Please be subscriber 18,270 (and daily reader 20,270). Put your email address in the upper right-hand box of the page at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com
We rely on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation via PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, top right corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
Hey, boys and girls! Notice how we keep finding out more and more about the corruption of the Ground Zero mosque project and its chief sponsors? Well, now we discover that the whole thing received a lot of secret help from NY City's mayor and government to ensure it was approved even though--on purely legal and financial grounds--that was a questionable decision.
The mayor's office says that the project received only normal help. Wow, I'll bet a lot of New York developers would be amazed at that statement. But let's never forget that this project, budgeted at far over $100 million, has no serious money raised!
I have a totally different view on this issue that is drenched with irony. The first irony is that the mayor's office and other city agencies pushed for a project that would never otherwise have been approved (given zoning issues, the bad record of the promoters, the fact that they didn't even own the property, etc).
This brought the second irony: the city government's leaning over double-backwards to show extra-special privileges for an Islamic institution--supposedly to fight "Islamophobia" and to prove how "tolerant" they are--raised antagonisms and set off a huge national controversy that otherwise never would have happened!
How can people keep debating this issue without noting that whether they are for or against it the odds of this mosque/community center ever being built is low? Again, even if no voice had ever been raised against this community center/mosque plan, it is never going to exist. And if people had not been so blinded by fear of being thought "Islamophobic" that they would ignore every other completely non-political factor involved, no one would ever have heard of the Ground Zero Mosque at all.
Here's an excellent essay on the whole issue by Douglas Murray, also showing how the mayor turned what should have been a no-brainer zoning rejection plus a questionable-given-the-location issue into a must-do activity to prove America wasn't evil. Indeed, the mayor equated opponents of the project to the September 11 terrorists.
By the way, while we are on the subject of New York, that state just released its hate crimes report for 2009 (hey, it's a government so it isn't very efficient). They found 683 such events including 251 hate crimes against Jews; 11 against Muslims. But, of course, reportedly 242 mosques have already been built in New York state without a single significant protest against any of them. So much for rampant "Islamophobia."
Back to corruption and lying. We discover two more new examples of it on the part of J Street.
First, veteran anti-Israel lobbyist (pretending to be a pro-Israel lobbyist) Jeremy Ben-Ami founded a consulting firm that received tens of thousands of dollars of J Street money. Ben-Ami claims he did not benefit financially but merely chose the best-qualified company.
Since he and his colleagues have already lied about so much I suspect there is more to discover here.
J Street is a truly amazing phenomenon. The smallest amount of serious research reveals that it is an anti-Israel organization; it has lied about funding; it has undertaken no pro-Israel actions virtually ever; its leader was an anti-Israel lobbyist, and yet since the mass media and even much of the Jewish media don’t publish this material there are many people totally unaware of this information.
Second, J Street has opened an office in Israel headed by someone named Drew Cohen. But in the age of the Internet an intrepid researcher has dug out his record which includes Cohen:
--Explaining that he can’t be comfortable unless he’s “with people who I am certain do not espouse Zionism or any form of oppression.”
--Describing Israel’s handling of the Gaza flotilla confrontation as “a heinous brutality” and saying that Gaza is only a “mythic threat” to Israel.
--Calling Operation Cast Lead (remember that one? How Israel defended itself when that "mythic threat" started firing hundreds of mortar shells and rockets at its civilians?) as an “unjust and even criminal” act.
Truly the right man to head J Street’s Jerusalem office! How many J Street supporters will ever hear about these things? For full documentation and also here's more:
But guess what! In a recent speech in Pittsburgh, when someone asked Ben-Ami about Drew Cohen, the anti-Israel activist claimed that Cohen was just an intern. Funny, a few hours earlier J Street had issued a press release trumpeting what a great guy he is and how he is the head of J Street's new Israel office. (Perhaps the office should be located in the Gaza Strip so that Drew doesn't have to come into contact with those evil Zionists.)
When will people who still support this group wake up and understand (as almost all members of Congress already do) that it is NOT a dovish, constructively critical group led by friends of Israel but a front group whose mission is to destroy American Jewish support for Israel?
