The Israel Lobby In The United Kingdom

Dispatchees with Peter Oborne

Aipac: Israel’s Agent Feeling Squeezed

By Franklin Lamb
Courtesy Of "Intifada-Palestine"

The American Israel public affairs committee (AIPAC) has seen headier days according to US congressional staffers forced to work regularly with the pro-Zionist agent of Israel.  The grip of fear and the lock on Congress that the Israel first organization has long touted in its service to Israel may be weakening against a backdrop of American Jews rejecting the increasing rants of Prime Minister Netanyahu that are driving many Jews to distance themselves from him, from AIPAC, from other Arabphobic US Zionist organizations, and from Israel.

AIPAC tells some Congressional aids that fund raising is hurting and it can’t keep promises it made to certain candidates that it would arrange “indirect” funding for their current election campaigns.  This at the same time Netanyahu is increasingly becoming the butt of jokes across the Israeli and American political spectrum. Several in his cabinet and member s of the US Congress reportedly consider him an embarrassment.  A perception likely added to by his recent General Assembly cartoon gimmick and his repeated Nazi style arm and hand gestures that were widely distributed by the main stream American media outlets especially Reuters, AP and even the Zionist Drudge Report.

In addition, there are signs that some members of congress and their staffs, who are heavily lobbied by AIPAC to donate cash, are beginning to chaff at heavy handed AIPAC fundraising tactics.

 Perhaps reflecting financial pressures on its free spending policies  including astronomical administration costs in the 75% range, on 9/24/12, Jonathan Missner, AIPAC’s Director of National Affairs and Development sent out  more 500,000 emails in a desperate and thinly veiled bid to raise cash to defeat Obama.

Wrote Missner:

 Dear Friend of Israel:

I am writing because we have not yet heard from you, and your support is greatly needed by September 30th.

As I’m sure you know, Israel and America are now facing serious threats throughout the Middle East. In recent months alone we have seen:

• Protestors in multiple Arab countries storm U.S. embassies, burn American and Israeli flags, and chant “death to America, death to Israel,” amidst false reports that a video was created by an Israeli Jew and backed by 100 Jewish financiers.

• Iran sent military personnel and large quantities of weapons across to Syria to aid the Assad regime’s violent crackdown.

• A deadly terror attack along the Egypt-Israel border that killed 16 Egyptians and enabled terrorists to penetrate into Israel.

• Leaders in Iran and its regional proxies increased their vitriol against Israel. The frequency and intensity of these recent statements has been troubling: “Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime.” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (August 17th).
• If you’re like most pro-Israel Americans, these events have made you more scared for Israel’s existence than you’ve likely felt in many years.
• But as you watch these dangers continue to unfold, it is important to remember there is something you can do to help keep Israel safe.
• You can join AIPAC, and help ensure that our leaders in Washington speak out clearly and unequivocally in support of Israel and that the aggressions shown toward our greatest ally Israel must immediately cease.
• At this dangerous time, the number one strategic answer to the threats facing Israel is for America to express – in every possible way- an unwavering, unshakable commitment to Israel.
• We must ensure that President Obama speaks out for Israel.
• We must ensure that America stands by its full commitment to Israel’s security assistance for fiscal year 2013, which is vital for Israel to be able to defend herself.
• And we must ensure that America continues to pledge 100% of its diplomatic support to Israel.
• We must do all of this, so that we can send a strong and loud message that America stands by Israel and that any attacks on Israel’s security is an attack on America’s security.”

AIPAC appears to be failing in carrying out its orders from the Israeli Embassy in Washington “to defeat Obama, whatever is required.” The latest polls, including two commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and one from the Anti-Defamation League show  Obama likely  avoiding  defeat  on November 6^th that Tel Aviv hoped his combative attitude toward Israel would produce. Obama currently leads Mitt Romney by a 69-20 percent margin among likely Jewish voters. If these polls hold, while they represent a marked decline from the 78 percent of the Jewish vote Obama got in 2008, they show Romney’s promise to put Israel “first no matter what “ is not resonating with American Jews. By even garnering 25% of the Jewish vote this shows there is plenty of resistance to the Romney  candidacy on a variety of  domestic social issues that increasingly among the American public matter more than Israel’s  perceived zany schemes. These poll projections may have been reflected at the UN last week when Netanyahu appeared to back off a bit from his pillorying of the Obama administration as being weak on terrorism.

