Iraq invades Iran causing hundreds of thousands of casulties. Iraq invades Kuwait causing ten of thousands of casulties.

The US leads a coalition to liberate Kuwait. We lose hundreds of soldiers and spend Billions of dollars to defend Arabs from other Arabs. And during the American War to Defend Arabs, Iraq commits a war crime by firing missles on civilians in Israel, leading to the death of single older woman.

And you say it is the Jews who forced the US to invade Iraq?

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Well, I say it does matter because people are afraid to say what they think, afraid of this anti-anti-semitism brigade. Dershowitz and other demagogues need to be confronted and shamed out of the mainstream media into the fringe where they belong.

Being an avid daily reader – ok, I think the NYT’s sports writers are easily the best in the business – I can’t recall a single pro-Israel article in 2006.

A long Magazine article about how well accepted the former Taliban propaganda minister is at Yale.

Lots of wonderful press in Arts & Leisure about the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie”. And another article about just how terrible the architecture of the “Separation Fence” is.

Pompous, and in my mind deeply flawed analysis, about how the Hamas victory will improve the chances for “peace”.

And last Sunday, on page 6 of the first section, a story on how nasty the settlers of a West Bank community are to a newly elected Knesset member from their town, who wants to resettle them to the west.

But nothing that could be considered even mildly neutral with regards to Israel.

Maybe the Times is edited differently in New York because of all those, you know, Jews who live there. So I’m sure one of you guys out east will be able to tell me about some of the numerous pro-Israel articles in the New York edition.

But here in “flyover country” I can’t recall any at all.
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I have to say though, that anytime Chomsky, Dershowitz, Hitchens and Massad agree that a paper on Israel is deeply flawed, it must really be a dreadful piece of work.

The paper is most useful at showing WHY the US has the Middle East policy it has. That’s a separable notion from whether the policy is counter to US interests. You may have thought the Congress should have refused to pass Hillary’s healthcare plan. But whether you did or not, the mobilisation of the National Restaurant Association is WHY the healthcare plan did not pass. Etc Etc.

The vast majority of Christian faiths in the United States support the Jews because Judaism is viewed as a valid faith while Islam is not. Revelations actually has very little impact on the practicing Christian faiths and the lives of individual believers. The fact that it is brought up as a reason for anything Christians do, Fundamentalist or not, suggests an ignorance about the beliefs and practices of significant portion of the country.

One day, abb1 will be right about something.

From the LRB article:
As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

Note the classic use of an out-of-context quote by a member of the group you are attacking, in order to get across sentiments you don’t want to say directly. See the similarity to the way LGF uses the Qur’ān?

So is criticizing the alliance composed of right-wing American Jews and rightwing American fundamentalist Christians supposed to be antisemitic? Just wondering. I’m oversimplifying, of course. There is also the kneejerk Israel-supporting but otherwise liberal (leaving aside his pro-torture stance, which I think is linked to his views of the Mideast) like Alan Dershowitz. But mostly the lobby seems to be an influential group of rightwingers of both Christian and Jewish extraction with the same sort of political influence the rightwing Miami Cubans have or had.

And by the way, in my personal NYC area circles, whatever the cause may be, the coverage of the I/P conflict is so one-sided that numerous otherwise well-informed people are astonishingly ignorant of the Palestinian case. People don’t know why Jews shouldn’t settle the West Bank, why the Arabs simply couldn’t give up a little land when there are so many Arab countries, they’ve never heard of any Israeli massacre except some vague recollection of Deir Yassin or maybe Sabra and Shatila (which was done by Lebanese anyway) and they often still think the Palestinian refugee problem was entirely the fault of the Arabs. But they know all about Arab antisemitism and suicide bombing. Funny how one-sided that picture is—and these again are well-educated friends, some of them liberal.

There’s nothing wrong with connecting to AIPAC, of course, it’s a political organization. If connecting to AIPAC makes one a bigot, then so does talking about Hamas or the IRA or Christian Coalition. Don’t be an idiot, get the facts and judge these things by the facts, not by the number of Jews involved, nobody cares about that.