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Showing posts with label J Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J Street. Show all posts
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
J Street: Lies Again, Gets Caught Again
By Barry Rubin
In the wake of its lies about pretending not to be getting money from George Soros, trying to help anti-Israel campaigner Richard Goldstone lobby Congress, cooperating with Iran's lobby to try to protect Iran from sanctions, and on other matters, here's another one. J Street founder and its leading "expert" on Israel, Daniel Levy--one of the mass media's favorite people to interview about Israel--was caught saying that Israel's creation was wrong. J Street lashed back calling its critics "far right" and issuing a video purporting to show that Levy never said such a thing.
Levy made the statement near the end of his talk. J Street cut out the end. This could not have been a mistake. It had to be deliberate so they could say: See! He didn't say it, he's only speaking regrettably about the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, these critics are lying, so you should all continue supporting J Street.
What? It's not there? Well, J Street: That's only because you edited it out of the video!
This is the moral level of these people.
J Street critics--who span the political spectrum--laughed because they already knew they had the evidence, just as they did in the tape of the telephone call where the offer to help Goldstone was made. So here it is:
(To be fully accurate, Levy said that the Holocaust was a rationale for him to accept Israel's existence but otherwise it was a mistake.)
Why is J Street so reckless in lying? Because it knows the mass media will protect it and that many of its followers won't believe the accusations--even if documented thoroughly--because those presenting them will be dismissed as extreme right-wingers. (Incidentally, the two bloggers who have brought out most of the information on J Street could be more accurately described as center-left.)
Nevertheless, each such exposed lie and demonstration of J Street's anti-Israel agenda further reduces its support. Already it has become too toxic to gain support from any American member of Congress or Israeli politician.
Here's a detailed analysis of this latest development.
In the wake of its lies about pretending not to be getting money from George Soros, trying to help anti-Israel campaigner Richard Goldstone lobby Congress, cooperating with Iran's lobby to try to protect Iran from sanctions, and on other matters, here's another one. J Street founder and its leading "expert" on Israel, Daniel Levy--one of the mass media's favorite people to interview about Israel--was caught saying that Israel's creation was wrong. J Street lashed back calling its critics "far right" and issuing a video purporting to show that Levy never said such a thing.
Levy made the statement near the end of his talk. J Street cut out the end. This could not have been a mistake. It had to be deliberate so they could say: See! He didn't say it, he's only speaking regrettably about the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, these critics are lying, so you should all continue supporting J Street.
What? It's not there? Well, J Street: That's only because you edited it out of the video!
This is the moral level of these people.
J Street critics--who span the political spectrum--laughed because they already knew they had the evidence, just as they did in the tape of the telephone call where the offer to help Goldstone was made. So here it is:
(To be fully accurate, Levy said that the Holocaust was a rationale for him to accept Israel's existence but otherwise it was a mistake.)
Why is J Street so reckless in lying? Because it knows the mass media will protect it and that many of its followers won't believe the accusations--even if documented thoroughly--because those presenting them will be dismissed as extreme right-wingers. (Incidentally, the two bloggers who have brought out most of the information on J Street could be more accurately described as center-left.)
Nevertheless, each such exposed lie and demonstration of J Street's anti-Israel agenda further reduces its support. Already it has become too toxic to gain support from any American member of Congress or Israeli politician.
Here's a detailed analysis of this latest development.
Monday, October 11, 2010
J Street Self-Destructs: The Con-Game Unravels. But Where Was the Mass Media?
Please be subscriber 17,576. Put your email address in the upper right-hand box of the page at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/
We rely on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation via PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, top right corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
I have been writing about how J Street is an anti-Israel group pretending to be a liberal pro-Israel group while the truth has been shielded by the mass media. I pointed out how it had worked with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's lobby last year to try to block sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
A typical front group is one in which leaders use false claims to win followers who would never support the organization if they understood its true nature. In other words, those actually leading and guiding J Street are seeking to destroy the American Jewish support base for Israel. Many of the individual members have good intentions and no idea that this is so. Well, now they have the evidence.
