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.
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.
“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. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2007/10/22/is-james-fallows-a-disloyal-american/
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*.