James Taranto points to a strange story in yesterday’s New York Times by Simon Romero praising President Obama for getting the better of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in his deft handling of the situation in Honduras:

From the moment the coup in Honduras unfolded over the weekend, President Hugo Chávez had his playbook ready. He said Washington’s hands may have been all over the ouster, claiming that it financed President Manuel Zelaya’s opponents and insinuating that the C.I.A. may have led a campaign to bolster the putschists.

But President Obama firmly condemned the coup, defusing Mr. Chávez’s charges. Instead of engaging in tit-for-tat accusations, Mr. Obama calmly described the coup as “illegal” and called for Mr. Zelaya’s return to office. While Mr. Chávez continued to portray Washington as the coup’s possible orchestrator, others in Latin America failed to see it that way.

If your goal in crafting American foreign policy is to become more popular among the world’s bad actors, (believing that by doing so they will behave less badly), then, yes, Obama has been thus far successful in his policy on the Honduran crisis. Such pusillanimity has been characteristic of this administration, from the President’s Cairo speech that flattered the Arab narrative of 1948, to its very public attacks on Israeli “natural growth,” to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pushing the “reset” button with Putin’s Russia. As for Honduras? Congratulations America, you are now on the same side as Chavez, the Castro brothers and other anti-American regional thugs. Meanwhile, we’re undermining the forces of democracy in that tiny country, particularly its courts and Congress, which both moved against President Manuel Zelaya’s attempts to subvert the constitution.

But while administration policy made Chavez’s predictable claims of U.S. subversion more difficult — if not impossible — to mount, the Venezuelan autocrat has quickly changed his tune to adapt to the new situation. He is, after all, a wily man, quick and able to respond to ever-changing situations; it’s one of the reasons he has stayed in power for so long. Though his public opposition to the “coup” might have thrown Chavez off for a day or so, it didn’t take long for the caudillo of Caracas to reorient himself, and now Obama is playing directly into Chavez’s hands. Ranting about American imperialism just a few days ago, Chavez — evidently delighted by his newfound friend in the White House — now says that Zelaya should score a meeting with Obama when he’s in Washington as such a photo-op would “deliver a major blow” to the interim government in Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital. Indeed, it would.

So let’s concede Romero’s point that Obama has “outmaneuvered” Chavez by escaping the traditional role of the president serving as a pinata for an anti-American leader. That’s very good for Obama’s self-esteem (recall the president’s relief, expressed in a speech at the April Summit of the Americas following an hours-long tirade from Daniel Ortega, that the Nicaraguan strongman “did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old”) but what have we gotten in return? U.S. interests in the region are not being served by continued international isolation of Honduras’s interim government, nor would they be served by restoring to power an anti-American authoritarian like Zelaya, who has approval ratings of less than 30%. Yet that’s what American policy supports. Instead of leading on this issue, we’re following, and following the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez at that. But, hey, it’s nice to have these guys saying nice things about us for once, no?

Last week, the Justice Department unveiled charges against a husband and wife team of State Department employees who allegedly spied for Cuba for nearly 30 years. Wendell and Gwendolyn Myers are accused of conspiracy to act as illegal agents of a foreign government, handing over classified information to that government, and wire fraud. According to the Justice Department, the couple wasn’t in it for the money. Like so many spies for communist regimes, they’re “true believers.”

Many questions need to be asked about this breach, ranging from concerns about the integrity of State Department employees to how the government handles sensitive information. First on my mind, however, is when does the Nation take up a contribution fund for the Myers’s legal defense?

Here’s a telling quote from a story in today’s Financial Times, quoting J Street co-founder and intellectual leading light Daniel Levy:

And Mr Obama dropped a hint that he understood the Arab world’s concerns at Israel’s nuclear weapons status. “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not,” Mr Obama said. Daniel Levy, a former Israeli government official, who is now at the New America Foundation, said: “Might this be a kind of: ‘Yes – we acknowledge there is a double standard here regarding the Israeli nuclear issue, and eventually we will get to that too’?”

So Levy agrees with the Mullahs in that there is a “double standard” between Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons and Iran’s pursuit of them. Remind me again how J Street is either “pro-Israel” or “pro-peace?”

