Wednesday, August 07, 2024
Elder of ZiyonIn most versions of a Washington Post story about Cori Bush's campaign over the past day, the reporter, Abbie Cheeseman, wrote that AIPAC was "long considered to be Washington’s most powerful lobbying force."
Who, exactly, considered AIPAC to be the most powerful lobby in Washington?
Antisemites, of course. It is part of the "Jews control America" meme that they accept as fact.
No one doubts that the pro-Israel lobby is powerful and that it poured a lot of money into some specific congressional races. But compared to other Washington lobbies - the health sector, finance, electronics, energy - the amount spent on pro-Israel lobbying is not large at all. (It fits in under "single issue" in the chart below by OpenSecrets.)
And here's another chart from OpenSecrets showing how much various nations themselves have spent to influence Washington over the past eight years. Israel is in tenth place, while others like China and Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of millions.
In the later versions of the Washington Post story, the language changed. It now says AIPAC is "one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying forces."
The initial language indicates that the writer of the story, Abbie Cheeseman, may harbor subconscious antisemitic feelings. It was caught and corrected, but she didn't do that - an editor did.
Before working at the Washington Post, where she is a Stern-Bryan Fellow with a three month internship for young British reporters, Cheeseman was a Beirut-based journalist. An examination of her tweets since October 7 find not a single ounce of sympathy for Israelis but plenty for Palestinians. She has reported favorably on Human Rights Watch anti-Israel reports. She does not seem to support Hezbollah, but she absolutely believes that Hezbollah has no choice but to support Hamas.
Of course, as a liberal, Cheeseman won't ever say anything explicitly antisemitic. But in 2012, she felt compelled to posit another antisemitic theory - that Hitler himself was part Jewish.
That theory has been thoroughly debunked, including in the Washington Post itself. The only other "evidence" is that his relatives have a chromosome called Haplopgroup E1b1b (Y-DNA) that is commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, in Algeria, Libya and Tunisia, as well as among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Which is a very tenuous thread to hang a theory on.
Most left-wing antisemitism today is not conscious. But when asked questions about policy using Jews as examples, compared to using other groups as examples, the were found to be more likely to judge the policies mentioning Jews more harshly than with others.
Every progressive and liberal critic of Israel is convinced that they base their opinions on hard evidence and that they do not have a biased bone in their body. . But when the evidence itself is cherry picked on only one side, and when Israel is judged by standards that no other nation in history has been judged by, the bias becomes more and more obvious.
In the end, it does come down to antisemitism. The irony is that this is the same kind of unconscious bias that the progressive Left accuses all white people of having against people of color. Yet they never even consider they have it themselves.
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