I don’t remember them connecting anything to Clinton’s Jewish advisors because they are Jewish; if they did, that’d be wrong and extremely stupid, I highly doubt it’s there.

Yeah, and the stuff about neutralising the existing anti-islamic bigotry by anti-semitism – you’re clearly pulling this stuff out of your ass, man.

If someone thought it had nothing to do with the Jews, why would they connect it to AIPAC, Clinton’s jewish advisors, as part of one undifferentiated Lobby?

What do the Afghan courts, Hizb ut Tahir, rioting french youth, and the Saudi government have in common that would cause a rational non-bigoted person to make them all part of one simple story?

Where did I change your position by 180 degrees? I said that Islamophobia is very visible in the mainstream and anti-Semitism is not there at all and I’m still saying that.

No you didn’t, you said ‘There’s no such thing’.

Now you are arguing about relative quantities, presumably in the hope that if enough additional anti-semitic bigotry is produced, it will somehow neutralise the existing anti-islamic bigotry.

Things dont work that way, bigotry feeds on bigotry, both extremes grow stronger and the sensible middle shrinks.

Where did I change your position by 180 degrees? I said that Islamophobia is very visible in the mainstream and anti-Semitism is not there at all and I’m still saying that. When were the Protocols or anything like the Protocols published in any US or British newspaper last time?

Well, the fact that pro-Israel mobilisation dominates politics is just interest group mobilisation, like the Cubans (who almost forced us into nuclear war in the 1960s). Re. academia, there is evidence of mobilisation by right-wing jIsrael lobby groups to harrass academics who criticise Israel, cf Massad at Columbia. Re. the media, the US media discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict is radically truncated compared to other parts of the world, it ranges almost entirely from full-throated-Israel-is-right (Peretz) to agonised-Israel-is-right (Friedman), with little or no Israel-is-wrong that you would find in e.g. British newspapers of both left and right. Where is the persistent critic of Israel among US news commentators and how does this compare in numbers with the those on the other side? This is quite unlike US media pluralism in general. And there is Israeli lobby mobilisation to put pressure on media for this purpose.

And they contend that this all-encompassing Lobby was a key factor in driving America to invade Iraq (hello? what ever happened to oil?)

That elements of the Israel lobby were a key factor does not rule out other factors, like oil. And the bureaucratic infighting over the invasion of Iraq was in fact driven by AIPAC affilated appointees (Wolfowitz, Feith), not to mention advisors to Netanyahu at an earlier stage. I dont know of any oil lobbyists calling for an invasion of Iraq, but maybe you can point to one.

and, worse, that America’s close relations with Israel has provoked the wrath of Al Qaeda. (Despite the fact that Israel/Palestine has never been central to their ideological grievances.)

Palestine has always been central to their ideological grievances. Bin Laden’s first public statement is about Palestine (see Messages to the World). And, to name just one other example, the first World Trade Center bombing was accompanied by a numbered list of demands which includes in its entirety:
1. Stop all military, economical, and political aid to Israel. 2. All diplomatic relations with Israel must stop. 3. Not to interfere with any of the Middle East countries interior affairs.

[You’ve got to love the ‘economical’ aid!]

If David Duke’s endorsement of this scholarship doesn’t drive that point home, I don’t know what would.

That’s no argument at all, as I hope you realise.

The Israeli lobby is just another example of a small organised group imposing negative externalities on the rest of US civil society, and in that sense just like the oil lobby, farmers, the Cuban lobby etc.

When you change your position by 180 degrees, it would be helpful to anyone else reading this thread if you added in some statement like ‘ok, thinking about it, fair point, that was wrong’.

To recap: there is nothing wrong with tracking or discussing the activities of either APIAC or Hizb ut Tahir, talking about the policies of the Afghan government towards Christian converts or of the Israeli government towards Palestinians, analysing Israeli or Saudi influence on US policy.

What is wrong is connecting either set of distinct issues into one grand central narrative, based on the actions of a sinister (or savage) group of people.

And what is very wrong is when you work backwards from that grand narrative to make up new facts that only seem plausible to someone who accepts it. For example, claiming muslims can’t live under democracy, or that the Jews tricked the US into attacking Iraq.