Hitch and the “lobby”

Christopher Hitchens at Slate wonders in the wake of the Rick Sanchez firing why it is so offensive to note what he says is so self-evident: Pervasive Jewish influence.

First, the crux of his piece is predicated on a factual error:

To take an example near to hand: A few months ago, I wrote here that the recent sharp deterioration in Israeli-Turkish relations was at least partially explicable by a single fact: This year, a key House committee voted to refer to the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915 as genocide. In previous years, that vote had gone the other way. The difference, I pointed out, was this: Until recently, the Israel lobby on the Hill had worked to protect Turkey from such condemnation. But after the public quarrel between Turkey’s prime minister and Israel’s president at Davos, the lobby was in no mood to do any more favors. In other words, a vote with major implications for U.S. foreign policy—positive ones in my opinion—was determined by the supporters of a single power.

In fact, as I noted here, the same committee passed the same resolution in 2007, when Turkish-Israel relations were just peachy, and the lobby pressed hard on Turkey’s behalf. There have always been competing factors afflicting this vexed issue, not least of them the conscience of the Foreign Affairs committee’s disproportionate Jewish membership. Jewish lawmakers, whether Israel, AIPAC and the ADL like it or not, are not predisposed to denying genocide.

Hitchens’ larger point is that success is nothing to be shy about:

Coming to Sanchez, then, I ask myself if the world in which I have worked for so many decades—the intersecting and overlapping world of the news media, publishing, the academy, and the think-tank industry—is even imaginable without the presence of liberal American Jews. The answer is plainly no. Moreover, I can’t think of any other "minority" of which this is remotely true, unless it were to be the other minority from which I can claim descent: people of British or Anglophile provenance.

True enough, but there is something else at work here and Hitchens flirts with its awareness, before ending his article on a rhetorical "Nah, it’s all about political correctness":

So why the fuss? I think it has to do with the tone of voice in which these facts are stated.

(snip)

In the manner in which Sanchez spoke, also, there was something like a buried resentment. He didn’t descend into saying that there was Jewish control of the media, but he did imply that liberalism was linked to a single ethnicity.

It is not simply tone, it is the naked bigotry that undegirds the tone. Sanchez might have argued that "in my business, news media, Jews have no reason to worry about discrimination." Instead, in his back and forth targeting Jon Stewart on Pete Dominick’s radio show, he extrapolated a larger meaning: Jews are functionally incapable of sympathy for others. He ellided from this:

Sanchez: He looks at the world through his mom who was a schoolteacher and through his dad who was a physicist or something like that– Great! I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home, with everything that you could ever imagine.

Dominick: What group is he bigoted towards?

Sanchez: Everybody else who is not like him. (snip) He can’t relate to a guy like me, he can’t relate to a guy whose dad worked all his life, he can’t relate to someone who grew up poor.

To this:

Sanchez: I just think that it’s important that people who are not minorities understand that those of  us who are — and very few of us will say the things that I just said —

Dominick: Stewart’s a minority–

Sanchez: Come on, how is he a minority?

Dominick: He’s Jewish–

Sanchez: Yeah, very powerless people, heee hee hee hee hee, I mean "Oooh, such a minority,’ Please! What, are you kidding? I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

The problem is not success, it is the presumptions attached to it. It’s not just the Jews, of course. Blacks who succeed have to deal with presumptions that they were favored through affirmative action, decades after its legal demise; Women have to deal with mugs who presume they use sex.

It induces a kind of schizophrenia — and "induces" is key here, because the insane tendency to simultaneously celebrate and hide success is not the fault of the sufferer but of bigots who will not recognize success as its own reward.

Is the pro-Israel lobby successful? Sure, and it behaves in many ways like any other successful lobby: It wants to be known as indispensable. My biggest arguments with AIPAC over the years were not about the Rosen-Weissman debacle, not about its arguments with the Obama and Bush administrations — the biggest arguments came if my reporting even intimated that AIPAC did not have a hand in Middle East policy.

If Congress were to place a bust of Yasser Arafat in Statuary Hall tomorrow, and I were to post that AIPAC was stunned by the gesture, I couldn’t count to ten before Josh Block would call me to yell that it was he, personally, who beat the ra’is‘ likeness out of raw granite.

We’d argue, we’d end the conversation as buddies, and that’s par for the course in this town. Normatively, that’s how you might cover it: "The Sierra Club sought credit for the new walrus initiative, but the hard work was done by a local, almost unheard of group in Northern California," etc. etc. etc.

It’s only with the pro-Israel Lobby that the equation is flipped, and that anything having to do with the Middle East must be the work of "the lobby," even if the evidence denies it, even if the lobby denies it.

But of course the lobby does not deny it — it is not in the nature of lobbies to deny influence — and so you have a confluence of antagonists: Pro-Israel groups (normatively) eager to claim influence and their enemies (abnormally) eager to assign it to them.

Wouldn’t that make you a little nuts?