In her disastrous press conference yesterday, Nancy Pelosi finally confirmed that she was aware waterboarding was taking place as early as 2003, after her top intelligence aide Michael Sheehy attended a briefing with CIA officials where he was told as much. This contradicts her earlier, and highly dubious, claims that she didn’t know about waterboarding until the rest of us found out.

But Pelosi really made news with her accusation that the CIA lied to her in September of 2002, specifically disputing the claims of the Agency (and others) who said that Congressional leaders were briefed about the actual, and not just potential, use of enhanced interrogation techniques. We’ve known about these briefings for at least two years, but it was only yesterday, with the real possibility of a congressional “Truth Commission” taking shape, that Pelosi decided to accuse the CIA of “misleading” her. In 2007, for instance, the Washington Post described the content of that meeting this way: “For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.” The Post further reported that “Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.”

But let’s take Pelosi at her word. Let’s assume that in 2002, all the CIA told her was that “they had some legislative counsel — the Office of Legislative Counsel opinions that they could be used, but not that they would,” as she put it last month. According to the people now calling for “war crimes” investigations against Bush administration lawyers, the mere writing of a legal memo that justified enhanced interrogation techniques itself constitutes a “war crime.” Put aside the question of whether the agents performing said techniques are themselves culpable, it’s the lawyers who argued for their legality who are the real “war criminals” and who should be disbarred, impeached, imprisoned, etc. By this logic, then, Pelosi being aware that such legal rationales had been provided by government officials (her claim), even if she wasn’t told waterboarding itself was taking place, would obviously make her complicit in the commissioning of war crimes since she did absolutely nothing about it.

I should state plainly here that I don’t believe Nancy Pelosi is a war criminal. But that’s because I also don’t believe John Yoo or Jay Bybee are war criminals for drafting legal opinions the Left disagrees with. Regardless, that Nancy Pelosi is complicit in the commissioning and cover-up of war crimes is the inescapable logic of the arguments being put forth by the mob calling for partisan witch-hunts. To maintain at least the guise of intellectual consistency, those calling for the heads of Yoo and Bybee should start calling for the Speaker’s as well.

Last week, several lawyers affiliated with the Federalist Society participated in a conference call in which they challenged the notion that waterboarding amounts to torture. The lawyers stated that since the military has waterboarded over 26,000 of our personnel as part of its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, waterboarding cannot constitute torture.

Disagreement with this mode of reasoning is encapsulated in a recent NPR story quoting a scientist who studied the effects of waterboarding on soldiers. He says that one cannot compare the psychological effect of SERE training with the tactic that was used aganist Al-Qaeda terrorists because our soldiers had the ability to “stop the process at any point” whereas the three high-level Al-Qaeda detainees whom the CIA waterboarded didn’t have that luxury.

Isn’t that the point?

The purpose of interrogation is to get information, and the purpose of the interrogations now under such virulent attack was to obtain information that, if acquired, would save (and, at least according to Michael Hayden, Michael Mukasey, and Dennis Blair, did save) American lives. For such interrogations to prove effective, it is necessary that they entail a level of coercion so that the person undergoing interrogation cannot simply demand a stop to it and call in his lawyer (as criminal defendants in the United States have the right to do during even the most fearsome good cop/bad cop routines). Focusing on fear is what distinguishes “enhanced interrogation” techniques from outright torture — things like drilling holes in kneecaps or pulling out fingernails — the effects of which are far worse than mere apprehension.

Let’s assume that waterboarding, as practiced on the three high-level al-Qaeda detainees by the CIA, does, however, produce “negative psychological repercussions,” in the words of NPR. A lifetime jail sentence, which any terrorist wanted by the United States should feel lucky to have, would also carry “negative psychological repercussions,” but that doesn’t mean we release terrorists onto the streets out of concern for their emotional well-being. There are more important things than the mental health of Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh-Mohammed. Risking these thugs’s psychological state is a price we should be willing to pay, albeit sparingly, if it’s required to save innocent American lives.

