Did I Get ‘Journolisted’? Was J-List Protecting J Street?

First published in Pajamas Media

This week, The Daily Caller published transcripts from the Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists. Among other things, the transcripts show a coordinated effort to bring a halt to articles and analyses about Barack Obama’s decades-long relationship with his pastor, radical Chicago preacher Jeremiah Wright.

According to the Daily Caller:

At several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate.

One “journalist” wrote to his colleagues:

In my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC [the leading newshound on the Obama-Wright relationship] and this idiocy in whatever venues we have.

Also according to the Daily Caller:

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.[emphasis added] … What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. … In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

I was not surprised by the account.

Reading the report, I realized Ackerman and his friends used this same strategy against me, attacked me as a racist, and attempted to put me through the plate-glass window because of my exposés on the supposedly “pro-Israel” lobbying organization J Street.

All of a sudden, at the end of October 2009, a pack of howling bloggers started nipping at my heels, accusing me of racism. I had written for Pajamas Media a fact-filled exposé about J Street’s founders, and about some of the contributors to the J Street PAC who were well-known pro-Saudi, Palestinian, Arab-American, and pro-Iranian activists. I added a few State Department Arabists for good measure. How could this group call itself “pro-Israel?” I asked.

Immediately, a torrent of condemnations hit from some of Israel’s strongest critics and from J Street advocates (I prefer “J Street-Walkers”): Spencer Ackerman, Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Luban, MJ Rosenberg, and Max Fisher. Lara Friedman from Americans for Peace Now also weighed in.

*** New information just received (HT: Batami): add journolisters Taylor Marsh, Matthew Yglesias, and Matt Duss, to those who followed Ackerman's battle plan in those 36 hours and attacked me as a racist. Philip Weiss (Mondoweiss) and Glenn Greenwald also joined the attack; as of this writing it's unclear if they are journolist members. ***

They focused on my naming someone with an Arab surname from the Arab-American Institute who contributed to J Street’s PAC. Typical of other contributors, I pointed out that her affiliation with one of the premier Arab lobbies in Washington was nowhere to be found in the Federal Election Commission's public records.

Their attacks were brutal:

Ben David is a cowardly racist … East German Stasi spook, believes everyone with Arab blood in their veins is The Enemy, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.
Spencer Ackerman even issued a threat:

Lenny Ben-David, you and I will meet someday, face to face. I hope it comes very soon. I promise you it will be an unforgettable experience.

MJ Rosenberg endorsed the threat, saying: If there’s anything left of him.

It was an amazing, likely coordinated attack. “My God! You’re radioactive,” a staffer from a real pro-Israel organization told me.

After reading the Ackerman strategy to attack those who sought to expose the Obama-Wright connection, it’s very clear the same tactic was deployed to protect J Street. Serious Washington reporters who can smell J Street’s type of fraud from a mile away have avoided investigating the outfit, originally called “the Soros project” in its early life. Several reporters have material on a Turkish donor to J Street’s PAC who was thrown off of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 when they learned he was involved in the production of the anti-American, anti-Semitic film Valley of the Wolves.

But not a word has been written.

They’ve seen the FEC data on an eccentric “Wyoming Latin teacher” who gave the PAC $36,000 this year — the largest contribution ever given to J Street’s PAC.

But not a peep.

It takes one click on the FEC site to see that leaders of the Arab-American and pro-Iranian lobby are still making major contributions But no one has challenged J Street to publish its board of directors or its major contributors.

Clearly, I had stepped on some very sensitive toes, and the journothugs didn’t like it. Therefore, to not be a victim of their thug tactics, I ask that you all read my original column that lit their fuse.

In October, I responded publicly to the Arab-American activist who was the supposed victim of my racism:

My reference to your involvement with J Street has nothing to do with your ancestry, or even you personally. Your name could be Golda Meir as far as I’m concerned. Your friends who label me a racist are only attempting to deflect attention away from the questions raised about J Street and its lack of transparency.

What I find disturbing about J Street is the deception surrounding it. One donor signed federal documents saying he is “not working” and living in Orlando when he’s actually a Palestinian billionaire from the West Bank. You are registered in the PAC as a “consultant” for USUS, not for the Arab American Institute. These disclosures have nothing to do with ethnic background. Why do Saudi employees and partners — “WASPS,” I presume — like lawyer Nancy Dutton and former CIA station chief Ray Close give to a “pro-Israel” organization? Why would life-long Arabist diplomats? Or activists in Muslim centers around the U.S., centers which identify with the Muslim Brotherhood? Or Genevieve Lynch, an officer in the Iranian-American lobby, give $10,000-plus to J Street’s PAC?

