US Middle East policy is politicized in two congressional races

by on June 12, 2012 11
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Here is further evidence that the cat is out of the bag–that American policy in Israel/Palestine issue will at last be discussed openly in our media, and that American voters will get to divide over the matter. 

At Huffington Post, James Zogby says the Steve Rothman defeat in New Jersey signals the empowerment of Arab Americans:

When the results were in, Bill Pascrell emerged victorious with over 60 percent of the vote. The Paterson turnout was decisive with Arab precincts recording such lopsided totals as 134 for Pascrell to 3 for Rothman, and 222 to 6 and 195 to 6 and 290 to 20.

While this election had been termed by some Jewish writers and organizations as “Arabs versus Jews” and being “all about Israel,” it was not. If anything this election was about Paterson voting for its favorite son, and it was about Arab Americans coming of age, demonstrating that they will not be quiescent in the face of attacks that slander their friends and attempt to demonize and marginalize the community.

Then there’s rightwinger Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post saying that Rothman’s defeat represents the downfall of the Jewish community, under the heel of antisemitism. This is so crazy I have to quote it, though yes I wonder if under the hysteria there is not a political development here.

Note that Glick says Rothman was singled out for being Jewish:

The striking weakness of the American Jewish community was exposed on Tuesday with the Democratic primary defeat of Rep. Steve Rothman in New Jersey…

Ahead of the 2008 US presidential elections, the anti-Israel pressure group J Street made a sudden appearance. Claiming to be pro-Israel, the anti-Israel lobby set about neutralizing the power of the American Jewish community by undermining community solidarity. And it has succeeded brilliantly.

Rothman is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel. His defeat at the polls in New Jersey by Rep. Bill Pascrell owed in large part to openly anti-Semitic activism by Pascrell’s Muslim supporters.

Then there’s the Democratic race for Congress in Brooklyn between Hakim Jeffries and Charles Barron, in which Barron’s harsh critiques of Israel are being thrown at him. Yesterday several of Barron’s critics held a press conference, “billed as an effort ‘to Denounce Charles Barron as Enemy of the State of Israel’ and the Jewish community,” according to this report by Politicker:

[Congressman Jerrold] Nadler was specifically concerned by Mr. Barron’s statements comparing the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians to the holocaust. He carried a few selected quotes made by Mr. Barron on a small slip of paper.

“When he compared what the Israelis are doing in Gaza to the conditions Nazis imposed on the Jews. Where is the Auchswitz? I mean, come on. That is so irresponsible, and so libelous and so disgusting,” said Mr. Nadler. “To compare Israel to Nazis, calling what Israel’s doing genocide? Israel’s trying to survive in a tough neighborhood….They’re not doing anything like Nazis. To even put them in the same universe is a disgrace to the English language….His election to Congress, to some extent, would legitimize this kind of anti-Semitic discourse and we don’t need that.”

I have no idea what Barron has said, and how ugly or not it was. I was reminded of the Warsaw Ghetto when I went to Gaza, and the Holocaust plainly has affected the Israeli mindset: many critics, and I’m one, believe that Israel has modeled the behavior of the abuser. Oh and by the way, and not that two wrongs make a right, but the late Tom Lantos compared Saddam to Hitler, and Netanyahu has repeatedly likened Iran to Nazi Germany.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in American Jewish Community, Israel Lobby, Israel/Palestine, Media, US Policy in the Middle East, US Politics

{ 11 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Woody Tanaka says:
    June 12, 2012 at 11:05 am

    The worst part about Nadler’s statement is the unspoken assumption that Nazi Germany was bad solely because of the genocide. Even if no Jew was killed, and all that happened was that they were wrenched from their homes and stuck in ghettos, that would still have made that state and evil, evil place.

  2. lysias says:
    June 12, 2012 at 11:32 am

    When the results were in, Bill Pascrell emerged victorious with over 60 percent of the vote. The Paterson turnout was decisive with Arab precincts recording such lopsided totals as 134 for Pascrell to 3 for Rothman, and 222 to 6 and 195 to 6 and 290 to 20.

    There are also Turks (and Hispanics) in downtown Paterson. (I once had an excellent meal in a Turkish pide restaurant there.) With figures like these, all the ethnic groups in Paterson must have voted heavily for Pascrell.

  3. Linda J says:
    June 12, 2012 at 12:37 pm

    Russia Today Cross-talk show w/Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Pollak and Mouin Rabbani on American Jews & Israel (falling out of love with). link to youtu.be

    • FreddyV says:
      June 14, 2012 at 8:19 pm

      Dan Pollak tries to say that Finkelstein is ‘lionised’ by the Jewish community and shortly after says he and Norm Chomskey are pariahs within the same group.

      Norm gets the last word and calls Pollak on it. Hilarious!

