U.S. MEDIA AND IRAN: TOM FRIEDMAN & NYT CHASTISE JEWS FOR OPPOSING GENEVA DEAL, IN WSJ, STEPHENS CRITICIZED FOR MUNICH ANALOGY

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Grey Lady’s “Israel Lobby” Fixation: Seth Lipsky, New York Post, Nov. 22, 2013— Israel and the Saudis, and a few other Arab states, have finally come together on an issue — they are against the deal with the Iranian mullahs that is being sought by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. They see it as appeasement. So what is the reaction from The New York Times? It rolls out Thomas Friedman to blame American Jews.

Fire Friedman — Forthwith: Martin Sherman, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 21, 2013 — Tom Friedman is back in Judeophobic “Elders-of- Zion-Jews-rule-the-world” mode.

Iran and Munich: a Fair Comparison?: Jonathan S. Tobin, Jewish Press, Dec. 5, 2013— Since Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama announced the nuclear deal with Iran, outrage over what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly termed a “historic mistake” has been intense, especially among supporters of Israel.

Why Netanyahu Gave Pope Francis His Father’s History of the Spanish Inquisition: Rachel Silberstein, Tablet, Dec. 5, 2013— Benjamin Netanyahu had an audience with Pope Francis in Rome, where he invited the supreme pontiff to Israel and presented him with a variety of gifts. One of them, as you can see in the photo above, was a Spanish translation of a history of the Spanish Inquisition, written by Bibi’s late father, Ben Zion Netanyahu.

On Topic Links

New York Times’ Obama Cheerleading Harms the Nation: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Nov. 10, 2013 

The Muslim World’s Intellectual Refuseniks Offer Enlightened Views on Islam and Israel: David Mikics, Tablet, Dec. 3, 2013

Let’s Make a Deal: Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013

Crypto-Jews Light Up Spanish Inquisition Prison: Rachel Silberstein, Tablet, Dec. 5, 2013

GREY LADY’S “ISRAEL LOBBY” FIXATION

Seth Lipsky

New York Post, Nov. 21, 2013

Israel and the Saudis, and a few other Arab states, have finally come together on an issue — they are against the deal with the Iranian mullahs that is being sought by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. They see it as appeasement. So what is the reaction from The New York Times? It rolls out Thomas Friedman to blame American Jews. That is the gist of his latest cable, sent from the United Arab Emirates and headlined “Let’s Make A Deal.” While the Arabs have been warning the Obama administration about a Geneva pact, Friedman complains, “[d]iplomats and ministers from Israel and the Israel lobby have been working Congress.”

“Never have I seen Israel and America’s core Arab allies working more in concert to stymie a major foreign policy initiative of a sitting U.S. president,” Friedman writes, “and never have I seen more lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — more willing to take Israel’s side against their own president’s.” And what does the three-time Pulitzer prize winner take from this? “I’m certain,” Friedman writes (that’s his word, “certain”), “this comes less from any careful consideration of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.”

Well, I’m certain there are some choice adjectives for Friedman’s tendency to blame America’s Jewish community for the failure of the Congress to do what Tom Friedman thinks best. “Loathsome” is the word that my erstwhile colleague at the New York Sun, Ira Stoll, uses in Wednesday’s edition of Smartertimes.com, his daily critique of the Gray Lady. Friedman, as Stoll puts it, “ignores the possibility that it might also be in America’s interest to avoid some sham deal with Iran that would leave the Iranian dictators in power with the ability to continue supporting terrorism, abusing the human rights of the Iranian people, and opposing the Arab-Israeli peace process, and secretly continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.”

The last Washington, DC, pooh-bah to ignore that possibility was Sen. Charles Hagel. He blamed the Israel lobby for just about all the ills of American policy in the Middle East. President Obama promptly picked him for defense secretary, and when, at his confirmation hearing, he was grilled about this, he backed away from his libel. Friedman reacted to Hagel’s then-pending nomination by writing that he was “certain” — that’s the word he used again — that “the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes.” He characterized that belief as including the view that “this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account.” It’s fun to imagine how would Friedman would fare in the kind of hot seat Hagel was put in by the Senate. It was Friedman who said when the joint meeting of Congress exploded in applause for Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu: “That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

How is that kind of talk any different than Patrick Buchanan writing, as he did in 2008: “Israel and its Fifth Column in this city seek to stampede us into war with Iran”? Or the kind of talk David Duke has been publishing in reaction to the Geneva talks? It would be inaccurate to suggest that Friedman shares David Duke’s view of the Jews or of Israel. All the more bizarre is Friedman’s suggestion that Congress has been bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The fact is that there are a lot of highly educated people, in and out of Congress, who have studied their history. They know the lessons it teaches — that it’s not just the deal that is the danger. It is the talking itself. The very process of negotiation makes each side the partner to the other. The lesson is that the hunger for peace can itself be a ­danger. At the time of the appeasement at Munich, the Times was as certain of one thing as Tom Friedman is of the culpability of the Israel lobby. It was that Neville Chamberlain, who cut the deal with Hitler to avoid war, would emerge as “a heroic figure, with the respect and admiration of men of good-will the world over.”

