I know this is days old, I missed it. Keith Weissman formerly of AIPAC, talking to Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation, on PBS:
“Now, for the first time, one of the two AIPAC officials, Keith Weissman, is speaking out. In a series of extended interviews with Tehran Bureau, Weissman tells his story. He’s come forward, he says, because he’s concerned that if a confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran leads to war, it will be a disaster — one that Weissman fears will be blamed on the American Jews. ….
“The reason why I want to tell this story now is, we may be going down a path, helped along by the American Jewish community, and maybe even Israel, that is going to be worse even than the one we’re on now – some sort of military confrontation with Iran. That worries me. Because they will be able to blame [it] on the Jews, to a great extent,” says Weissman, who worked at AIPAC from 1993 until 2005, much of that time as the group’s deputy director of foreign policy. Though Weissman disagrees sharply with those who say that AIPAC played a critical role in pushing for the 2003 U.S. decision to invade Iraq, he believes a war with Iran — which he says “would be the stupidest thing I ever heard of” — might well be blamed on AIPAC’s leaders and their constituents. “What the Jews’ war will be is Iran,” he says. “Not Iraq.”
I find this slightly irresponsible. I mean, it’s a good thing, to stop a war on Iran. But it’s defensive, inasmuch as the argument is, Jews qua Jews had nothing to do with the Iraq war, when plainly they did. As I argued just the other day. As Jonathan Franzen apparently says in his novel Freedom (the post above this). This ain’t going away, Keith and Robert, this is something the Jewish community must come to terms with, the neoconservative complicity in the burning of Iraq as a means of improving Israel’s security, and the liberal Jewish complicity of silence, not diming their neocon cousins out.
