I always underestimated the strength of the Israel lobby. I didn't want to extrapolate beyond what I'd seen before my eyes. But this piece suggests that the lobby is imbedded in the New York Times itself, that our leading newspaper sees it as its job to support Israel when the president is seeking to reassess his relationship with the country -- supporting a right-wing racist foreign leader over the president. Just what 47 Republican Senators did, and what Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush are doing now, what Robert Menendez and Chuck Schumer and many Democrats also do, out of what a more honest bureau of the Times has called "loyalty" to Israel.
And everyone knows what is going on. As David Bromwich wrote after Netanyahu's speech:
"As if he anticipated the strange moment in which we find ourselves -- when a foreign leader who asked us to fight one disastrous war now commands us to fight another on his behalf -- [George] Washington said: 'A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.'"
John Mearsheimer once said that the fight against pro-Israel ideologues was "mortal combat," and I take his point. I call on others with any spine to decry the influence of the lobby in our politics, to challenge anyone who is serving Israel's aims against the president. I want my country back.
Thanks to James North.
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