Adam Kredo reports on private emails exchanged by a group supporting Hagel (called the Committee for the Republic) and exposes Fallows’s anger over Elliott Abrams’s use of the anti-Semitism smear, and his defense of Chas Freeman. Kredo:
Fallows, who has repeatedly defended Hagel on the Atlantic’s website, wrote [in the private emails] that “[Elliott] Abrams and his wife” are “central” figures in the fight against Hagel.
“Was there any single person who was as central to the ‘accusations’ in Chas Freeman’s case as Abrams and his wife, who’s centrally involved in Emergency Committee for Israel, have been in this case?”…..
“I won’t comment on what anyone else might have said in an email exchange that has been given to you,” Fallows said via email Monday… “I do not know [fellow group members] David Fenton or Robert Naiman,” Fallows added. “I do know and respect Charles Freeman.”
“I was going to say more about the flat-out anti-Semitism accusation that Elliott Abrams made on NPR a week ago,” he said. “But I decided to wait to see whether the Council on Foreign Relations stood behind or distanced itself from that charge.”
This is significant because Chas Freeman was smeared in 2009 when Obama chose him for director of national intelligence. Freeman was forced to abandon the offer and was then declared damaged goods: a good man disqualified from the mainstream discourse as an alleged “Arabist”. Fallows is obviously disturbed by this type of redlining, and is standing up for Freeman privately– and now publicly.
Arianna Huffington is also angry about the Elliott Abrams smear of Hagel:
What’s amazing is that the Council on Foreign Relations would allow its credibility to be used to advance an accusation like this. In response, a CFR official told Al-Monitor‘s Laura Rozen that the views of their experts are “theirs only” and that “the Council on Foreign Relations takes no institutional position on matters of policy.” But this isn’t policy, it’s character assassination. Does the Council take no official position on that?
Scott McConnell says the neocons have put the fat in the fire, and may regret it:
Of course, the reason the opposition to Hagel is so desperate and so focused on side-issues or made-up charges is because they don’t want a debate that would shine a spotlight on their spectacular and disastrous failure in Iraq.
Indeed, it is something of a puzzlement why Abrams even seeks a role in American foreign policymaking, as he has written that unless they live in Israel, Jews are “to stand apart from the nation in which they live,” though perhaps his views on this question have evolved.
In short, we are in for a wild ride. By raising charges against Hagel that those who know the man find bizarre and disgraceful, the neocons have succeeded in turning a spotlight on themselves–not only on their history of warmongering, but on their political tactics and on their character. They may regret it.
I wonder if we have not reached a watershed moment in the use of the anti-Semitism charge. For decades now, people who have wanted to speak out about the Israel/Palestine conflict have been frightened by the possibility of being charged with anti-Semitism. Many of my anonymous tipsters on this site don’t come forward because of that fear. And having experienced the charge myself, I can tell you that it’s deeply concerning: I wonder if the claim that I’m anti-Semitic will shadow my work and leave me sidelined for years to come, and diminish my ability to publish.
One of my anonymous writer friends complained to me about the pattern the other day– “this Stalinist use of the anti-Semitism bogy, the constant search for suspected kulaks” and went on:
Why is there a government office to monitor and combat anti-Semitism in a nation where an underclass of blacks and Indians was part of the fabric of the constitution. It is a combination of moralizing with opportunism.
[I wrote back, Well let's have a federal office against racism. My correspondent said:]
We have laws against racism, and courts. A government office against racism would be a magnet for cronyism and diverted taxpayer money, as this special-interest anti-Semitism office is. We should spend the money on education. My tax dollars should be going to schools and healthcare, not on kulak hunting.
“We have laws against racism, and courts. A government office against racism would be a magnet for cronyism and diverted taxpayer money, as this special-interest anti-Semitism office is. We should spend the money on education. My tax dollars should be going to schools and healthcare, not on kulak hunting.”
I so agree with this. And it’s not because I am not sympathic toward and don’t believe in protecting people from being discriminated against and treated as lesser humans or citizens.
We do have laws and those laws should be and are enforced for the most part as far as I can tell.
And beside creating offices for croynism and special interest it creates this national ‘notion’ where people of some races or classes will think of themselves as “Victims” or claim victim status whether they actually ARE vicitms or not….it would create even more attitudes among the public.
