The other day on "All Things Considered," NPR anchor Robert Siegel quoted Marty Peretz to Chas Freeman. Siegel said that Peretz said it would be crazy for Marty Peretz himself to be put in an intelligence position–he's too in the tank for Israel, by his own admission–and so the same standard should hold for Chas Freeman: he's too in the tank for Saudi Arabia. Freeman rejected the comparison, saying that the money he's gotten from the Saudis is minimal and that Peretz has demonstrated a devotion to Israel that in no way compares to his own position on the Middle East.
Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that Freeman was a foreign service officer for 30 years and is an iconoclastic thinker, two things you'd want in an intelligence chief. Let's talk about Siegel's argument. Siegel was saying: If an Israel-loving Jew were about to get his hands on the steering wheel, people would freak out about that too. But this is simply not true. And I can prove it.
In 2003, when I still worked at the NewYork Observer, Hussein Ibish, then of the American-Arab Discrimination Committee, pointed me to Elliott Abrams's book, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, and said that it contained passages arguing that Jews must stand apart from the country they live in, except when in Israel. Abrams was then the head of Middle East policy at the National Security Council. After talking to Ibish, I walked to my bookshelf; I had bought Abrams's book because of his rage against intermarriage and then wrote this linked piece for the Observer in August 2003, questioning whether Abrams, who has family in Israel, was too much of a religious separatist to have anything to do with Middle East policy.
I quoted this passage from Abrams's book:
the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews,
faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are
to stand apart from the nation in which they live…. [Jews] are
in a permanent covenant with God and with the land
of Israel and its people.”
To his great credit, my editor Peter Kaplan put the piece on the front page of the Observer (3 years before I got shown the door there because I'm an anti-Zionist). I sent the piece along to Abrams but he declined to comment. Didn't want a brushfire.
Needless to say, no one in the mainstream media picked up on my article. Robert Siegel did not call Abrams to ask him if he was too in the tank with Israel to do his job.
Just as no one has called Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the son of a member of an Israeli terrorist organization, who went off to put on an Israeli army uniform during the Gulf War I and serve on an Israeli base, on the issue of whether he's too in the tank for Israel. Nor Jeffrey Goldberg on his Israel service. Nor Chuck Schumer or Steve Israel or Howard Berman–the pack whom Glenn Greenwald rightly describes as Israel-centric fanatics who supported the disastrous Iraq war and rode Freeman out of town on a rail.
So the answer to Siegel is: Consciously or not, you're misleading your listeners. This golden standard you embrace is not one you ever sought to impose during the neoconservative era. And I don't think you're a neocon. But in whose service are you asking this question?
