Antiwar.com has a piece called "America's Israeli-occupied media," by Philip Giraldi, a writer for the American Conservative. This strikes me as a milestone: because this kind of statement has now lost its incendiary lunatic-fringe tonalities, it is a commonplace.
Joe Klein's remarkable confession that Jewish neoconservatives with divided loyalties had fomented the Iraq war and were now moving on to Iran has opened the floodgates to this sort of journalism. Abe Foxman might as well get a barrel, we're all going over the falls on this one.
Giraldi cites the fact that the Times ran Benny Morris's shocking bomb-'em-now piece, that Tzipi Livni's father was an Irgunist who helped detonate the King David Hotel in 46, and that Wolf Blitzer worked for AIPAC. This is not a conspiracy theory; it's an exploration of affinities. Let us remember that anti-Zionist rabbis said this day would come; they warned that with the Law of Return, any American Jew would be susceptible to questioning on where his true allegiance lies. And some of that questioning is surely fair. For instance, an anti-Zionist website asserts that Judith Miller, the water-carrier for war lies at the Times who now serves at the neoconnish Manhattan Institute, is a Zionist. I don't know. I'd like to know. Just as I like to know about the religious agendas of people who oppose stem-cell research.
I think we are due for good journalism on this issue before long. And I have a suggestion. Joe Klein should name some of his sources, the neoconservatives who told him about the benign domino theory that would bring democracy to the Middle East. He says the conversations were off the record, but there must be a couple of these smart guys he can name. And Tom Friedman should name his sources: the 25 neoconservative intellectuals he told Haaretz about, that "elite" within a mile or so of his office, who conceived the great war. "It's not that 25 people hijacked America," Friedman says. No, but they sure helped. Who were these dreamers? Where is the accountability?
As a role model, here is the nonagenarian Louis Auchincloss, diming out his social cohort on an earlier disaster:
Bill Scranton, Ted Beale, both Bundys, Bill and McGeorge – they all got
behind that war in Vietnam and they pushed it as far as they could. And
we lost a quarter of a million men. They were all idealistic, good,
virtuous,” says Auchincloss, “the finest men you could find. It was the
most disillusioning thing that happened in my life.”
Auchincloss
has struggled to understand just how their shared patrician background
could have produced this disconnect. And the answer would appear to be
that wars are lost, if not always made, on the playing fields of New
England. “Bill Bundy and I shared a study at Groton…"
Richard Witty has said that I'm vindictive when I do posts like this. I don't want to kill these guys, I want an audit, I want them exposed and (further) marginalized. Open discussion is the sunlight of a democracy, and of Jewish tradition too.
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