Mondoweiss

In Neocons' 'Parallel Establishment,' a Foundation Hides Its Israel Concerns

One of the best lines in Jacob Heilbrunn's book on the neocons, They Knew They Were Right, is that having been excluded by the old WASP establishment, young Jewish rightwing intellectuals of the 50s-70s burned with outsider resentment. And in the end, when they gained influence (in the administrations of Reagan, Clinton and GWBush) they created a "parallel establishment" in Washington.

Heilbrunn never fleshes this idea out; but it is in essence an idea about money. Scott McConnell, the editor of The American Conservative, has said that "Neoconservatism is a career." The neocons created a wealth of jobs and opportunities for intellectuals in Washington, chiefly at thinktanks--the thinktanks that thunk up the Iraq war.

I bring this up because lately I took a look at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a little-known thinktank in Washington that is a pillar of that parallel establishment. The whole foundation is dedicated to fighting radical Islam and fostering democracy in the Middle East. Its website says that it is defending democracies "under assault by terrorism and militant Islamism." There is very little on the website about Israel, and yet it is plain when you look into the group that support for Israel is at the heart of the group's creation. In this sense, FDD is like Freedom's Watch, the Ari Fleischer pro-Iraq war group I have written about. Freedom's Watch purports to be all about America's interests, and yet it is plain, even to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which did the first story on the outfit last summer, that its board and staff are chiefly Jewish and that promoting a U.S. foreign policy that joins the U.S. at the hip with Israel in the fight against terrorism, starting with the Palestinians, is the group's main objective.

I have criticized Freedom's Watch for not being upfront about this aim. The same charge can be leveled at FDD. Go to the website and the group says it was started after 9/11 by "visionary philanthropists," then gives as its board of directors just three names, Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick. Three gentiles. But if you go to the organization's latest 990 form, which it filed with the federal government because it is a 501c3 (forms collected by the great guidestar.org) there are more than 20 directors listed, and most of them have a strong Jewish interest.

Among the board members listed for 2005 are Michael Steinhardt, the co-owner of the New Republic who started birthright, the program to send Jewish kids to Israel for free; Roland Arnall, the ambassador to the Netherlands who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Charles Bronfman, who started birthright with Steinhardt; Cheryl Halpern, who has been associated with the Republican Jewish Committee and WINEP, the pro Israel military thinktank; Tony Gelbart, who started Nefesh B'nefesh, an organization that urges American Jews to move to Israel; Larry Mizel, who started a Jewish museum in Denver; Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare and founder of a Jewish museum; and Lindsay Rosenwald, who is identified online as a member of the Republican Jewish Committee.

These are some of those "visionary philanthropists." Of course, there is nothing wrong with these folks taking a part in the political process. What is unkosher is the website's failure to identify them. Indeed, I see an effort throughout FDD's online publications to hide the salami. Charles Jacobs, a member of the board of advisers, is listed as the head of the American Anti-Slavery Group, a Darfur organization. There is no mention of the fact that Jacobs started the rightwing David Project, an Israel lobby group on campus, or that he was (according to Wikipedia) associated with CAMERA, another Israel lobbyist. Why doesn't FDD share this info?

I.e., if the U.S. and Israel really do share interests, and Americans widely support the unwavering alliance (even as apartheid conditions prevail in the West Bank), why don't the people who care about Israel put it right on the menu when they're selling foreign policy? Because they fear, as Bill Kristol, an adviser to FDD, said at Yivo, that Americans may abandon Israel post-9/11 and -Iraq.

Now let's talk about money. The salaries listed in the Form 990 on Guidestar.org are pretty shocking. The writer Claudia Rossett gets $110,000 a year. Walid Phares, anti-Islamist, get $118,000. Joel Mowbray, a columnist based in New York, gets $127,000 a year. Wow. I can tell you, that's big money for writers. Eleana Gordon, the group's senior v.p. who does occasional events on women's rights in Iraq, got $197,500--3 years ago. I bet she's gotten a raise since then.   

Then there's the group's vice chairman: Tucker Carlson's father Richard W. Carlson, a former ambassador. In the 2005 report Carlson made $138,255 as vice chairman and then his company, Tulip Hill Enterprises, got another $385,000 for "radio show and documentary production." Huh. I wonder what they produced.

This is the character of the "parallel establishment." Conservative gentiles working intimately with conservative Jews to fight radical Islam; and I bet most of the money is Jewish, as most of the money behind Freedom's Watch is Jewish. The sense I got about the visionary philanthropists is that they are self-made entrepreneurs who made it in the great Jewish leap forward of the meritocracy and service economy. Megarich, like Arnall, who started Ameriquest, a subprime lender, or Bernard Marcus, of Home Depot. A couple others are in biotech.

