Israel lobby group AIPAC and the National Security Council come down on NBC for raising questions about a Biden aide who donated $559,000 to AIPAC — calling the story an antisemitic allegation of dual loyalty — and NBC retracts the story! A shocking case of influence in plain sight.
Netanyahu sticks his thumb in the eye of US security establishment by embracing Jonathan Pollard in Israel, a man who endangered US lives with his espionage. And Pollard flew to Israel on Sheldon Adelson’s plane. The donor has gotten one move after another from Trump on behalf of Israel.
Standing up for Ilhan Omar’s controversial point about allegiance to a foreign country, Peter Beinart says his children in a Jewish day school believe they should be loyal to both the US and Israel, and that AIPAC has sided with the Israeli government over the US one and maybe ought to have to register as a foreign agent.
Israeli politician Benny Gantz raised the specter of dual loyalty of Jews in other nations when he said yesterday, “If there is one Jew in danger, anywhere in the world, then our mission is unfinished.”
The AIPAC policy conference in Washington began Sunday on a defensive note, with the Israel lobby organization’s chief executive saying that Israel’s friends face a terrible new challenge: taking on “the scurrilous charge of dual loyalty” and declaring “The intense hatred of Israel is now creeping from the margins to the center of our politics.”
Memo to Tom Friedman: Israel is not your “ancestral homeland,” that is a Zionist myth. There was never an exile from Judea. Jews were all over the Roman Empire as converts; and your ancestors were surely among them. And mythical Jewish history doesn’t convey rights to someone born in Minnesota.