Eric Fingerhut mentioned the other day that the fight over Charles “Chas” Freeman, the Obama administration’s pick for chairman of the National Intelligence Council, is getting personal. Well, the Israel Policy Forum’s M.J. Rosenberg is doubling down with his latest column at HuffingtonPost, charging Freeman’s critics with fomenting anti-Semitism by providing ammunition to those who want to play the dual-loyalty card against American Jews.
In other words… In the spirit of good old American free speech, Freeman’s critics should just keep their comments to themselves.
It used to be that if you favored a two-state solution then you ran the risk of being branded a self-hater, traitor, etc. Now the left has started playing that game too, so those to the right of the liberal blogosphere don’t really love the United States, are as bad as Jonathan Pollard and threaten the well-being of all Jews.
Judge for yourselves:
It’s silly to pretend that it isn’t [about Israel] when the people applying these strict standards to Freeman never applied them to anyone before. Would they oppose a nominee who had a few million dollars invested in Israel or was unnaturally close to the Israel lobby? Of course not. They would applaud the appointment. Employees of the lobby have gone directly from it to the highest levels of the State Department. Who protested? Certainly not these people.
Here is the scary part.
I’m a pro-Israel Jew, who has visited Israel 50 times in 40 years. But I am, like 99.9% of American Jews, first an American.
The idea that the anti-Freeman crowd is running all over town demanding that anyone not close to Israel be banned from working in an American intelligence agency leaves me nauseated.
How dare they? It has taken 20 years to get over the Pollard spy scandal. Good Jewish American kids cannot get jobs in various US government agencies because some people who provide (or withhold) clearances think that American Jews have divided loyalties.
We don’t. But crusades like this, not surprisingly, leave the impression that we do.
This isn’t about Freeman.
It is about a group that has decided to go after him to warn the administration that only friends of the lobby are acceptable appointees. It is about a group that is so oblivious to Jewish history that it believes it can recklessly put their interests in Israel above everything else and not expect to build strong resentment in Washington (it was strong enough, even before this).
How dare they? My children are first generation (their mom, my wife, was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany after her parents survived the Holocaust). We love this country and will be damned if we allow anyone to convey the impression that we take it for granted.
For us, this is the "goldeneh medina" (the golden land), the best homeland Jews ever had. How dare they imply that for us it’s only second best.
This whole thing is creepy. And it hurts all Jews.
It also hurts Israel, a country I love, which is being destroyed by policies these people have consistently supported. Why can’t they just shut up? Haven’t they done enough damage?