Meanwhile, according to an Arab American Institute (AAI)  poll, 52 percent of all Arab-Americans say they plan to vote for Obama, compared to 26 percent who have declared their support for Romney. Broken down by religion, Arab American Muslims support Obama overwhelmingly (75% to 8%), while Orthodox/Protestants support Romney by a 16% margin.  According to the poll, Arab American Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 margin (46% to 22%), continuing a steady migration away from the GOP toward the Democratic Party since 2002.

Congressional staffers report that the Obama White House is rejecting the tactics being employed behind its back to assert pressure for the “red lines” that Netanyahu’s has been pushing and that the administration is aware that AIPAC is actively working to defeat President Obama on November 6^th.

What is confusing many in the American Jewish community appears to be the same as what perplexes a growing segment of the non-Jewish American public. And that is Netanyahu’s nonsense over Iranian progress in having nuclear weapons and the history of this “the sky is falling-we must cry wolf!” canard.

It was back in April  of 1984, that the British defense magazine Jane’s Defense Weekly got things started with its false claim that Iran was “engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years.”

Jane’s became embarrassed since it could offer no proof to back its sensationalist claim and soon admitted that its speculation was based on a West German intelligence source which turned out to be an assistant engineer who visited the unfinished Bushehr nuclear reactor that year and became curious. Soon, a pillar of the US Zionist lobby,  US Senator Alan Cranston’s  picked up on the report and declared that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1991.

The next year, Benjamin Netanyahu, a onetime campaign volunteer for Cranston, now an Israeli parliamentarian, began a campaign to inform the World that Iran could develop nuclear weapons within “three to five years” and therefore must be stopped through “an international front headed by the US.”

The current President of Israel Shimon Peres announced in 1992 that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1999.  As noted by Robert Fisk in the UK Independent, current Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in 1996 that Iran would have a nuclear arsenal by 2004.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joined the project and reported to Congress in 1998 that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear or a biological payload that could hit the US within five years. Secretary of State Colin Powell soon claimed in 2004 that if fact, Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. These allegations boldly came from Powell’s less than one year after his Iraqi weapons of mass destruction assertions were being proven to be false.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joined the project and reported to Congress in 1998 that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear or a biological payload that could hit the US within five years. Secretary of State Colin Powell soon claimed in 2004 that if fact, Iran had been working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. These allegations boldly came from Powell’s less than one year after his Iraqi weapons of mass destruction assertions were being proven to be false.

For his part, Netanyahu reportedly got into an ugly argument with the American ambassador to Israel last month over the Obama administration’s unwillingness to take matters regarding Iran to a more aggressive level. The Israeli prime minister was, according to the New York Times, “at his wit’s end” because, he claimed, Iran was “only four to six weeks away from a nuclear bomb”. A few weeks later, Netanyahu backtracked and pushed the deadline “to six or seven months away.”

And round and round it goes.

Congressional sources insist that White House staff will not forget Netanyahu’s blatant attempts to humiliate and defeat their boss.

The American public, as well as the international community are exhibiting exhaustion over this incessant hysteria which was summed up recently by Professor Stephen M. Walt, writing in Foreign Policy. “Those prophesying war with Iran are starting to sound like those wacky cult leaders who keep predicting the End of the World, and then keep moving the date when the world doesn’t end on schedule. At what point are we going to stop paying attention?”

One Congressional source emailed this observer: “Time will tell if next year’s AIPAC conference finds President Obama or any of his top aides on its program.”

Minion Of The Empire

By Muhammad Sahimi, 
March 26, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

On Dec. 1, 2009, Yukiya Amano began his tenure as the director general (DG) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), after a bitter election in which he narrowly defeated the South African diplomat Abdul Minty. On Feb. 18, 2010, Amano issued his first report on Iran’s nuclear program. Analyzing the report in a piecepublished by this website on March 13, 2010, I wrote,

The tone of the latest [IAEA] report, as well as its speculations and unfounded allegations, are in sharp contrast with those in the past issued under the former IAEA DG Mohamed ElBaradei. … Yukiya Amano has set aside ElBaradei’s cautious approach and measured tone and uses blunt language. But, while the blunt language is not a problem, the fact is that, as the latest report indicates, the IAEA is being transformed [by Amano] from an objective international organization to a politicized one to be used by the United States and its allies to advance their agenda regarding Iran’s uranium enrichment program.

