Jim Jones' Scary Joke

National Security Advisor James Jones' speech before the Washington Institute last week was parsed and analyzed by all good policy wonks with talmud-like scrutiny.

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There were problematic parts such as his linkage of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front with confronting Iran. One very positive statement could not be misinterpreted: "Peace must be made by the parties and cannot be imposed from the outside."

Advocates of strong-arming Israel such as Stephen Walt, Zbig Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and J Street-walkers may have been disappointed but they will no doubt find solace in Jones' offer "to do whatever is necessary to help the parties bridge their differences" and will interpret that as a threat to pressure Israel. But they follow in the 40 year-old footsteps of Israel's strongest detractors such as Sen. William Fulbright, George Ball, Paul Findley, etc. who also called to "save Israel in spite of itself." They all failed in their attempt to change U.S. policy.

In recent days, American veterans of the "peace process" such as Aaron David Miller and Richard Haass have put the Israel-Palestinian process into proper perspective and warned against the rush for the Arab-Israeli panacea.

Haass: [I]t is easy to exaggerate how central the Israel-Palestinian issue is and how much the U.S. pays for the current state of affairs. There are times one could be forgiven for thinking that solving the Palestinian problem would take care of every global challenge from climate change to the flu. But would it? The short answer is no.

Miller: The notion that there's a single or simple fix to protecting those interests, let alone that Arab-Israeli peace would, like some magic potion, bullet, or elixir, make it all better, is just flat wrong. In a broken, angry region with so many problems it stretches the bounds of credulity to the breaking point to argue that settling the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most critical issue, or that its resolution would somehow guarantee Middle East stability.

What should bother American Jews about Jones' speech, however, is not what's in the official White House transcript, nor on the standard video found online from the Washington Institute event, but what's on the tape before he began his official remarks. It's standard practice to open a Washington speech with a joke, often self-effacing. It warms up the audience.

But Jones' joke, posted by Breitbart TV, was a little different. Yes, it got its laughs and guffaws, but afterwards, some in the audience admitted they were uneasy. The joke was certainly not self-effacing, but a "true, recent story," Jones related, that took place in southern Afghanistan with an encounter between a Taliban fighter and a Jewish merchant. In his anger, the Taliban fighter screamed at the Jew "about Israel, about the Jewish people... you people don't get it." And the Jew responded to the "insults against me, my family, my country." See the clip to get to the punchline.

OK, some may not like a gentile promoting the stereotype of a cunning Jewish merchant. But, something else, it seems, should worry my American Jewish friends about the National Security Advisor's depiction of the Jew -- who could be a Jewish merchant in New York, Lima, or Paris -- being attacked "about Israel," and the same Jew feeling the need to respond to insults about "my country."

Doesn't that assume or imply -- perhaps subconsciously -- a belief in the dual loyalty of Jews?

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