Waterboarding does not instill fear of imminent death (as KSM probably figured out around the 4th or 5th time he endured it), which makes the difference between these two scenarios — the difference, ultimately, that distinguishes the training that soldiers voluntarily undergo from the “torture” that the CIA used to extract information – the imposition of fear. It says something absurd about the “torture” debate that scaring terrorists, in the cause of saving American lives, is now considered not only out of legal bounds, but on par with the behavior of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

Eli Lake of the Washington Times had an important yet overlooked scoop yesterday: Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman, scourge of the left-wing of her party and subject of intense and petty hatred from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “was one of the only lawmakers in 2003 to challenge the CIA’s program of harsh interrogations, according to a little-noticed letter to the CIA that was declassified last year.” Lake reports on a letter that she wrote to the CIA, in which she expressed her concern that the interrogation program “raises profound policy questions and I am concerned about whether these have been as rigorously examined as the legal questions. I would like to know what kind of policy review took place and what questions were examined.”

Harman not only questioned the legality and effectiveness of the CIA interrogation programs, she also called upon the CIA not to destroy tapes of its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Whatever one thinks about the propriety of this program, Harman at least demonstrated the concern that Nancy Pelosi only now claims — completely unconvincingly, as Bret Stephens cogently reminded us last week — to have expressed.

Furthermore, Lake cites a government official who says that Harman’s inquiry “was one of very few the CIA received about the program from members of Congress at the time.” So much for the theory — a point of consensus among the leading lights of the credulosphere — that Harman is part of the vast neoconservative conspiracy and was merely an appendage of the Bush administration in Congress. In the eyes of her left-wing detractors, Harman ought to be a hero.

But why let facts get in the way of a good narrative? Harman was a vocal supporter of the Iraq War and opposed most of her colleagues by not supporting a withdrawal of troops from that country in 2006 and 2007. Due to her hawkishness, she has long been a target of virulent left-wing attacks, and lost out on her bid to chair the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a job that former Minority Leader Dick Gephardt promised her when the Democrats were in the minority. Pelosi ended up giving that job to Silvestre Reyes, a legislator who infamously didn’t know that Al Qaeda is primarily Sunni and Hezbollah is Shi’ite.

If the Democratic Party leadership wants voters to think they’re serious about national security, they would be promoting Jane Harman. One can draw the appropriate conclusions from their not having done so.

In yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, Lenny Ben-David showed how the anti-Israel conspiracies of the present — seen in the form of Walt-Mearsheimer, the AIPAC “espionage” case, and the politically charged leaking of classified information to imply Jane Harman has dual loyalties — have a long and ugly history in Washington. The entire column is worth reading, but there’s a nugget of particular interest buried halfway through the piece:

In 1962 [William] Fulbright launched an investigation of foreign lobbyists in Washington, attempting to force AIPAC to register as an agent of Israel rather than a domestic American lobby. His chief investigator was a journalist named Walter Pincus. (Today, Pincus, the Washington Post’s veteran national security reporter, helps cover the Jane Harman story and the Rosen-Weissman trial.)

“Israel controls the United States Senate,” Fulbright told Face the Nation in 1973. “Around 80 percent are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants it gets. Jewish influence in the House of Representatives is even greater.” (Years later, after retiring from the Senate, Fulbright registered as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia.)

Ben-David neglects to mention that Pincus also covered the aftermath of the Freeman debacle for the Post, and did so in a thoroughly dishonest fashion. Most embarrassing was a story he filed on the Arab media’s reaction to Freeman’s resignation, as if the typically paranoid, inaccurate, and anti-Semitic ramblings of the Arab press were somehow newsworthy (the piece was deftly skewered by Noah Pollak). Nevertheless, by reminding us of Pincus’s past work as a “chief investigator” for the segregationist and virulently anti-Israel William Fulbright, Ben-David provides context for understanding his contemporary reporting on Israel.

Paul Krugman isn’t one for subtlety, but his latest column about CIA interrogations during the Bush years really takes hyperbole to new heights:

In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those [founding American] ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.

As a liberal, Krugman ought to be eminently familiar with the entire catalogue of American sins. Were the memos released last week really demonstrative of a greater “betrayal” of American ideals than slavery, massacres of Native Americans, Jim Crow, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II? One doesn’t have to be a devotee of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to be familiar with these events. Perhaps Krugman conveniently overlooked these instances of American dishonor because Democrats presided over them.