Two years later the assertion has turned out to be completely correct. Amano has demonstrated that he is nothing but a minion of the United States whose reports on Iran have contributed significantly to hysteria about Iran and its nuclear program, which has remained completely peaceful. Most importantly, Amano is no longer viewed as a puppet of the West by only antiwar activists such as this author, but also by a broad spectrum of experts. I shall come back to this point shortly.

Here’s an example of Amano’s baseless allegations against Iran (see my original article and my analysis of the IAEA latest report on Iran for many more examples). In article 46 of its February 2010 report, the IAEA made a most outrageous statement:

While the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, Iran has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the Agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.

He repeated the same allegation in his November 2011 report:

Although now declared and currently under safeguards, a number of facilities dedicated to uranium enrichment … were covertly built by Iran and only declared once the Agency was made aware of their existence by sources other than Iran. This, taken together with the past efforts by Iran to conceal activities involving nuclear material, creates more concern about the possible existence of undeclared nuclear facilities and material in Iran.

This is pure innuendo and insinuation. The Natanz enrichment facility was declared to the IAEA when it was supposed to be — in February 2003, 180 days prior to the introduction of nuclear materials into it. Whether the timing of Iran’s declaration of the Fordow enrichment facility on Sept. 21, 2009, was in accordance with its obligations is a matter of dispute. I discussed this in a previous article and argued that Iran did not violate its safeguard obligations. A ridiculous assertion that is always made is that Iran informed the IAEA about the Fordow facility, only after it learned that the U.S. knew about it, but it is never stated how Iran became aware of this. In addition, both the Fordow and Natanz facilities were incomplete at the time of their declaration and therefore could not have been used for producing enriched uranium in secret. There is no evidence of any other uranium-enrichment facility anywhere in Iran. Regardless, Amano alleges that there are undeclared nuclear materials in Iran.

But months before my article the evidence that Amano is nothing but a political dwarf in the service of the United States was in a document that was publicized later by WikiLeaks. In a July 9, 2009, cable the U.S. chargé d’affaires, Geoffrey Pyatt, stated, “Amano attributed his election to support from the U.S., Australia, and France, and cited U.S. intervention with Argentina as particularly decisive,” and  his primary goal was “implementing safeguards and UNSC [United Nations Security Council]/[IAEA] Board resolutions” to impose economic sanctions against Iran, as dictated by the United States. The United States had also complained to Amano about some IAEA experts under ElBaradei who “have not always been helpful to U.S. positions.” Once in office, Amano removed those “unhelpful” experts from key positions. He eliminatedthe Agency’s office of external relations and policy coordination that, under ElBaradei, had questioned some of the judgments made by the safeguards department inspectors.

Pyatt also reported that Amano had consulted with Israeli ambassador Israel Michaeli “immediately after his appointment,” that Michaeli “was fully confident of the priority Amano accords verification issues,” that Michaeli discounted some of Amano’s public remarks about there being “no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons capability” as mere words that Amano had to say “to persuade those who did not support him about his ‘impartiality,’” and that Amano wanted to have “consultations” with the head of the Atomic Energy Commission of Israel, a nation that has at least 200 nuclear warheads and has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but has been threatening Iran with military attacks for years.

In another cable on Oct. 16, 2009, the U.S. mission to the IAEA reported that Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded ambassador [Glyn Davies] on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. More candidly, Amano noted the importance of maintaining a certain ‘constructive ambiguity’ about his plans, at least until he took over for DG ElBaradei in December [2009],” so that he could fool the world that he would be an independent and objective DG.

In view of such irrefutable documents, it becomes clear why Amano makes baseless allegations about undeclared nuclear materials in Iran. If such materials did exist, they would represent a gross violation of Iran’s safeguards obligations. Thus, Amano alleges their existence to provide ammunition to the West in its confrontation with Iran, even though he has no evidence to support his outrageous claim. Such allegations have become a pattern in Amano’s reports on Iran.

