Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Why are the Jews asked to do the heavy lifting?

on Syria, Obama has convinced AIPAC, AJC RJC etc to lobby for the attack. I'm for punishing Assad for this,, but guess who will get the blame if things go wrong? And then, credibility with Congress will be reduced when the REAL issue, Iran, comes up
edlasky@att.net
"AIPAC, ADL, and the RJC have signed onto the push to get Congress to approve giving the President authority to take military action in Syria.

As has been reported by various news outlets, the pro-Israel lobby was “asked” by the White House to use (up?) its influence in Congress to push this issue.

Already this has revived charges of Jewish control of American foreign policy.

This was a canard that emerged during the Iraq War-though Bush did not “ask” Jewish groups to become involved AT ALL-and Jewish groups remain uninvolved and silent.

The charges of dual loyalty dissipated because the Jewish community had not issued any call to arms and was not asked to use its influence in Congress. There were no “smoking guns” that would lead people to believe Jewish Americans were pushing for war.

Now that has changed and the conspiracy theorists are already charged up.

Example: A simple edit of a New York Times story that mentioned AIPAC was deleted because it was redundant from a previous day’s story about Congress and Syria (see this Politico column http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/09/ny-times-scraps-aipac-from-syria-story-171669.html)

This elicited a series of  stories about AIPAC controlling the media and forcing the mention of AIPAC out of New York Times. These included outlets with fairly large readership (among them were The Daily Beast (Newsweek), Slate Magazine, The Nation, Politico, etc.).

Even the Atlantic has gone off the deep-end: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/09/03/u-s-credibility-not-israel-lobby-will-decide-syria-vote/#more-832549
There was never much doubt that sooner or later any debate about U.S. action on Syria would get around to an effort to drag the “Israel Lobby” canard out of the closet. While some on the right are wrongly characterizing the case for striking the Assad regime’s ability to use chemical weapons as Obama’s war for “al-Qaeda in Syria,” some on the left are back to riding their own favorite hobbyhorses and blaming the whole thing on Israel. That’s the upshot of a piece published on the Atlantic’s website in which James Fallows posted a lengthy quote from William R. Polk in which the author and former State Department staffer seeks not only to claim that the proof of chemical weapons was cooked up by Israel but that the Jewish state used chemical weapons in Lebanon and Gaza. Suffice it to say the former charge is contradicted by the large body of evidence about what happened in Syria that has been made public in the last week as the impact of the most recent use of chemical weapons by Assad became clear. The latter charges are simply lies.
That such weak and nasty stuff should get an airing at the Atlantic is troubling. But it is just as unfortunate to read accounts in other mainstream outlets such as the New York Times that the Obama administration appears to be counting on supporters of Israel to pull the president’s chestnuts out of the fire on Syria. While Israel certainly has an interest in the survival of American influence in the Middle East, the idea of shifting the discussion from one that revolves around America’s credibility and national security to one that seeks to parse the decision as either good or bad for the Jewish state is a profound misreading of the administration’s problem. No endorsement from Israel or AIPAC can substitute for the ability of the president and his team to articulate a case for the sort of action that they know they must take


So my question is-since Jewish organizations have been drafted into this effort in Congress (that will once again lead to anti-Semitism) where are all those Arab-American groups? Why don’t we read articles about them working on Congressmen? Why hasn’t the White House “asked” them to become involved in this effort? After all, it is their people being murdered by the tens of thousands. At the very least it would reduce charges about Jews and Israel and Washington-even if Arab-American groups don’t have as much sway as other groups.

But they remain out of the picture."

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