This hyperbole is demonstrative of the the outrage racket indulged in by the Left since Abu Ghraib. Proclaiming one’s shame of the United States isn’t anything new for liberals, but in the aftermath of 9/11 they had to wait a few years before finding a reasonable pretext. In the freshest round of self-flagellation, the more scandalized one can become over revelations that American interrogators put wet towels on the faces of terrorist masterminds or subjected them to loud music for hours on end, the greater moral standing one can claim for oneself. To be unmoved by these tactics is to be cold and heartless. Outrage, much of it insincere, has become a badge of pride for swathes of the liberal commentariat and earns them membership in the club of the self-righteous. If you aren’t outraged at what’s taken place in your name — and if you’re not willing to share it with the country on a regular basis — then you’re simply a Cheney-esque barbarian, no different from Nazis and Communists.

The moral vanity of these people is a thing to behold.

Last week, I wrote an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post in which I criticized J Street’s endorsing the production of Seven Jewish Children, by the British playwright Caryl Churchill, in Washington, DC. For those of you not familiar with the 10-minute play (the full text of which is available here), it is enough to say that it draws a direct parallel between Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews and Israel’s contemporary treatment of the Palestinians. In the words of the prominent British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson, it is “wantonly inflammatory” and unquestionably anti-Semitic. In my op-ed, I questioned the propriety of a purportedly “pro-Israel” organization going out of its way to endorse the production of such material.

In a letter to the Post defending his organization’s stance, J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami writes:

J Street didn’t, as Kirchick noted, endorse all the words or sentiments in the play’s script. So it must be that Kirchick objects to providing a stage to a work that might provoke a conversation about the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality.

I do not “object to providing a stage” to any theatrical work, and never did I give the impression that I do. Indeed, I wrote that “complaints over the propriety of [Seven Jewish Children’s] production…should not be confused with a call to ban it.” And if Jeremy Ben-Ami thinks that a lurid, anti-Semitic screed “might provoke a conversation about the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality,” then perhaps he should find work in a field unrelated to Jewish causes.

Not content to merely imply that I oppose freedom of speech, Ben-Ami comes right out and falsely accuses me of it directly:

Would Kirchick really ask theaters not to run plays which disagree with his political viewpoints? What country does he think he lives in?

Nowhere do I say that productions of Seven Jewish Children should be shut down because of what I believe to be the play’s utterly contemptible content. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and a million leftist, self-hating Jewish theater companies put on performances of anti-Semitic propaganda. It’ll only hurt their fund-raising appeals when they try to hit up Jews for money. Ben-Ami invents his charge out of whole cloth, painting me to be a censorious, close-minded, proto-fascist who would go around shutting down drum circles and readings of Palestinian love poetry.

What I questioned was the motivation of those who lead an ostensibly “pro-Israel” organization endorsing the dissemination of anti-Semitic material, and, moreover, justifying it as something beneficial to the “Jewish soul and Jewish morality.” There is a vast difference between an argument over the right of theaters to stage whatever plays they wish (where I consider myself a free speech absolutist) and the cultural value of the play’s content (an entirely subjective matter). So the debate here about J Street is not analogous to the one about the legality of neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois. The controversy over J Street and Seven Jewish Children, rather, is analogous to Jewish organizations at the time celebrating such an ugly spectacle because it “might provoke a conversation about the impact of the [Nazi-Jewish] conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality.”

“Are we so vulnerable and weak as a community that we can’t endure a debate sparked by a 10-minute play at the JCC with some controversial dialogue?” Ben-Ami asks. The Jews are a resilient people, and they’ll certainly “endure” whatever phony “debate” is “sparked” by a bigoted play (notice how even the most lurid anti-Semitism never rises above the level of “controversial dialogue” to Ben-Ami and Jews of his ilk). What most Jews won’t endure, I predict, is the self-loathing masked as communal angst exemplified by J Street.

Scott Horton, April 14: “The Bush Six to Be Indicted”

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast.

Reality, April 16: “Prosecutor: Drop Case Against Those Bush Officials”

MADRID, Spain (CNN) — Prosecutors will recommend that a Spanish court drop its investigation of six former officials in the administration of U.S. George W. Bush for alleged torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Spain’s attorney general said Thursday.

David Frum has more on Horton’s “enthusiastic credulity and indifference to fact.”

Over at his Nation magazine blog, Robert Dreyfuss, the former Middle East Editor of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review, huffs and puffs over the U.S. government’s reaction to the problem of piracy off the coast of Somalia, as well as the media’s coverage of last week’s daring rescue, comparing it to such salacious celebrity scandals as the O.J. Simpson case and the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder mystery. Piracy on the high seas, Dreyfuss writes, is a “tempest-in-an-Indian Ocean-teapot.”

