The Jerusalem Post is giving Abe Foxman a blog platform to deny that neoconservatism has a Jewish connection, to deny that neocons played a role in the Iraq war, and so forth. Basically to jump all over Joe Klein on the dual loyalty "canard." It's time the American mainstream media visited this important question, got it out of the ghetto. Joe Klein, you have connections, kick this can down the road a little further. Because the key to figuring out the Middle East mess is to get more folks involved, not less. Fewer folks=Israel lobby=Tom Friedman's wonderful statement of a year back or so:
the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the
neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when
September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this
is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite.
Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom
are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if
you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq
war would not have happened.
That was Friedman talking in a type of code to Ari Shavit, in Haaretz. Just a Jewish conversation. But note that Friedman is saying something corollary/corroborative to Joe Klein's statement about all the Jewish neocons with divided loyalties who pushed a benign domino theory to help Israel, off the record, in the runup to the war. Klein and Friedman know this stuff because they were in the conversation. Both Klein and Friedman were for the Iraq war, Friedman with both pens blazing, Klein with just one. (The Jewish second amendment is the first amendment.) When oh when do we get to talk about these things here, daddy mainstream?
PS. I wish Friedman would write a column about it. But frankly I doubt his intellectual honesty on the issue. Some years back he came back from Saudi Arabia shaking his head about the "conspiracy" theories they have over there– obviously a reference to issues of Jewish influence that the Saudis shake their heads over. The only way to dispel such conspiracy theories is for people who actually know about this stuff to talk openly about it and say what is true and what isn't. As it is, Friedman's coded statements to Shavit make him sound like a meeting of the confidential war-planners group, best and the brightest redux. This is not how journalists should talk about such important questions. God bless Joe Klein