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FIRE FREEDMAN — FORTHWITH

Martin Sherman                                                                                                                                    Jerusalem Post, Nov. 21, 2013                                                         

Never have I seen more lawmakers – Democrats and Republicans – more willing to take Israel’s side against their own president’s [policy]. I’m certain this comes less from any careful consideration of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations. – Thomas L. Friedman, “Let’s Make a Deal,” November 19, 2013.

Tom Friedman is back in Judeophobic “Elders-of- Zion-Jews-rule-the-world” mode. In his latest rant in The New York Times, “Let’s Make a Deal” (November 19, 2013), in which he berated Israel, as the Jewish state, and its US supporters for opposing the emerging appeasement of Iran, Friedman sinks to a new nadir of journalistic drivel and racist incitement –which is no mean feat, given the lows he has stooped to in the past. As he is normally prone to do, when writing on Israel, Friedman has, in his column this week, penned his usual pernicious potpourri of the malicious and the mendacious, generously seasoned with logical inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies.

Of course, journalists are permitted to produce pure poppycock if the media outlet they are associated with has no objection to publishing it, or to leading its readers astray. So the claptrap that Friedman inflicts on his readers in not really a valid reason for his dismissal by the NYT – which has given ample indication that not only does it have no objection to leading its readers astray, but when it comes to Israel, it has a strong interest in doing so. But surely, his unbridled bigotry is such a reason – especially in the pristinely politically-correct milieu Friedman is associated with.

Indeed, in recent years, there have been numerous instances of people, across the social strata–from well-known media celebrities to unknown fast-food employees– being dismissed from their jobs for racial slurs far less serious, less malevolent and less calculated than those expressed by Friedman. The fact that Friedman’s bigoted bile is directed against his own ethnic kinfolk should make little difference. Indeed, earlier this year a high-profile former black football star was fired from his position as a TV sports commentator for making racially disparaging remarks about his black co-host.

In past columns, I have repeatedly exposed the faulty– often blatantly self-contradictory – analysis and argumentation that Friedman employs in his frequent anti-Israel tirades. His offering this week is no less flawed than his previous ones. However, rather than once again focusing on the almost infantile claims and glaring non-sequiturs that “grace” Friedman’s latest column, I shall turn attention to his incendiary Judeophobic innuendo; referring to his faulty logic and factual inaccuracies only when these are instrumental in shedding light on his hurtful racial slurs and his hateful racist incitement. Indeed, in a world where you can lose your job for making remarks that are borderline offensive, expressing little more than awareness of someone’s ethnic origins/sexual preferences, the lack of outrage at Friedman’s inflammatory insinuations is remarkable. After all, were Friedman to employ the same derogatory innuendo that appeared in his recent NYT columns towards any other minority – gays, blacks, Hispanics – he would be unceremoniously fired. But when it comes to the Jews, apparently things are different.

Clearly, this week’s blatant barb as to the iniquitous impact of Jewish plutocracy on US national interests cannot be dismissed as a momentary, unintentional slip of the pen – or a mistakenly depressed computer key. As can be seen from the introductory excerpts, this has been a recurring theme in his columns over recent years, making it look like an ongoing vendetta against the Jewish state and its Jewish supporters in the US and very much a calculated campaign. Friedman’s repeated allegations point almost inexorably to an unequivocal conclusion: The Jews control US foreign policy and have reduced America to no more than a banana republic, where elected representatives are willing to sell their nation’s – and hence their constituents’ – interests to the highest bidder and can be bought by unscrupulous, conniving Judeo-plutocrats (with hooked noses?).

Mearsheimer and Walt – and subscribers to their venomous views regarding the sinister influence of the “Israel (read, “Jewish”) Lobby”– could hardly ask for a more ringing endorsement of their noxious doctrine! Indeed, much of the criticism leveled at Mearsheimer and Walt’s shoddy slander could equally apply to Friedman’s writings. Thus, following the endorsement of their work by none other than Osama bin Laden(!), who urged his followers to read their book, David Rothkopf, chief executive and editor at large of the Foreign Policy Group wrote: “All [this] book did was weave precisely the kind of fabric of partial truths and old biases that are used to dress up the hatreds of demagogues everywhere.”