The latest episode took place after a team of IAEA inspectors led by Olli Heinonen’s replacement, Herman Nackaerts, visited Iran twice to see Parchin, southeast of Tehran, where Iran has been producing conventional ammunition for its military for decades. Parchin has never been, nor been declared, a nuclear site, and therefore Iran is under no obligation to allow the IAEA to inspect it. The Agency can demand a visit only in the framework of the Additional Protocol of the Safeguards Agreement. Iran stopped carrying out the provisions of the protocol after doing so voluntarily from October 2003 to January 2006 because the European Union reneged on its promises. Iran did allow two IAEA visits to Parchin, one in January and a second in November 2005, each time allowing the IAEA inspectors to visit five sites within the facilities of their own choosing. According to the Iranian press, during the second visit, Heinonen, who was then deputy director general for safeguards, asked to make surprise visits to two more sites within Parchin, which Iran allowed. The inspectors did not find anything, and the Iranian press reported that Heinonen said at that time that “Parchin’s case has become history,” meaning that there was no case to pursue anymore.

Amano has revived the old allegations without presenting any new evidence — not that there was any to begin with — making it a major issue in his November 2011 report. During the Jan. 29-31 visit, Iran and the IAEA agreed that inspectors can visit Parchin later on during the negotiation process. But during the second visit of Feb. 20-21, the inspectors demanded again to visit Parchin, in violation of the agreement. Iran asked them to extend their visit for one more day to finalize the agreement so that the visit could take place, but on Amano’s order they refused and left Iran. The mainstream media then claimed that Iran “was refusing to cooperate with the IAEA,” which is a complete fabrication.

First, even if Iran does not allow any visit to Parchin at all, it is still acting within its rights (see above). Second, the IAEA’s demand to visit Parchin during its second trip to Tehran violated a previous agreement with Iran that the visit would come later in the process. Third, in fact, Iran offered to allow the IAEA inspectors to visit another site in Marivan in western Iran, about which the IAEA report had expressed concerns, but on Amano’s instructions the inspectors turned down the offer.

As Gareth Porter, as well as the media within Iran, reported, the allegation about Iran’s intransigence prompted Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, to go public with these facts, suggesting strongly that Amano had reversed the earlier agreement with Iran after consulting with the United States. In fact, the only reason Iran and IAEA did not finalize the agreement in January was the IAEA’s insistence on reserving the right to reopen the issue even after the visit and the resolution of the issue, as it had done after the visits in 2005. Soltanieh’s revelations blunted the attempt to issue the resolution by the Board and were so convincing that even P5+1 did not fault Iran for the non-visit to Parchin.

Why did Amano reverse the agreement? Because, once again, he wanted to serve the U.S. government, helping it to make a case for a resolution by the IAEA’s Board of Governors to condemn Iran’s imaginary intransigence, so that the P5+1 — the five permanent members of the UNSC plus Germany — can increase diplomatic pressure on Iran before a new round of negotiations that is to take place soon between the two sides in Turkey.

But the episode did not stop there. Suddenly, it was alleged, based on some satellite images, that Iran was trying to “clean up” a site in Parchin, as if it had something to hide. Built in a 60-square-kilometer area, Parchin is a sprawling complex with over 1,000 large buildings, next to a major highway. There is no scientific way of discerning the type of activity seen in a satellite image. In addition, the allegation was first made by Associated Press correspondent George Jahn, quoting the usual suspects — two unnamed diplomats from one unidentified country, most likely Israel. Jahnhas a history of making allegations based on “information” fed to him by anonymous sources — Israeli and Western intelligence agencies. The allegations and the reason for making them lack any credibility.

In response to Jahn’s report, Amano said that there was “evidence of activity” at Parchin. What kind of activity? He did not specify, but he suggested at a briefing for the Board of Governors that the alleged activity made a visit to Parchin a “matter of urgency.” He did not, however, provide any evidence for the allegation, nor did he explain why he broke the agreement with Iran, if a visit to Parchin is so “urgent.”

So once again the U.S. government is using international organizations to advance its imperial ambitions. It is helped by Yukiya Amano, who has demonstrated that he is willing to be a minion of the empire, and by the mainstream media, which accepts Amano’s allegations about Iran’s nuclear program without examining them critically and thereby contributes significantly to the hysteria over Iran’s nuclear program. Only a sustained public campaign of informing the people and pressuring the mainstream media to report the truth, rather than propaganda, can reverse this trend, and there are already signs that the tide is turning.

