Israel Matzav

Did the Journolist protect J Street?

I suspect that those of you who are in the US are much more familiar with the 'Journolist' scandal than those of you who are elsewhere. In a nutshell, a group of Leftist media types had a email group in which they conspired to keep certain stories from ever reaching the mainstream media in the US. As I noted last week, one of those stories was President Obama's relationship with his toxic, racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, which was far more discussed in the blogosphere than in the mainstream media. Some Journolist emails were published here.

When I first published the 'Journolist' story, I did so because I believe that anything having to do with Barack Obama's election has something to do with Israel. And also because it's the kind of story that draws traffic to this blog who might not necessarily be interested in hearing about the latest dispute among Bibi's coalition members. But there actually is an Israel angle to this story, and it's a nasty one.

You may recall that last fall, I blogged several exposes that were done by Lenny Ben David regarding the sources of funding of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace nominally Jewish pro-Obama lobby. In particular, this one should have raised some eyebrows. At the time, Lenny was attacked by many bloggers on the Left: Spencer Ackerman, Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Luban, MJ Rosenberg, Max Fisher and Lara Friedman all took shots at him. Many of those shots were scurrilous, smearing him as a racist for naming J Street's Arab donors and raising questions as to why Arabs and Iranians would want to contribute to a purportedly Jewish lobby.

Now that we know where this originated, we could all give Lenny a collective hug and make him feel better and leave it at that, except... that Lenny reports that there are still embarrassing questions for J Street that have not come out in the mainstream media due to fear of attack by the Journolist bloodhounds.

After reading the Ackerman strategy to attack those who sought to expose the Obama-Wright connection, it’s very clear the same tactic was deployed to protect J Street. Serious Washington reporters who can smell J Street’s type of fraud from a mile away have avoided investigating the outfit, originally called “the Soros project” in its early life. Several reporters have material on a Turkish donor to J Street’s PAC who was thrown off of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 when they learned he was involved in the production of the anti-American, anti-Semitic film Valley of the Wolves.

But not a word has been written.

They’ve seen the FEC data on an eccentric “Wyoming Latin teacher” who gave the PAC $36,000 this year — the largest contribution ever given to J Street’s PAC.

But not a peep.

It takes one click on the FEC site to see that leaders of the Arab-American and pro-Iranian lobby are still making major contributions. But no one has challenged J Street to publish its board of directors or its major contributors.

Read the whole thing. And you thought that the media could only be controlled in small, third world dictatorships.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:28 PM