Extremism In ‘Defense’ Of Israel

Israel-Firster: "Take Out The President" 

By Justin Raimondo, 
January 23, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

There’s no doubt about it: Andrew B. Adler, the editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, is afool. His article advocating the assassination of President Obama has by now beenbroadcast all over the internet, and brought condemnation from every quarter down on his head. His tearful apologies, his denials that he actually meant to call for Obama’s death, and the swiftness with which major Jewish organizations distanced themselves from his crazed call are, perhaps, punishment enough for the poor man: I can’t help feeling sorry for him.

The Atlanta Jewish Times is not exactly the Forward: with a circulation of around 3,000, it is an obscure publication that carries news of the local Jewish community and is seemingly typical of the dozens of similar niche newspapers throughout the country – except, of course, for the views of its editor, which are by no means typical of the Jewish community. That being said, this incident underscores a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked until recently, and that is the extremism of a certain segment of the pro-Israel community. That this element is present in the Jewish community was acknowledged by none other than my old friend Abe Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League, in his statement condemning Adler’s piece:

“There is absolutely no excuse, no justification, no rationalization for this kind of rhetoric. It doesn’t even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage.

“Irresponsible rhetoric metastasizes into more dangerous rhetoric. The ideas expressed in Mr. Adler’s column reflect some of the extremist rhetoric that unfortunately exists – even in some segments of our community – that maliciously labels President Obama as an ‘enemy of the Jewish people.’”

Foxman is right: there are indeed extremists among us who could easily be incited to act on Adler’s recommendation – and not all or even most of them are of the Jewish faith. We have millions of Christians in this country who have theological reasons for fanatically supporting the state of Israel, even over and above the interests of their own country – not that they would ever admit the possibility of any “daylight” between the nations. They are, to put it in popular parlance, “Israel-Firsters,” and proudly so.

Adler, for his part, appears to be at least a sympathizer of the Chabad movement, an international ultra-orthodox movement some of whose followers reportedly cheeredthe assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. I won’t get into their theological justification for such kookiness: suffice to say that Chabad has allied itself with the most extreme elements, including within Israel, with parties and politicianswho call for the expulsion of all Arabs. Chabad of Georgia claims Adler is not a member, but this has to be taken with a very large grain of salt: after all, visitors to the web site of his newspaper are greeted by a promotion for the local Chabad organization.

Whether he is an official member, or merely a sympathizer, is a detail, however: the larger picture is that the scenario imagined by Adler in his piece reflects the all-too-familiar narrative put out there by our Israel-Firsters, and by the Netanyahu government, which is that Israel currently faces an “existential” crisis, the inevitable result of which will be a second Holocaust:

“You are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. You are responsible for 7 million Israeli citizens who comprise the state of Israel. You wake up one morning, and the Israel Defense Forces’ military commander hands you a detailed report regarding what to expect during a major conflict with Hezbollah and Syria five years from today.

“The report states that Israel will come under fire from 15,000 rockets and missiles, and that casualties will be in the thousands. That’s thousands, not hundreds - thousands.

“Simultaneously, another IDF military commander strolls over while you are finishing your first cup of coffee and hands you a report that Iran has reached nuclear launch capabilities.

“If that’s not enough, an Israeli diplomat informs you that you cannot expect much help from the United States due to its newly implemented military budget and the administrations never ending “Alice in Wonderland” belief that diplomacy is the answer.

“To all the Netanyahus out there, what do you do?”

Adler has three suggestions: 1) “Order a pre-emptive strike against both Hezbollah and Hamas,” 2) “Go against Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s wishes that Israel take a lethal bullet in the name of preserving a healthy, worldwide economic climate, and order the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities at all costs”, and 3) “Give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler describes these actions as possible “options,” and you’ll note they aren’t mutually exclusive – although carrying out the third option, in tandem with numbers one and two, seems like overkill , if you’ll pardon the expression. Yes, but not to someone so imbued with apocalyptic urgency that he would seriously contemplate the third option. Because, you see, Israel’s very existence is imperiled: it’ faces an “existential threat.” Once you accept this premise, the idea that one could save the lives of millions of Israelis by sacrificing the life of one man – even if he is President of the United States – becomes all too plausible. True believers in the “existential threat” narrative would have every reason to not only entertain the prospect of assassinating a President they thought was anti-Israel – or even a secret Muslim – they would consider it a moral duty, whether they did it for religious reasons or out of a devotion to pure utilitarianism.

