Israel Matzav

With 'friends' like Joe Klein, who needs enemies?

Ron Radosh demolishes a recent blog post from Time Magazine's Joe Klein.

Klein goes on to argue that while the Palestinians have fulfilled all the conditions necessary to achieve peace, the Israelis alone have not, since they continue to colonize. And those who have a different analysis — he specifically cites Abrams and Jennifer Rubin — they are condemned as perpetrators of the “Big Lie” and in Rubin’s case, of being “a pro-Likud fanatic.” Now Rubin — as any readers of her wonderful posts knows — can well take care of herself. But what Klein has done is to respond not to her argument that Obama is presiding over “the most anti-Israeli administration in history,” which many of us feel has been established as fact, but to deal with this claim by engaging in an outpouring of ad hominem remarks one does not expect to find on the site of a distinguished magazine.

Indeed, he then writes that Abrams, Rubin and AIPAC — the notorious “Jewish lobby” — are guilty of undermining American policy in such a manner that their views “teeter on the brink of treachery.” (my emphasis) They are, to put it another way, potential traitors to our country! This is as good an example of liberal McCarthyism as one can find. Klein, I think, is the first to make such an accusation since the right-wing crazy Taki argued a few years ago in the pages of the American Conservative that American Jews are a “fifth column,” and elsewhere that the Jewish neo-cons (he actually lists thirteen of them by name) are “as shameless and contemptible as most traitors are.”

And why should they and Israel “stand down”? The answer Klein gives is that “the U.S. is trying to build a regional, and international, coalition to contain and deter Iran — to prevent it from building nuclear weapons, if possible — that will work to Israel’s benefit, if it is successful.” Is Joe Klein serious? Has he not read the newspapers the past few days, in which the administration has made it clear it is backing off tough sanctions?

If anyone is trying to get the U.S. to in fact do precisely what Klein says it is already doing, it is those very people he is criticizing in his article, including Rubin, Abrams, the neo-cons Klein detests, and a dwindling group of liberal hawks who see clearly the Obama administration’s continuing backsliding.

Klein closes with the same old charge. AIPAC, the neo-cons, all of those whom Klein sees as wrong-headed are “extremists” who “stand well outside mainstream thinking on this issue.” If this is true, it is mainstream thinking that is wrong. But as Doug Pike has learned down in Philadelphia, is it the Joe Kleins and the J Street crowd that are the ones suffering from delusions. Klein, like J Street, ends by trying to paint himself as the real friend of Israel, while those who criticize our current administration’s policy are, he writes, encouraging “ right-wing American extremists who deny the legitimacy of our President.”

With a comment like that, Joe Klein reveals himself to be part of a conspiracy mongering group of liberal journalists who evidently see any criticism — no matter how ably it is developed and put forth — as extremist in content. In Klein’s world, this can only end by stopping our criticism. What happened to both free speech and the right to oppose a foreign policy when we think it is wrong?

In other words, Klein who - you guessed it - is Jewish himself, accuses all Jews who oppose President Obama's policies on Israel of dual loyalty.

Radosh also demolishes David Remnick and Andrew Sullivan in the same piece. Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:59 AM