Already, some journalists are challenging or dismissing the Daily Caller’s exposé. The test of good journalists will be if they actually investigate the “Journolist” allegations, stiffen their backbones, and start investigating J Street.

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Hizbullah Tunnels under Border

The Jerusalem Post reported this morning, "Concerns are mounting in the defense establishment that Hizbullah may be digging tunnels from Lebanon to Israel to attack a border community or IDF outpost."

The concerns are not new. They were reported here and in the Jerusalem Post in October 2007. Here is the detailed story:

Mining for trouble in Lebanon. Is Hizbullah building tunnels into Israel? Jerusalem Post, Oct 30, 2007, by LENNY BEN-DAVID

Last summer Yitzhak Goren went out to his orchards to check the damage after a barrage of more than 100 Hizbullah Katyusha rockets slammed across Israel's Galilee. No one was working the orchards those days. The plums rotting under the trees gave off a sweet fermented smell. Branches were strewn everywhere. Yitzhak noted the craters left by the rockets, but one seemed different. He didn't see the bottom of the crater or the shrapnel left by the rocket. In fact, he couldn't see the bottom of the crater at all. Just darkness.

Goren had stumbled on one of the surprises promised by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It was the exit of a mile-long tunnel dug from Lebanon. The tunnel's mouth was in a stone quarry purchased by Hizbullah five years ago. The dust and trucks around the quarry raised no suspicion. Nor did the North Korean advisors and equipment brought in by the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation (a.k.a. Changgwang Sinyong Corporation) to assist the Iranians and Lebanese Shi'ites digging the 100-foot deep tunnel shaft.

The North Korean-Iranian cooperation in Lebanon is an extension of North Korea and Iran's conflict with the United States and its allies, a cooperation that also includes the provision of long- range missiles and nuclear research to Syria.
Indeed, despite its "mining" appellation, the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation was sanctioned by the United States for missile development and proliferation activities. As for the tunnels, North Korea had 50 years of experience digging tunnels under the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, some 500 feet deep and two miles long [pictured right.] Equipped with electric lines and ventilation, some of the DMZ tunnels were large enough for the passage of a thousand soldiers an hour. Hizbullah's plans were more modest: to send 200 guerrillas behind Israel's lines to shoot up civilian targets and military vehicles waiting to move into Lebanon. Hundreds of advanced shoulder-fired RPG-29s and laser- guided Kornet-E anti-tank missiles were already in place in their subterranean storerooms 100 yards from the end of the tunnel when the errant Katyusha punched a hole in the tunnel exit.

The above description of Yitzhak Goren's tunnel is fiction. The description of North Korean tunnels and cooperation with Iran are based on fact. The picture above is of weapons stored in a Hizbullah bunker in southern Lebanon.

Hamas, Hizbullah’s Sunni allies in Gaza, had already perfected the tunnel tactic in a small scale attack on an IDF tank and its crew in Israel when it abducted Gilad Shalit, on June 25, 2006. Tunnels dug to Egypt's Sinai desert represent Hamas' materiel and financial lifelines.

Earlier this summer, Hizbullah's Sheik Hassan Nasrallah warned of a "big surprise" if there's another round of fighting with Israel. Some analysts believe he was hinting at the acquisition of new missiles, possibly even anti-aircraft missiles. But tunnels from Lebanon may just be the "surprise" Nasrallah keeps promising.

SINCE ISRAEL'S withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Iranian money, troops and experts have been assisting Hizbullah to build their bunkers and underground bases throughout the country, including a warren of offices and headquarters deep beneath Hizbullah's autonomous Al Dahiyeh quarter in southern Beirut. "Hizbullah is rebuilding underground positions from which they can store weapons and defend and attack whomever they choose," said Toni Nissi, head of the International Lebanese Committee for UN Security Council Resolution 1559, The Washington Times' W. Thomas Smith, Jr., recently reported.

Just in the first half of 2006, 60,888 Iranian "tourists" visited Lebanon, according to published reports.

Hizbullah's military bases, armories, bunkers and communications networks were much more extensive than Israel's intelligence services estimated on the eve of the 2006 war. Israeli news reports have subsequently confirmed the existence of deep and well-fortified bunkers in Hizbullah's "nature reserves" all along Israel's northern borders.

Missing from the accounts, however, is the obvious question: If Hizbullah was building bunkers along Israel's (east-west) border, what is to stop them from building (north-south) tunnels - with Iranian and North Korean assistance - under Israel's border? Indeed, during the war one of Israel's TV news crews picked up on their microphone a conversation between a senior IDF officer and a wounded soldier. The officer revealed that such a tunnel was discovered from one position north of the border to an IDF position south of the border. But no further mention was ever made of the revelation.