For years The New York Times’ David Sanger and William Broad have routinely referred to Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapon program, but they took a particularly hawkish position on the issue after the IAEA latest report on Iran’s nuclear program in November, describing the report, which was simply a rehashing of the unfounded old allegations, as full of “chilling” details. Another Times reporter, Steven Erlanger,brazenly lied when he claimed that “recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency” has concluded that “Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective.” The work of Sanger, Broad, and Erlanger, hyping and propagating Amano’s politicized reports and unfounded allegations, got so bad that ombudsman Arthur S. Brisbanehad to intervene, expressing the view that the paper’s coverage of Iran’s nuclear program had been unbalanced. This apparently forced the Times to have reporters other than the trio to write on Iran’s nuclear program.

And Amano’s have not gone unnoticed. The Guardian reported that several experts and former senior officials have accused him of “pro-Western bias, over-reliance on unverified intelligence, and sidelining skeptics.” Among them were Robert Kelly, a former U.S. weapons scientist who ran the IAEA action team on Iraq in 2002-2003, who accused Amano of “falling into the [Dick] Cheney trap,” meaning “relying on a very small group of people [whose] opinions are not being checked.” Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a non-proliferation organization, was quoted as saying, “The main beneficiaries of the Amano reign have been U.S. policy [toward Iran]. … On Iran, the difference is like night and day. ElBaradei constantly sought a diplomatic solution, while Amano wields a big stick and has hit Iran hard and repeatedly.” MIT’s Jim Walsh, an expert on Iran’s nuclear program, was quoted saying, “I think if the Agency is going to be a neutral player in this — and we [do] need a neutral player to make the sort of judgments that have to be made — it will have to be more conservative than the national governments on this,” referring to that fact that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate has concluded that Iran ended its nuclear program in 2003 (if, in fact, it had one), whereas Amano is still pretending that the program is ongoing.

Yukiya Amano is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. If his antics continue, the IAEA will be a prime culprit in starting a war with Iran.

Why The Washington Post Won’t Fire Jennifer Rubin

BY GLENN GREENWALD 
FRIDAY, NOV 11, 2011 11:28 AM EASTERN STANDARD TIME 
Courtesy Of "Salon Magazine"

Several weeks ago, I wrote about a truly twisted, deranged rant by neocon royal family member Rachel Abrams. Abrams — wife of Iran-contra convict and Bush 43 official Eliot Abrams, step-daughter of Norm Podhoretz, half-sister of John Podhoretz, and a Board Member of Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — unleashed a torrent of anti-Palestinian hatred upon the release of Gilad Shalit that could be produced only by the most rotted of souls:

Then round up [Gilad Shalit's] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.

While Abrams’ post sparked widespread revulsion, it found one noted admirer: The Washington Post‘s Israel-obsessed blogger Jennifer Rubin, who re-tweeted Abrams’ promotion of her post with obvious (and admitted) agreement.

In the ensuing controversy, ECI claimed that Abrams’ murderous desires were directed only toward Palestinian “terrorists,” not Palestinians generally — a self-evidently false excuse that quickly fell apart after Abrams wrote that, in essence, all Palestinians are Terrorists (“there are no fine points of distinction in what they’re after”). To make her genocidal wishes even clearer, Abrams then directed her bile to ThinkProgress’ Ali Gharib — an Iranian-American who was one of the many commentators objecting to her original post — explaining that she’d also “feed HIM and his friends to sharks.” To put it mildly, Abrams’ post was bigoted, violence-inciting, and driven by hatred of the purest and most repellent strain.

It’s the opposite of newsworthy that a rabid neocon like Abrams spews this sort of anti-Arab hate-mongering; that is basically the defining attribute of neoconservatism. But what is significant is that Jennifer Rubin promoted and endorsed it without any hesitation. Over the past 18 months, we’ve witnessed a series of journalists fired for far less virulent sentiments directed at Israelis and Jews (Rich Sanchez’ complaints about disproportionate Jewish media influence and Helen Thomas’ call for Jews to leave the region), and even for completely innocuous remarks whose only sin was offending neocons (Octavia Nasr’s mild eulogizing of a moderate Hezbollah cleric). Yet here we have a Post blogger who has endorsed this extreme hate-mongering, and does so with total impunity.