It’s hardly surprising that the national security correspondent for the Nation would react this way, seeing that the crisis resulted in a stunning victory for the American military and the death of three brigands.

But onto the more important question: is piracy off the Horn of Africa the problem that the media is cracking it up to be, or wildly overblown? In the past year alone, the Wall Street Journal reports, pirates have attacked 78 ships and hijacked 19. As I write this, nearly 300 people remain hostage to pirates. The Gulf of Aden, one of the main areas where pirates operate, is a major world shipping route where 20,000 ships and 7% of world oil shipments pass through it annually. To anyone concerned with the world energy markets, not to mention the rule of law on the high seas, piracy is a vitally important issue.

Nevertheless, one can understand how these facts would mean little to the reality-based folks over at the Nation, in particular, their LaRouchite national security reporter. On to more pressing matters, like urging a boycott of Seth Rogen movies and construction of the “Eurasian Landbridge.”

In light of President Obama’s returning home empty-handed after pleading with our European allies to boost their troop commitments to Afghanistan, it’s heartening to see that Poland has announced plans to increase its troop presence in the country by 20%. This is no small thing, considering that the primary threat to Poland is a revanchist Russia and that the diversion of troops and military material anywhere out of the country reduces its defenses against the expansionist power to its east. Poland has been one of America’s most steadfast allies since 9/11, a strong coalition partner in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bedrock of NATO. It’s long past time that this nascent democracy got the respect it deserves.

Though he was much derided for it at the time, Donald Rumsfeld was onto something when, in response to complaints that “Europe” opposed the American-led war against Saddam Hussein’s regime, he spoke of people’s tendency to conflate the entire European continent with what was really just “Old Europe,” and even more specifically, was just France and Germany. The rest of the continent, he said, in particular the once-”captive nations” of the Cold War, are far more pro-American in their attitudes. What might have sounded provincial and simplistic six years ago to some, was in fact quite prescient.

At a news conference in Strasbourg, France, earlier this week, President Obama said the following in response to a questioner from Austria:

It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing.

You can watch the video here.

This is a perfect Daily Show segment; all Jon Stewart has to do is play the clip and look smugly at the camera with his head in his hands as his audience laughs at the president’s ignorance over Austrians not having their own language but rather speaking German. Of course, had President Bush said this, he would have been laughed off the stage, as he was when he referred to Greeks as “Grecians.” Bush’s occasional verbal foibles were a cottage industry for Jacob Weisberg and supplied the left with a comforting narrative of presidential stupidity. Don’t expect this embarrassing gaffe to lead the ironic, snarky left to criticize its own.

A committee of Arab doctors has been established to “investigate” what caused the death of Yasser Arafat. The passing of the Palestinian terrorist leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner has been shrouded in mystery ever since he died in 2004, as his widow forbade an autopsy and the French doctors who treated him at his deathbed in Paris could not officially determine a reason for his sudden, “massive brain hemorrhage.” Other symptoms that Arafat faced in the later stages of his life were an immune system–suppressing blood disease, the loss of 1/3 of his weight, and mental dysfunction.

These conditions, of course, are all associated with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which may very well have killed Arafat. His alleged homosexuality was something of an open secret among intimates, if rarely ever reported on by a fawning media that didn’t want to complicate the macho image of the courageous resistance fighter (although Arafat’s homosexuality was probably not something that would bother most of the left-wing reporters who cover the Middle East, the same cannot be said for his Palestinian followers and sympathizers in the Arab world). Ignoring the probable cause of Arafat’s death has served the Palestinian political narrative, as it it allows them to place his death on the ledger of grievances against Israel: it was Israeli poison, not AIDS, that killed him. That the French medical officials who cared for Arafat could find no trace of lethal toxins in his system has done nothing to disabuse Palestinians of this meme.

So much of the discourse in the Arab and Muslim world thrives on deceit, the way in which homosexuality is discussed being one of the most egregious examples (for instance, see Saudi Arabia, where sex between men — including members of the Royal Family — is prevalent to a comical extent, yet for which the penalty is death by decapitation). Impaneling a group of venal doctors to issue a politically useful diagnosis on the long-deceased leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement may provide a gloss of legitimization for yet another Arab conspiracy theory. Its more corrosive effect will be the exacerbation of a destructive cultural artifice.