AT THE END of the 2006 war Israel Defense Forces did discover the entrance to a very elaborate subterranean mini-city several dozen yards from a UNIFIL position, some 350 yards inside Lebanon. The fortification contained dozens of rooms connected by phones and equipped with showers, toilets, air conditioning and escape hatches.

Last year, a garrulous officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard revealed to the Arabic publication Sharq al Awsat that Iranian diplomats smuggled North Korean experts into Lebanon under the guise of "domestic workers." They joined "hundreds of Iranian engineers and technicians to build a 25 kilometer (!) tunnel." The officer did not reveal the location but bragged "each opening in this [tunnel] measures 12 to 18 square meters, and has a mobile floor and a semi-mobile ceiling. Each four openings are connected by a passage that allows fighters to pass easily [from one opening] to the other."

THE IRANIAN supply of funds, weapons, and training is seemingly unlimited. The Iranian-sponsored civilian infrastructure, schools and welfare systems have transformed parts of Lebanon to nothing short of a full- fledged, Shi'ite, jihadist colony on the eastern Mediterranean. Even while Iran is facing its own financial turmoil (unemployment, inflation and gasoline shortages), hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in Hizbullah institutions in Lebanon. Visitors to Hizbullah areas under construction report seeing many "Thank you Iran" signs.
Iranian influence and Islamist fundamentalism may have already undermined the foundations of Lebanon's fledgling democracy beyond repair. And what Iran hasn't corrupted, Syria has.

After being run out of Lebanon almost two years ago, neighboring Syria is determined to return and reassert its kleptocratic rule in Lebanon, as well. After all, President Bashar Assad and his thugs seem to have literally gotten away with the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. Earlier this month, Lebanon's Prime Minister Fouad Siniora provided the UN Secretary General with details on the Syrian links to the Fatah al- Islam terrorist group that held off Lebanese forces in the Nahr al- Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon for three months. Many of the jihadists had crossed into Lebanon from Syria, and many were trained by the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.

The bottom line: There is no way that Iran, Syria and Hizbullah will honor UN Security Council Resolution 1559 calling for the Lebanese army to deploy to the border with Israel and for the disarming of the militias (ie. the Shi'ite Hizbullah or the Sunni Fatah al-Islam). These axis- of-evil regimes and terrorist groups will do all they can to endanger the stability of the precarious Lebanese government and to disrupt Lebanese elections. Assassinations of anti-Syrian parliamentarians are shaving down the anti-Syrian majority's numbers. And it is questionable if they will permit the establishment of the special international tribunal to try the suspects in the Hariri murder.

In 2007, I got this response from an Israeli defense correspondent: Anonymous said...
Rumors of infiltration routes under Avivim have been circulating for some time. So far, only official denials. Good luck at holding MoD's feet to the fire on this one. They shouldn't be allowed to "excuse" away the prob as they have in Gaza (sandy surface, ground water, etc.) Detection technology suited to the North's mountainous terrain is commercially available and has been used for decades south of the DMZ and in mining/industrial sites around the world. Good luck on this important new initiative!

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A Tip to Analysts: Look Where the Aircraft-Carriers Are Located or Headed

“Any of you boys seen an aircraft-carrier around here?” – Maverick (aka Top Gun)

Actually, a couple of them. The USS Truman sailed through the Suez Canal last week with a dozen escort ships all armed to the teeth. The Truman is supposed to relieve the USS Eisenhower on station in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Ike stays around a little longer. Ostensibly, the Truman is supposed to provide support for the Afghanistan war, and several support ships are supposed to peel off for anti-piracy patrols off the coast of Somalia.

French President Sarkozy [pictured right] revealed this week that the French carrier the Charles De Gaulle is heading out to the region “before the end of the year.” How soon will it be before the British HMS Ark Royal will also join the other carriers in the region? Probably not too long considering that French, British and American jets have been participating in joint exercises in recent months with pilots landing on each other’s carriers.

An Iranian Nightmare

Earlier this month Navy Times detailed the joint air operations and interoperability exercises of the French and U.S. carriers.

A brace of French Navy Rafales flying from the Charles de Gaulle carrier roared down [pictured left] to perform touch-and-go landings on the vast deck of this Nimitz class carrier, in a show of interoperability between the two navies. The cross-deck operations included a Rafale landing on the U.S. carrier June 4, being taken down in one of the maintenance hangars and having one of its engines removed and refitted. …The U.S. carrier Truman docked at Marseille on June 8 …. [on its way to the Suez Canal.] Meanwhile, [U.S.] F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, practiced touch-and-go landings on the Charles de Gaulle, which was sailing nearby. American pilots also took part in close-air support training exercises with British and French forward air observers at Canjuers, the French Army training base in the dry, scrubby countryside behind Toulon.