J Street lied in claiming not to have received large-scale funding from George Soros, the billionaire financier for left-wing and anti-Israel causes. There are other really shady things going on to conceal where their money comes from. It is possible the group broke the law by using money from a resident of Hong Kong to support American political candidates.
Now, too, it has come out that it wanted to organize the Capitol Hill visit of Richard Goldstone, author of the extremely flawed anti-Israel UN report on the Gaza Strip. As a result, Colette Avital, a Labour Party politician, has resigned as the group's representative in Israel. By the way, J Street is once again lying but the conversation about Goldstone is on tape. Incidentally, Avital also denied telling the reporter anything about Goldstone. The tape of the phone call where Colette Avital described the offer to the reporter also shows her to be a liar.
Indeed, Jeremy Ben-Ami is so inept that while denying they actually helped Goldstone confirmed they were ready to do so: "J Street staff spoke to colleagues at the organizations coordinating the meetings and, at their behest, reached out to a handful of congressional staff to inquire whether members would be interested in seeing Judge Goldstone."
There is another, broader story here, however, that is extremely important. Indeed, it applies to virtually every other issue foreign and domestic for the United States.
How could a man whose only personal involvement in the Middle East was as a paid Arab, anti-Israel lobbyist (for a firm which since he left is the public relations' agency for the pro-Hamas Gaza flotilla) portray himself as leader of a pro-Israel group with no mass media outlet pointing out this contradiction? How could a group which for most of its existence never took any pro-Israel stand--and even then took only minor steps to the contrary--be lauded in the mass media as something it wasn’t? How could a group loaded with anti-Israel activists portray itself as the opposite?
This is not to say there weren’t many well-intentioned people who joined, supported, or sympathized with this group thinking it was a liberal, dovish, but still pro-Israel organization. But that, too, is the point. If they had been informed properly by the media they never would have done so.
Why did the truth have to be discovered by an intrepid, hard-researching blogger, Jeff Dunetz; a reporter for a small conservative newspaper, the frequently scooping Eli Lake here and here; and another tireless hero working independently, Lenny ben-David, see here and here and here.
Answer: because the mass media is out to lunch on anything that makes a certain side of the political spectrum look bad.
Just as with the story on an extremist, racist minister in a Chicago church with a famous parishioner, the background and qualifications of that parishioner for holding the world's highest office, and many other stories, most of the mass media has let people get away with murder (to use the popular expression) as long as they have the right political credentials. They wrote (or didn't write) stories and slanted them on the basis of their personal political stances rather than based on professional ethics of fairness, balance, and honesty.
There's another old expression about whether a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes a sound. Of course, we know due to scientific instruments, that it does.
But what if a tree falls in a forest and millions of people see television programs and read newspapers with headlines like: "No Tree Falls in Forest," "Forest Doesn't Exist," "Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorists Claim Tree Falls in Forest, Ha! Ha! Ha! How Could Anyone Be So Stupid," and "All Scientists in World Agree: No Tree Falls in Forest." OK, one more because I can't resist: in the British mass media, "If Tree Fell In Forest It's All Israel's Fault!"
This is the situation we face today. Indeed, it is even worse. We live in a world in which Time Magazine can have a cover story one week inveighing against "Islamophobia" (isn't prejudice awful?) and the next week evince antisemitism by claiming Israelis don't want peace because they're making a lot of money.
Thus, large elements of the mass media don't merely not report or distort some stories, they actively preach hatred toward certain groups. Graham Greene coined a phrase by writing there were "torturable" and "untorturable" classes. We now have "acceptable-to-slander-and-hate groups" and "groups-against-which-the-merest-reportage-is-a-hate-crime."
We are long familiar with this regarding the treatment of Israel. What has been the big surprise in recent years is to find that such practices have spread across the board to scores of other issues. It was often said that the treatment of Israel was a warning sign, that Israel was a canary in a coal mine. We are now long past that point. In retrospect, the unfair treatment of Israel in the media seems more like a pilot project.
