having a sinecure (or even having a job at all in times like these) is reason enough for many people to make flacks of themselves — whether they can and do think differently or not. This explains (whether correctly or not) the miserable reporting of the media on Ron Paul, on Israel, etc.
Phil, your piece reads like there should be an excerpt or quotation from Andrew Sullivan sandwiched between those of Kinsley and Ben Smith, but it does not appear.
It’s a truism to state that the US media is disproportionately Jewish, and even moreso at the top. No one believes that every single one of these Jewish editors, publishers, and managers in our print and broadcast media believe it is a good idea for the US to support Israel no matter what. It is a sad fact that not a single one of this group of Jewish bosses has the courage to go public with their criticism of Israel and free their underlings to actually report what’s happening on the ground.