In similar exercises last month, American jets were landing and taking off from the British Ark Royal off the eastern coast of the United States.

For armchair generals, here’s a website that provides details on American carriers, their location and status.

The presence of several aircraft carriers near the Afghanistan conflict also puts them within range of Iran. And carriers come with a large complement of guided missile cruisers, destroyers and submarines. In addition to the scores of planes on the carriers, presumably more aircraft are on bases on the Arabian Peninsula. Long-range bombers can also be launched from bases thousands of miles away.

An Iranian attack by anti-ship missiles or even short and medium-range ballistic missiles must be taken into account by allied forces in the region. All four of the destroyers accompanying the Truman are equipped with the Aegis ballistic missile defence system. Their offensive weaponry, particularly their Tomahawk cruise missiles, should worry Iranian military planners.

Postscript: The importance of interoperability was brought home several decades ago when an Israeli helicopter pilot was faced with a mechanical failure on his craft. As he was examining his options for ditching, he spotted an American aircraft carrier and decided to land his helicopter on the deck. As he got out of the aircraft, the fuming American captain charged and screamed at the chopper pilot, “How could you do that? How can you just land on my ship?!” The Israeli (who confirmed the story for me) responded, “I thought it was one of ours.”

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Why the Iranian Claim of Israeli Planes in Tabuk Saudi Arabia Is Bunk

There's no question that the war jitters in the Middle East are a little stronger these days. Add to the swirling rumors the new claim made by the Islam Times that Israeli aircraft were seen last week at the Saudi airfield in Tabuk unloading equipment.

There's little doubt that Iran is behind the Islam Times' charge that "Saudi Arabia’s measures to allow Israel to use their country in order to harm the resistance movements in the region is something that has enflamed Muslims throughout the world in recent years."

Middle East intrigue sometimes creates strange political bedfellows, but Israel's use of the Tabuk base makes little sense, simply because it doesn't benefit Israel. Tabuk is located in northwest Saudi Arabia and 800 miles from Iran. It doesn't cut any flying time from Israel to Iran. If -- and that's a big if -- Israel wanted to attack from Saudi Arabia, there are other Saudi bases closer to Iran, such as the Prince Sultan base near Riyadh or the Dhahran base close to the Gulf. And, if Israel plans to attack Iran, and if Israel couldn't accomplish the task with mid-air refueling, there may be other bases in the region that would be better.

Tabuk is so close to Israel -- about 150 kilometers -- that when the U.S. sold F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in 1982 there was a ban on basing the jets in Tabuk. Legend has it that Israeli planes overflew Tabuk dropping spent fuel tanks on the base as a reminder of the base's vulnerability. (Empty fuel tanks falling from under an aircraft's wing could look like something much more lethal, and the Royal Laundry at the base probably had to put on a second shift to clean the soiled trousers that day.)

In 2003, the Saudi Royal Air Force moved the bulk of its F-15s to Tabuk with U.S. permission and tacit Israeli accession.

The winds of war may be blowing stronger in the Middle East, but the Tabuk story appears to be hot air.

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My Turn to Weigh In on Peter Beinart: What's with His Hero-Worship of an Anti-Israel South African Marxist?

This commentary was written over a week ago, but sat on an editor's desk. Here is the liberated column:

Commentators and analysts are still writing about Peter Beinart’s New York Review of Books essay on the Failure of the American Jewish Establishment and the subsequent essays Love Israel? Criticize It and Why Israel Has to Do Better. The J Street-walkers tout his pieces as proof of the justice and righteousness of their ways. The Zionist, traditional supporters of Israel see Beinart as ignoring the Arab/Iranian threats and the Palestinian incitement, and they decry as unfair his one-sided blaming of Israel for the Middle East’s woes.

I share many of those criticisms, for it is clear to me that Beinart’s view of Israel is not necessarily myopic; it is microscopic. From afar, he focuses intensely on an event or a person in Israel’s history and projects that speck as representative of all of Israel or its government or its leadership here and now. By definition, such a view is distorted. Thus Prime Minister Netanyahu’s old opposition to Palestinian statehood is presented as contemporary, and Shas’ Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef and Yisrael Beitenu party leader Avigdor Lieberman’s pre-election party platforms are portrayed as the same positions held in the coalition government today. It would be as if someone calls President Barack Obama today a lackey to the Jewish lobby because he stated as candidate just two years ago that Jerusalem must “remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The biased Israeli authorities quoted by Beinart such as Ha’aretz’ Akiva Eldar or academic Ze’ev Sternhell are held with the same esteem in Israel as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. What Beinart sees from there – or what he chooses to see – is not the same that we see and experience here in Israel.