Is there any doubt whatsoever that had Rubin promoted a rant spewing these sorts of ugly caricatures about Jewish children and Israelis with accompanying calls for savage violence — rather than directed at Palestinians — that she would have instantly been fired, then castigated and attacked by all Serious precincts? As Gharib reports today, that was the question posed by a Post reader via email to the Post‘s Ombudsman, Patrick Pexton. To his credit, Pexton had previously condemned Rubinon his Ombudsman blog, writing: “in agreeing with the sentiment, and in spreading it to her 7,000 Twitter followers who know her as a Washington Post blogger, Rubin did damage to The Post and the credibility that keeps it afloat.” After denouncing Abrams’ rant as “reprehensible,” Pexton added: “That a Post employee would retweet it is a huge disappointment to me.”

That’s all fine as far as it goes, but what about the question posed by the reader: wouldn’t Rubin have been fired for promoting this hate-mongering had it been directed at Jews and Israelis rather than Palestinians? Pexton’s email response, published by the reader who emailed him, was this:

Off the record, I think it’s quite possible. But the ombudsman does not hire or fire people here. I only comment.

Leave aside the bizarre belief of establishment journalists that they can unilaterally decree their statements to be “off the record” and then expect that to be honored in the absence of any agreement by the person to whom they’re making the statement. What is most striking here is Pexton’s highly revealing cowardice — probably well-grounded — in wanting his observation about this double standard to be kept private; shouldn’t an Ombudsman who believes this be eager to raise it in public? As the reader noted in reply to Pexton:

If, in your opinion, such a grave double standard exits, why do you comment off the record? Why not publicly state your opinion? Why self censor? Doesn’t that reinforce insidious limitations on free speech?

Think of the absurdity. You must stay cautiously silent about a perfectly reasonable opinion while Rubin and Abrams can let fly with genocidal remarks. With respect, your silence contributes significantly to the poisoning of public debate.

Please speak up.

What’s particularly remarkable is that Pexton is admitting (albeit wanting it kept secret) what any honest observer knows to be true: that there is a very high likelihood — I’d say absolute certainty — that Rubin would have been fired had she promoted a post like this about Jews and Israelis rather than Arabs and Palestinians.

But this is the insidious, pervasive bias that has long been obvious in a profession that relentlessly touts its own “objectivity.” Even the mildest criticism of Israelis and anything even hinting at criticisms of Jews is strictly prohibited — a prohibition enforced by summary, immediate dismissal and enduring stigma. As Nicholas Kristof wrote during a visit to Jerusalem last year: Israel “tolerates a far greater range of opinions [about Israel] than America.”

But the most extreme forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry and hatred flourish often with no condemnation and virtually always with no sanction (Juan Williams’ firing by NPR was one of the very few exceptions, though that was ultimately motivated by long-standing NPR animosity toward Williams’ role on Fox). Had Rubin promoted (and admitted agreeing with) such disgusting bile toward Jews and Israelis, her journalism career would have been over, but because it was directed at Palestinians, it continues to thrive. Indeed, the neocon fanatic who runs the Post‘s Editorial Page, Fred Hiatt, predictably defended and praised Rubin, calling her “an excellent journalist and a relentless reporter” who “is often the target of unjustified criticism.” (Pexton argued that what Rubin did violated Post rules “that apply to editors, reporters and bloggers,” but since Rubin is an opinion writer, those rules do not apply to her: except Hiatt and Rubin herself repeatedly describe her as a “reporter” and a “journalist”).

Herein lies one of the great myths of American political culture: the media’s “objectivity.” No institution plays a greater role in restricting the terms of permissible debate in America than they do. The fact that they impose these limitations with such gross bias is bad enough; their self-praising insistence that they do no such things makes it that much worse. If the Post applied media standards equally to anti-Arab and anti-Israeli commentary, then Jen Rubin would be waiting on the unemployment line next to Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas and Octavia Nasr. But it plainly does no such thing, and therefore she will remain exactly where she is.

* * * * *

The ebook version of With Liberty and Justice for Some is now availablehere and the Kindle version is here. On a different note, last night I debated former Bush drug czar John Walters on the Drug War at Brown University; a write-up from Brown’s student newspaper on that debate ishere, and a video of the entire quite-contentious debate will be posted online in a few days.