Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman thinks Jewish readers should get over it and let him come in from the cold. He’s explained to The Jewish Week’s Gary Rosenblatt that he “regrets” his choice of words in a December 13 column when he said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s standing ovations during his speech to Congress were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

The ugly charge with its overtones of anti-Semitism caused a firestorm of criticism. But now we know, he only meant to say the standing ovations were “engineered” by the lobby.

He tells The Jewish Week:

“In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby — a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to,” Friedman said. “It would have helped people focus on my argument, which I stand by 100 percent.”

Does that include standing 100 percent by his statement attributing to Mitt Romney the view that:

America’s role is to just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its A.T.M. and shut up

And does it include Friedman invoking as admirable the radical, fringe voice of Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levy, whose unbridled attacks on Israel include applauding academic boycotts of Israel and hoping for boycotts “someday [that would] also include tourism officials, business people, artists and athletes.”

Of course, Friedman’s clarification is nonsense. It is precisely the argument that he stands by 100 percent that was so outrageous and offended so many and endeared him to the likes of Stephen Walt.

It will take a lot more than meaningless interviews in this vein, no matter in how many Jewish papers they appear, to persuade readers that his vituperative charges are consistent with his self-described — as relayed by The Jewish Week — “unswerving support for the State of Israel.”

Tom Friedman and Stephen Walt

Tom Friedman’s screed claiming that standing ovations for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he spoke before a joint session of Congress were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” has stirred a firestorm of negative reaction.

Well, not only negative reaction. There’ve also been kudos from some quarters. Stephen Walt, co-author of the infamous The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, really likes the column. Bizarrely, he titles his Foreign Policy blog post: “Why Tom Friedman is a true friend of Israel.”

“Bizarrely” because Walt, a maligner of the Jewish state who blames the pro-Israel community (defined as a vast collection of groups and individuals of many faiths who defend or support the Jewish state) for distorting American policy to serve Israel, seems to believe he can credibly comment on who is a “true” friend of Israel.

His effusive praise for Friedman is, though, certainly a telling measure of how extreme the views of the New York Times writer have become.

Surely unrelated — but noteworthy: Word of the sudden departure of Times CEO Janet Robinson included reference to the plunging value of the company’s stock. Seems that stock has declined more than 80 percent since December 2004 and is down nearly 25 percent this year alone.

Maybe Walt will discover the devlishily clever Israel Lobby is behind this too, undermining Tom Friedman’s platform for promoting their special form of friendship for the Jewish state.

John Mearsheimer

Alan Dershowitz has thrown down the challenge to Professors John Mearsheimer (U Chicago) and Richard Falk (Princeton) to debate in public their decision to endorse the anti-Semitic ravings of Gilad Atzmon in his book The Wandering Who.

Writing in The New Republic, Dershowitz observes that the Mearsheimer/Falk endorsements, along with those of a number of other credentialed academics, is an ominous sign.

These endorsements represent a dangerous step toward legitimizing anti-Semitic rhetoric on university campuses. If respected professors endorse the views contained in Atzmon’s book as “brilliant,” “fascinating,” “absorbing,” and “moving,” these views—which include Jewish domination of the world, doubting the Holocaust, blaming “the Jews” for being so hated, and attributing the current economic troubles to a “Zio-punch”—risk becoming acceptable among their students. These endorsements of Atzmon’s book are the best evidence yet that academic discourse is beginning to cross a red line, and that the crossing of this line must be exposed, rebutted, and rejected in the marketplace of ideas and in the academy.

The images of the newly released Gilad Shalit, malnourished, weak and pale, clearly having suffered deprivation during his five years of imprisonment, stirred sympathetic reporting in many media outlets.

But MEMRI notes that an article on a Fatah-Affiliated Website by journalist Sami Foda, charges:

“[Gilad Shalit is] a young man who spent his time in bars and brothels, playing games and pampering himself. He enjoyed the pleasures of a land not his own. He went around robbing, stealing, torching, raping, trampling, and desecrating the soil of this land that is not his own. He viciously strove to shed the blood of the martyrs, killed innocent people, shelled the homes of innocent people with tanks, destroying them without shame, mercy, or pangs of conscience, a stupid murderer who did not mind killing our elderly, our men, our youth, and our women, and even our poor children, [so] pure and innocent.

Will commentators quick to urge that Israel make concessions to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority report on and deplore the screed?

Crowds participate in the Occupy Wall Street campaign

The ADL reports the tenor of the Occupy Wall Street protests is unclear — noting some commentators describe attending numerous benign gatherings, free of anti-Semitism, while others cite the rabid anti-Jewish ravings seen on the internet.

Whether anti-Jewish rhetoric is on the fringe or more commonplace, it’s clear publicity about the presence of bigots raises concern — including with certain extreme left, anti-Israel elements among OWS advocates.

An interview with anti-Israel radical Arun Gupta on the RT network (Russian Television) illustrates the effort to dispel any stigma of anti-Semitism. Gupta, who contributed, for instance, to a volume of anti-Israel essays about the 2010 effort to land a flotilla in Gaza (Midnight on the Mavi Marmara) along with Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi and Norman Finkelstein, among others, understands crude attacks on Jews are repugnant to most Americans, including, needless to say, Jewish Americans,some of whom might be active with OWS.