Courtesy of Mickey Kaus, we now have a view into the infamous “Journolist,” on which over 300 liberal journalists and activists debate — er — gossip all day like a group of high schoolers. Kaus got his hand on one thread, dated March 24, in which Center for American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias starts off a discussion by exposing the supposed racism of Marty Peretz.

Today, Yglesias writes about the Foreign Policy Initiative, a new think tank/advocacy group founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. He opines:

When I was a kid, I remember hearing that cockroaches would not only survive the sure-to-happen US-Soviet nuclear holocaust, but actually emerge stronger than ever as they devour our irradiated corpses. Similarly, there’s a new think tank in town, headed by Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesguy Dan Senor.

The use of the word “cockroach” to describe undesirable persons has a long history, but there’s a specific and ugly context that is most pertinent. In the run-up to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 — in which nearly 1 million people were massacred over the course of just 100 days — “Hutu power” radio stations used the word repeatedly to describe members of the minority Tutsi tribe. Historians and political scientists who study Rwanda cite the intensity and pervasiveness of this hate speech as playing a crucial role in mobilizing Hutus to kill so many their fellow countrymen. Such language is used to dehumanize.

As an expert on nearly everything, surely Yglesias is aware of the word’s loaded history. That he would simultaneously act as traffic cop for internet civility is risible.

Earlier this week, news emerged of unidentified aircraft killing 39 arms smugglers in Sudan in January. Israel is suspected of having carried out the attack, as the smugglers were reportedly transferring Iranian-supplied weaponry to Hamas fighters in Gaza, via Egypt. On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Miniser Ehud Olmert issued the sort of non-denial denial characteristic of Israeli leaders when some terrorist’s car blows up in the Middle East. “We operate everywhere where we can hit terror infrastructure — in close places, in places further away, everywhere where we can hit terror infrastructure, we hit them and we hit them in a way that increases deterrence,” he said.

Not everyone is pleased by Israel taking out a bunch of Islamist terrorists in the deserts of Sudan. Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation’s national security correspondent (and former Middle East editor of Lyndon LaRouche’s newspaper), has an interesting take:

But the raid, which reportedly killed between 30 and 40 people and destroyed 17 trucks, is a big deal, even though it occurred months ago, and it could severely destabilize Sudan, inflame relations between Arab countries, Iran, and the United States, and set the stage for a response by Iran. (emphasis added)

Yes, because an air-strike in Sudan might precipitate a genocide, or spark a civil war, or lead to the international criminal indictment of the country’s president, or… I don’t expect much from The Nation these days, but this is akin to arguing that intercourse with a pregnant woman puts her at risk of becoming pregnant.

Today brings the disappointing news that the government of South Africa has denied a visa to the Dalai Lama, who was planning to visit next year for a peace conference associated with the World Cup. The event is being organized by three South African Nobel Laureates: former Presidents Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu has announced his decision to back out of the conference due to the government’s action, saying that, “We are shamelessly succumbing to Chinese pressure.”

If only the explanation was so simple. Contrary to Tutu’s assertion, the South African government came out with a statement claiming that China had no role to play in its decision. If true, that makes this episode even more disturbing. Normally when these sorts of choices are made to appease Chinese demands, it’s due to China’s economic leverage over the country in question. But in the Chinese-South African trading relationship the South Africans are hardly the weaker party. Exchange with South Africa represents 20.8% of China’s trade on the entire African continent, putting South Africa in a strong position to say “no” to the inevitable Chinese complaint that arises whenever the Dalai Lama travels anywhere.

There doesn’t need to be an economic rationale for this decision, as South Africa’s relationship with China is deeper than the desire for mere lucre. As I’ve written before, the foreign policy of post-apartheid South Africa has taken on a disturbingly anti-Western and Third-Worldist tone. While the African National Congress has adopted many free market economic policies that angered the populist segments of its broad coalition, on foreign policy it has hewed closely to the “anti-imperialist” precepts espoused by its intellectual leaders — almost all of whom were Soviet-sympathizing leftists who formed close relationships with revolutionary movements around the world. It is for this reason that the ANC is so virulently anti-Israel and supportive of Robert Mugabe, to take just two pressing international controversies. This frame of thinking perceives the United States and European powers as colonialist, while seeing China — whose record in Africa over the past decade is far closer to “imperialism” than than that of the United States — as the savior of the continent.

