The New York Times has hired Bret Stephens as a columnist, elevating an Islamophobic neoconservative who regularly pronounces on the “disease of the Arab mind” and the “communal psychosis” of Palestinians, while Israel is blameless.

Trump strike on Syria leads Chuck Schumer and Netanyahu to cheer him, neocon Elliott Abrams to liken him to Kennedy and Reagan, while Steve Walt says air strikes are “easy way to look tough w/o fixing anything.”

The Obama administration was hard on Israel from start to finish, in perception of US Jews. Donald Trump’s messaging is better “out of the gate,” says leading liberal Zionist rabbi Elliot Cosgrove.

If a definition of Deep State is being impervious to elections, then what about the influence that AIPAC has exercised in both parties: fostering Trump’s Islamophobia and trampling a Democratic Party thinktank’s efforts to expose that Islamophobia. Eli Clifton shows that AIPAC supported Frank Gaffney, the Islam-basher, to the tune of $60,000.

Forty years ago, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer warned that Israel was a strategy “liability” to the U.S., and Israel’s dependence on the Jewish lobby’s ‘influence’ threatened to bring “hostility” to Jews from other Americans. Why didn’t people listen?

The New York Times sounds like a newspaper opining about the Negro Problem in the 1950s, says Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, in its pieties about Israeli choices re Palestinians. And Tom Friedman is even worse.

The Republican Jewish Coalition and J Street are at odds over nomination of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel. With Senate hearing on Thursday, Holocaust scholars publish letter vehemently opposing Friedman’s use of the word “kapos” to describe liberal Zionists.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul blocked John Bolton’s naming to be Number 2 at State. Now he’s going after Elliott Abrams, and the neocons. They believe in “perpetual war” and they will “scurry in by the hundreds” if Abrams gets the job, he says. Bill Kristol says that’s anti-Semitic.

So who got neoconservative Elliott Abrams a meeting with Trump, and likely appointment as number two at State? The obvious answer is there is a segment of opinion that Trump wants to mollify. The Israel lobby, which even US nationalist Steve Bannon has made peace with.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, slams “Mr. Obama” as weak and unable to appreciate “capacity for evil” by Russia and Syria. Haass’s harsh comments show there is no difference between Clintonite liberal interventionism and neoconservatism in the US establishment.