J'Accuse!

The weekend before last on Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol recommended what he took to be a terrifying campaign strategy for Hillary Clinton. "Run ads featuring an Ohio voter," he urged, "who says, 'I attended an Obama rally and was impressed. But then I did some research, and it turns out he's being advised by [cue sinister music] Zbigniew Brzezinski.'"^*

Come again? Kristol called this "the politics of fear," but who is going to be cowed into a terrified stupor at the mention of the name of a relatively obscure Carter administration official? Certainly not undecided Democratic primary voters in Ohio.

Kristol had confused the Ohio primary with the New York Sun editorial boardFrightened yet?: Zbigniew Brzezinski primary. In so doing, he offered a fascinating glimpse into the double- and triple-encrypted language he and his ideological comrades use to poison the public discourse over foreign policy generally, and policy towards Israel specifically.

The targets and objectives of this witch-smelling campaign are so various, widespread, and susceptible to instantaneous Eurasia-Eastasia revisionism, that trying to pin down just what the expected Pavlovian response to (say) the name "Brzezinski" is supposed to be --- and what mission is served and what enemy defeated by eliciting that response --- is the political equivalent of trying simultaneously to measure the position and trajectory of an electron.

And yet over the past several months, a discernible pattern of attack has emerged within the white noise. As Barack Obama's presidential ambitions have picked up steam, numerous American supporters of the most aggressive, militantly irredentist factions of Israeli society have engaged in a campaign of plausibly-deniable innuendo aimed at creating and propagating the meme that Obama has an animus against the Jewish state, and in turn, an animus against the Jewish people.

This campaign faced an immediate difficulty: Obama's views on Israel sit squarely within the mainstream of Democratic views on Israel, which is equivalent to saying that they sit squarely within the mainstream of Republican views on Israel. On the same day that Kristol advocated using the politics of fear against Obama, the senator told Jewish community leaders in Cleveland that he had "an unshakable commitment to the security of Israel and the friendship between the United States and Israel."

There is nothing in Obama's record as a legislator, nor any of his public statements, nor any other sort of publicly accessible evidence to contradict that sentiment. If you want to portray Obama as an anti-Israel candidate, you would need to find evidence of a secret malice that he has successfully concealed for years.

Sure enough, Ed Lasky of the American Thinker discovered the key to theObviously an anti-Semite Obama-antisemitism code. In a January article that quickly went viral (in multiple senses of the term), Lasky wrote: "[H]is canned speeches [are] filled with 'poetry' and uplifting aphorisms and delivered in a commanding way," but "his off-the-cuff remarks have been uniformly taken by supporters of Israel as signs that the inner Obama does not truly support Israel." Putting aside the risible "uniformly taken by supporters of Israel" construction, just how would Lasky have the slightest clue what "the inner Obama" thinks? Through his choices of advisers, aides, and friends, Lasky contends.

In the thousands of words that follow this set-up, Lasky levels an indiscriminate, defamatory, self-contradictory artillery barrage at individuals at multiple degrees of remove from Obama, employing standards of interpretive charity befitting a religious inquisition, and standards of evidence and logic befitting a Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet. A few examples are in order:

• Lasky falsely claims that Obama attended a "Muslim school," and, in a perfect example of the function of half-true innuendo, contends that Obama's "full name alone conveys the biographical fact that he has some elements of a Muslim background," as if facts about Obama's father or involuntarily given name have the slightest bearing on his character.
• Lasky devotes considerable space to the pernicious influence of George Soros on Obama, somehow neglecting to mention that Soros is a major benefactor of the Democratic party, and thus his claims about furtive anti-Israel beliefs attaching to Obama through Soros' patronage apply mutatis mutandis to the Democratic party as a whole. In other words, if Lasky had the courage of his convictions, he would be led to tar the entire party as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. This is to say nothing of the obscenity of describing a refugee from the Holocaust as an enemy of the Jewish people, or the crudely antisemitic trope Lasky invokes in recounting horror-stories of a malign, shadowy Jewish financier.
• Lasky construes Obama's call for "the abolition of all nuclear weapons" as an anti-Israeli view. In point of fact, it is a position Obama shares with Ronald Reagan.

The foregoing list is by no means exhaustive, but it is illustrative of the quality of reasoning and the absurd, scattershot conspiracy-mongering Lasky stoops to in order to lend his case the thinnest patina of prima-facie plausibility. In a follow-up piece, Lasky expands his case that Obama's foreign policy team harbors ill-will towards Israel by offering what he takes to be a shocking expose of the biography of Obama adviser Robert Malley.