In Friday’s column I wrote about the case of the DC Five, the five bloggers for two liberal Washington think tanks who were reprimanded – and, in one case, fired – because they used the term “Israel Firster.” The same organizations – the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, etc. – that pounced on Adler had just finished jumping all over the DC Five for engaging in “toxic” and “classically anti-Semitic” discourse, promoting the “myth” of “dual loyalty” among Jewish-Americans and supporters of Israel more generally. James Kirchick, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, claims to have traced the etymology of “Israel Firster” back to Willis Carto, the notorious anti-Semite who published The Spotlight newspaper: avid researcher Kirchick doesn’t even bother trying to prove the term originated with Carto (after all, how could one prove such a thing?): it’s enough for him that Carto’s obscure publication used terms like “Israel-Firster” and routinely hurled unfounded accusations of “dual loyalty” to make the entire subject off limits to the rest of us.

In answer to defenders of the DC Five who say their writings are being taken out of context, Kirchick argues they are encouraging “far right” anti-Semitic discourse taken straight from The Spotlight’s repertoire, and adds:

“As if there were ever a context, other than that of, say, Jonathan Pollard, in which it would be appropriate to label an American Jew an ‘Israel-firster’ or ‘dual loyalist.’”

I would ask Kirchick to read Adler’s article, and then revise his sweeping statement. Surely Adler qualifies as a bona fide “Israel-Firster”: he’s no Pollard, and he is very far from being an anomaly. Never mind his Jewishness: there are probably far more alleged Christians immersed in a similarly apocalyptic mindset who are just as likely to draw the same demented conclusions.

The leaders of pro-Israel groups who lined up demanding the purge of the DC Five, are in denial: if they doubt the existence of Israel-Firsters, let them read the words of an American citizen calmly contemplating the assassination of his own President – in the name of “saving” Israel.

Let them also begin to take some responsibility for Adler’s frame of mind: faithfully echoing the hysterical cries of the Netanyahu government, they have pushed the idea that Israel faces an “existential threat” from Iran against all available evidence. The chief persecutor of the DC Five, one Josh Block – a former AIPAC spokesman and longtime Democratic party operative – told Politico there is “no room” for “political rhetoric that is hostile to Israel, or suggests that Iran has no nuclear weapons program” in “mainstream Democratic party discourse.”

As our policymakers contemplate going to war with Iran, the Israel-Firsters among us want to stop the debate before it even begins. They want to police our language so as to make it impossible to even talk about the issue in terms of what serves America’snational interest.

I am struck by how much the War Party’s case for war with Iran resembles the “ticking time bomb” argument used to justify torture. Torture advocates routinely pose the question in the following terms: suppose you were confronted with the imminent destruction of New York City by a nuclear device, and your choice was either to torture the details of the plot out of a captive terrorist or allow the destruction of the city – which would you choose? This limns the scenario Adler presented to his readers, in which the “ticking time bomb” of a supposedly pending nuclear attack on Israel is prevented by the assassination of the President. Granted, it’s an extreme “solution” – but, hey, only an anti-Semite could possibly object.

The reality is quite different from the impending apocalypse projected by the Israel lobby, which Adler takes to its “logical” and thoroughly nutty conclusion. Bristling with weapons bought and paid for by you and I, its hundreds of nukes aimed straight at Tehran, the Jewish state has easily repelled repeated attempts by its neighbors to enforce the Palestinians’ claimed “right of return”: its military superiority is unquestioned. Our own National Intelligence Estimate informs us Tehran stopped trying to create a nuclear weapons program in 2003, and in spite of a relentless propaganda campaign no new evidence has been uncovered to convincingly show otherwise. Yet to listen to Israel’s leaders, and their amen corner in the US, one would think nuclear-tipped missiles are already hurtling toward Tel Aviv. By manufacturing this phony “existential threat,” the Israel lobby implicitly gave the green light to idiots like Adler, who take their cynical propaganda dead seriously.

Everyone was shocked by Adler’s article, but was anyone besides Kirchick, Foxman & Co. really surprised? In the context of the hysterics engaged in by Israel’s most vocal “defenders,” this was likely to happen sooner or later. Let us hope and pray no one is sufficiently “inspired” by their rhetoric to act out Adler’s prescription for Israel’s continued survival.

