Bloodthirsty Liberal

God knows the world doesn’t need a new way to crap all over the Jewish state, but that’s never stopped it before:

In early March, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its forty-seventh annual conference in Washington. AIPAC’s executive director spent twenty-seven minutes reading the “roll call” of dignitaries present at the gala dinner, which included a majority of the Senate and a quarter of the House, along with dozens of Administration officials.

As this event illustrates, it’s impossible to talk about Congress’s relationship to Israel without highlighting AIPAC, the American Jewish community’s most important voice on the Hill. The Congressional reaction to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Lebanon provide the latest example of why.

On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution “condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel’s exercise of its right to self-defense.” After House majority leader John Boehner removed language from the bill urging “all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure,” the House version passed by a landslide, 410 to 8.

AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it. “They [Congress] were given a resolution by AIPAC,” said former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19. “They didn’t prepare one.”

Nothing like citing former Carter Administration officials to liven up a debate.

But hang on, you say. What’s new about making sly insinuations about the Jewish lobby (heavy on the chintz, light on the potted plants)? That’s as old as, well, the Jews themselves.

True, but note the twist (and I do mean twist):

“The Bush Administration is bad enough in tolerating measures they would not accept anywhere else but Israel,” says Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress and a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But the Congress, if anything, is urging the Administration on and criticizing them even at their most accommodating. When it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, the terms of debate are so influenced by organized Jewish groups, like AIPAC, that to be critical of Israel is to deny oneself the ability to succeed in American politics.”

Even Jewish lobbyists decry the influence of Jewish lobbyists. Still not novel enough for you? Jews have criticized Jews as long as, well, there have been Jews?

True, but Israel is under attack. Thousands of missiles have fallen on its soil, dozens of soldiers and civilians killed and wounded, three soldiers kidnapped and held for ransom–and The Nation sees this as a fit time to examine the pernicious influence of the Jewish lobby. I have to say, I’m impressed.

Still not unique? Israel was criticized by the Left in ‘67, ‘73, and probably ‘48, you say?

You know, you may be right. This may be nothing more than the same streak of anti-Zionism (which, employing the commutive property of bigotry, equals anti-Semitism) which has long run through the Left. After all, whom do they cite?

Dennis Kucinich…Nick Rahall…Charlie Rangel…James Zogby.

What useful and innovative contributions they make! I guess when you boil it down, the new way to demonize Israel is no different form the old. Leave it to ZbgnvBrznski to state the latest Protocol of the Elders of Zion:

“Either I make policy on the Middle East or AIPAC makes policy on the Middle East.”

The anti-Israel set just can’t get over that Americans just might see Israelis as themselves, but for the grace of God.