It explains its setbacks, which it argues came at the height of its power and influence, on what it calls two smart and effective U.S. moves in 2006-07: an effective U.S. media and psychological campaign, which convinced many that the "mujahideen" had committed atrocities against Iraqis and killed thousands of Muslims; and the Awakenings, achieved through its manipulation of the tribes and the "nationalist resistance." The document doesn’t mention the "Surge" much at all, at least not in terms of the troop escalation which most Americans have in mind.

Back in the U.S., of course, hawks have been keen to emphasize the third element–the troop escalation–at the expense of the other two. After all, to suggest that the Awakenings bore primary responsibility for the drop in violence comes uncomfortably close to implying that jihadists are not a monolithic group of bloodthirsty fanatics who "hate us for our freedom"; instead, it might suggest that we should actually talk to them and perhaps (gasp!) offer the relative moderates among them incentives to defect. Classic appeasement, in other words. Similarly, although talk of winning "hearts and minds" is all the rage in counterinsurgency (COIN) discussions these days, hawks have been careful not to focus too much on the role that atrocities (by the U.S. or its enemies) play in swaying public opinion; that might imply that the U.S. should, for instance, close Guantanamo and Bagram, thoroughly reform its detainee system, or halt the drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Far better, from the hawks’ perspective, to credit the drop in violence and the wane in AQM’s fortunes entirely to the surge. Doing so sends a nice unambiguous message: when in doubt, the solution is always more troops, more money, more war.

Iraq experts continue to vigorously debate which factors were most important in causing the drop in violence, and in any case I am no Iraq expert myself. Nonetheless, it is striking that strategists associated with AQM itself appear to attribute their downfall primarily to public perceptions of their own atrocities, and to the U.S. decision to reach out to former members of the insurgency, rather than to the surge itself.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog .]

In the wake of the backlash, Cheney’s defenders seem to have decided to drop their original allegations that the DOJ lawyers were active al-Qaeda sympathizers (the clear upshot of the ad’s question “whose values do they share?”) and instead portray the controversy as a mere transparency issue. It’s not that they are accusing the DOJ lawyers of being a pro-Qaeda fifth column, the Keep America Safe crowd now tells us, but simply that they think the public has a right to know that backgrounds of all government officials.

If Keep America Safe was hoping to moderate its image, however, Andy McCarthy didn’t get the memo. The former prosecutor and frequent National Review Online contributor (also a fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies) weighed in on Saturday, writing that “I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist.” He later softens the accusation slightly, suggesting that “the relevant question with respect to progressive lawyers is not so much whether they are pro-Qaeda as it is whether, as between Islamists and the U.S. as it exists, they have more sympathy for the Islamists.” On the contrary, I would think that the question of whether the U.S. Department of Justice is “pro-Qaeda” is in fact highly relevant.

This is, of course, not the first time that McCarthy has wandered off the reservation. As National Review has attempted in recent months to impose some semblance of intellectual standards, and purge the outright nutters and conspiracy theorists from the “respectable” right, McCarthy’s colleagues have frequently been forced to scold him publicly for indulging in tropes from the lunatic fringe. (I’ve recounted some of McCarthy’s exploits here and here.)

In October 2008, at the height of the presidential campaign, McCarthy penned the all-time classic “Did Obama Write “Dreams from My Father” … Or Did Ayers?,” which suggested that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers may have been the real author of Obama’s first book. This forced fellow NRO contributor Jonathan Adler to remark that McCarthy’s accusations were “outlandish” and “nutter-territory stuff”. In June 2009, in the wake of Iran’s post-election crisis, McCarthy suggested that Obama was intentionally siding with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad against the protesters, because “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” He speculated that Obama’s first choice would have been to “issue a statement supportive of the mullahs,” but because this was politically impossible he settled for “the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.” This prompted National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to step in and tersely dismiss McCarthy’s allegations.

