Sheldon and Miriam Adelson
This is so shocking it’s funny. LOL funny. ROTFLMAO funny. The New York Times has a long front-page story by Nicholas Confessore about Sheldon Adelson’s wife Miriam donating another $5 million to the Gingrich campaign and there is no mention of Adelson’s #1 issue, Israel. Not a single mention.
What is the Times doing to the discourse? Hollowing it out. Chris Matthews needs the Times if he is going to discuss this openly. The bloggers at the Center for American Progress need the Times if they are going to hold their positions.
The more shocking when you see that the Forward profiles Miriam Adelson as an Israeli-born doctor who has founded clinics and gives millions to Birthright, the program to propagandize American Jews for Israel.
Tablet is also forthright about Sheldon’s agenda.
But if [the nominee] does end up being Gingrich, it will be in no small part thanks to Sheldon Adelson, the richest Jew in the world (as he has boasted) and an extremely hawkish supporter of Israel. And this is quite important. Earlier this month, Adelson materially aided Gingrich and politically helped him by changing the narrative when he donated $5 million to a pro-Gingrich group, well over half of which was spent in South Carolina.
And David Bromwich at the New York Review of Books is trenchant (no wonder this was the quotation of the day for Andrew Sullivan):
The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with the help of an American party in an election year, for an act of war that it could not hope to accomplish unassisted; while an American opposition party complies with the demand of support by a foreign power, in an election year, to gain financial backing and popular leverage that it could not acquire unassisted.
Bromwich lauds New Yorker editor David Remnick for speaking frankly about Jewish donations on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show, GPS.
Remnick’s comment is especially notable because it gives up the euphemism “Jewish voters” and refers frankly to Jewish donors. It is millions of dollars and not just a few thousand votes that the pandering Republicans are trawling for.
And not just Republicans. Obama is also trawling. From the New York Post:
Obama had started his evening [last Thursday] at a reception and discussion with Jewish leaders at [Upper East Side restaurant] Daniel about relations between Israel and the United States. The event was thrown by UBS’s Robert Wolf, Aryeh Bourkoff, Dr. Daniel Fass and Jeremy Goldberg, among others.
Before the discussion, there was a private reception where Obama met with Harvey Weinstein and Showtime’s Matt Blank….
During the discussion, Obama stressed his strong support for Israel, and discussed the peace process, energy policy and Iran. The event, attended by up to 100, raised about $500,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign.
I have to believe that the Iran talk at Obama’s events last Thursday night was less bellicose than it was during the Republican debate last night, in which two candidates seemed to relish a confrontation with Iran. I have to believe that there is a split within the Jewish (Israel-loving) community on this question, and that Sheldon Adelson’s money and Obama’s money-men are on opposite sides. Alas the Times is doing nothing to advance that process.
The Times’ omission is the more stunning because elsewhere in the same paper it does talk about Adelson’s big issue, apropos of an Islamophobic film from the Clarion Fund used by the NY police for training:
[Clarion’s] previous documentary attacking Muslims’ “war on the West” attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.
P.S. Some gratitude to the Times. Here is Bill Keller, the former NYT editor, trying to calm the Iran talk with a piece called Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb-Iran. He goes after Matthew Kroenig’s recent article in Foreign Policy and seems to express misgivings for his own disastrous support for the Iraq war. The piece includes some hinting references to the Israel lobby.
The [warmaking] scenario above is extracted from an article by Matthew Kroenig in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. (The particulars are Kroenig’s; the mordant attitude is mine.) Kroenig, an academic who spent a year as a fellow at the Obama administration’s Defense Department, apparently aspires to the Strangelovian superhawk role occupied in previous decades by the likes of John Bolton and Richard Perle. His former colleagues at Defense were pretty appalled by his article, which combines the alarmist worst case of the Iranian nuclear threat with the rosiest best case of America’s ability to make things better. (Does this remind you of another pre-emptive war in a country beginning with I?)
