Here's
a disgrace. A rabbi/blogger named
Kurt Stone is seeking to dispel reports that Obama is being advised on
Middle East policy by anyone who is remotely critical of Israel, say Zbig Brzezinski or Rob Malley. Stone finds that in fact
Obama's advisers make up a Jewish "minyan"–a religious congregation–and reels off several
Jewish names and also that of Denis McDonough:
Denis is a stalwart supporter of Israel, and despite the fact that
he is not "MOT" ["A Member of the Tribe"] he is without
question a member-in-good-standing of the Obama Minyan.
Horrifying. These might be the views of just another ethnocentric rabbi who wants Jews to control policymaking in this part of the world, except that his
analysis is being passed around by Barry Jacobs, a leading official of the
American Jewish Committee. So reports Mike Desch, who picked the Obama Minyan
piece off a listserv titled Salon@committeefortherepublic.org, to which a member had posted it after receiving it from the AJC. One of the
great lessons of Aaron David Miller's book and also the book by Dan Kurtzer,
who is one of Rabbi Stone's elect, is that there were too many Jews on Clinton's advisory team for it to be effective. Sad that an AJC official is endorsing this kind of dangerous
chauvinism. We need Arab-Americans involved in this process, gentiles, if we are to escape the cycle of violence this conflict has generated.
