NY Times headline blames Israel for Freeman's undoing
A New York Times story about the withdrawal of Chas Freeman from consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council has a "blame Israel" tone and a "Blame Israel" headline: "Israel Stance was Undoing of Nominee for Intelligence Post" (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).The article goes on to attribute Freeman's undoing to evil Jooos and the worldwide Zionist conspiracy known as the 'Israel Lobby.' By the way, I'm not even going to put a sarc tag or a lot of scare quotes on that sentence: It captures the article's essence. It's as if no one from China ever opposed Freeman and no one ever questioned his business associations with Saudi Arabia.
Read the whole thing.
In the comments section yesterday, a reader asked whether I think Freeman's views on Israel had anything to do with the opposition he generated. I believe that Freeman's views on Israel were a motivation for the pro-Israel community to find other bases for criticizing him (such as his views on China, the 9/11 quote and the national identification system, all of which were hot buttons that went well-beyond the pro-Israel community).
I don't believe his views on Israel were the reason he was brought down.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:14 PM
3 Comments:
For the record, the AJIC pro-Israel lobby did NOT take a stand on Chas Freeman. The assumption Jews have a veto on federal appointments in America is not only untrue; it smacks of anti-Semitism. Freeman did withdraw his nomination but that was on account of factors that had nothing to do with Israel. That's a story worth exploring but don't hold your breath waiting for the American MSM waiting to pick it up and run with it.
Freeman was so dirty it wasnt even close....
but let's not talk about the real issues it's so much sexier to give us Joos power!
Face facts...
Freeman?
An arabist hack... On the pay role of Communist China... A scum sucker...
People like this OF COURSE hate Jews....
If we were all powerful we would have exposed this cretin YEARS ago but here is a nice recap of this Hero of the Israel Haters Association of America By Ben Cohen (fellow Joos)
http://blog.z-word.com/2009/02/chas-freeman-the-new-hero-of-the-resistance/
Chas Freeman: The New Hero of the Resistance
Published by Ben Cohen on February 27, 2009 in Israel Lobby, Middle East and USA.
Yet more evidence of the overlap, when it comes to Israel, between the unreconstructed left and America-first realists comes in the shape of this piece by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation.
Dreyfuss is overjoyed by the appointment of Chas Freeman as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, despite the objections of the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and other inhabitants of what Dreyfuss calls “Planet Perle.”
Who is Freeman? What has he done to deserve such adulation? Is he a fiery liberal, determined to speak truth to power in the murky corridors of international relations?
Nope. Freeman was George H.W. Bush’s Ambassador to that beacon of enlightenment in the Middle East otherwise known as Saudi Arabia. More recently, he’s served as President of the Middle East Policy Council (MPEC), a Washington-DC based institute which has enjoyed generous Saudi funding.
The composition of MPEC’s National Advisory Committee makes for fascinating reading. There’s Marc Ellis, an anti-Zionist Jewish academic with a penchant for authoring lines like, “to speak of the Holocaust without confessing our sins towards the Palestinian people and seeking a real justice with them is a hypocrisy that debases us as Jews.” There’s Richard Falk, the Counterpunch contributor and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories who believes that there’s something amiss with the 9/11 “narrative”. These two, along with several other journalists and scholars with broadly left credentials, sit happily alongside a Senior Director of the Petroleum Finance Company (which advertises its “special understanding of the impact of US foreign policy on energy issues”), a former Chief Executive of the Bahrain Petroleum Company and a former director of Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company.
It should come as no surprise that Freeman is a stalwart defender of Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby.” Their thesis that Israel’s advocates in America are powerful enough to cajole the US into acting against its own national interest has been aggressively pushed by MPEC. Boasted Freeman: “No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article, given the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it.”
There it is again: that line about controlling the discourse. And now the man who uttered it will be in charge of producing the US National Intelligence Estimate.
Might Freeman nonetheless be capable of being the dispassionate analyst so sorely needed in the wake of the recent, bitter debates about politicized intelligence? Perhaps - though Jeffrey Goldberg may well be right that we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Unless we write for The Nation, of course.
I'm glad he's gone. But that won't change the outlook of the Obama Administration towards Israel. Like I said, to make America's enemies warm up to her, someone must pay the price for that to happen. It will be Israel.
Post a Comment
<< Home