What a fitting description this would be of Friedman’s accusations that Jews in America deliberately press for policies that harm the national interest! Osama would doubtless concur. The left-leaning The Forward, in reportedly the longest editorial in the paper’s 120-year history, aptly titled “In Dark Times, Blame the Jews,” castigated the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. Expressing surprised concern at “the flimsiness of their work,” it noted disparagingly, “Countless facts are simply wrong. Long stretches of argument are implausible, at times almost comically so….An undergraduate submitting work like this would be laughed out of class.”…

Like Mearsheimer and Walt, Friedman seems totally incapable of fathoming the true texture of the Israel-US bond – at least, as it was perceived and prevailed until the advent of the current Islamophilic administration that has proved itself to be totally unmoored from the Judeo- Christian heritage, which underpinned that bond for decades. Thus, The Forward concluded its previously-mentioned editorial with the following words: “Mearsheimer and Walt join a long line of critics who dislike Israel so deeply that they cannot fathom the support it enjoys in America, and so they search for some malign power capable of perverting America’s good sense. They find it, as others have before, in the Jews.” This is a diagnosis that fits Friedman’s malevolent malaise like a glove…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link – ed.]
 

Contents

IRAN AND MUNICH: A FAIR COMPARISON?

Jonathan S. Tobin

                                      Jewish Press, Dec. 5, 2013

Since Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama announced the nuclear deal with Iran, outrage over what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly termed a “historic mistake” has been intense, especially among supporters of Israel. That has led some observers to invoke comparisons with the 1938 Munich agreement in which the Western powers betrayed Czechoslovakia in an attempt to appease Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The question of whether Munich should be mentioned in the same breath as the agreement signed in Geneva was discussed recently by Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Bret Stephens in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column. According to Stephens, the deal Obama is claiming as a triumph for diplomacy is “worse than Munich.” Is he right? Whether you think the deal is as bad as Stephens thinks or whether the price of a mistake with Iran is as costly as the West’s miscalculations about Hitler, the real answer depends on whether Iran betrays Obama.

As to the merits of the Iran deal, the facts are very much with Stephens in terms of the feckless nature of this diplomatic endeavor. The agreement loosened sanctions and handed over billions in frozen cash to the Islamist regime while tacitly legitimizing the Iranian nuclear program. While administration supporters can claim the sanctions relief involves a fraction of the existing restrictions, they cannot claim that Iran’s supposed concessions do anything to roll back the nuclear progress Tehran has made in the last five years. Instead of making the world, and Israel, safer, as Obama and Kerry have insisted, it makes it more likely that Iran will get a nuclear deal in the long run as well as heightening the chances of a Middle East arms race involving Saudi Arabia and new outbreaks of violence involving current and perhaps future Iranian allies like Syria, Hizbullah, and Hamas. Stephens also makes an important point when he speaks of Obama’s desire for détente with Iran as being far less defensible than British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s decision to trust “Herr Hitler.” Britain and France were weak in 1938. It can, as Stephens points out, be argued that delaying the war with Germany by a year, during which Britain built up its military forces, hurt Hitler even if it did result in the annihilation of the Czechs. Though appeasers might have been justified in thinking they had no better option in 1938 than to give in to Hitler, there is no comparable excuse available for Obama and Kerry. Iran is weaker than the West and its economy is, thanks to the sanctions Obama opposed and delayed implementing, in tatters.

Like Chamberlain and French President Edouard Daladier, Obama sued the ayatollahs for peace while saying the only alternative to appeasement was war. Though no one wants a war with Iran, the alternative was to toughen the sanctions and increase pressure on Iran and to at least demand that it begin dismantling the nuclear program. Like the appeasers of 1938 who thought Hitler couldn’t be persuaded to back down and therefore must be given what he asked for, Obama gave in to Iranian demands because the Iranians insisted on them. Iran is not the hegemonic power Nazi Germany was. Nor can it attack the West on equal or superior military terms as Germany did. But the assumption that Iran has no capability or desire to commit genocide is merely a matter of faith. Once the Iranians get a nuke – and it can be argued that the Iran deal is a bridge to a containment policy rather than one aimed at prevention – genocide or at least a war with incalculable consequences becomes a possibility. Bad as the Iran deal was, the real analogy to Munich is the way in which Obama and Kerry not only ignored the concerns of the nations endangered by an Iranian nuke – Israel and Saudi Arabia – but also excluded them from the negotiations. Like the Czechs who were told by Chamberlain they had no choice but to accept the dismemberment of their country, Israel and the Saudis have been callously told they can either like the deal or lump it.

