Jewish Fact Check #7: Where Joe Klein proves my point from Jewish Fact Check #6

Wow. When I wrote my blog post earlier this week pointing out that critics of Israel seem to take pride in being called "anti-Semite," even to the point of exaggerating or making up accusations of anti-Semitism, I never dreamed that three days later I would read something that would make my point even better than any of the examples I used in the original post.

Not surprisingly, it comes from Joe Klein, who I also cited as an example in my original post. He wrote a column for Time Magazine which began by recounting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech to the U.S.-Islamic Conference in Doha on Sunday, and her statement that a solution to the blockade of Gaza can only come with a comprehensive settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Klein writes that's the "wrong answer" and suggests that when he came into office, instead of trying for a comprehensive settlement, President Obama should have tried solving the Gaza crisis first. Klein then argues that the White Hosue needs to "engage" Hamas.

That brought a retort from Commentary's Jonathan Tobin, who calls that a bad idea and says that "what Klein fails to understand is that no matter who sits in the White House, it is not in America’s interest to rescue the killers of Hamas. Rather, it should be our policy to isolate and hopefully oust them from power." Tobin, while criticizing Obama's general foreign policy, even praises the president and Clinton for opposing any engagement with Hamas.

Tobin's post seemed like a fairly standard, relatively innocuous blogosphere post , but it brought an bizarre, almost unhinged response from Klein, in an "update" to an ealrier blog post linking to his column. It has to be read in full to be believed. It begins: "The neocon extremists over at Commentary have wasted no time responding to my column with their usual bile and bullying." He then goes to on identify a couple minor errors in Tobin's piece and claims something is an error that really isn't (he says that Tobin said he blamed Israel for the Gaza situation; in fact, Tobin says Klein blamed Israel for "Obama's acknowledged failure in the Middle East," which was obviously a reference to Klein's line "U.S. envoy George Mitchell's slow-moving effort to start talks tanked because of Israel's unwillingness to stop building illegal settlements on Palestinian land.") And he reiterates some of the points he made in the column

Then Klein writes this:

My suggestions--or their distorted burlesque of my suggestions--are, apparently, what passes for anti-Israel extremism over at Commentary. But anything that doesn't conform to their half-crazed macho crusaderism is seen as either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. Their constant fury, their slightly-veiled calumnies against the President--and against the very notion of diplomacy--would be laughable if they weren't so dangerous and disgraceful.

Whoa! Anti-Israel? Anti-Semitic? Where'd you get that, Joe? Tobin's piece said your proposal to engage with Hamas was a bad one because it wasn't in America's interest to help out terrorists. Tobin may be right, he may be wrong, but he never said anything about you being "anti-Israel" or "anti-Semitic" anywhere in the piece. He didn't even imply it. He just didn't like your ideas, and didn't like your statement that Israel was at fault for the failure of George Mitchell's efforts. But in your attempt to make yourself out to be some courageous truth-teller, you claim you've been smeared -- when you're the one doing the smearing.

Klein lowers himself even further when he writes that "the barely concealed anti-Arab bigotry so frequently found on the Commentary blog, reveals itself in this sentence: That answer pleased neither the Arabs nor Klein," a sentence which referred to Clinton's answer when asked about Gaza. Klein accurately points out that he was attending a U.S.-Islamic forum in which Arabs were just about half of the delegates. I'm not sure how that mistake is clear and convincing evidence of "anti-Arab bigotry," but it would be a bad mistake on Tobin's part. Except that here's what Klein writes in his column: "Clinton's tough talk on Iran got most of the U.S. headlines, but her position on Gaza was far more important to the Islamic participants at Doha, especially the Arabs."

In other words, Klein specifically said that those at the U.S.-Islamic forum who were most interested, and thus obviously the most disappointed, by Clinton's remarks on Gaza were the Arab delegates. Should Tobin have said Muslims? It would have been better. But in using Arabs, he was only following Klein's lead.

I used to really like Joe Klein as a writer. And I was really impressed about a decade ago when I saw him speak at a local synagogue. It was around the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, and in part of his talk he discussed his view that personal matters were getting way too much attention in politics and destroying Washington. I asked him how he could make this argument when a few years earlier he had written an really interesting article for Newsweek on Bill Clinton (I think it was titled "The Politics of Promiscuity") in which he argued that Bill Clinton as a president was like Bill Clinton in his private life--promiscuous and unable to stick to one woman or one idea. I gained a lot of respect for Klein when he answered, "I was wrong" and that he shouldn't have written that article. But after his most recent attack, I've lost most of that respect. Hopefully, he'll admit he's wrong this time, too.

Jewish Fact Check #3: Jennifer Rubin, J Street and the Univ. of Penn. Hillel

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary only wrote three sentences this morning about J Street, and yet she got enough wrong that it's worthy of a fact check. Here's the item, the first in her daily "Flotsam and Jetsam" post on the Contentions blog:

University of Pennsylvania’s Hillel is hosting J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami. Does Hillel not know that J Street doesn’t like to be known as a “pro-Israel” organization? One wonders what those who support Hillel must be thinking.

Rubin links to this page at the J Street Web site, which has information on the launch of "J Street Philadelphia," part of a national rollout of local J Street chapters planned for next month, and says that Penn's Hillel is "hosting" J Street and its executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami. The event is being held at Steinhardt Hall at the University of Pennsylvania campus, which, via a Google search, I discovered is the UPenn Hillel building. But the J Street announcement doesn't mention Hillel at all, just the building, and it's not like it's uncommon for Hillels (or any building for that matter) to rent space to an organization without actually endorsing it. (When I was a student at Duke University--and there wasn't a Duke Jewish center built yet--my fraternity used to rent the UNC Hillel House for our January semi-formal every year. I don't think anyone would have said UNC Hillel was "hosting" us or sponsoring us--we were just renting the space. And yes, I know this isn't a perfect analogy since the formal was closed to the public and the J Street event isn't, but I thought it sort of made my point anyway.)

But all the evidence above is speculative, so I sent an email to a J Street spokesperson, who responded that yes, the organization is renting the space from Hillel. Why didn't Rubin make that call or send that email to J Street? Don't know--could be laziness, or that she just wanted to stir up trouble among critics of J Street and knew that actually getting the correct information might stop her from doing that.

Rubin also isn't quite accurate on something else she writes in those brief three sentences. She says that J Street "doesn't like to be known as a 'pro-Israel' organization." But that's just not the case. Although some question whether they should be using the slogan, J Street clearly has always called itself a "pro-Israel, pro-peace" organization. Rubin is conflating J Street with its campus arm, J Street U. The Jerusalem Post reported back in October that J Street U has decided that individual chapters did not have to use "pro-Israel" in its slogan, J Street U denied it, and there was a lot of confusion and back and forth over the issue--and I'm still not really sure what the deal is. Suffice it to say that J Street U's Web site does not use the term "pro-Israel" to describe itself in its mission statement and decries polarizing voices using the terms "pro-Israel" and "pro-Palestinian"--but also states clearly that "as supporters of Israel, we are firmly committed to protecting the future of the State of Israel as a Jewish democratic homeland."

As for those of you reading this and asking, "What would be wrong if UPenn Hillel was hosting a speech from Jeremy Ben-Ami?" that's a legitimate question that is worthy of debate, but has nothing to do with fact-checking--and thus I'm not going to get into it. But you're welcome to hash that out in the comments.