That leap forward is something I participated in and celebrate. We knocked down the doors that made my parents' generation justly resentful. But you have to wonder whether Jewish entrepreneurs have not become the leading engines of the American economy. Surely the thinktank economy. I would never single out their Jewishness were it not for the role that wealth is playing in the political process.

Even for a Liberal American Jewish Journalist, the Occupation Is a Family Matter

A few months back at a party in New York, I met the wife of a prominent liberal journalist and mentioned that I had lately been in Hebron, in Palestine. This woman said that she had close relatives in the settlement in Hebron. They had made aliyah to Israel some years ago; indeed many of the extremists in the West Bank are transplanted Americans. We talked about it for a while, and bewailed the settlement, which has fostered apartheid conditions in the center of the second largest city in the West Bank. The woman said that she speaks to her relatives, sees them, they visit her; but they agree to disagree about the legitimacy of Israeli colonization of the West Bank.

A couple of weeks ago, I emailed the journalist, whom I know as an acquaintance, and said that I wanted to mention his personal connection to the settlement in the West Bank. He asked me not to. He said that this was party talk, and he preferred that it remain off the record.

I'm honoring his request, inasmuch as I'm not giving his name. But I need to write about it all the same. For this is frequently the character of liberal American Jewish connection to Israel and to the colonization there. Yes, this journalist has been to Israel, unlike so many other Jews. And of course, like so many other American Jews, he laments the Occupation and wishes there was a Palestinian state. And yet, on the simple question of being open about his own connection to the illegal settlement program that has so corrupted Israel, he cannot be honest with me or his own readers. His discretion is understandable; we are talking about his relations. And this is the cultural question I have repeatedly visited here: American Jews feel different levels of intimate connection to the Jewish state. Some of them are hawkish supporters, some are liberal demurrers. But to renounce or repudiate the colonization scheme--in which Israelis destroy Palestinian ways of life and humiliate them?  That is hard to do. After all, family is involved.

Hosni Begat Gamal. Saddam Begat Qusay. And Norman Begat John

One of the best things in Jacob Heilbrunn's new book, They Knew They Were Right, is his analysis of the children of the neocons. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz had struggled to attain prominence. They had varied careers, generally on the outside of mainstream culture, wearing moth-eaten tweeds, and never thought they'd achieve political power, as they did beginning in the 70s. Indeed, Lionel Trilling, one of their mentors, said that instrumentalized intellectuals--intellectuals who served power--were debased. Anyway, Heilbrunn says that the children of the neocons--John Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, and Bill Kristol, that whole generation--didn't get the life experience and the political development their fathers did. And meantime their fathers placed too much value on filial piety, and wanted the narcissistic pleasure of seeing their kids doing what they did, and having the same politics. So the kids didn't develop the intellectual toughness their fathers had. (Let alone serve in the military, as their fathers generally did!)

A long way of saying: the kids gave us Iraq.

I bring this all up because of the succession at Commentary magazine. Norman Podhoretz is the editor emeritus. As we all know, his son John Podhoretz, whose online handle is Jpod, is due to become the editor of the magazine this year some time. It's a sad moment for a once-noble magazine that led opposition to the Vietnam War. Podhoretz is an impish, tabloid intellectual. And a weak copy of pa. Shouldn't Commentary have threshed the fields a little? Or looked around for a new direction... It feels samey to me; honestly, I don't know if I'm going to renew my subscription ($45 a year.).

Oddly enough, the succession at Commentary is most like those regimes that the neocons so desire to smash: Arab dictatorships. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak is about to be succeeded by his son Gamal, they say. Over in Iraq, Saddam had groomed Qusay to be the head Fred; and we know how that turned out. In Syria, Hafez el-Assad was grooming his oldest son, then when he died it went to the London son, ophthalmologist Bashir.

Is that any way to run a country--or a magazine?

[Thanks to Dan Swanson for this idea]

'Commentary' Distances Itself From Podhoretz (Norman)

You have to do Kremlinology with the neocons. Study the pictures, see who's missing.

Well, the latest Commentary I got has as its lead coverline, "Stopping Iran: Why the Case for Military Action Still Stands," by one Norman Podhoretz. If you read the article, though, it's not a consideration of "a case for military action" still standing. It is that case. Podhoretz is emphatic that we have the same opportunity to stop Iran now as England and France had to stop Hitler in 1938. Ah, calm thinking. Between bombing Iran and letting Iran get the bomb, "there is simply no contest," Podhoretz says. But we must "summon up the courage to see what is staring us in the face and act on what we see."

