Israel Matzav

Time to excommunicate J Street

Every organization that claims to be Jewish is lining up against the Iran nuclear sellout. Everyone except one: Pro-Obama, pro-Iran, anti-Israel J Street. Charles Jacobs and Elliott Hamilton argue that it's time to kick J Street out of the Jewish communal tent. In fact, it's long past time.

But the J Street lobby has broken ranks with that sentiment. Back when the deal’s framework was reached in early April, J Street co-authored a statement with the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) and the Arab American Institute, welcoming the agreement. Now that the details have become known and almost every major Jewish organization is trying to kill the deal, J Street is undertaking a multi-million dollar campaign to get Jews to support an arrangement that at best keeps Iran nuke-free for about a decade while it gives the mullahs $150 billion to arm Israel’s enemies. This puts J Street in direct confrontation with the more than 80 percent of the Jews of Israel, whose political parties from left to right are fiercely united against President Barack Obama’s deal.

J Street’s campaigning for the Iran deal comes as no surprise to those who have been carefully watching the organization since its inception in 2008. J Street’s policy on Iran has never been aligned with the rest of the American Jewish community. In Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s film “The J Street Challenge,” Professor Alan Dershowitz complains that: “It’s impossible to know what J Street’s position on Iran is. I actually offered to contribute money to J Street if they would answer a series of specific questions about their positions on Iran, and I couldn’t get an answer to any of those questions.”

J Street has a history of taking significant sums of money from anti-Israel sources—and lying about it. For example, J Street continuously lied about its funding from George Soros, who has blamed Israel and the Jewish people for the rise of global anti-Semitism. While J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami kept denying it, Eli Lake reported in 2010 that J Street acquired $750,000 from Soros’s family. Ben-Ami was eventually forced to apologize for lying.

Even more troubling was the discovery that Genevieve Lynch, a board member of the NIAC, also funded J Street. NIAC is no ally of the Jewish community, and has recently created a 501(c)4 to counter pro-Israel groups’ attempts to halt the Iran deal.

In 2012, J Street spent $100,000 trying to convince lawmakers on Capitol Hill to both ease the rhetoric against Iran and to alter the status of the Palestinian Diplomatic Mission to the U.S.
J Street has also received funding from the Ploughshares Fund, Inc., a global security foundation that supports a “peaceful world, including on free of nuclear weapons.” This same organization spent millions of dollars pushing for Chuck Hagel’s nomination for Secretary of Defense and lobbying to lift sanctions off Iran. According to the Ploughshares Fund’s Form 990 in 2012, J Street acquired $25,000 “to support efforts to educate members of Congress on the consequences that preemptive use of military force against Iran’s nuclear program may have on Israel.” In its Form 990s in both 2013 and 2014, it shows that Ploughshares gave J Street a total of $275,000 “to use a pro-Israel frame to educate members of Congress on the dangers that a military confrontation with Iran could have for both Israel and the U.S., and to promote political solutions to the nuclear impasse.”

Why would a seemingly pro-Israel organization acquire funds from pro-Iran sources to promote a pro-Iran agenda to the United States Congress? One reason seems clear: J Street’s usefulness to Israel’s adversaries is its “pro-Israel frame,” and that can be successfully monetized.

 Read the whole thing. J Street: Pro-Obama, pro-Iran. Anti-Israel.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iranian nuclear threat, J Street, pro-Israel pro-peace

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:16 PM