This scenario represents one pole in a debate that is the most abused foreign policy issue in this presidential campaign year.
Actually, pretty impressive of the Times to mention the Adelson gifts at all. Arthur best be careful least he ends up like poor old Alfred Harmsworth
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_bruck?currentPage=all
Read…it…all.
A revived peace process. We wouldn’t want that. And he got his way:
Money doesn’t buy influence does it? Nah:
Quid meet quo. This shows both the power of money and the corrupting influence of Christian Zionism.
This was all in the New York Times article right? Uh..oh..nevermind. All the news that’s fit to spike.
I don’t understand, there is a “split” between Harvey Weinstein, the guys from UBS, Showtime etc and Sheldon Adelson? Yeah, I dont think so my brother.
You would think that Showtime and Harvey were proponents of the sopa/pipa bills. They bust up unions just like Ol Shelly, and are all known to be ruthless capitalists – this is who they are. Showtime and the Weinstein’s want young, cool people in and watching their products – so, they donate to democrats, who carry out the same agenda as the Republicans when in power. This is all marketing gimmicks – these guys are two sides of the same coin.
I really dont understand the recent obsession with Adelson. Nor do I understand the “why wont the NY Times or Chris matthews discuss this” stuff. They aren’t going to discuss it Phil. They aren’t going to admit they have been lying for decades – its just not going to happen. And that is precisely what it would mean if all of a sudden the Times and NBC changed its tune or “allowed different voices” etc. Nope, the mainstream press will continue to be a place where a major propagandist of a war of aggression can years later make jokes — “(Does this remind you of another pre-emptive war in a country beginning with I?)”– about a slaughter that killed hundreds of thousands like it was a bad dinner entree selection. And he’ll even get “some gratitude.”
This whole fucking conversation is waaaaaaay to “polite” for my tastes. (some) American Jews represent the most reactionary, racist and militaristic elements in American society – but unlike many of the toothless gentiles on the right wing, they have “Serious People” credentials – they own businesses, write for newspapers, journals, broadcast “news” and so on. So, they are taken seriously. Their language is measured, they seem symptathetic, and maybe they even donate to charity. They resemble something approaching humanity, so we project onto them views similar to our own. We begin quests to find this humanity, “we have to believe” its there. Well, brother Phil – it aint. Adelson is just keeping it real.
And not for nothing, the Times already writes too much about “all things jewish” — I know its your thing Phil, but the rest of us are getting kind of tired of hearing and reading about the “debates” or potential “debates” within the “jewish community” – as if the Jews are some sort of vanguard we need to first wait on, then follow. You guys aren’t as interesting as you think. And maybe not as important to the “discussion” going forward. The cat is out of the bag and us gentiles aren’t feeling as guilty as we once did. You saw the panic in Ynet’s response to Ben Whites book and Zoabi’s forward – THAT is progress. A jewish guy writing about jewish guys as it relates to jewish people in Israel and their relations with Palestinians has the effect (even if unintended) of making I/P and “israel firsters” like Adelson etc a “jewish issue” — its not. The Times in no way offers an alternative to I/P being cast as a jewish issue – all the way down the line, from its investors/owners to its editors to its writers. I’d like to see Phil and Co. take on jewish dominance/vanguardism in advocacy on this issue, it seems like the same entitlement that adelson and weinstein feel is felt elsewhere as well
The NY Times didn’t cover the Andrew Adler “Gee, the Mossad really should think about assassinating Obama” story. Neither did the Washington Post.
should the israel-firster abelson couple’s ten million dollar gift to a gingrich superpac help win the presidency for him, will the quid pro quo be an iran war? if so, when the body bags start coming home, what will be president gingrich’s message to the bereaved loved ones of u.s. navy personnel killed in the straits of gormuz? something like “nobody can say that your loved one died in vain, because they gave their lives for the settler entity israel – that it remain jewish and democratic* with jerusalem as its capital.”
*except for its being ethnically cleansed of palestinians