  4. Annie Robbins says:
    June 12, 2012 at 12:50 pm

    as an outsider (i don’t know nj politics) one thing stands out for me. rothman is a coward. instead of staying home and taking on the gop candidate he moves(literally) over to Pascrell’s turf and tries to take out a popular sitting dem candidate. he got what he deserved. he should have shown some cajons and tried to take out the opposition when his district got eliminated.

  5. DICKERSON3870 says:
    June 12, 2012 at 4:24 pm

    RE: “I was reminded of the Warsaw Ghetto when I went to Gaza, and the Holocaust plainly has affected the Israeli mindset: many critics, and I’m one, believe that Israel has modeled the behavior of the abuser.” ~ Weiss

    FOR INSTANCE, SEE: “Avraham Burg: Israel’s new prophet” ~ By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 1 November 2008
    Avraham Burg was a pillar of the Israeli establishment but his new book is causing a sensation. It argues that Israel is an “abused child” which has become a “violent parent”. And his solutions are radical, as he explains to Donald Macintyre.

    (excerpts). . .But his book “The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes” – published this week in Britain – caused a much bigger sensation when it came out last year in Israel, at once becoming a best-seller and provoking a furious reaction not only from the right but from many of Burg’s former colleagues on the political centre-left. In the book – a compelling mix of polemic, personal memoir, homage to his parents and meditation on Judaism – Burg argues that Israel has been too long imprisoned by its obsessive and cheapening use – or abuse – of the Holocaust as “a theological pillar of Jewish identity”. He argues that the living role played by the Holocaust – Burg uses the regular Hebrew word Shoah or “catastrophe” for the extermination of six million Jews in the Second World War – in everyday Israeli discourse, has left Israel with a persistent self-image of a “nation of victims”, in stark variance with its actual present-day power. Instead, the book argues, Israel needs finally to abandon the “Judaism of the ghetto” for a humanistic, “universal Judaism”.
    The implication of Burg’s analysis, one that perhaps only an Israeli would have dared promote, is that the fostered memory of the Holocaust hovers destructively over every aspect of Israeli political life – including its relations with the Palestinians since the 1967 Six Day War and the subsequent occupation. “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context,” he writes, “and turned it into a plea and generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah and therefore all is allowed – be it fences , sieges … curfews, food and water deprivation or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.”
    For Burg, whose own father Yosef was a German Jew, and for many years leader of Israel’s National Religious Party, the “real watershed moment” in this deforming process was the trial and subsequent execution in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, which Yosef Burg vainly opposed from inside the Cabinet. Instead of Eichmann’s death symbolising, as it was meant to do, “the end of the Shoah and the beginning of the post-Shoah period,” he says, in reality “the opposite happened… The Shoah discourse had begun.” . . .

    ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to informationclearinghouse.info

  6. American says:
    June 12, 2012 at 6:10 pm

    Well I read Barron’s speech and don’t see it as exaggerated …is it exactly as he describes it. ….at least by everyone else who has actually been there.

    If Jerrold doesn’t like Israel being likened to nazis then the solution is simple….have them quit acting like nazis.
    Till then– tough s*** Jerry —you and Israel are gonna have to own it, maybe you will have to own it for decades, a century maybe, depending on what Israel does next.

  7. American says:
    June 12, 2012 at 6:31 pm

    I think Glick is losing her edge, she only used anti semites and anti semitic and Jew hatred 5 times in 19 paragraphs.

    But why is she so upset over Rothman’s lose? She has always claimed Israel doesn’t need the US and our support had nothing to do with the Israel firsters in our congress.

  8. American says:
    June 13, 2012 at 12:25 am

    Barron could win. the Labor unions are supporting him.

    Labor Boosts Mugabe Lover, Israel Foe Charles Barron In New York

    He was called a “malignant clown” by the Daily News this weekend, but New York City Councilman Charles Barron, the controversial Brooklyn Democrat who last year mourned Muammar Qaddafi and hosted Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe at City Hall (and who has called Israel “the biggest terrorist in the world”) is getting a big financial boost from local labor unions in his bid for Congress. Ben Smith at Buzzfeed has the scoop:

    Two major city public worker unions, District Councils 37 and 1707 of the giant American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, have already endorsed Barron against Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a relatively moderate legislator who has championed charter schools, a union bugaboo.

    And BuzzFeed has learned that their powerful federal parent union, known as AFSCME, is planning to dive into the race on Barron’s behalf. Another key New York State public workers union, the Civil Service Employees Association, meanwhile, blocked an AFL-CIO effort to endorse Barron’s rival.

    “We respect the voice of our members,” AFSCME spokesman Chris Policano told BuzzFeed. “With the unanimous endorsement of the three affiliates, there will be money spent in this race.”

    link to slate.com