The kicker came in July 2009, after National Review published an editorial attempting to squelch the “birther” phenomenon once and for all. While the editors were likely hoping to increase their respectability by silencing the far right (just as magazine founder Bill Buckley famously expelled the John Birch Society from the mainstream conservative movement), McCarthy quickly put to rest any hopes that the birthers would go quietly into the night. McCarthy responded with a long critique of the editorial. As I wrote in July:

While conceding the craziness of the allegation that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was a fake, McCarthy raised a host of new allegations against the president. These include, in no particular order: that Obama was secretly adopted by his mother’s second husband; that he was a secret Muslim in his youth (although McCarthy concedes that he is now a “professed” Christian); that he was (and remains) an Indonesian citizen; that he made a “mysterious” trip to Pakistan in his youth; that he intervened in the 2006 Kenyan election in an attempt to install “a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to sharia law”; finally, that his pitching abilities mark him as “something less than Sandy Koufax.”

This time, it was NRO contributor Kevin Williamson’s turn to step in and try to talk sense into McCarthy; he accused McCarthy of making common cause with “kooks…[who] engage in intemperate, paranoid, hysterical speculation, and not always from the best of motives.”

Somehow, I doubt if McCarthy’s latest intervention is going to do much to help Keep America Safe’s sagging fortunes. The real questions: when will the right stop treating him as its go-to guy for stories related to detainee policy, and when will mainstream media outlets like the New York Times stop treating him as a credible source? The Times ran a lengthy profile of McCarthy in February which contained no mention of its the man’s history of nutty statements — a history that makes clear that he is, to be perfectly blunt, a crank.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

Peretz is quoted by Glenn Greenwald, who says most of what needs to be said about Peretz’s latest display of bigotry. I’m sure we can expect a 4000-word J’accuse from Leon Wieseltier condemning his boss’s racism any day now.

In any case, if one views Peretz’s post now, one finds that the offending sentence has been changed, without any indication that it used to read differently:

There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture like this in the Arab world turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

The fact that Peretz changed the post (however nasty his revised formulation remains) looks like a tacit admission that he knows he crossed the line. In that case, however, it seems that he should provide an explanation (not to say an apology). Does he believe that Arabs are in fact congenitally shifty and untrustworthy? Does he concede that his slur against Arabs was unacceptable? To simply change his post covertly in the hopes that no one will notice is surely the most cowardly way to deal with the issue.

I realize that it is unwise to waste much time on Peretz. He is an embarrassment, as even his own staffers generally recognize, and the only reason that TNR is forced to publish his rantings is that he owns the magazine. Still, if Peretz wants to be taken seriously in public debate it seems reasonable to demand that he conform to some minimal standards of honesty, decency, and responsibility.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog .]

However, as Kramer admits, the idea of slashing the Palestinian birthrate by ending UNRWA aid does not originate with him, and he “credit[s] Gunnar Heinsohn for making a much more detailed case for it,” as well as for coining the term “superfluous young men.” Heinsohn, a German academic at the University of Bremen, made the case in more depth in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in January 2009, at the height of the Gaza war. I meant to write about Heinsohn’s article at the time, but the Kramer controversy is as good a time as any to revisit it. (The New Left Review has more background on Heinsohn and his politics.)

Heinsohn argued that by providing humanitarian relief to the population of Gaza, UNRWA (and by extension its western funders) are fueling a “youth bulge” that provided a steady supply of violent and superfluous young men, and thus the West is “unintentionally financ[ing] a war by proxy against the Jews of Israel.” He called for UNRWA to end assistance to Gazans born from now on, although (perhaps to avoid the grim implications of his argument) he refrained from calling for a cut-off of aid to already living Gazans. Still, the UNRWA humanitarian aid has been virtually the only thing keeping the population of Gaza alive since the imposition of the blockade, and it is not clear what Heinsohn imagines will happen to Gazan children born under the siege who are denied UNRWA aid. (Or perhaps it is clear, but not terribly pleasant to think about.) Whether or not Heinsohn’s proposed policies meet a legal definition of genocide, these sorts of population-control measures targeting “undesirable” ethnic groups have a revolting history, and have been a hallmark of fascist regimes in particular; such ideas, as Leon Wieseltier recently wrote in a very different context, have “a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”

What’s the punch line? According to his bio, Heinsohn is the head of something called the “Raphael Lemkin Institute” at the University of Bremen, which bills itself as “Europe’s first institute devoted to comparative genocide research.” Lemkin, of course, was the Polish-Jewish lawyer who fled the Nazis, coined the word “genocide,” and figured as one of the heroes in Samantha Power’s book A Problem From Hell.