The last this country needs is to become a nation of victims.
The whole point to laws ending racism is to get to the point where all people are able to live ‘feeling equal’ as well as actually being equal and without feeling like they are some lesser class all their life…Not feeling different or singled out…which is what these kinds of offices would do.
The hounding to death of Aaron Swartz shows the degree of responsibility we can expect from an office within the Department of Justice.
The prosecutors in the Aaron Swartz case knew they would never get a unanimous guilty verdict against him from any computer literate jury. So they grossly over-charged him in hopes of scaring him into a plea bargain that would make him accept significant jail time. Instead they scared him so badly (he had always battled with depression) that he took his own life.
When I hear a song like “God Bless America” I sometimes wonder what America they’re talking about.
Carowhat, thanks for the post – you nailed it.
“And beside creating offices for croynism and special interest it creates this national ‘notion’ where people of some races or classes will think of themselves as “Victims” or claim victim status whether they actually ARE vicitms or not….it would create even more attitudes among the public.”
How right you are, American. All I ever hear from my white friends (I have a few, but I’ll be damned if i marry their daughters) is all about their victimisation at the hands of affirmative action and diversity. And the white Christians are victimised by atheists! Will nobody stand up for the rights of whites?
I’ve been following the Jacob Augstein debate over here, and just noticed that I was right Dieter Graumann the president of Central Council of German Jews does not believe Augstein is an antisemite either, I think we had already the vice president denying it. English version
And here is a little more from Rabbi Abraham-Cooper. The German TV audience only got one sentence in the larger “Augstein case context”. Anyway lame interview but interesting nevertheless and in English. We learn that France could have made it on the list too. Interesting to a certain extend it seems to be about Germany more than about Augstein. But to understand you have to listen to the very, very end.
Hendryk M. Broder, by the way has apologized to Augstein by now. I haven’t checked his “Axis of the Good” site, but it’s reported.
thanks leaNder, interesting
“I wonder if the claim that I’m anti-Semitic will shadow my work and leave me sidelined for years to come, and diminish my ability to publish.”
Not if you work it right! All you’ve got to do is rediscover you Judaism, re-affirm your Zionism (in the blandest, most indefinite terms, of course, no use painting yourself into another corner) and you’ll command double the rates. And think of the readings! Not a dry eye in the house, as you describe kneeling by your bedside, a broken man, and stuttering your first S’hma since boyhood through your tears. Just think of the product-placement fees from Soda-stream! You can ring down the curtain on this entire episode, and come out on the right side of the ledger.
OBTW, I hate to ask, but what did you think was going to happen when you entered the high-prophet, low-overhead field of anti-Zionism?
Five years ago Fallows himself was being smeared by the neocons: “Is James Fallows a Disloyal American?” by Gabriel Schoenfeld in Commentary. link to commentarymagazine.com
Imagine a cult of elite rich DC or NY gays and lesbians that sprung up and took over US foreign policy and started planning wars against third world countries such as Paraguay and Burundi on the basis that they were homophobic. And that loads of money paid by insurance companies to HIV patients was appropriated by the cult and none of it spent on the people who suffered. But nobody would talk about it
And ordinary gays felt that they had to support them. Except for a few who didn’t like it and knew that real homophobia would be back and that it was stupid to abuse the word for imperial purposes.
And tried to draw attention to the fable about the boy who cried wolf but were labeled “self hating fags”.
And afterwards Donald Trump went on youtube all camped up and said war was* fabulous*.
RE: “Fallows, who has repeatedly defended Hagel on the Atlantic’s website, wrote [in the private emails] that ‘[Elliott] Abrams and his wife’ are ‘central’ figures in the fight against Hagel.”
MEET RACHEL ABRAMS (ELLIOTT ABRAM’S WIFE):
“Rachel Podhoretz Decter Abrams’s Gay Problem — And Ours, by Daniel Luban, LobeLog.com, 7/13/10
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – link to lobelog.com
If Rachel Abrams has such a thing about homosexuality, I wonder what she thinks of William Kristol.
