The New York Times has run a front-page article about Jewish donors battling over the Iran deal, converging on Chuck Schumer and other politicians to support or oppose the deal. The piece is rigged to leave the impression that the two sides are evenly matched in financial firepower and political influence.
The thrust of the article is that a lot of donors feel strongly about this deal, and they’re canceling one another out. In fact, the pro-deal people even seem to be somewhat ahead in the article.
The article actually misrepresents four big donors as opposing forces: George Soros and Haim Saban are “on the left,” and Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson are on the right, it asserts. The truth is that Saban is opposing the deal. That count is actually three against one; and Saban and Adelson together are two rightwing lobby giants who have talked about buying the New York Times.
This misrepresentation is continued when authors Jonathan Weisman and Nicholas Confessore say that the Israel lobby group AIPAC is spending “millions” against the deal, while the liberal Zionist group J Street is spending, more specifically, $5 million. Why can’t they tell us that AIPAC is spending as much as $40 million. As NPR reported more honestly last week:
AIPAC and Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran plan to spend between $20 million and $40 million on this fight. That range vastly dwarfs the $5 million its main adversary has to spend — J-Street, a pro-Israel group that supports the deal.
That doesn’t sound very even now, does it? Anyone reading the article would come away with the misplaced complacent view that the debate is a stalemate. But there’s new and disturbing evidence that the anti-deal money is effectively corrupting the political process. The polling numbers on the Iran deal began heavily in favor of it. Now the polls have swung even or against the deal. That surely reflects the millions spent on the airwaves against the deal. If you look at the latest Quinnipiac poll of New York, it suggests that outer-borough Catholics and Jews are against the deal while Manhattan Jews are overwhelmingly for the deal. This reflects the fact that elites, who tend to be more educated and informed, are for the deal, while people who have less time to follow such matters because they’re working are being swayed by scare ads on the Nightly News that make Iran seem like 50 North Koreas (to quote Benjamin Netanyahu, per Michael Oren).
So the NYT is covering up for the rightwing Israel lobby here by portraying a process of corruption as one of contending equal forces. It’s a little like corporate fatcat journalism in the good old days that used to say, ‘Hey, labor unions pour money into the election campaigns too, so the left and the right balance one another out!’
In fact, the donor imbalance is likely the reason that Chuck Schumer is opposing the deal. Insiders say that Schumer is doing so so as to raise money for Senate candidates in the next election so that they will support him for Democratic leader, and he knows that the big Jewish money is against the deal. All the same, he is doing a form of Kabuki hedge: opposing it but quietly, so as to not alienate President Obama and the liberal Zionists completely.
That ideological power struggle inside the Israel lobby between liberal Zionists and rightwing Zionists is also absent from the Times’ consideration. It is epitomized by the fact that S. Daniel Abraham of SlimFast fortune is a big supporter of J Street and is for the deal. Abraham’s beneficiary, Robert Wexler, the former Florida congressman, has come out for the deal too, and this kind of support has held the Jewish firewall against Schumer. It has allowed J Street to brag today:
A majority (5 of 9) of the Jewish Members of the Senate now publicly support the #IranDeal: Boxer, Feinstein, Franken, Sanders, Schatz
The liberal Zionist forces are against the occupation and against Netanyahu. Record producer Danny Goldberg just wrote an article piece for Huffington Post saying that Schumer and the Likud Party are destroying the “pro-Israel” brand that he and his father loved, an idealistic Israel.
Danny Goldberg is 65. Sheldon Adelson is 82.
Right now the rightwing Adelson Israel lobby in the United States has a lot more money than the liberal Zionist Goldberg wing. But J Street and the liberal Zionists are betting on the future, and believe those donors can somehow save Israel from the occupation.
P.S. One really good thing about the New York Times article is that it breaks a longstanding MSM taboo about identifying donors as Jewish. Virtually every donor in the piece is Jewish, and several are identified as Jewish or caring about Israel. The headline is neutral — just “donors” — but you can’t get to the end of the article without thinking, This is a battle of Jewish donors over an issue that affects all Americans. So the Times is demonstrating that it is possible to discuss a central fact of the political landscape — some Jews have great wealth and are using it in the political sphere in tremendous disproportion to their percentage of the population — without the sky falling.
The dilemma: completely given over to a daily reading of the New York Times while detesting its coverage of I/P issues (and its determined Russophobia as well).
Thanks, James and Phil.
Very sorry state of affairs.
On a similar topic, MW readers may want to take time to read a special section of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), sent to subscribers with the August/2015 issue, called “The Israel Lobby”, transcripts of a April 10, 2015, National Press Club conference (presumably not reported elsewhere) on that topic. Very long, lots of new (to me) information on the tentacular lobby as it distorts news, smirches people’s reputations, suppresses discussion, all things we’ve long known about, but lots of details.
Announced here (http://www.wrmea.org/action-alert-archives/announcing-speakers-for-april-10-israel-lobby-conference.html) but seems not public on-line. Seems available on sale on paper or DVD (http://www.wrmea.org/action-alert-archives/order-special-israel-lobby-supplement.html)
I think the NYT feels that it has to create a false equivalency in order to write a front-page piece about Jewish donors and American foreign policy, so as to escape the howls from communal organisations. How many NYT reporters and editors are going to schul with these people? This is how the Goldstone report got crushed; communal pressure. So the NYT is being selective with the truth to write (small parts) of the truth at all.
As you say, even talking frankly about the Jewish donor class is in of itself a step forward. I’d be interested to know if there was lobbying from the WH, specifically the Jewish members of the admin, on the NYT to write about this.
Obama and his team knows that his real domestic opposition is the right-wing Jewish donor class – which transcends party – and as such need a firewall of their own, the J Street money to escape the accusations.
Obama surely felt stung after he got attacked on the NYT front-page no less for talking “dangerously” by invoking the lobby and the donor class. Seems the Times came around and I wouldn’t bet against heavy WH involvement to push this story out.
P.S. Note that it’s all Jewish Zionism inside baseball here from the NYT in these recent weeks. You’d think the NYT would be interested in interviewing any Iranian-Americans, but nope! Their voices just don’t count, just like Palestinians don’t next to Zionist Jews.
The “money balance” is harder to figure than James and Phillip suggest. Adelson’s wing of Israeli lobby is rabidly partisan so they would not contribute to war chests of Democratic candidates in any case. What I would call “ZOA wing or Adelson wing” of the Lobby made a bet that GOP is a natural ally of Israel, and additionally a perfect representation for their other causes, e.g. bashing trade unions, keeping taxes low, preventing any actions to decrease the use of fossil fuels and so on.
One could also defend NYT that it is natural for journalists to focus on novelty and accentuate the unusual. And the split in the Lobby is a relatively new and important phenomenon.
That said, expecting NYT to give a “full picture” is naive, and I understand the need to complement that picture (I mean, “add to”, not “praise”). The other fact is that the “leftwing Israel Lobby” has a record of collaborating with the nixing of the settlement freeze, fights BDS and so on. They merely recognize that a success of AIPAC/CNFI would by Pyrrhic, or perhaps an outright “own goal”.
By the way, according to Russian Spring, Kerry said that rejection of the deal with Iran would collapse EU support for sanctions on Russia. Their motto used to be “Only verified information” but lately it is “continuation of the project” (they changed the web address), but I am lazy to verify it.
It seems Sen. Al Franken is for the deal. At least that is one congressperson who has been able to reject Bibi’s propaganda. Still, he makes sure Israel’s security is mentioned.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/13/opinions/franken-iran-deal/