Still, while extraordinarily low figures can be cited for trust in the mass media by the public, there are huge numbers of people who do believe what they are being told by it. What is the way out of this mess? Some of it is technological, the rise of the Internet, the variety of cable television and Internet-distributed radio. All of these things, though, can be used for the same purpose.
One of my best-educated readers, after looking only at J Street's own site, concluded that it was just a regular liberal group. Make no mistake: There is a difference between the radical left and liberalism. That's precisely why left-wing forces create front groups that seem to be liberal: to fool people who would recoil if they knew the true views and aims of the radical left, as well as its current tendency to sympathize or even support the world's biggest threat from the radical right: Islamism.
The solution is this: As long as liberty remains then the news sources that prove more accurate, showing predictive capacity and better explaining the facts, will win out. Moreover, the very boldness of the Islamists and Western radicals exposes them. In 1848, Karl Marx concluded the "Communist Manifesto" what might be called the founding document of the ideological revolutionary left:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions."
Well, today if you do a little digging--and at times translation--the Islamists do proclaim their views and goals. And if you do some more digging so do their radical Western allies, even if they pretend to be liberals, which they aren't.
It's just that most of the mass media doesn't report these things. But we will.
Appendix:
Jeremy Ben-Ami, who founded J Street after leaving a promising career as an openly anti-Israel lobbyist to be a covert one, has been so shaken that he wrote, "Reports of our demise...are greatly exaggerated." I don't think J Street will disappear--it has too much money (including from Soros and other anti-Israel sources) to vanish. It just will have no influence on Capitol Hill and very little on any but fringe elements in the Jewish community.
That's quite a fall from a group practically created with Obama Administration support as a Trojan Horse to wean American Jews away from strong support for Israel. But the Obama Administration, following a friendlier policy toward Israel, doesn't need J Street either.
James Besser of the New York Jewish Week notes:
"There's no way this isn't going to make the politicians supported by J Street and those who may be considering accepting its endorsement incredibly nervous. Instead of providing protection for the politicians they supported, J Street essentially hung them out to dry...by lying about their connection to the controversial philanthropist.
"And there's no way this doesn't sow mistrust among commentators and reporters who write and speak about J Street, and who were repeatedly misled by its officials...."
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
We rely on your contributions. Tax-deductible donation via PayPal or credit card: click Donate button, top right corner of this page: http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/. By check: "American Friends of IDC.” “For GLORIA Center” on memo line. Mail: American Friends of IDC, 116 East 16th St., 11th Floor, NY, NY 10003.
By Barry Rubin
I have been writing about how J Street is an anti-Israel group pretending to be a liberal pro-Israel group while the truth has been shielded by the mass media. I pointed out how it had worked with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's lobby last year to try to block sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
A typical front group is one in which leaders use false claims to win followers who would never support the organization if they understood its true nature. In other words, those actually leading and guiding J Street are seeking to destroy the American Jewish support base for Israel. Many of the individual members have good intentions and no idea that this is so. Well, now they have the evidence.
J Street lied in claiming not to have received large-scale funding from George Soros, the billionaire financier for left-wing and anti-Israel causes. There are other really shady things going on to conceal where their money comes from. It is possible the group broke the law by using money from a resident of Hong Kong to support American political candidates.
Now, too, it has come out that it wanted to organize the Capitol Hill visit of Richard Goldstone, author of the extremely flawed anti-Israel UN report on the Gaza Strip. As a result, Colette Avital, a Labour Party politician, has resigned as the group's representative in Israel. By the way, J Street is once again lying but the conversation about Goldstone is on tape. Incidentally, Avital also denied telling the reporter anything about Goldstone. The tape of the phone call where Colette Avital described the offer to the reporter also shows her to be a liar.
Indeed, Jeremy Ben-Ami is so inept that while denying they actually helped Goldstone confirmed they were ready to do so: "J Street staff spoke to colleagues at the organizations coordinating the meetings and, at their behest, reached out to a handful of congressional staff to inquire whether members would be interested in seeing Judge Goldstone."
There is another, broader story here, however, that is extremely important. Indeed, it applies to virtually every other issue foreign and domestic for the United States.