So you see, Commentary's headline is deceptive, and suggests a meditation rather than a call-to-arms. The accurate headline for this hysterical farrago would have been, "Why We Must Bomb Iran," or "Why We Must Bomb Iran Before It Gets the Bomb," or some such. I believe that even the neocons are somewhat embarrassed about their track record, and leery of the feverish drum-banging for another Middle East shebang.
 

What Obama Bragged About in Kansas, Men Were Once Lynched For

Yesterday in El Dorado, Kansas, Barack Obama told of his white lineage, and how his maternal grandparents had met and fallen in love (did people fall in love back then, or just hook up?) in Kansas. His mother was born there, later met his Kenyan father in Hawaii. They're both dead now. According to the BBC radio coverage this morning, Obama sought out white cousins in the crowd after. One said she was praying for him.

"Bleeding Kansas" was a battleground in the fight against slavery, and then 100 years later in the fight against segregation. In 1954, just about when Obama's mother left Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in Topeka.

Which is to say that the family story Obama was celebrating yesterday would have been denounced not that long ago in Kansas as miscegenation, or even "the mongrelization of the white race." Black men were lynched for doing what he was bragging about, and the crowd was adoring. Countries change. When Ali Abunimah says that Palestine is one country and that Jews and Arabs can learn to live with one another in freedom, I think of Obama's Kansas. People surely doubted that blacks and whites could live as equals here. Progressive America has a lot to teach the world...

My Country Needs Jewish Liberals to Expose Neocons as a Jewish 'Special Interest'

I've long argued here that American Jewry won't be healed, and neither will American leadership, till we come to terms with the neocons as an expression of a hawkish Jewish interest in the Middle East, and a powerful expression at that. For this conversation to take place, it is necessary for liberal and leftwing Jews, even centrists, to turn on their cousins whose thinking they understand intimately--the hawkish neocons--and explain how fears for Israel came to pervade the  Jewish establishment post-67 and '73. It means, in essence, trusting America enough to say, "Guess what, Junior just blew up the  neighborhood with his rocket set..."  Can the Jewish family do that? 

So far the leaders of this conversation have been outside the Jewish family: Walt and Mearsheimer. Though lately Jacob Heilbrunn has joined in with his book on the neocons. And now, on his new blog the writer Bernard Avishai comes close to turning Junior in with a discussion of Jews as a special interest. Avishai writes of neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz:

Podhoretz’s real breakthrough came, not when he reimagined blacks as more or less permanent adversaries, but when he reimagined Jews as a more or less permanent interest group—when he reimagined the old liberalism as a trendy behaviorism and argued that “Jewish interests” (protection of wealth, “support for Israel,” etc.) required nothing more than a common sense use of power.

[Emphasis Weiss's]... The liberalism we once knew assumed fallible citizens, skeptical of received wisdoms, struggling to come up with some common, provisionally defined good. Podhoretz assumed us to be atomized bundles of appetites, organized into “socialized” groups, getting what we can from a competition for inherently scarce goods (like money, power and fame). Old liberals were interested in rights;  now we were right to have interests. 

What’s the Jewish interest?... what if this was always the wrong question? What if American Jews are not an interest group but restless, loosely connected citizens—curiously proud of (what Aharon Appelfeld calls) their “fate,” not Christian but not unChristian, no longer immigrants, educated and well-off, to be sure, but still not quite comfortable, looking to make sense of themselves in an evolving America? What if, by choosing, they show themselves who they are?

We Can Talk About Religion in the Republican Party. But Not Among Democrats

The talk on MS-NBC tonight was all about the religious right. Is the religious right over as a dominant force? Are Huckabee and Romney splitting the religious right vote? Has the Republican Party matured past the social issues to accept a McCain? (Yes, sez I, to all).

I wish the journalists would be even a fraction so candid about the religious forces in the Democratic camp, the Israel lobby, the Jewish vote, Jewish money, and so on. These forces are just as important as the religious right, probably more important, as they are helping to burn down the Middle East in the name of a clash of civilizations, even as they push for stem-cell research. Yet journalists are still afraid to bring them up, partly because they know the Democratic religious types and don't see them as nuts--no, they're secular--where they don't know many evangelicals, and can easily caricature them.

I keep predicting that things are changing for the better. And they are. It's just taking a while...