The fact that the head of an institute bearing Raphael Lemkin’s name is calling for these frankly fascistic population control measures against the Palestinians is among the most revealing signs of the way that the memory of the Holocaust has been abused by a particular strand of militarist and virulently racist right-wing politics.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

Smith’s pieces wear their ideology on their sleeve to such a degree that it hardly seems necessary to respond (although the Leveretts have, and Matt Duss has also picked the pieces apart). Regarding the Leveretts, I do not personally agree with all of their writings, and many Iran analysts whom I respect have criticized them for underestimating the Green Movement’s prospects of success. Still, their pessimism does provide a needed counterweight to much of the high-flown commentary we see these days claiming that the Islamic Republic will fall tomorrow if only the U.S. strikes the proper heroic pose, and they certainly deserve better than the transparent smear job that Smith produces, which all but accuses them of being Iranian agents of influence. It is quite obvious that the real reason the Leveretts are being targeted by Smith and his cohort is not they are pessimistic about the Green Movement, but rather that they are staunchly opposed to U.S. military action against Iran (which, ironically, is the main issue on which they agree with the Green Movement).

As for the attack on Parsi, it merely marks the continuation of a neoconservative campaign aimed at silencing any insufficiently hawkish Iranian voices. (I previously wrote about the campaign and its architects here, here, and here, among other places.) Like his allies, Smith drops insinuations of dual loyalty in a way that would clearly be deemed anti-Semitic if applied to a Jewish political figure. He also implies that Parsi is thin-skinned or conspiratorial for identifying his antagonists as neoconservatives — but nearly all of the critics Smith cites are, in fact, neocons, from Eli Lake to Michael Rubin to Reuel Marc Gerecht. (See Jim Lobe’s post from last week for more on Rubin’s and Gerecht’s recent antics.) Smith mentions Parsi’s award-winning book on the U.S.-Iran relationship, but bases his critique of the book entirely on reviews in Commentary and Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Quarterly (the latter of which was written by — no surprise — Michael Rubin). Smith does quote a couple Iranians, one of whom, Hassan Daioleslam, is currently involved in a defamation lawsuit with Parsi and has already been dealt with extensively here. Multiple knowledgeable sources have identified Daioleslam as an associate of the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK) terrorist group, but he has become the Iranian face of an anti-NIAC campaign driven primarily by Washington neoconservatives. Another Iranian cited in the article, Pooya Dayanim, is an ardent regime change advocate and contributor to National Review Online.

Among the ironies of Smith’s article: he more or less accuses Parsi and the Leveretts of being Iranian agents, while relying heavily on Michael Rubin, a longtime shill for actual Iranian intelligence asset Ahmed Chalabi. He argues (against all evidence) that Parsi only shifted to a pro-human-rights stance in the wake of this summer’s Iranian election crisis, while taking anti-Parsi talking points from a magazine published by Daniel Pipes, who notoriously endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prior to the June elections. (Unsurprisingly, Pipes has written a glowing review of Smith’s new book, the basic message of which — as Matt Duss correctly notes — is the familiar claim that Arabs only understand force.) He accuses Parsi and the Leveretts of indifference to the lives and wishes of the Iranian people, while sharing an institutional home with the likes of Norman “Bomb Iran” Podhoretz. And so on.

While Smith’s pieces are predictable pieces of neocon agitprop, the venue in which they were published is more interesting. Tablet is one of the new breed of Jewish cultural journals and websites that have sprung up in recent years, aiming to offer what it calls “a new read on Jewish life” more in tune with the sensibilities of the younger generation. Like its peers Jewcy and Heeb, Tablet is relentlessly progressive in its sensibility and politics — at least as far as domestic politics are concerned.

But foreign policy is another matter; insofar as the magazine offers political coverage of Israel and the Middle East, it is relentlessly conventional and nearly always hawkish. (Nearly all of their foreign policy articles are written by hawks of either the liberal or neocon variety — Adam Kirsch, Seth Lipsky, and Michael Weiss, etc.) Smith’s pieces, which could have been ripped from the Weekly Standard or Commentary, are, sadly, par for the course.