How could a man whose only personal involvement in the Middle East was as a paid Arab, anti-Israel lobbyist (for a firm which since he left is the public relations' agency for the pro-Hamas Gaza flotilla) portray himself as leader of a pro-Israel group with no mass media outlet pointing out this contradiction? How could a group which for most of its existence never took any pro-Israel stand--and even then took only minor steps to the contrary--be lauded in the mass media as something it wasn’t? How could a group loaded with anti-Israel activists portray itself as the opposite?
This is not to say there weren’t many well-intentioned people who joined, supported, or sympathized with this group thinking it was a liberal, dovish, but still pro-Israel organization. But that, too, is the point. If they had been informed properly by the media they never would have done so.
Why did the truth have to be discovered by an intrepid, hard-researching blogger, Jeff Dunetz; a reporter for a small conservative newspaper, the frequently scooping Eli Lake here and here; and another tireless hero working independently, Lenny ben-David, see here and here and here.
Answer: because the mass media is out to lunch on anything that makes a certain side of the political spectrum look bad.
Just as with the story on an extremist, racist minister in a Chicago church with a famous parishioner, the background and qualifications of that parishioner for holding the world's highest office, and many other stories, most of the mass media has let people get away with murder (to use the popular expression) as long as they have the right political credentials. They wrote (or didn't write) stories and slanted them on the basis of their personal political stances rather than based on professional ethics of fairness, balance, and honesty.
There's another old expression about whether a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes a sound. Of course, we know due to scientific instruments, that it does.
But what if a tree falls in a forest and millions of people see television programs and read newspapers with headlines like: "No Tree Falls in Forest," "Forest Doesn't Exist," "Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorists Claim Tree Falls in Forest, Ha! Ha! Ha! How Could Anyone Be So Stupid," and "All Scientists in World Agree: No Tree Falls in Forest." OK, one more because I can't resist: in the British mass media, "If Tree Fell In Forest It's All Israel's Fault!"
This is the situation we face today. Indeed, it is even worse. We live in a world in which Time Magazine can have a cover story one week inveighing against "Islamophobia" (isn't prejudice awful?) and the next week evince antisemitism by claiming Israelis don't want peace because they're making a lot of money.
Thus, large elements of the mass media don't merely not report or distort some stories, they actively preach hatred toward certain groups. Graham Greene coined a phrase by writing there were "torturable" and "untorturable" classes. We now have "acceptable-to-slander-and-hate groups" and "groups-against-which-the-merest-reportage-is-a-hate-crime."
We are long familiar with this regarding the treatment of Israel. What has been the big surprise in recent years is to find that such practices have spread across the board to scores of other issues. It was often said that the treatment of Israel was a warning sign, that Israel was a canary in a coal mine. We are now long past that point. In retrospect, the unfair treatment of Israel in the media seems more like a pilot project.
Still, while extraordinarily low figures can be cited for trust in the mass media by the public, there are huge numbers of people who do believe what they are being told by it. What is the way out of this mess? Some of it is technological, the rise of the Internet, the variety of cable television and Internet-distributed radio. All of these things, though, can be used for the same purpose.
One of my best-educated readers, after looking only at J Street's own site, concluded that it was just a regular liberal group. Make no mistake: There is a difference between the radical left and liberalism. That's precisely why left-wing forces create front groups that seem to be liberal: to fool people who would recoil if they knew the true views and aims of the radical left, as well as its current tendency to sympathize or even support the world's biggest threat from the radical right: Islamism.
The solution is this: As long as liberty remains then the news sources that prove more accurate, showing predictive capacity and better explaining the facts, will win out. Moreover, the very boldness of the Islamists and Western radicals exposes them. In 1848, Karl Marx concluded the "Communist Manifesto" what might be called the founding document of the ideological revolutionary left:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions."
Well, today if you do a little digging--and at times translation--the Islamists do proclaim their views and goals. And if you do some more digging so do their radical Western allies, even if they pretend to be liberals, which they aren't.
It's just that most of the mass media doesn't report these things. But we will.