I once met Beinart at the Chabad Center in Washington. I was truly impressed by his brilliance, confidence, and breadth of knowledge. And I was proud that he was unserer – one of us, and a self-proclaimed Orthodox Jew, no less.

But I forgot that not all Orthodox Jews are unserer. I certainly have little in common with the Haredi, ultra-Orthodox members of the fringe Neturei Karta who meet and express solidarity with Iran’s Ahmadinejad and pray for Israel’s demise. Their creed, dogma and rebbes are not mine.

And frankly, I am sorry to say, Peter Beinart’s dogma and rebbes are not mine, either. I thank Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for sharing Beinart’s ani ma’amin – his set of basic beliefs:

"My hero growing up was Joe Slovo, who spoke only Yiddish until he was nine and upon moving to South Africa as a boy from Lithuania (we South Africans are almost all Litvaks, except my mom's side, who are Sephardi) became the head of the military wing of the African National Congress. There are Slovos in every place Jews have gone, people who have devoted themselves as Jews (though I'll admit Slovo was not as good a Jew as say, Abraham Joshua Heschel) to the fate of non-Jews. There's a tension, but for me the value is in the tension, in loving Zionism and Judaism and also feeling that one's love of who one is impels one towards moral universalism. I see that spirit powerfully in the Israeli left. It's the use of Jewish suffering as a moral imperative not only to act on behalf of imperiled Jews, but of imperiled non-Jews that really touches me. "

Most of us here in Israel don’t have the confidence in our neighbors to allow ourselves the luxury of moral universalism. We didn’t approve of the restraint showed by our national leaders during the 2006 war with Hizbullah, and we did approve of the so-called “disproportionate response” to Hamas terror two years later. We feel sorry for the innocent civilians killed in Gaza and are dismayed that they were used as human shields, but there is no remorse that our casualty figures didn’t match those of Hamas fighters.

That Joe Slovo is Peter Beinart’s hero explains a whole lot. I first heard Slovo’s name when I travelled through South Africa in two eye-opening trips during the apartheid era and visited Johannesburg, Soweto, Capetown, and Grahamstown. [Today, I still listen to the music of the Jewish-Zulu singer Johnny Clegg.] As I visited various schools, I met dozens of Jewish students who were drawn to the right-wing politics of Meir Kahana or to the left-wing liberation politics of the banned African National Congress, led by Mandela and his former classmate, Joe Slovo. I tried to pull the students away from the extremes of both their camps.

Many of the leftist students seemed ridden with guilt. Most seemed to live like the Nationalists (“Nats”) -- with blacks coming from the townships to work in their homes – while they screamed their rage against the Nationalist government.

Peter Beinart’s parents moved from South Africa to Cambridge before he was born, but it is obvious that the South African experience still weighs on the younger Beinart. He refers to himself in the Goldberg dialogue as “we South Africans.” He told C-Span in 2005, “the anti-Apartheid movement was a very powerful force in both [of his parents’] lives, and that was really in many ways one of the great movements of the 20th century.…”

Beinart’s hero, Joe Slovo, was a committed Marxist dedicated to overthrowing the apartheid regime. But he also bore a deep hatred for Israel. This is what Slovo wrote, as published in his unfinished autobiography published after his death in 1995:

"Within a few years the wars of consolidation and expansion began. Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization for the preparation by Zionists of acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified by the Zionist press. It is ironic, too, that the Jew-haters in South Africa – those who worked and prayed for a Hitler victory – have been linked in close embrace with the rulers of Israel in a new axis based on racism."

Beinart, like the ultra-Orthodox fringe group Neturei Karta, views today’s Israel as godless and increasingly illegitimate in the scheme of his moral universalism. For him, Israel is embroiled in a battle between the light and darkness – a “domestic struggle between democrats and authoritarians.” He envisions a Yerushalayim shel Ma’aleh – a heavenly, utopian Jerusalem led by Israel’s left.

That’s not my view, nor the view of the majority of Israelis as we express our opinions in our democratic elections.

Have we come to a point that the standard penitence for South African Jewish ex-pats and ex-Nats, whether Beinart or the hanging judge Richard Goldstone, is to say 20 Hail Marys and to kick Israel?

PS: In preparing this article I discovered that Joe Slovo is admired by another well known Jewish figure who was often critical of Israel: David Miliband, the former British Foreign Secretary.

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