Michael Gordon piped neoconservative and Israeli objections to the Iran deal in the New York Times a year ago and also helped foment the Iraq war with the bogus aluminum-tubes story. Now he lands at a neoconservative thinktank that opposed the Iran deal as a writer-in-residence for the summer.
Brace yourself for the news from the Democratic Platform Committee. The platform this year will be even worse than previous platforms on Palestine. That’s how things look, despite the insurgent anti-Benjamin-Netanyahu campaign of Bernie Sanders: there is no occupation, and no settlements either. Jerusalem forever, and death to BDS. The party belongs to Hillary Clinton.
Netanyahu’s only goal is to control the news cycle and the New York Times gave him two solid victories last week by playing up a misstatement by Palestinian president Abbas in Brussels. And the construction of Abbas’s line as anti-Semitic reflects the power in our discourse of a tribal Jewish fantasy: non-Jews are always thinking anti-Jewish thoughts.
Cynthia Ozick has expressed racist views of Palestinians loving hatred more than bread — “they have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors” — but extolling the novelist at 88 in the NY Times Magazine Giles Harvey does her a great blessing, by leaving ’em out!
NY Gov Andrew Cuomo’s glaring overreach in his executive order against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) continues to pay off, with the Washington Post publishing an article by Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace, explaining how she supports BDS as a Jew because only outside pressure will get Israel to change.
We’re closely following the reception of Ben Ehrenreich’s big new book, The Way to the…
Bloomberg News runs a Pravda-style article about Israel’s political crisis whose goal is obfuscation from start to finish so as to make Netanyahu look good. Those charges of fascism? Eli Lake reports that they call you a fascist in Israel when the garbage doesn’t get picked up.
A frontpage article in the New York Times says that 30-60,000 Palestinians a year go illegally across the “security barrier” to work in Israel, along with 55,000 legal workers; thus making clear that the wall hasn’t stopped attacks on Israelis, Palestinians have chosen not to use violence by and large.
Media marginalize critics of US Israel policy. Chris Matthews says the Democratic Party platform is riven by “red hot” Cornel West and James Zogby, but censors their concern about Israel. And Foreign Affairs publishes a navel-gazing issue all about Israel that leaves out the depths of extremism in Israel, let alone Palestinian conditions.
The original campaign of putting triple parentheses around the names of Jewish newsmakers or reporters is both ominous and sinister. There is real antisemitism out there and I’m against it, and it has nothing to do with the Israeli occupation.