Appendix:
Jeremy Ben-Ami, who founded J Street after leaving a promising career as an openly anti-Israel lobbyist to be a covert one, has been so shaken that he wrote, "Reports of our demise...are greatly exaggerated." I don't think J Street will disappear--it has too much money (including from Soros and other anti-Israel sources) to vanish. It just will have no influence on Capitol Hill and very little on any but fringe elements in the Jewish community.
That's quite a fall from a group practically created with Obama Administration support as a Trojan Horse to wean American Jews away from strong support for Israel. But the Obama Administration, following a friendlier policy toward Israel, doesn't need J Street either.
James Besser of the New York Jewish Week notes:
"There's no way this isn't going to make the politicians supported by J Street and those who may be considering accepting its endorsement incredibly nervous. Instead of providing protection for the politicians they supported, J Street essentially hung them out to dry...by lying about their connection to the controversial philanthropist.
"And there's no way this doesn't sow mistrust among commentators and reporters who write and speak about J Street, and who were repeatedly misled by its officials...."
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Exposed: J Street is an Anti-Israel Wolf in Dove's Clothing
(Please subscribe and don't miss a single article.)
By Barry Rubin
If you want to see how ridiculous the J Street fraud is, please read Lenny Ben David's new research piece on the background of this organization. If you don't know about J Street, it is an anti-Israel lobby being set up under the pretense of being a dovish pro-Israel group. While Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum are in fact that kind of organization, J Street is something else entirely.
The leader of J Street is someone who has no record of pro-Israel activism. But he was a paid lobbyist for an Arab country and involved in anti-Israel activities. Donors include a number of anti-Israel individuals as does the board of directors. And while the organization--which enjoys lavish support in much of the mainstream media--keeps claiming to have made pro-Israel statements, you'll never find one.
(Oh, wait! They did one, criticizing those who wanted to ban Israel from the Toronto, Canada, film festival. That's it.)
Did I mention that George Soros, on record with his hostility to Israel (and unrepentent for his role in helping round up Jews during the Holocaust while pretending to be a Hungarian Christian) is funding this group? [Obviously he should not be held responsible for what he did at the time but decades later not even to express remorse--even if it was a total lie he felt bad--says something scary.]
And how about J Street's joint project with the Iranian regime's front group in Washington to block sanctions against Iran?
Urge people not to participate in this farce and ask members of Congress to remove their names--as many have already done--as endorsers of this effort.
One more thing. This is not a left/right ideological issue. J Street is not a liberal dovish pro-Israel group, it is--though some participants are no doubt acting in good faith--a leftist anti-Israel group.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books. To see or subscribe to his blog, Rubin Reports.
By Barry Rubin
If you want to see how ridiculous the J Street fraud is, please read Lenny Ben David's new research piece on the background of this organization. If you don't know about J Street, it is an anti-Israel lobby being set up under the pretense of being a dovish pro-Israel group. While Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum are in fact that kind of organization, J Street is something else entirely.
The leader of J Street is someone who has no record of pro-Israel activism. But he was a paid lobbyist for an Arab country and involved in anti-Israel activities. Donors include a number of anti-Israel individuals as does the board of directors. And while the organization--which enjoys lavish support in much of the mainstream media--keeps claiming to have made pro-Israel statements, you'll never find one.
(Oh, wait! They did one, criticizing those who wanted to ban Israel from the Toronto, Canada, film festival. That's it.)
Did I mention that George Soros, on record with his hostility to Israel (and unrepentent for his role in helping round up Jews during the Holocaust while pretending to be a Hungarian Christian) is funding this group? [Obviously he should not be held responsible for what he did at the time but decades later not even to express remorse--even if it was a total lie he felt bad--says something scary.]
And how about J Street's joint project with the Iranian regime's front group in Washington to block sanctions against Iran?
Urge people not to participate in this farce and ask members of Congress to remove their names--as many have already done--as endorsers of this effort.
One more thing. This is not a left/right ideological issue. J Street is not a liberal dovish pro-Israel group, it is--though some participants are no doubt acting in good faith--a leftist anti-Israel group.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books. To see or subscribe to his blog, Rubin Reports.
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