Israel

Not so long ago in America, immediately after a Democratic politician announced a run for president, he or she would make a series of public gestures supporting Israel. This would range from a major address before an American-Jewish audience, to the required visit to the Holy Land. In a way, even mild criticism of the Jewish state would have amounted to political suicide when it came to a Democrat running for high office. Historical, cultural, political and geo-strategic considerations – including the influence of a politically active American-Jewish community whose members resided in key electoral states and contributed money for the Democratic party – made it politically axiomatic to back Israel.

When Ilhan Omar says that there’s too much money in American politics, she’s stating the obvious. That’s why I support her brave campaign against the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, General Electric, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Business Roundtable, the AARP, and Boeing. These are America’s top 10 lobby groups, ranked by total spending over the last 20 years. In 2018, the US Chamber of Commerce spent $94.8 million on lobbying. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent $21.7 million and surged to Number Eight on the charts. The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ranked Number 157, and spent $3.5 million.

Ilhan Omar is a confused anti-Semite. In 2012, she thought Israel (translation: the Jews) controlled the world through hypnosis. Now, seven years later, she believes something else: ‘it’s all about the Benjamins.’ Both ideas are classic anti-Semitic tropes. In a piece for Commentary magazine late last month, Abe Greenwald dissected the trope that had inspired Omar’s 2012 tweet. He writes: ‘The history of mystical anti-Semitism is long indeed. It predates Christendom and thrived, at times, long afterward. Martin Luther wrote that “a Jew is as full of idolatry and sorcery as nine cows have hair on their backs, that is: without number and without end.

Jews in this country have long been accused of holding dual loyalties. This week, that canard was brought back into the media and political landscape not by white supremacists chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, but by Rashida Tlaib, a freshman Democrat, and a woman of color. In response to a bill that would, among other things, challenge the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Tlaib said that supporters of the legislation had ‘forgot what country they represent.’ Those words are familiar to anyone who’s read anything about anti-Semitic rhetoric. The implication is that Jews, especially Jewish public servants, are all nothing more than foreign agents – traitors, in other words.

So aides to Donald Trump, the Observer reports, retained an Israeli intelligence organization to launch a 'dirty ops' campaign against two former national security officials in the Obama administration, Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes. Both happen to have been involved in the negotiations about the Iran deal and the idea seems to have been to find information that could be used to smear their reputations. On Twitter today, Kahl freely confessed to many sins, including selling off his valuable X-Men comic book collection as a lad to help finance a trip to debate camp. It remains to be seen whether Rhodes, too, will fess up to any such grave transgressions dating back to his childhood.