Let’s play, Find the Israel lobby.
Today the New York Times prints a fairly long story on page A15, titled “Menendez’s Views on Cuba and Iran Show Rifts With Obama,” about Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bucking President Obama on certain foreign policy issues. Cuba is an understandable difference. Menendez is the son of Cuban immigrants. But Iran is the more critical divide.
I kept looking through the piece, asking, where’s the lobby? where’s the lobby? where’s the lobby? Because a lot of it is about Iran sanctions. Menendez is pushing for more sanctions. He described Obama’s appeal for time to negotiate during the State of the Union speech as “talking points that come straight out of Tehran.”
Finally, three paragraphs from the end, I found the lobby. Menendez himself brings it up:
Mr. Menendez also said he took “personal offense” at the president’s suggestion during a closed-door exchange last month that supporters of the Iran sanctions bill were motivated by politics. Some of the people there interpreted the comment as a thinly veiled reference to pressure from pro-Israel groups that back a hard line against Iran. (Mr. Menendez has received $341,170 over the last seven years from such groups, more than any other Democrat in the Senate, according to Maplight, a nonpartisan research group.)
OK. That’s the answer to today’s puzzle. You find the Israel lobby– “pressure from pro-Israel groups that back a hard line against Iran”– three paragraphs from the end of the story.
(On the plus side, I have to say, I thought I wasn’t going to find the lobby at all in Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Ashley Parker’s story. And I attribute the fact that the lobby is in there, although buried, to pressure from a broad-based grassroots community, including Palestinian solidarity activists, Jewish Voice for Peace, and American national interest types.)
The NYT uses the term “pro-Israel lobby” instead of just Israel lobby. The reason being that saying the former is somehow less offensive than the latter.
Saying pro-Israel lobby suggests that it is a partisan organisation but still part and parcel of America. Saying it is simply the Israel lobby means it is entirely foreign, which it is, because it’s un-American.
That’s still a battle we have to fight, but yes, there is progress here.
What do more sanctions against Iran mean? Surely there are no US companies doing business with Iran, the only way the US can impose more sanctions, is if they threaten other countries more than they are doing now, China and Russia for instance, in which case they will rightly tell the US to ‘take a hike’. Senator Menendez [Likud] is only singing for his supper. How the American electorate put up him and that other crazy fool McCain, they have to explain.
the joke to me is-and the proof of how insular the new york so-called intellectual left is-that even if this menendez senator is influenced by the big bad ‘lobby’ its the assumption that ordinary mainstream Americans from the midwest, south, and in-between believe the appeasement of Iran is in the US interest. That many Americans hold to the believe that Iran is an enemy of the US that has nothing to do with the AIPAC and disagreements with Netanyahu govt. A very good argument could be made that its the left leaning msm that has been pushing the fusion of Israeli hardline on Iran and Obamas risky strategy of empowering the Irans against the wishes of some of the USAs oldest allies in the region. That the left in the US is pleased with this policy hardly makes the case that the US legislature is ONLY motivated by “politics” where I would submit that most conservative americans do not trust Iran period-and regardless of the addition of a US allies claims that Iran represents a looming threat. And there is nothing inherently anti-American about supporting a close allies policy against a mutual enemy. Just like there are many in Israel who disagree with Nety policy so to many in US not trust Obama policy regarding Iran.
Sorry, DaBakr, but after reading dozens of your comments, I’m not sure that you have the expertise necessary to recognize a “very good argument.”