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A demented fringe of the left used to accuse the Bush administration of taking its marching orders from Israel. I recall neoconservatives, and particularly neoconservative Jews, objecting to that offensive and acrid stench of the dual-loyalty charge. And now here’s the demented fringe of the right, represented by Daniel Pipes — thanks to Matt Duss for tweeting this — writing this about the Obama administration:
The U.S. government takes marching orders from [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas and passes them along to the Israelis.
It’s tiresome to get into fights over which statement is more offensive or which side is more hypocritical or which side needs to more stridently police its crazies or which extremist statement sums up the Left or the Right. So let’s simply create a standard for universal application: no one gets to write statements about foreign control of the U.S. government unless they can prove them in court to be true. Argue like a fucking adult.
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Bravo. I would only add that the demented fringe from the left was joined by such noted non-leftists as Brent Scowcroft who told the Financial Times prior to the 2004 that Ariel Sharon had W wrapped around his finger. Also would you count Juan Cole now as a member of the “demented fringe of the left?” If you remember he said Israel had been using the US military as its Gherka regiment and often would go on about Likud agents inside the Pentagon.
It’s true, and absolutely fair to mention that both political parties representatives in the US have been guilty of making radical and extremeist accusations that have no basis in observable reality.
But it is also important to note that the American Political right, as a matter of course, makes a great deal more of these sorts of accusations. There just doesn’t seem to be a Democratic analog to Bachman, Inhofe or Tancredo, and Olbermann and Maddow don’t seem remotely similar to Beck and Limbaugh except in their choice of medium.
Ultimately, an ideology of exclusion and hate is going to require more angry, frantic demonization than one of inclusion and diversity…
mikey
Not the same type of control, Eli. Scowcroft was talking about a personal relationship between men, not the usual rant of how the entire US government are purchased pawns of the Israel lobby, bendable as pipe cleaners, absorbent as six-ply Charmin.
nice title.
Granting that both varieties of hyperbole are in fact that, I think there remains value in considering which is closer to, and which further from, the truth.
Thank you! This is bookmarked for this-poster-knows-who-they-are. I was about to say to said poster that the precedent of Alfred Dreyfus if nothing else requires extraordinary proof for any claim that there are spies. We have seen in Iran a spying case which from the outside looked like nothing more than an attempt to intimidate the Jews there.