BERLIN – The media firestorm unleashed by allegedly anti- Semitic bloggers at a
prominent think tank affiliated with the US Democratic Party resulted Thursday
in a White House Jewish affairs official terming the situation at the Center for
American Progress to be “troubling.”
According to a
Washington Post
online article on Thursday, Jarrod Bernstein, the new White House liaison with
the Jewish community, told Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, that what was unfolding at CAP was “troubling,” and, “that
[the attitude toward Israel at the think tank] is not this
administration.”
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Washington Post wrote that the Cooper met last week
with Bernstein to convey the Wiesenthal Center’s worries about CAP’s hostility
toward Israel and American supporters of the Jewish state.
CAP is a
Washington-based policy organization that serves as a source of Middle East
ideas for President Barack Obama and the party.
Zaid Jilani had blogged
for the Center for American Progress’s ThinkProgress website; he used Twitter to
call US supporters of the Jewish state “Israel Firsters” and compared Israel to
the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
A CAP employee who said her
name was Amanda told
The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that Jilani was no longer
employed by ThinkProgress.
Jilani’s biography and photo no longer appear
on the ThinkProgress website “About” section. His Twitter feed no longer
identifies him as a reporter for ThinkProgress. His last CAP blog posting was on
January 12.
E-mail queries and telephone calls to senior CAP
representatives, including Faiz Shakir, editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress, were
not returned.
The Jerusalem Post exclusively obtained an e-mail in
January in which Shakir described Jilani’s words charging supporters of Israel
with dual-loyalty as “terrible anti-Semitic language.”
As a result of the
alleged Judeophobia at CAP, the
Jerusalem Post has learned from a Democratic
Party source that CAP has introduced a new social media policy to monitor and
prevent prejudicial writings. CAP declined to confirm the existence of the new
policy.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation
League and the American Jewish Committee have all termed the anti-Israeli
rhetoric of Jilani and fellow CAP writers Eli Clifton, Ali Gharib, Matt Duss and
Ben Armbruster to be infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy
positions toward Israel.
Duss, CAP’s Middle East Progress director, wrote
on ThinkProgress that “the entire Israeli occupation” of the Gaza Strip is “a
moral abomination” comparable to the former Jim Crow South in the
US.
Armbruster, who has attacked Jewish critics for pointing out alleged
anti-Israel and anti-Semitic tirades from CAP writers, wrote “no comment” in an
e-mail response to a query last week.
The think tank has been engulfed in
the affair since December, electrifying the blogosphere and print and online
publications in the US and Israel.
Matt Drudge, the founder of The Drudge
Report, one of the most popular news aggregation websites in the US with
millions of daily readers, placed a
Jerusalem Post article on the CAP
controversy on his site earlier this month. Drudge titled his post, “Dem Think
Tank cops to anti-Semitism.”
The conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart
wrote on his large Twitter feed, “Email Proves ‘Anti-Semitism’ at Lib Think
Tank: Will Faiz Shakir fire Zaid Jilani over ‘Israel Firster’ slur at CAP?“ It
is unclear if CAP plans to take disciplinary action against the rest of the
faction of Bloggers who have launched an escalating series of attacks against
Israel and supporters of the Jewish state in the US. CAP refused to answer
queries about its nondiscrimination polices and whether employees have been
reprimanded for anti- Jewish conduct.
Writing in a
New York Post opinion
article on Wednesday titled “The White House’s Israel Bashing Pals,” Alana
Goodman noted that “CAP hasn’t distanced itself from these comments or even
acknowledged that they’re anti-Israel. If it deems them acceptable public
comment, one wonders what the internal dialogue is like at the think tank — and
among the alumni who have gone on to the Obama administration.”
Goodman,
who is an online editor of
Commentary magazine, added, “At a minimum, the
controversy highlights how progressive groups are working to undermine
traditional Democratic support for Israel.”
According to her article,
shortly after a Jewish NGO slammed CAP for trafficking in hatred of Israel on
its website in December, “Six days later, President Obama met for coffee with
the man who oversaw the offending content — Faiz Shakir, the site’s
editor-inchief.”
Speaking from New York via telephone, Dr. Eric Alterman,
a senior fellow at CAP, told the
Jerusalem Post last week that the term “Israel
Firster is not ipso facto anti-Semitic.”
Alterman, who was not speaking
as a representative of CAP, added, however, that the phrase is “infelicitous
language” and “I, personally, would not use such language.”
Dr. Jeffrey
Herf, a leading authority on anti-Semitism and a historian at the University of
Maryland, told the
Jerusalem Post last week that the concept of “Israel
Firsters” suggests Jews are “more loyal to a foreign country than to their own.
The notion that the Jews are rootless cosmopolitans, disloyal to any nation,
especially to their own was a feature of classical anti-Semitism in Europe and
in the United States in the 1930s. In the US today, the isolationist Right and
the ‘anti-imperialist Left’ are finding common ground in the attack on Israel.”