I suspect a lot of this has to do with money. Several people who have personal experience with Tablet and its predecessor, Nextbook, have told me that the group’s funders are both significantly older and more right-wing than the rest of the operation — a common pattern in such organizations. Hence the tendency to delegate all discussion of Israel to the hawks, in order to keep the funders satisfied. But while this sort of compromise might be necessitated by internal politics, it has clearly had a destructive intellectual effect on the magazine’s content. It’s hard to provide “a new read on Jewish life” when all discussion of Israel and foreign policy as a whole is confined within the narrow limits deemed acceptable by the right.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

As Jerry Haber notes, however, these criticisms are based on a simple misunderstanding. In fact, the “operations” that Travers refers do not commence with the start of Operation Cast Lead on Dec. 27, but rather with Operation Double Challenge on Nov. 4. Double Challenge was an IDF incursion into Gaza that left six Palestinians dead, ending months of calm; because the operation came the day of the U.S. presidential elections, it vanished without a trace in the U.S. media. Paul Woodward explains that the ceasefire was, in fact, functioning quite well until the Israelis broke it on Nov. 4; only after the IDF raid did the number of rocket attacks increase.

Therefore, when Travers speaks of “the month preceding their operations,” he is referring not to December but to October 2008. And how many rockets were fired into Israel in October? According to the very figures [PDF, p. 6] that Gordon cites against Travers, only one. (According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs , there were two rockets fired in October, and twelve in the four-month stretch from July through October.)

The fact that the ceasefire was actually working quite well in preventing rocket fire into southern Israel is one reason that we should be skeptical of the claim that Israel had no choice but to use military force to prevent the rocket attacks. (This is not, of course, to deny that the rocket attacks constituted war crimes in their own right.) If Israel’s primary goal were simply to end the rocket attacks, it could have worked to maintain the ceasefire (or better still, lifted the siege of Gaza). Why, then, did Israel choose to violate it instead? I suspect that the Israeli government, wary of the incoming Obama administration, believed that the blank check it enjoyed during the Bush years was coming to an end, and was determined to make one last sustained effort to root out the Hamas government before it did.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog .]

It is clear from every sentence that Wieseltier writes that the man considers himself a Great Intellectual, and I am told that his writings from twenty years ago (and his book about his father’s death) are worth reading. I will have to take this on faith, because I certainly can’t remember ever reading anything particularly interesting by the man. His articles tend to be compendiums of liberal hawk cliches, made notable only by the fact that they are delivered in the most pompous prose style this side of the New Criterion . He tends to rely on superficial displays of erudition to draw attention away from the weaknesses of his argument; note the long and rather gratuitous disquisition on Auden that opens the Sullivan piece. And frankly, one wonders what would happen if others applied to his writing the remarkable oversensitivity he applies to Sullivan’s. Consider Wieseltier’s account of his celebration upon learning that Barack Obama had been elected president:

I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown’s for fried green tomatoes.

Of course, the fact that Wieseltier believes that the election of an African-American president calls for soul food rather than classical music does not make him a racist. Still, it is easy to imagine how he would react if he caught Sullivan (or anyone else) making a comparable statement about a Jewish politician.

I am less interested in what the whole affair says about Wieseltier, however, than in what it says about the changing politics of anti-Semitism.

As Greenwald notes, the reaction to Wieseltier’s attack demonstrates how badly the pro-Israel hardliners have overplayed their hand when it comes to allegations of anti-Semitism. For a long time, such accusations were a political death sentence for those on the receiving end of them. Even in recent years, they have remained damaging when directed at figures who were not known personally by many people in Washington journalistic circles (e.g. Walt and Mearsheimer, Chas Freeman).

However, the hardliners badly blundered by casually and frivolously leveling the anti-Semitism charge against people who were widely known — and widely known not to be anti-Semites — in Washington. Joe Klein, an anti-Semite? Andrew Sullivan, an anti-Semite? The obviously absurdity of these charges has caused many observers to go back and reevaluate the entire way that the charge has been used in the past — and has only confirmed the impression that it is all-too-frequently used to stifle all dissent from Israeli policies.

