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Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Murkier and Murkier

The case of the alleged AIPAC spies that eventually collapsed a few months ago was always murky and strange. Haaretz has now interviewed Larry Franklin, the Pentagon analyst who was convicted of leaking classified documents to the AIPAC staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman; the story just keeps getting wierder. Franklin, a Catholic, was set up to trip the AIPAC men by feeding them a false document telling about an imminent threat to Israeli agents in Iraq; the way he tells it, this was the culmination of years of investigation which can only be decribed as antisemitic.

The case, as long as it was active, was used by many in the Walt-Mearshiemer section of the American public (and blogosphere), as an indication of the pernicity of the Israel Lobby and the danger it poses to America. If they were intellectually honest, those people, they might now want to engage in a spot of investigation in the opposite direction, and ask themselves if it's possible that antisemitism can still be a motivating force for an American federal agency - a very serios allegation, I would think.

4 comments:

  1. Antisemitism permeats everything in politics and the intelligence arena.
    And it is getting worse.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pollard destroyed a lot of trust.
    Netanyahu's support of Pollard made it worse.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Talking about murky - if I get his meaning correctly, Salam Fayyad wants to get rid of Gaza...
    rgds,
    Silke

    http://ideas.theatlantic.com/2009/07/building_palestine.php

    VIDEO 7 JULY 2009
    Building Palestine
    Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, talks to Thomas Friedman about laying the groundwork for statehood

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah, well, when you say something about Walt and Mersheimer "if they were intellectually honest," you're sort of limiting it, aren't you?

    I read the book, grisly task though it was, and I don't recall in terms of influencing American policy very much at all about millions and millions of Saudi money. I guess foreign influence, real and imagined, is OK if it's not Israeli.

    Without undue modesty I point out this simply proves again what I announced on Meryl Yourish's weblog several years ago. Meryl calls it the Exception Clause but I refer to it as the Bensky Corollary to Everything.

    You can check her weblog for details but basically every statement made by anyone, any group, any institution, any government, always carries with it the tacit proviso: "Except for Jews."

    I await rebuttal but so far haven't seen any.

    ReplyDelete