Putting Israel First

The War Party's Achilles' Heel

By Justin Raimondo, 
January 30, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

The campaign to lure the US into attacking Iran has one big problem to overcome before the War Party can taste success: the rather obvious fact that such a war would benefit Israel, and not the United States. This is why Israel’s partisans in the US constitute the spearhead of the pro-war agitation, why AIPAC has made this aconsistent theme for the past few years, and why the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, aside from funding the Newtster, has poured untold millions into the same project. Hardly a day goes by without some Israeli government official reiterating, once again, that Iran represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state, and threatening to strike the first blow if Uncle Sam fails to wake up in time, while Israel’s amen corner dutifully echoes the same line.

Israel and its more vehement partisans in this country havedemanded the US attack Iran, even going so far as to raise the specter of another Holocaust if America fails to act. However, one argument they have failed to make is significant by its absence – they have failed to show how it is in America’s interest to launch a military strike. Indeed, they have neglected this part of the equation rather ostentatiously, and yet one can hardly blame them for this oversight for the simple reason that such a case would be impossible to make. An attack on Iran would deprive the world economy of a significant portion of its energy needs, and would likely result in an economic catastrophe in this country – to say nothing of the costs of the war, in blood and treasure. War-weary Americans are not in the mood for another invasion and occupation in search of nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction.” This is the War Party’s Achilles’ heel.

How to get around this is the problem at the heart of the War Party’s current project, and in order to do so they are employing the deadliest weapon in their well-stocked arsenal: the accusation of “racism,” the most toxic accusation anyone can make about someone in the current political climate. Specifically, they are accusing war opponents of “anti-Semitism.” After all, if Israel is the Jewish state, and that state’s very existence is threatened by the specter of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program (which US intelligence has stubbornly failed to detect), then opposition to US military action is “anti-Semitism,” pure and simple.

Today’s war propagandists have figured out a way to make the issue of American interests, as opposed to Israeli interests, go away, and that is by policing the language of the debate. Are you calling someone who wants to pursue Israeli interests over and above those of his or her own country an “Israel firster”? Well, then, you are “anti-Semitic,” you are employing the oldest “anti-Semitic tropes” and echoing “neo-Nazis,” who – James Kirchick assures us – are the originators of the phrase. This is the argument made by “progressive” Spencer Ackerman in a recent issue of the Tablet, in which he joins the neoconservative assault on Glenn Greenwald, M.J. Rosenberg, andfour bloggers over at the Center for American Progress who got slapped down for daring to wield (or imply) this supposedly “toxic” phrase.

There’s just one problem with this argument: it isn’t true. Ackerman cites Kirchick as the authority in this matter, but as a researcher the man Time columnist Joe Klein called a “dishonest prick” and a cheap “propagandist” leaves much to be desired. Kirchick claims the phrase originated with Willis Carto’s Spotlightnewspaper, a cesspool of anti-Semitism, but this is false: it originated, as one can see here, with Alfred M. Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist Jew who wrote several books in the early 1950s and 1960s, notably What Price Israel? Lilienthal’s 1953 book was brought out by Henry Regnery, the noted conservative publicist and pioneer publisher, whose press also printed a number of otheranti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian works, including Freda Utley’s Will the Middle East Go West? – which presciently argued American support for Israel would alienate the Arab world – Road to Beersheba, a novel by Ethel Mannin which dramatized the plight of a conquered people imprisoned in their own land, and a collection of photographs and text by the Swedish photographer Per-Orlow Anderson, They Are Human Too, which, in Regnery’s words, “brought us face to face with the tragedy of the Arab refugees, whom he photographed crowded into the inhospitable Gaza strip.” Which brings to mind the old saw about “the more things change.” Yet another example of the changeless nature of our politics was described by Regnery, who reported in his Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher:

“One unexpected consequence of the book’s publication was the visit from an agent of the FBI, who had been sent to make some inquiries about its author.”

“This was,” continues Regnery, “one of the less serious calls by government agents of one kind or another that frequently followed the publication of a book that displeased some group or individual of influence.” Our witch-hunters will surely characterize Regnery’s sardonic remark as evidence that he, too, was another one of those awful “anti-Semites” – after all, he was implying the Zionist lobby had enough influence to call out the dogs of the FBI and sic them on a mere photographer.