The Clinton We Never Knew. Well Actually Some of Us Did

John Harris of Politico has a nice column on Bill Clinton's shrill, tempery performance saying this was the Bill Clinton who reporters saw every day back in the 90s, who Washington establishment types came to dislike. The only problem is that Harris is saying it now when it's safe to say it; even Hillary has Bill to kick around this week. Where was this portrait of Bill when we needed it? There were many references to his temper in the press, but reporters didn't let go about it. Only Clinton-haters like myself did.

The Clinton everyone is now seeing is the one we dislike, mean and ruthless and self-obsessed. As Mike McCurry, his press spokesman said, when it was too late, he was probably unfit to be president. Smart guy, I agree. Great politician, absolutely; and now we're seeing that calculating mind in all its glory. Good president, I go along with that too. But character, bravery, selflessness--none of the above.

The other night a friend repeated the old saw to me that Clinton got impeached for a blowjob. I bit my tongue. This is false. Clinton got impeached because the Supreme Court voted 9-0 to maintain a valiant democratic principle, that even a president has to deal with an accuser in the courts. Clinton's way of dealing with Paula Jones was to lie repeatedly under oath. (You'll notice that Detroit's mayor is now in trouble for the same sort of thing, saying under oath he wasn't having an affair with an aide; and no one has started moveon.org.) Clinton flouted the rule of law out of a monstrous sense of his importance--and bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, on bogus George-Bush-like intelligence, when the House was voting to impeach. Had the press been more upfront about the Bill Clinton they were coming to know and hate, maybe the threats his people made to women he had gone out with would have come out, and he would have been forced from office. Al Gore would have gotten the job (and I wouldn't have voted for Nader). As it is, the country has had to wait till now to see the real Bill.

"Lots of elite Democrats never liked the guy that much," Harris said. The insiders' rage at him today is approaching the levels they felt when he pardoned all those money guys, including Marc Rich, at the last minute. Sadly, the Washington elite protected Clinton right through to the end. He was their boy... 

Another Zionist Nightmare--Backing Outpost Settlers, Israeli Soldiers Bare Moon Palestinian Shepherd

On January 11, an Ohio volunteer for the interventionist group Christian Peacemaker Teams visited grazing lands of a Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills where settlers from an illegal "outpost" settlement called Havot Maon had stopped Palestinians from grazing their sheep. The settlers were being aided by Israeli soldiers, who were forcing the shepherds off their lands, and who approached the volunteer. A shocking video provided by CPT shows a group of Israeli soldiers dismissing the Ohio volunteer's complaint that the lands are Palestinian, according to Israeli maps. The 3-minute video is shocking because it shows two of the soldiers dropping their pants to baremoon the Palestinian shepherd. They do so with calm deliberation.

These are settlements that even George Bush said "ought to go" a week before this video was made. Obviously, the U.S. government does not care about the landgrab.

My appeal is to American Jews to try and save our religion and people from this disaster. You say it is an aberration, it's not--this type of behavior has been licensed again and again by the occupation; and Breaking the Silence, an Israeli veterans' group which has worked with CPT, has amply documented the moral degradation. The occupation has claimed Israel; and once-noble Commentary Magazine runs articles speaking of the settlements' "achievement." Messianic colonialism, crude racist behavior, contempt for civil norms--this is how Zionism is working itself out. Sixty years past the Holocaust, 100 years past Herzl, 110 years past Dreyfus and the Russian pogroms, and 60 years past the ethnic cleansing, this is how Zionism has formed itself in modern history.

Will Obama's 'Jewish Problem' Allow Media to Talk about Israel Lobby?

OK, maybe Walt and Mearsheimer were the first guys over the barbed wire, and they left their bodies there. No one's allowed to touch their ideas now. They were bad and wrong. Worse: controversial. OK. Well, comes now Barack Obama with his weirdass background and his couple slips about Palestinians, and the Jewish leadership is worried, says the Jewish Advocate--

"Given his heritage, background and upbringing, there is no question that he’d be more open than the other candidates to arguments from different perspectives and viewpoints and not hold the standard party line regarding Israel and the Jewish community,” said the Rebbe, Grand Rabbi Y. A. Korff.

Party line?

In the race for the American presidency, securing support from Jewish leaders has become a valuable tool in swaying Jewish voters...

Leaders? The article cites Steve Grossman, an important fundraiser. He says Obama seems OK, but he's a bit unknown.

It is the senator’s relatively unknown status that raises doubts in the minds of Jewish voters, according to Steve Grossman, former chair of the Democratic National Committee and of AIPAC, and a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton.

Last year Grossman attacked Desmond Tutu for saying Palestinians are oppressed. AIPAC. Party line. Jewish leaders. Jewish givers. Isn't it time for some mainstream journalism about the alleged Israel lobby?