It is an iron rule of debate that the first person to invoke the Holocaust usually loses, and in the eyes of some any talk about Munich is always going to be viewed as over the top no matter how strong the analogy might be. That may be so, but the flipside of this argument is that the problem with the Iran deal is not what it means for the world today but what will follow from it. Opponents of the appeasers of 1938 were unable to convince grateful Britons who were overjoyed that war had been averted, no matter the cost, to listen to their warnings. They could point to the probable consequences but until Hitler marched into Prague, and then invaded Poland despite promising Chamberlain that he wouldn’t, it was just talk. So, too, are the critics of appeasing Iran powerless to do much to stop Obama’s policy until the Iranians prove them right. Until that happens, Obama’s defenders can accuse Stephens and others like him of hyperbole and hysteria. But once Iran cheats on the deal and uses its weak terms to get closer to its nuclear ambition, critics of the agreement will sound a lot more credible even to liberals who are trying their best to ignore this debate. At that point, as the world confronts a nuclear-armed state sponsor of terror run by Islamist fanatics, Stephens’s suggestion that Obama and Kerry are the same as the appeasers of Hitler, “minus the umbrellas,” will seem tame.

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WHY NETANYAHU GAVE POPE FRANCIS HIS FATHER’S HISTORY OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION

Rachel Silberstein

Tablet, Dec. 5, 2013

[Dec. 2, 2013], Benjamin Netanyahu had an audience with Pope Francis in Rome, where he invited the supreme pontiff to Israel and presented him with a variety of gifts. One of them, as you can see in the photo above, was a Spanish translation of a history of the Spanish Inquisition, written by Bibi’s late father, Ben Zion Netanyahu. At first glance, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain looks like a rather awkward selection. After all, when visiting with the pope, it’s probably best not to remind him of his institution’s role in the infamous persecution and torture of innocent Jews. Certain things would seem better left unsaid on state visits. But this isn’t your typical history of the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, Ben Zion Netanyahu’s revisionist account of the event was so controversial that when he passed away in April 2012, the New York Times chronicled the debate over it in his obituary. Understanding the book’s unique argument enables us to understand why Netanyahu chose to give such an ostensibly undiplomatic gift to the Pope. The Times recounts:

As a historian, Mr. Netanyahu reinterpreted the Inquisition in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (1995). The predominant view had been that Jews were persecuted for secretly practicing their religion after pretending to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mr. Netanyahu, in 1,384 pages, offered evidence that most Jews in Spain had willingly become Catholics and were enthusiastic about their new religion. Jews were persecuted, he concluded — many of them burned at the stake — for being perceived as an evil race rather than for anything they believed or had done. Jealousy over Jews’ success in the economy and at the royal court only fueled the oppression, he wrote. The book traced what he called “Jew hatred” to ancient Egypt, long before Christianity.

In other words, Ben Zion Netanyahu’s argument shifted the root blame for the Inquisition from religion to ingrained racial animus–from the spiritual to the secular. If one was going to give the pope a book about the Inquisition, then, this would be the one. Moreover, not only does the book’s revisionist reckoning partially absolve Christianity for Spanish persecution of the Jews, it offers a contemporary message of pressing relevance. At a time when Christian anti-Semitism has receded–evidenced not least by the friendly relations between the Vatican and the state of Israel–secular and racial forms of anti-Semitism have been on the rise, particularly in Europe, where a nearly a quarter of Jews say they are afraid to publicly identify as Jewish. The anti-Semitism diagnosed by Ben Zion Netanyahu is alive and well. The elder Netanyahu’s account of the Inquisition then, whatever its merits as a reconstruction of the past, serves as a powerful warning about the dangers lurking in the present–one that his son doubtless intended to convey.

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New York Times’ Obama Cheerleading Harms the Nation: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Nov. 10, 2013 — Poor Barack Obama. Ending his fifth year as the world’s most powerful man, he is running out of scapegoats and fairy tales. Blaming George W. Bush has lost its punch, and the ObamaCare debacle is shredding the myths he is competent and honest.

The Muslim World’s Intellectual Refuseniks Offer Enlightened Views on Islam and Israel: David Mikics, Tablet, Dec. 3, 2013 — When it comes to the Muslim world, Western opinion-makers seem to have a taste for what Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”—figures whose intellectual and political virtue flows from their rootedness in their native cultures.

Let’s Make a Deal: Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013 — Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates — The Middle East once again proves that if you eat right, exercise regularly and don’t smoke, you’ll live long enough to see everything, including a day when the Jews controlling Jerusalem and the Sunni Saudi Custodians of the Great Mosques of Mecca and Medina would form a tacit alliance against the Shiite Persians of Iran and the Protestants of America — with the Hindus of India and the Confucians of China also supporting America, sort of, while the secularist French play all sides.

Crypto-Jews Light Up Spanish Inquisition Prison: Rachel Silberstein, Tablet, Dec. 5, 2013 — More than 100 descendants of Jews who converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition celebrated the eighth night of Hanukkah in Palermo, Sicily last night at an unlikely venue: the infamous Steri Palace prison, where Jews were routinely tortured from 1601 to 1782.

On Topic Links

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