Midge Decter, by the way, wrote a notoriously vitriolic piece for Commentary on gays and Fire Island. The Boys on the Beach. (Decter’s piece is blocked by a paywall, but you can read Gore Vidal’s brilliant reply in The Nation: Some Jews & The Gays .)
that’s hysterical lysias
Dickerson – You have a habit of both excerpting and bolding within the excerpt. FWIW, I find it difficult to read. If it’s the right excerpt, why the need to bold?
from kredo’s article:
but it wasn’t until the very last paragraph of kredo’s article he informs the reader
then you open the article by Ali Gharib and it recounts abrams interview on NPR. and what kredo forgot to mention is that abrams ( on npr) was discussing kredo’s thoroughly debunked smear article! link to mondoweiss.net
it’s like a circular clusterf and when abrams attacks hagel personally he complains about getting smeared back? he expects people to argue his false allegations and not attack him personally.
RE: “it’s like a circular clusterf” ~ Annie Robbins
QUESTION: What the devil is a “circular clusterf”? [LOL!!!]
P.S. It was reportedly a favorite of Parisian “salon society” after-parties (after the women had retired to the sitting rooms).
A great-grandmother of mine supposedly told everyone she met: “We’re French, you know.”
If she had only known!
Or, might she have?
“Enquiring mimes want to know!”
pardon my parlance! in this case i meant kredo printing lies (immediately debunked) and the abrams humping the already debunked lies on npr and then kredo writing about abrams humping the lie on npr forgetting to mention the lie had been previously debunked and on and on … like a circular cf
RE: “Fallows, who has repeatedly defended Hagel on the Atlantic’s website, wrote [in the private emails] that ‘[Elliott] Abrams and his wife’ are ‘central’ figures in the fight against Hagel.” ~ Adam Kredo
MY COMMENT: As far as I am concerned, Elliott Abrams is one of those rare individuals who can fairly be derided as being ‘evil incarnate’.
His Iran-Contra associate in Central American mayhem (and its conjoined arms and drug trade), John Negroponte , is another.
FROM ‘RIGHT WEB’/IPS [Elliott Abrams]:
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to rightweb.irc-online.org
P.S. FROM HistoryCommons.org [Elliott Abrams]:
SOURCE – link to historycommons.org
Actually, the fact that Abramses and Crystol became central figures in the campaign against Hagel shows how narrow and tepid this campaign was. The most significant change that I see in this affair is that the notion of Zionist extremist fringe was defined at long last. The grand poobah of the Jewish establishment went through motions of opposing Hagel but without zest, and it would take a page to list Jewish commentators, journalists etc. who were opposing the opposition. In the Hagel affair, AIPAC was a hollow shell, a shadow of the dragon which nixed the idea of “settlement freeze” that Obama floated in 2009.
There is a growing sense in those circles that (i) war on Iran is a moronic idea and (ii) settlement expansion has to stop. The first point is easy, for all huffing and puffing Israel cannot do it without American permission. The second is hard, because this and the next government of Israel will escalate the settlement expansion, intensify oppression and dispossession until it is disciplined by some form of sanctions and “regular Zionists” have to face that.
This is closely related to the issue of “new anti-Semitism”. My attitude is “we are all new-Antisemites”. New anti-Semitism is a bait-and-switch concept. Bait: it is evil to slaughter 6 million people. Switch: it is evil to oppose any steps that Israeli deem necessary for their survival, however insane and delusional.
New anti-Semitism has think tanks devoted to classifying and tracking the phenomenon and branding the perpetrators. It has about as much of moral validity as Intelligent Design has scientific validity.
To restate my modest proposal, any accusation of anti-Semitism should be inspected: old or new? If new, the accusation is not a slander but kvetching. The accused should be viewed as not harmed, and he/she/they should not be harmed.
“New anti-Semitism has think tanks devoted to classifying and tracking the phenomenon and branding the perpetrators. It has about as much of moral validity as Intelligent Design has scientific validity.”
What’s interesting is that Bernard Lewis’s Islamophobia fully mirrors, no comprehensively extends, what he called new anti-Semitism, including his wet dream about Iranian cosmic evil.
RE: “I wonder if we have not reached a watershed moment in the use of the anti-Semitism charge.” ~ Weiss
MY COMMENT: Have I derided Phil’s Weissglossian optimism lately?
If not, this is a good occasion for it.