With Walt and Mearsheimer’s Israel Lobby book about to burst onto the scene, the poverty of the existing debate over the Israel interest in American politics is demonstrated by the coverage of Freedom’s Watch, the new rightwing group spending millions on television to urge the Congress to keep American forces in Iraq.
Only the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has the guts to say what is obvious, that "Pro-Surge Group Is Almost All Jewish" that four out of five board members of Freedom’s Watch are Jewish, and the fifth board member is married to a Jew. I take this point further. A large number of Freedom’s Watch’s staff or backers have stated that Israel’s security is central to their view of the Iraq war.
Matthew Brooks, a board member of the group, said two years back to justify this war:
You know, as well as I, that Saddam
Hussein launched scud missiles atIsrael
…
You know that Saddam paid a bounty of
$25,000 to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers.
Brooks is director of a group called the Republican Jewish Coalition, which does not even accept the idea of a Palestinian state. It speaks only of a "Palestinian political entity" under the right circumstances. I think it’s in America’s interest to push for a Palestinian state!
Then there’s Freedom’s Watch board member and spokesman Ari Fleischer. Three years ago I heard him tell a Jewish audience in
Cincinnati that they should vote for Bush because he had helped make Israel safer with the Iraq war. And as for the the director of the new group, Brad Blakeman, last year at the end of Israel’s botched and gruesome Lebanon war, Blakeman, an Orthodox Jew, said on MSNBC:
Israel
… could have wiped out
Lebanon
in a day if they chose
to. They chose not to.
[Israel] knows exact what it‘s doing. Israel is
protecting their borders.Israel
is fighting with one hand tied behind their back. They‘re fighting according
to international law.
Blakeman had worked in the Bush White House. His brother Bruce told the Forward that Bush launched the Iraq war partly out of concern for Israel.
"The
president realized not only that Saddam Hussein was a danger to
America, but that Saddam Hussein had designs on attacking Israel," said
Blakeman, whose brother Brad is a former Bush aide. "There was a
concern that an attack on Israel would turn into a regional war, with
Syria and Iran joining in on Iraq’s side."
Among donors to Freedom’s Watch are real estate kingpin Richard Fox, who is the head of the unreconstructed neoconservative Jewish Policy Center. And casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has lately donated $60 million to Birthright, the program that seeks to indoctrinate young American Jews in a love of Israel by paying for a free trip there before they turn 26 (gentiles need not apply!).
Most of the leaders of this group live and breathe Israel, but this overarching concern is nowhere to be found in their calls on Americans to sacrifice more blood and treasure in Iraq. When they talk about threats to the region, they are talking about Israel’s security. And the press lets them get away with this subterfuge, with the exception of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The Washington Post, for instance, was happy to suggest that
the organization is a "White House front," but said nothing about the
Jewish character of the board, or those Jews’ view of Israel. Politico was also silent on the issue. In a second piece, the Washington Post reported that one board member leads neocon cipher Scooter Libby’s defense committee.
I wish the Post would ask these guys what they think about Israel. Nope, they’re all afraid to mention it.
Again I note, there’s nothing wrong with rightwingers expressing their views. The problem is when those views have a religious character that they’re not upfront about, and that the press declines to discuss. Any one else bringing a religious worldview to American politics is described as doing just that. We constantly hear about the "evangelical" voters or the "Christian right." What about the Jewish right? Especially now, when there’s a widespread apprehension in the country that the Israel-centric Jewish right pushed this disastrous war.