Simon Malley, Robert's father, "was born to a Syrian family in Cairo" and eventuallyRobert Malley: His cousin's daughter-in-law's hairdresser's gardener was Egyptian. Therefore Barack Obama hates Israel. became an advocate of the PLO cause. (Ding! There goes Pavlov's bell again.) This is a disquieting fact about Simon Malley to be sure, but it would be more compelling if Lasky could enunciate the alchemy by which Obama's adviser's father's activities forty years ago have the slightest bearing on what Obama thinks about Israel. Moreover, the sinister glare Lasky applies to Malley's biography loses some of its force in virtue of the fact that that the Malleys are Syrian Jews and that Malley's mother (maiden name Silverstein) is a chosen person as well. Which is most likely why Lasky never bothered to mention any of that. Further ominous signs of Malley's hostility to Israel include the fact that various unsavory characters such as Norman Finkelstein (Ding!) have cited Malley in their writing, and Malley's role in the 2000 Camp David peace talks has been criticized by the unimpeachably pro-Israel diplomat Dennis Ross, currently an adviser to (wait for it) Barack Obama.

The improbable copulation of paranoid manias in Lasky's imagination might well have been destined to fade into a quiet obscurity. Instead, Noah Pollak, a writer at Commentary (and sometime Jewcy contributor), picked up, refurbished, and proselytized Lasky's slanders-by-proxy of Obama.

Pollak leaves no doubt that he is preparing to stage a show trial when he declares the Lasky pieces "serious work" and "must-reads" --- articles that, recall, traffic in the "Obama is a Muslim" and "Obama attended a madrassa" lies. Extending Lasky's soritic efforts at damaging Obama by attacking his surrogates, Pollak sets his sights on Obama's chief foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power. What follows is a shameful defamation of the foremost theorist of human rights of her generation.

In an interview last May, Power explained her view that the errors of the Iraq war "have exposed and exacerbated long-standing structural and conceptual problems in U.S. foreign policy." Decrying Power as a disciple of the "Walt-Mearsheimer view of the American relationship with Israel" (Ding!), Pollak quotes Power's answer as follows:

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the “national interest” as a whole is defined and pursued . . . America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests–especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace–seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq.

Pollak concludes: "Power is not just assenting to the Israel Lobby view of American foreign policy, but is also arguing that Israel had something to do with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 --- an appalling slander, and a telling one."

And indeed, if Power had made the remarks Pollak attributes to her, it might beSamantha Power: Probably doesn't appreciate having quotes doctored reasonable to infer that "automatic deference to special interests" refers to deference to representatives of Israel. But that is not what Power said. Here are the contents of the ellipsis in Pollak's citation: "Look at the degree to which Halliburton and several of the private security and contracting firms invested in the 2004 political campaigns and received very lucrative contracts in the aftermath of the U.S. takeover of Iraq [my emphasis]." In other words, the special interests Power suggests we should not defer to are Halliburton and the various mercenary outfits. Israel has absolutely nothing to do with it. The only way in which Israel figures into Power's critique is on a tactical level. She argues that American policy-makers are too eager to conduct military efforts in the same manner as our Israeli allies; she is not, for one fleeting moment, so much as hinting that shadowy Israeli interests have an undue influence on American strategy. Beyond that, the passage is about 2004 and afterwards and doesn't have the slightest thing to do with the 2003 invasion; Pollak's imputation of any thoughts about the invasion are entirely his own invention.

There is no excuse for the way Pollak has conducted himself. His error is not plausibly attributable to misreading or negligence. He deliberately altered (by excision) a quotation from Samantha Power that self-evidently in no way, shape, or form assigns blame to Israel or "the Israel lobby" (a term Pollak introduces without Power ever having mentioned it), in order to present a case that Power is suspicious of and hostile to the perfidious Jewish state. His redaction, to adopt that Washington cant phrase, is libelous.

Thus Pollak's hasty challenge to identify where he "accused Power — or anyone associated with the Obama campaign — of 'Jew-hatred,' or anything that could be construed as Jew-hatred" is easy enough to meet. Far more difficult is understanding how Pollak could maintain a straight face while protesting that all he did was ask a rhetorical question.

In the same spirit, we might ask, Can anyone in full possession of his wits reasonably believe that Pollak is the least bit interested in understanding or reporting Samantha Power's actual views? Or might he be more interested in circulating fact-free calumnies about an important scholar who has done nothing to earn such disgraceful slanders, in order to score political points on the candidate she advises?

Next: Following in Pollack's footsteps

*Not quite verbatim, but I'm not going to pony up twenty bucks for a transcript. Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post has roughly the same notes.