Here is a nice piece in Haaretz showing how the Shalem Center, a thinktank whose pigeons are now reroosting in the Netanyahu administration, including Michael Oren and Ron Dermer, was heavily funded by neoconservatives so as to keep bad ideas alive. "The institute was founded with the aid of American
Jewish donors, including the Bernstein family, Sheldon Adelson, George
Rohr and Ron Lauder."
I dunno who the Bernstein family is. I think I went to college with George. Nice guy; now a New York financier. Peace, brother. (The contribution button is on the right.)
What is disgraceful about this article–yes, I know; everything is disgraceful today, I'm in that kind of mood, I feel the tail wagging my dog–is that it is actually piecemeal journalism about a scandal of the American discourse, the extent to which the neoconservative policy options that ultimately burned Baghdad and destroyed my country's image in the world were kept afloat by rich donors, generally rightwing pro-Zionist Jews such as Bruce Kovner and Irving Moskowitz, supporters of the American Enterprise Institute, and Sheldon Adelson, who backed the Shalem Center, Natan Scharansky, the Republican Party, and also Douglas Feith when he was at One Jerusalem.
The flow of this international money (yes, I know, a canard) can also be glimpsed in the $96,000-a-year support that Dore Gold, a former Netanyahu aide who has his own thinktank, receives from the American Enterprise Institute as a "scholar." Why Gold is getting this money from an American institute is something I've never been able to figure out.
I suppose this is the sort of scandal we can expect journalists and historians to begin to unravel in five years, when it is safely over (we pray). The disgrace is that the Times and the Washington Post have shown utter indifference to the question. Myself, I did a little bit on it at New York Magazine, but no one ever hired me to do more investigation of the social/intellectual/political/journalistic and financial networks that kept hope alive for the neocons. What the story deserves is a thorough unearthing of the network, or at least one chain of it, going back, say, to '96 when Richard Perle, Feith and David Wurmser, all of whom would turn up later in the Bush Administration, wrote the Clean Break paper for Netanyahu urging him to forget about the peace process and Palestinian sovereignty– and work to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Walt and Mearsheimer of course broached this alarming coincidence, and were smeared as anti-Semites. The difficulty for anyone exploring the matter is that the story really does involve Jewish influence, and even dual loyalty. You can't not address these questions if you are going to be intellectually honest. Doug Feith's former law partner Marc Zell is a religious settler in the Occupied Territories, and also a person with influence during the Bush years. Go figure.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has blabbed on Amy Goodman about "Jewish money" pushing the Iran madness, has also said he would rather run through the streets naked than report on this stuff. And you know why: because if he did, he'd be unpaid. The best unfolding of this conspiracy inside our politics–and yes, it is a conspiracy, in precisely the way that the slave power functioned as a "conspiracy" in American politics in the 1850s, as then-obscure Abraham Lincoln stated when he raised up the Republican Party to smash it– is by Stephen Sniegoski. He too has been smeared and marginalized. I guess we have to wait for Haaretz.
