As my comments on this awful piece by Robert Wright two years ago was so buried, I'm duplicating it here but go read the whole monte with all his apologists if you like.
This is despicable, of course. People forget this old story involving a Twit-spat and the Jewish community -- and it all got smoothed over and forgotten, although both sides suffered casualties.
But I never forgot because it really epitomizes so much of what CAP is about -- and that means Soros, since they are among its most important funders. John Podesta, the former head of CAP now in the Obama Administration, has always been one of Soros' chief thinkers.
Says Wright:
Suddenly lots of people are asking whether calling someone an "Israel-firster" is anti-Semitic. The occasion for these reflections is a controversy--the subject of a Washington Post piece yesterday--surrounding the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. The Post piece noted a "dispute with several Jewish organizations over charges that some center staffers have publicly used language that could be construed as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic."
Don't be misled by the attention being given to the term "Israel-firster" into thinking that it's the real issue here. That term was used by a single, very junior CAP staffer on his personal twitter account, and he apologized weeks ago. So if people ostensibly complaining about the 'Israel-firster' thing are still after CAP scalps, we know that the issue must go deeper.
Here is the real issue: Some people at CAP who haven't used the term Israel-firster have committed a different sin--criticizing, sometimes harshly, the policies of Israel. And some defenders of those policies find it easier to stigmatize critics than to answer them.
Well, you know where it's going from there, keep reading, and predictably, it's one of those whiney chest-beaters about how criticizing Israel isn't anti-Semitism, but organized Jewry and AIPAC always exaggerate that it is to "place a chill on speech" blah blah.
Except, it is anti-Semitism, because the practitioners are so intensive, repetitive, vociferous, and nasty. It's not just criticism of Israel. It's hate. it's antipathy beyond all reason. It's obsession.
This is a faith issue, perhaps. I don't believe the Israeli occupation is a "moral abomination." I think Palestinian terrorism and the sustaining of that terrorism and violence for decades by the Arab League are the moral abomination, and when that stops, what you don't like about Israel will stop, too. I'm for sequencing here.
My responses:
I want another look at this "very junior staffer" business. I'm trying to track down where it was said that this fellow was so "junior".
Here's what is said about him on the Think Progress website, which I'll quote here in full because the site may be updated:
Zaid Jilani is a Senior Reporter/Blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Zaid grew up in Kennesaw, GA, and holds a B.A. in International Affairs with a minor in Arabic from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining ThinkProgress, Zaid interned for Just Foreign Policy and was a weekly columnist at The Red & Black, the University of Georgia’s official student newspaper. He is a co-editor at the Georgia-based blog Georgia Liberal and a regular on RT America's The Alyona Show and The Thom Hartmann Show and has been a guest host on Al Jazeera English's The Stream. He is also an occassional contributor to the op-ed pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
http://thinkprogress.org/autho...
And here's what CAP said in defense against his tweets:
A very small number of tweets on the personal accounts of ThinkProgress staff were inappropriate, and the authors have publicly apologized for using objectionable language
Zaid Jilani is called a *senior* reporter/blogger. Maybe you can be a "senior blogger" but a "junior staffer," but I wonder how, if it is in fact the same guy. While he sounds young, he's not inexperienced and has even gotten himself on that premier "progressive" anti-American circuit, the Kremlin-sponsored Russian TV's Alyona Show, and that other premier "progressive" anti-American circuit, Al Jazerra English's The Stream.
Of course the anti-Israel/anti-semitic/anti-American/anti-Western ideologies are often co-morbid.
I cite this to make the point that there is an intellectual climate here that isn't about some junior staffer carelessly saying something that was only his personal opinion in isolation from something more mainstream. His expression *was* the zeitgeist of the "progressive" circles he moved in, and we find the "Israel apartheid state" slur in leaked OWS email and other places, and then as has been pointed out, the American variant of the "Zionism=Racism" Soviet canard, which is "Gaza is like the American south was".
Mind you, I'm *not* for firing/disciplining/gagging people on Twitter. I think the answer to any and all complaints about Twitter must be "don't follow that person if you don't like them". If a staffer then spouts nonsense and hate, he should have less followers or objectionable followers that will self-discredit. And that's how it has to be. Of course we are going through a feudal period where the little city-states of the think-tanks become defensive and try to rein in their serfs and establish even more draconian polices for expression on twitter, so that instead of open intellectual life, we have rich and powerful institutions using their leashed junior attack dogs on Twitter against others -- or most often, absolutely silence by senior fellows terrified of losing their jobs over a Twit-fight.
That era will pass.
***
And more...
This is lame, Robert. Your argumentation should not be based on the "personal Twitter account" gambit or "the guy is long gone' excuse. I'm not for punishing people for their personal tweets, obviously. I don't think CAP should have fired him if they truly had the "progressive" values they claim (and they don't in a case like that, which is why I always use the term in quotation marks). The guy just said what many think or even say, and even say at conferences (Durban). You know that and I know that. So looking for literalist search-strings of text on CAP-owned servers is silly. If CAP reaaaalllly believes that it is an indefensible slur and wrong, then let them write that? Instead of firing the guy, you know?
***
Then more:
Um, I'm going to say that number one, junior staffers should get to say what they like on Twitter and not have to go through self-criticism sessions, and if somebody doesn't like their tweeting, they...can just not follow that junior staffer? That's my advice all around.