Yet Regnery’s views, and those of his attendant authors, were hardly considered “subversive” back then: indeed, theirs was the standard conservative position on the state of Israel, which, back in the day, was an ally of the Soviet Union and a proudly socialist state. It is inconceivable, of course, that the Regnery Publishing Co. of today would put out anything remotely resembling Lilienthal’s work: not with the conservative movement of 2012 dominated by warmongering neoconservatives andnutty Christian Zionists who see support for Israel as divinely ordained. In 1949, however, when Lilienthal wrote “Israel’s Flag is Not Mine” for Readers Digest, his critique of Zionist propaganda was shared by mainstream conservatives as a matter of course:

“Today we see Zionists boasting of ‘Jewish’ political strength, Zionist picket lines around British consulates, Zionists demonstrating against Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin when he arrives here to sign the Atlantic Pact, New York stores plastered with posters screaming ‘Do Not Buy British. Made Goods.’

“Are these people acting as Americans? Europe’s recovery through the Marshall Plan is the keystone of our bipartisan foreign policy, which the Communists are trying to sabotage. Any boycott of British goods, organized or unorganized, helps this destruction.”

It wasn’t any neo-Nazis, but Lilienthal, a political conservative and a devout Jew, who was the first to raise the question of “dual loyalty.” The “Israel Firster” meme originated, not with the neo-Nazi fringe, but with conservative Jews who, like Lilienthal, objected that:

“My one and only homeland is America. I am proud of my belief in the age-old Judaic concept of one God in Heaven and one Humanity here below. But my faith does not pull me into a feeling of narrowly tribal kinship with all others who worship God in this way. Whenever I read of Americans singing the Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, or see youth groups raising Israel’s flag beside the Stars and Stripes. I am outraged. For Israel’s flag and anthem are symbols of a foreign state; they are not mine.”

The Kirchicks, the Ackermans, the Goldbergs – and also the Cartos – want us to forget this heritage, which has been buried under the landslide of pro-Israel propaganda, because it challenges the premises of both the Israel-Firsters and the anti-Semites.

Lilienthal was no fringe character: a diplomat who worked in the State Department during the war, he served in the US Army in the Middle East, and was later a consultant at the founding conference of the United Nations. His opposition to Zionism as a political movement was initially shared by many if not most American Jews: see Jack Ross’s new book, Rabbi Outcast, for a biography of the most well-known figure in this movement, Rabbi Elmer Berger, which also serves as a detailed history of the American Council for Judaism, the organizational expression of this tendency. These Jews did not think it extraordinary that they would oppose the claims of a foreign government on their loyalties, and they warned – presciently, as it turned out – that American Jews would face charges of harboring dual loyalties because of the Zionists’ insistence that all Jews somehow owed allegiance to Tel Aviv.

In short, the “neo-Nazi” origins of the “Israel Firster” meme is a myth that depends on ignorance of the real history of American Jewish opposition to Israeli nationalism. Like all war propaganda, it is based on blanking out whole portions of the historical record in favor of a black-and-white version of events.

So don’t worry, Glenn – you can still use “Israel Firster” without being tainted by the stain of anti-Semitism.

Yet why use the term at all? Isn’t it just a nasty epithet, one that doesn’t illuminate any valid point about our impending war with Iran?

In a word: no. The advocates of war with Iran are finagling to set up the debate in terms of whether or not we will act to prevent another Holocaust – in which case opposition to bombing Tehran will be characterized as enabling mass genocide. Here is where the neoconservatives and the “responsibility to protect” “progressives” on the left will meet and merge.

That this “argument” is based on fantasy – the fantasy that Iran is indeed busy cooking up nukes, and is determined to wipe Israel off the map – is being obscured in a barrage of lies and phony “intelligence” similar to that which dragged us into attacking Iraq. But war propaganda and facts don’t mix: indeed, they are mutually exclusive. The idea behind any effective campaign designed to push us into war is to whip up an emotional storm, and a key part of this hysteria is smearing antiwar writers and politicians as “anti-Semites.” In the America of 2012, where political correctness is the Iron Rule, even the accusation – no matter how unfounded – of racial or religious bigotry is toxic, and the War Party hopes to poison the debate over Iran by injecting it into the discourse.

They must not be allowed to get away with it: the Language Police don’t have a warrant when it comes to “Israel Firster,” and appeasing them can only constrict the debate so that the essential motive of the pro-war forces is obscured. And, no, it won’t do to argue that Israel’s interests are not served by a US war with Iran: after all, if we aren’t allowed to argue in terms of what’s in America’s interests, and the interests of its people, then we are hogtied from the word go.