The result is that the tacit framework governing “responsible” criticism of Israel is breaking down. For members of what we might call the liberal wing of the New Republic crowd (as opposed to the outright neocons who also populate its pages), some mild criticism of Israel is permitted so long as it is strictly confined within narrow limits. One may allude to unidentified “mistakes” made during the Gaza war, but not suggest that these constituted war crimes. One may offer tepid support for the hypothetical goal of ending settlement construction, but not offer clear-cut support for the Obama administration when it actually tries to implement this goal. One may criticize the occupation as imprudent, but not condemn it as immoral; one may argue against it on the grounds that it is bad for Israel, but not on the grounds that it is bad for the Palestinians.

Above all, any such criticism must be uttered only by Jews, and even Jews must display their Zionist credentials at all times while doing so. In this way, criticism of Israel is permitted only provided it be so emasculated that it is guaranteed to be ineffectual.

Wieseltier’s attack on Sullivan appears motivated not by any actual belief that the latter is an anti-Semite, but by rage that he has violated these tacit rules — that a gentile dares offer unapologetic criticism of Israeli policies. More than that, we can detect in Wieseltier’s piece a deep sense of panic that this framework of “responsible” criticism is breaking down. The attack is quite obviously an attempt to intimidate Sullivan into ceasing all criticism; I join many others in hoping that Sullivan sticks to his guns.

Finally, it’s worth noting how radically the debate about the role of the Israel lobby (or Likud lobby, or status quo lobby, or whatever one wishes to call it) has shifted in recent years. For proof, see the New Republic ’s Jonathan Chait, in a post titled “Andrew Sullivan Is Not An Anti-Semite”. While Chait’s views on these issues are certainly to the right of mine, he is smart and generally reasonable in his views; for that reason, he frequently ends up engaging in damage control for his intemperate bosses. His discussion of the politics of the Israel lobby is interesting:

Leon agrees that the pro-Israel lobby wields significant power in U.S. policymaking, and determining this level of power is also a legitimate topic of inquiry. At one point on the spectrum of thought you have what Leon and I would consider a realistic assessment of the power of the Israel lobby. As you move further along the spectrum, you eventually approach Osama bin Laden’s view of the power of the Israel lobby. Clearly, bin Laden qualifies as an anti-Semite. But the judgment can’t be that as soon as you go just a little further along the line from my view, then you’re an anti-Semite. There has to be some room on this question to be merely wrong — to harbor an exaggerated view of the power of the Israel lobby without being an anti-Semite. Otherwise debate becomes impossible.

This echoes an earlier point that Chait made in the wake of the Chas Freeman affair (in which he was one of Freeman’s chief antagonists):

Of course I recognize that the Israel lobby is powerful, and was a key element in the pushback against Freeman, and that it is not always a force for good. I just don’t ascribe to it the singular, Manichean, different-category-than-any-other-lobby status that its more fevered critics imagine.

Similarly, the Atlantic ’s Jeffrey Goldberg (another exemplar of the “TNR liberal” type described above) wrote a 2008 New York Times op-ed in which he endorsed the bulk of the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis — while insisting, of course, that his views bore no resemblance at all to theirs.

Thus we can see how deeply discussion of the Israel lobby has shifted. The TNR liberals now insist that of course the Israel lobby is extremely powerful, and of course it exerts an influence on U.S. foreign policy that is frequently (or even generally) pernicious. To conceal the fact that they are conceding the truth of the basic Israel lobby thesis, they tend to contrast their views with some caricatured position that they attribute to Mearsheimer and Walt (the Israel lobby is the only interest group with any influence in Washington, The Jews call all the shots in U.S. foreign policy, or something to that effect). Of course, only a few years ago many of the same parties alleged that it was an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory even to claim that there is such a thing as an “Israel lobby” and that it exerts a powerful (although not all-powerful) influence on U.S. foreign policy. However, they seem to expect the public to forget all this.

In short, the Wieseltier-Sullivan affair demonstrates that things are changing in Washington. And, I might add, not a moment too soon.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog .]

Photo by Stuck in Customs

This latest attack on the Israeli human rights sector comes in the context of an ugly smear campaign launched against the New Israel Fund, the leading progressive Israeli funding organization, by the right-wing group Im Tirzu. The lowlight of the campaign was a full-page ad in the Jerusalem Post attacking NIF head Naomi Chazan, the former deputy speaker of the Knesset. The ad — “reminiscent of Der Sturmer,” in Didi Remez’s words — labeled Chazan “Naomi Goldstone-Hazan” and showed her wearing a horn. (Remez and co. have been doing the best reporting on the war against human rights NGOS over at Coteret.)