Gupta ducked discussion of one troublesome matter — reports the far-left, anti-Israel Adbusters magazine was an originator of the anti-Wall Street effort. Adbuster editor Kalle Lasen publishes a lot of crude material, some of it anti-Jewish and a lot of it anti-Israel, including an article comparing Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto and various others.

Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon Abdullah Abdullah

There was a time when Palestinian leaders sought to conceal their goal of overrunning the Jewish state in misleading commentary for Western audiences that implied a willingness to accept coexistence with a sovereign Israel. Now, evidently, times have changed and blunt statements are deemed safe to make. A remarkable interview in Lebanon’s Daily Star (September 15, 2011) illustrates the shift. According to Abdullah Abdullah, Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, Palestinians would not all become automatic citizens of any future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The story reports:

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens. Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would “absolutely not” be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees.

Abdullah’s willingness to leave Palestinians stateless in camps even in territory under Palestinian authority is spelled out further for anyone who’s missed the point:

The right of return that Abdullah says is to be negotiated would not only apply to those Palestinians whose origins are within the 1967 borders of the state, he adds. “The state is the 1967 borders, but the refugees are not only from the 1967 borders. The refugees are from all over Palestine. When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

Is that clear? “When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict” just a change in the rules of the game. Sound like the PLO’s 1974 “phased plan” for the destruction of Israel?

Something, indeed, is changing when an “ambassador” can give an interview such as this and there’s not a ripple in the Western media.

hat tip Evelyn Gordon at Contentions

Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

An excellent video produced by Eye on the UN explains why the reconvening of another “Durban” event — dubbed Durban III — is nothing more than the continuation of efforts in the international arena by Israel’s enemies to defame and undermine the Jewish state.

A short video of the first 2001 Durban conference is a reminder of the libelous, hypocritical attacks on Israel.

UN officials, such as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay who has pushed the Durban campaign, are thus far unswayed by the growing number of nations boycotting the event. These include: Canada, Israel, United States, Czech Republic, Italy, The Netherlands, Australia, Austria and Germany.

According to Anne Bayefsky, Pillay said she was “disappointed” with these pullouts, labeling them a “political distraction.”

Yet the biased assault on Israel — and neglect of focus on truly oppressive nations — may trigger congressional action. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act (H.R. 2829) to cut funding if the U.N. fails to reform.

Twitter sure can be helpful to readers, as an offhand tweet by New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal demonstrates. His Twitter page includes a noteworthy entry for August 14, 2011. Commenting on a speech by recently announced GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, Rosenthal took the opportunity to observe:

Perry announce speech. Did he miss a GOP cliche? One fave: Isreal (sic) won’t have to worry about him. As if it ever has to worry about a US prez.
14 Aug via TweetDeck

The editor’s sardonic (or, depending on interpretation, his snide, sarcastic, negative) comment that Israel has an automatic, no-worry relationship with every president is factually absurd and troubling coming from the man who heads the editorial page at the Times.

Israel has had rocky relationships with a number of presidents. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, for instance, have all been perceived by Israelis as tilting toward the Arabs and away from the Jewish state.

The implication that Israel enjoys automatic favor at the highest political levels also carries with it the whiff of Walt/Mearsheimer and their fevered Israel Lobby paranoia.

Reading too much into a tweet? Probably not.

(Hat tip to an anonymous visitor to the CAMERA Web site)

The New York Times rightly featured an image of the Palestinian terrorist attack in southern Israel on its front page on August 19, 2011. It was, after all, a deadly, multi-pronged attack from the Sinai of a kind not seen in many years. (The Times itself, needless to say, refrained from actually calling it a terrorist attack.)

Yet, while the attacks primarily targeted and killed civilians, the image was one of soldiers.

And, in what is virtually an art form of misdirection and circumlocution at the paper, editors managed to shade the language of the caption to omit the targeting of Israeli civilians, even to leave unclear the attack occurred inside Israel, and to omit identifying the perpetrators — Palestinians. In contrast to the un-named Palestinian actors in the attack, a bolded headline above the caption made clear how Israel responded — by bombing Gaza — and this was repeated in the text of the caption. It read:

Israel Responds to Attacks by Bombing Gaza

Wounded Israeli soldiers were treated Thursday after gunmen attacked them near the border between Israel and Egypt. Eight Israelis were killed and more than 30 wounded in multiple attacks in the area. Israel responded with air strikes on Gaza.

The original AP photo caption that accompanied the image was far more clear and direct, making clear the attack occured in Israel and identifying Palestinians as involved. It read this way:

Wounded Israeli soldiers are treated at the site of a shooting attack along the border between Israel and Egypt, southern Israel, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011. Assailants armed with heavy weapons, guns and explosives crossed into southern Israel from the neighboring Egyptian Sinai peninsula on Thursday, killing six Israelis and wounding at least a dozen more in an audacious string of attacks that stoked concerns about Palestinian militants exploiting the recent instability in Egypt. (AP Photo/Yosi Ben)