Mehdi Hasan, There Is a Taboo Against Criticizing AIPAC — and Ilhan Omar Just Destroyed It
Bingo--spot on.
Look at all the antisemitism Hasan uncovered! (Read the whole thing here.)
IN 2005, STEVEN Rosen, then a senior official with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, sat down for dinner with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker. “You see this napkin?” Rosen asked Goldberg. “In twenty-four hours, [AIPAC] could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”
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Look at all the antisemitism Hasan uncovered! (Read the whole thing here.)
IN 2005, STEVEN Rosen, then a senior official with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, sat down for dinner with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker. “You see this napkin?” Rosen asked Goldberg. “In twenty-four hours, [AIPAC] could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”
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Rosen, after all, wasn’t the first AIPAC official to boast about the the raw power that “America’s bipartisan pro-Israel lobby” exercises in Washington, D.C. Go back earlier, to 1992, when then-AIPAC President David Steiner was caught on tape bragging that he had “cut a deal” with the George H.W. Bush White House to provide $3 billion in U.S. aid to Israel. Steiner also claimed to be “negotiating” with the incoming Clinton administration over the appointment of pro-Israel cabinet members. AIPAC, he said, has “a dozen people in [the Clinton] campaign, in the headquarters … and they’re all going to get big jobs.”
Go back further, to 1984, when Sen. Charles Percy, a moderate Republican from Illinois, was defeated in his re-election campaign after he “incurred AIPAC’s wrath” by declining to sign onto an AIPAC-sponsored letter and daring to refer to Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as more “moderate” than other Palestinian resistance figures. AIPAC contributors raised more than a million dollars to help defeat Percy. As Tom Dine, then-executive director of AIPAC, gloated in a speech shortly after the GOP senator’s defeat, “all the Jews, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians — those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire — got the message.”
NEARLY FOUR DECADES later, as members of the U.S. political and media classes pile onto Omar, are the rest of us supposed to pretend that AIPAC officials never said or did any of this? And are we also expected to forget that the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, a long-standing advocate for Israel in the American media, once described the standing ovations received by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from members of Congress, as having been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby”? Or that Goldberg, now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and dubbed“the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel,” called AIPAC a “leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs”? Or that J.J. Goldberg, former editor of the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward, said in 2002, in reference to AIPAC, “There is this image in Congress that you don’t cross these people or they take you down”?
Are we supposed to dismiss Uri Avnery, the late Israeli peace activist and one-time member of the Zionist paramilitary, the Irgun, who once remarked that if AIPAC “were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 senators and 300 congressmen would sign it at once,” as a Jew-hater? Or label Jan Harman, a former member of Congress and devoted defender of Israel, an anti-Semite for telling CNN in 2013 that her former colleagues on Capitol Hill had struggled to back Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear diplomacy to due “big parts of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States being against it, the country of Israel being against it”?
To be clear: AIPAC is not a political action committee and does not provide donations directly to candidates. However, it does act as a “force multiplier,” to quote the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s Andrew Silow-Carroll, and “its rhetorical support for a candidate is a signal to Jewish PACs and individual donors across the country to back his or her campaign.” As Friedman explained to me in an interview in 2013: “Mehdi, if you and I were running from the same district, and I have AIPAC’s stamp of approval and you don’t, I will maybe have to make three phone calls. … I’m exaggerating, but I don’t have to make many phone calls to get all the money I need to run against you. You will have to make 50,000 phone calls.” (Is Friedman an anti-Semite too? Asking for a friend.)
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“When people ask me how they can help Israel,” former Israeli prime minister and uber-hawk Ariel Sharon once told an audience in the United States, “I tell them: Help AIPAC.”