This stepped-up attack on human rights groups is a reminder of the fundamental disingenuousness of the argument, frequently made by Israel’s hardline apologists, that international human rights groups should butt out due to Israel’s own vibrant human rights sector. Former Human Rights Watch chairman Robert Bernstein, for instance, attacked his former organization last year for its reporting on Israel, arguing that Israel’s open society and plethora of human rights organizations made international investigation redundant and that resources would be better spent on Arab countries.

But although the hardliners may sing the praises of the Israeli human rights sector in the international context in order to discredit the likes of Goldstone and HRW, one finds that — with few exceptions — they tend to be the same people leading the charge domestically against these very same human rights groups. It is not that they believe that criticism of Israel’s human rights record should be left to B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, rather than Goldstone and HRW; quite obviously, if Gerald Steinberg et al got their way there would be no criticism of Israel’s human rights record whatsoever.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

While the poll deals with the American rather than the European context, it is a reminder that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have typically gone hand in hand. This is worth remembering when looking at the rise of European far-right leaders like Jean-Marie Le Pen of France and the late Jorg Haider of Austria. Hostility to Muslim immigrants forms the centerpiece of their political stance, but their parties have also tended to espouse anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial — a reminder of their neo-fascist roots.

But this anti-Semitism has quite naturally prevented them from making common cause with neoconservatives and other right-wing Zionists in America, whose militant stance towards “Islamism” (very broadly defined) would otherwise make them natural allies of the European far right. Hence we have seen in recent years that the savvier of the European far right leaders — such as Filip Dewinter of the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang (VB) — have dropped the explicitly anti-Semitic elements of their platforms and doubled down on Islamophobia. They realize that by portraying themselves as staunch supporters of Israel and allies in the war against Islamofascism, they can acquire a new set of influential and well-connected supporters in America — the likes of Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn, Frank Gaffney, etc. (Eli Clifton and I wrote about the connections between Wilders, his U.S. supporters, and the VB this past February.)

While focusing on Islamophobia rather than anti-Semitism is certainly a savvy move, whether it is sincere is another question. The VB, for example, is a successor to the Vlaams Blok, which disbanded in 2004 after being convicted of “repeated incitement to discrimination”; its fall was precipated by top VB official Roeland Raes’s widely-publicized Holocaust denial on Dutch television. Despite the VB’s claims to have cleaned up its act since the Raes scandal, the Belgian Jewish community isn’t buying it. They maintain that, regardless of whatever philo-Semitic noises the top leadership makes in public, the group has a clear pattern of associating with anti-Semitic and neo-fascist elements. (Right-wing apostate Charles Johnson has in recent years provided the most thorough coverage of the devil’s bargain that the American Islamophobic right has made with the European far right.) Similarly, although Wilders himself does not come from the neo-fascist milieu, there can be little doubt that his base of popular support contains many of the same elements as Le Pen’s and Haider’s.

All this is to say that Daniel Pipes and his compatriots are playing with fire when they embrace Wilders and other European Islamophobes. While the European far right has proven increasingly willing to say the right things about Jews for tactical reasons, all indications are that hatred of Muslims frequently goes hand-in-hand with hatred of Jews.

[Cross-posted in modified form on Lobelog.]

It is not terribly surprising that the leading apologists for the Bush-Cheney torture regime — the likes of Marc Thiessen, Thomas Joscelyn, and so on — have refused to respond to Horton’s piece. What is more surprising, however, is that the major U.S. papers have paid little attention as well. After remaining silent all day, the New York Times and Washington Post finally posted an AP wire story on the revelations this evening, but it is nowhere to be found on their main pages. The Los Angeles Times still appears to have nothing whatsoever on the story.

By contrast, the major British papers (with the exception of Rupert Murdoch’s Times) have all followed up on Horton’s piece. It is by now a depressingly familiar pattern that the British media exhibit far more interest in the abuses of the Bush/Blair years than their American counterparts. Still, one would think that a possible triple homicide of detainees in U.S. custody, and the subsequent cover-up by both the Bush and Obama administrations, would merit some U.S. news coverage — even given the almost exclusive focus on Haiti and Massachusetts at the moment.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]