A “cultural breakthrough” is Sullivan’s description of the Saturday Night Live skit in which Senator John McCain challenges Chuck Hagel to agree to fellate a donkey on the orders of Benjamin Netanyahu for the security of Israel: After being banished from earnest Washington discussion for decades by various press gate-keepers, the absurdly overblown power of […]
This was inevitable. Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast reports on the Anti Defamation League’s letter of outrage to NBC over the Israel lobby skit that Saturday Night Live recorded but did not televise Saturday night, and that was then broadcast on the internet, featuring the immortal question: Would you fellate a donkey for Israel? […]
Jim Fallows’s steady, quiet, and urgent criticism of the Israel lobby is important because Fallows is an eminent establishment type who has long supported Israel’s public relations effort; but he is evidently concerned about the lobby as a militant, religious faction that could drag us into another war. Fallows is indirect in his criticisms. After […]
SNL stays away from Israel jokes but comic Vanessa Bayer highlighted Jewish alienation from Israel in mentioning “my uncle Simon even though my dad says he is so blinded by his devotion to Israel that he ignores all reason.” The line got a pretty good laugh.
A former Republican PR person named Lisa Baron who once worked for Ralph Reed has written a lascivious memoir that has the word “tart” on the cover along with a sexy photo and includes an anecdote about fellating Ari Fleischer. Michelle Goldberg has reviewed the book at Daily Beast (link above), and she does a […]
I frequently criticize Brian Lehrer because he is an intelligent/progressive/influential public-radio host in New York City and also a reflexive defender of Israel. He’s what I’m up against in liberal Jewish establishment opinion. Well, the other day Lehrer interviewed neoconservative Elliott Abrams (who is due to speak at Brooklyn College’s Political Science Department soon) and– […]
On two stories in a row last night on National Public Radio, reporters promoted Israel and its army as a model to the United States in the ways that it deploys women in combat. First Ailsa Chang: CHANG: [Yale professor Gene] Fidell points to other countries with similar legal systems that have already stripped commanders of […]
In Oct. 2017, Al Jazeera said it had done an undercover investigation of the Israel lobby in the U.S. in 2016. But the documentary has never aired — and meanwhile Israel advocates Alan Dershowitz and Mort Klein have visited the monarchy and put pressure on the government to rein in Al Jazeera. The network should air its findings.
Evidently, the Israelis and Americans (and the French and Germans?) have succeeded in pressuring the failing Greek government into preventing the flotilla from sailing. As Medea Benjamin pointed out earlier, this likely has a lot to do with Greece’s sovereign debt crisis. While many of us feel angry, it’s probably best not to direct our […]
On a 2013 visit, possible Def Sec’y nominee Ashton Carter lauded the Israel-US bond and called Israeli army dogs “the fun part” of military life. Israel used dogs to quell Palestinian stone-throwers in protests against the occupation. Shades of Birmingham.
The stunning invitation to Netanyahu to address the Congress in March against Obama may at last politicize the “special relationship,” forcing Democrats to side with the president over Israel and unleashing a debate over our Israeli policy, including the damage to the U.S. from the unending occupation
Samantha Power is Obama’s nominee to be the UN ambassador. I think Power understands the conflict as clearly as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel does: she is a student of human rights atrocities and has described Israel as a “major” human-rights violator backed by an American lobby with “tremendous… financial and political” clout. She surely recognizes […]
Last week in Washington, The National Interest held a discussion of “Israel’s fraying image” based on Jacob Heilbrunn’s piece warning that American political culture is shifting against Israel. Heilbrunn listed a number of signs: Obama’s detachment from Israel, the farcical Chuck Hagel confirmation hearing and the SNL donkey-fellating skit that parodied it, the Oscars joke […]
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager says the “hand of the Kremlin” has been working in US elections, but no one talks about the hand of Israel, which is on everything from pushing the Iraq war to censoring any reference to the “occupation” in the Democratic Party platform. The system is rigged by the Israel lobby, and everyone knows it, even if they can’t talk about it.
NYT: Qaddafi Is Said to Survive NATO Airstrike That Kills Son Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi survived a NATO airstrike on Saturday night that struck a house in Tripoli containing several of his family members and killed his youngest son and three of the colonel’s grandchildren, a Libyan government spokesman announced early Sunday. “This was a direct […]
(Image: AP) It’s award season, with the recent Golden Globes and Grammy telecasts and lots of buzz about the upcoming Oscars, so it’s no wonder that the Pentagon didn’t want to be left out of the fun. That’s why they’ve come up with a new medal to award for “extraordinary achievement” in the field of […]
Headlines like that one used to be antisemitic. Fox seems to be using it as a selling point. Here’s the Fox story’s lead: As Barack Obama continues to absorb accusations that he is not committed to maintaining America’s staunch support…
My news list, Today in Palestine, for today. Note the Emily Henochowicz coverage in the Baltimore Sun, Henning Mankell thinking of withdrawing his books in Hebrew from Israel, and the Evergreen State College news.
“What investigation could raise the dead?” Abdullah al-Sawarka, 45, asks, while standing distraught at the edge of a 50-foot-wide crater where his cousin’s tin shack stood. Israelis bombed the house in Gaza on Thursday killing eight family members. They now say it was a mistake but Gazans scoff at the idea that there will be any accountability for the crime. The file will be thrown in the trash, says an aunt of the children killed.
It is “shameful” and “unacceptable,” that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a book store, Book Culture, was coerced into signing a political statement opposing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) targeting Israel in order to participate in a bookfair at a leading synagogue. More than 40 Jews, including Peter Beinart, Dorothy Zellner and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, write that “a cloud hangs over our neighborhood.”
For the racism/Orientalism file. Daniel Pipes says that Avigdor Lieberman’s speech left him “elated.” It said, “Israel is back.” And this guy has standing? Yes. I saw him at a jammed Philadelphia synagogue that would never invited the great Noam…
On his recent visit to the States, Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti challenged Americans by expressing solidarity with Native Americans who were also ethnically-cleansed from their lands. I say challenge because the issue is rarely addressed in activist circles; I rarely address it myself, I don’t know how to think about it. The other night I […]
Update: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) issued a statement in response to the LGBT Center ending its moratorium on Palestine solidarity organizing: While we are pleased to see the Center’s announcement, we in QAIA believe that the true test of the Center’s new space usage policy will come when we request space at the […]
Officials of Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop issue a crazy fiat: to “stop scheduling any events related to SodaStream, BDS, Israel or boycotts related to these subjects in the meeting room.” The censorship begins after a meeting this Sunday about SodaStream’s new facility in the Negev and the treatment of Bedouins there.
Bernie Sanders’s populist fundraising efforts may drastically reduce the role of Jewish donors, says JJ Goldberg. While Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List says rising politicians were forced to adopt AIPAC positions in order to raise funds