In scuttling the nomination of an able intelligence analyst because he is unabashed in his criticism of Israeli policy and U.S. obsequiousness to said policy, someone else will become our foremost national intelligence analyst- the person responsible for those Presidential Daily Briefings with titles like August 6, 2001's "bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". And this person, who presumably has to pass an Israeli litmus test, may offer a report to the president that contains flaws upon which Chas Freeman would have improved. I don't apologize for trafficking in hypotheticals on my own fucking blog, but what if the analyst who is appointed screws up and it leads to another horrible attack on U.S. soil? Would it not follow that the people responsible for pillorying Chas Freeman bear some responsibility for this? And would it not be difficult for an ambitious and charismatic politician to translate this debacle into the message that powerful Jews are not as concerned with American security as they should be? In fact, I raise that question right now. Do Senator Charles Schumer, Congressman Steve Israel, and the jackanapses at the National Review, New Republic, Weekly Standard care enough about American security to allow for more criticism of Israel? The blogosphere is crackling with outrage over the velocity with which protests against this nominee registered in the corridors of American power, and the alarming resemblance that these machinations bear to Mearsheimer and Walt's big bad Israel Lobby. My favorite meta-summary of commentary on how this has all gone down comes from Salon's Glenn Greenwald.
Of course, many opponents of the Freeman nomination claim that their objections stem from his genuflection toward authoritative regimes like the Saudis and Chinese. But to me, this is like taking Donnie Brasco's badge because he's too cozy with the mafia.
If I were not theocentric enough to worry deeply about the fate of my own, obnoxious people, I wouldn't care about this. But I feel ever more certain that American Jews, who have prospered to unprecedented degrees thanks to America's freedom, are now doing exactly what Pharoah said they would- exporting their highest national allegiance to Israel at the expense of American well-being. I am not naive enough to think that all anti-Israel propaganda is true, nor am I unaware of the frightening alignment of certain Islamo-fascist engines of propaganda with "progressive" causes in America (hence general global opinion that, say, George W. Bush is more evil than Osama bin Laden). But that insidious does not apply to all criticism of Israel. If Israel cannot tolerate official criticism from America, then they need to work on their statecraft. But mark my blog folks, American Jewish insistence that all national public servants slavishly support everything Israel does is bad for America. And Americans who want bad things for America are bad Americans. Wake up, Jews!
