from Antiwar.com,
Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic and a prominent supporter of the Iraq war, has a bone or two to pick with Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Reviewing their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy for The New Republic, he disdained "their methodological arrogance, their failure to meet any serious standard of empirical inquiry, their slavish reliance on second- and third-hand works" – this from a "reporter" who, before the invasion of Iraq, wrote two extensive pieces for the New Yorker detailing the now-debunked Bush administration talking point that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were allies.
Goldberg’s March 2002 reportage was based on the transparently untruthful testimony of one Mohammed Mansour Shahab, who was then being held prisoner in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. This testimony was easily exposed as fraudulent by Jason Burke, of the London Observer. According to Goldberg, Shahab had met Osama bin Laden near Kandahar, who had tasked him with smuggling weapons from Iran and Iraq to al-Qaeda – including a mysterious liquid hidden in refrigerator motors, biowar poisons no doubt. Except that Shahab had never been to Kandahar, as his inaccurate description of the city as made "entirely" of mud huts made all too apparent to Burke. And that was just one of the rather obvious holes in his story, which, somehow, Goldberg never saw or questioned, but merely reported as fact.
Goldberg was perfectly willing to accept Shahab’s lies as "fact," and go on television (CNN) spreading the Bush-driven meme that Iraq possessed "weapons of mass destruction" and was about to unleash them on the world – but it’s Mearsheimer and Walt, you understand, who have "failed to meet any serious standard of empirical inquiry."
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Next up – a virulent post, which excoriates former CIA officer and chief of the bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, whom Goldberg describes – without any evidence – as "viscerally anti-Semitic." Scheuer’s crime? He told the National Journal the following:
"There is indeed an identifiable fifth column of pro-Israel U.S. citizens — I have described them here and elsewhere as Israel-Firsters — who have consciously made Israel’s survival and protection their first priority, and who see worth in America only to the extent that its resources and manpower can be exploited to protect and further the interests of Israel in its religious war-to-the-death with the Arabs. These are disloyal citizens in much the same sense that the Civil War’s disloyal northern "Copperheads" sought to help the Confederates destroy the Union. The Israel-Firsters help Israel suborn U.S. citizens to spy for Israel; they use their fortunes and political action organizations to buy U.S. politicians with campaign donations; and most of all they use their ready access to the media to disguise their own disloyalty by denigrating as anti-Semites or appeasers fellow citizens who dare to challenge them. The Israel-Firsters are unquestionably enemies of America’s republican experiment and will have to be destroyed as the Copperheads were destroyed — by the people, after a full public debate, at the ballot box."
...An Israel Lobby? In the media? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?!
If Jeffrey Goldberg has any doubts about the existence of such an entity, he should try looking in the mirror. That he can’t – or won’t – see what, increasingly, the rest of America sees, is an indication that either he’s going blind, or that he’s just not telling us the truth. Of course, it could be both: that he’s blind, and willfully so. This is a telling symptom of what we might call the Goldberg Syndrome: an inability to see and/or acknowledge what everyone knows to be true – that a lobby, and a powerful one, exists in this country that puts Israel’s interests above those of the US.
-more here
Yes, the Israeli Lobby acts as a fifth column within the United States, though its members and supporters cultishly (and erroneously) believe it to be a founding pillar.
And in what can only be described as an almost Shakespearean like comedy/tragedy, many of those supporters are evangelical Christians who are ignorantly supporting a movement that sees them as public enemy #1.
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