But you're being entirely disingenuous with all your literalisms and word-string searches here if you don't realize that "Israel the apartheid state" (a modern variant of Zionism=Racism) isn't in fact a mindset and a phrase that is part of the lexicon of the "progressives" and found everywhere on the hard left. If you don't technically find that search-string on some other blog or website in around CAP, that doesn't mean it is entirely absent as a mindset. It isn't. That staffer merely said whateverbody else says, only not on Twitter. He's not the problem. Making him seem like the problem, and that the problem went away because he was canned is pretty misleading.
Number two, I'm going to say, what, we can't criticize Soros-funded think-tanks Robert? Ever? In our lives? Even when they use really sly and nasty code expressions like "Israel-firsters". Is that like birthers? Or is that like truthers? You know, it's like here in New York? You say "The Bronx" but you don't say "The Manhattan"? So if you put an "er" at the end of the term like that, it's pejorative. And you know that.
Number three, CAP is so awful in other ways. Like the way Samuel Charap was on Russia, currying favour with Putin. He then went over to State. I wonder how that's working out now.
CAP *is* toxic on Israel. They're obsessive and mean like a lot of the left is on Israel. It's really awful to see. Shouldn't the Arab Spring have done one thing, show everybody who was obsessing about Israel where the *real* crimes against humanity are, like in Syria?
The occupation isn't a moral abomination; to any extent that it is for anybody, you would have to concede that there were moral abominations by the Palestinians that forced the situation, like suicide bombing, which your indignant CAP types never condemn, or at least with never of the throaty enthusiasm that they scream about Israel.
What's terrible about your intervention, Robert, is that you upped the ante and made it seem like no one can ever call out hateful anti-Israel writing let alone anti-semitism people disagree about without getting smacked down by the liberal establishment as "smearing a think-tank".
Think tanks should be able to take care of themselves without harassing and bedeviling those who don't like their thinking and criticize them.
You were at New America Foundation, which had Soros funding
http://newamerica.net/about/fu...
And you've blogged at OSI
http://blog.soros.org/2011/09/...
That's fine; I have too. But then don't pretend you're not tribal here, defending the pack.
***
then to some of the other people in this forum:
Bullies? What? The bullies are people who fire staffers for tweeting what the management believes and even says privately and the bullies are those that claim we can't criticize leftist think tanks for fear of being told we're "smearing" somebody.
I am so profoundly tired of people slyly hiding behind their artificial distinctions between anti-Israel views and anti-semitism pretending they can get away with their malicious obsessiveness forever.
Uh, no. Maliciously obsessive is how people get about Israel, and keep backing and filling and pretending they aren't antisemitic ohnoes and that they "get" to make "legitimite criticism of Israel" and who-are-we- blah blah to tell them they can't apply universal human rights to Israel, and are we really for not ever applying human rights scrutiny to Israel blah-blah-blah. I've heard it a million times. No sale.
Those people who do that never crossed the street to defend intellectuals being dragged from their homes in Syria until now -- and some not even now. They didn't work on these other countries now bursting into flames. Their imbalance was shocking. They applied universal standards all day long -- to that one country, Israel. They would never lobby the obviously hypocritical countries in the Human Rights Council who opposed any country resolutions, but who upheld a special stand-alone agenda item for Israel.
So don't talk to me about blurred distinctions. The blurred distinctions in are those who can't see how horridly obsessed they've become about Israel and its offenses, real and imagined, to the obscene exclusion of many other country situations.
Ask yourself: did you do anything about the violence in Nigeria between Christians and Muslims? Did you condemn fundamentalism Muslims making attacks in Nigeria? Or were you busy taking out your microscope for Israel?
Check a map right right back at you, big guy. Look at Israel. Look at the *size* of Israel. Look at all the countries surrounding it, and their powers. And stop your nonsense.
I know I'm not going to have a rational conversation with someone who can't acknowledge that multiple suicide bombings over years caused the occupation of Gaza and that many other acts by Palestinian terrorists over years caused and/or exacerbated the other situations. So I won't try.
As for Desmond Tutu, people who want to dignify the odious term "Israel apartheid state" often try to drag in his name, thinking that no one will dare to object to a black bishop in South Africa using the term "apartheid" about something.
But I do. There is a world of difference between institutionalized state racism in South Africa's apartheid, and Israel's policies, where racist acts, if they occur, have a framework where they can be prosecuted.
Yes, people who think they find "unpleasant similarities" are indeed antisemitic, and yes, Desmond Tutu and Uri Avnery are guilty of inciting hatred on false racism charges with this loaded and unjust comparison, yes indeed, regardless of their record on behalf of human rights and justice elsewhere.
The problem with South Africa's ANC politics is they absorbed a lot of the Soviet ideology, and the "Zionism=Racism" canard fostered by the Soviets -- which finally Kofi Annan called a "low point" in the history of the UN, and which was reversed on a General Assembly vote after the USSR collapsed. Soviet legacies like that within ANC politics should have collapsed too. They didn't.
So no, again, no sale. People need to stop pretending they can find daylight between antisemitism and anti-Israel statements that make use of this odious canard, which itself is what deserves oppobrium.
And again, that's why I'm for not firing that staffer or forcing him to leave and letting him talk on Twitter. He is saying what everybody thinks. Let them take responsibility for that, fully. Let people debate the staffer and CAP openly as much as they deem necessary about this terminology. Let people stop thinking they can hide from their responsibility for it by forcing a staffer off Twitter and pretending he's the problem.
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