This latest episode once again reveals the startling hypocrisy of the ANC, which for some 40 years was sustained by the solidarity it earned internationally. Banned in South Africa and with its leaders either in jail or exile, the ANC set up offices around the world and appealed to governments, NGOs, and people of good conscience to join the fight against apartheid. It successfully pressured governments to boycott South Africa economically, and ironically, in international sporting venues as well. The ANC could never have ended apartheid on its own; for most of its history it was a battered and weakened organization that lived off the generosity and sympathy of friends abroad. It says something sad about the legacy of the anti-apartheid movement when the very same people who rightly insisted that to ignore their pleas was to be complicit in a crime against humanity have turned their back on another’s struggle for freedom.

There are a lot of unexpected gems in Philip Weiss’s American Conservative story on Chas Freeman, especially from the great defender of the Tiananmen Square massacre himself. The following one really takes the cake for what it says about the various manias of State Department Arabists and the journalists who love them:

I am interested in seeing the survival of a humane and not a thuggish Jewish state in the Middle East.

Let us, for analytic purposes, take at face value Freeman’s characteristic of Israel as a “thuggish” state. What, then, does that make Saudi Arabia, the monarchy to which Freeman was posted as Ambassador and where he developed a severe state of clientitis? The state where gays are beheaded, women are banned from driving, and the practice of Christianity is outlawed? Surely, rational people can agree that the things the Saudi monarchy does to keep itself in power are more “thuggish” than the Israeli occupation. Certainly, “thuggish” and stronger epithets can also be used to describe Ba’athist Syria, or Jordan, where torture is routine. Why is it only the perceived transgressions of Israel that rile men like Chas Freeman and the Israel-obsessives at the American Conservative?

It was only a matter of time before J Street — the self-proclaimed “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization that is neither — came to the defense of Tiananmen Square Massacre enthusiast Charles “Chas” Freeman. In a statement released Friday, J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami says says that “J Street stayed out of this fight. First, we – probably like many of those who did comment – did not know enough about Freeman or his positions to really take a stand.” But even though Ben-Ami admits that his organization didn’t bother to familiarize themselves with Freeman and his worldview, he then goes on record defending the man and attacking his critics. “What is important to me is that the Obama team not draw the lesson from this episode that they simply need to be more careful vetting of appointees to make sure they’ve never criticized Israel,” he writes.

The problem with this assertion is that there are plenty of people in the Obama administration, up to and including President Obama himself, who have criticized Israel, some quite stridently. This has been the case in every presidential administration. So the claim that Freeman lost out because he failed to pass an ideological litmus test imposed by “Israel-firsters,” in the language of his intemperate son, is a straw man argument, and it’s disappointing, though not surprising, that Ben-Ami would parrot it.

Israel was not at the heart of the controversy over Chas Freeman. And Ben-Ami never actually acknowledges just what it is that made so many people — liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Democrats, Republicans etc. — outraged about his appointment to the NIC Chair. Doing so might lend credence to those critics’ arguments, so Ben-Ami does the easier thing. He ignores these concerns and propagates the meme that it was Freeman’s statements on Israel — awful as they were — that ultimately ended his career, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Does Jeremy Ben-Ami believe that Congressmen Wolf and Hastings, as well as Senators Bond, Coburn and Chambliss were all lying when they told the media that the dread Israel Lobby had next to nothing to do with scuttling Freeman’s appointment?)

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It’s always worth mentioning — and bears repeating — that The Nation magazine’s chief national security reporter, Robert Dreyfuss, was the former Middle East Editor of Executive Intelligence Review, the newspaper of fringe-movement leader and convicted tax felon Lyndon LaRouche. Now, youthful political dalliances should not prevent one from being taken seriously in the court of public opinion. But what makes Dreyfuss’s history relevant is that his contemporary writings are indistinguishable from the sort of bile you’d find in a LaRouchite tract.

Anyway, Dreyfuss sinks to a new low in the current issue of The Nation. There’s nothing wrong with using the phrase “Israel Lobby” to describe the constellation of organizations (all supported by American citizens, something that can’t be said of the Lobby whose pecuniary courtesies got Chas Freeman into so much trouble) committed to supporting strong U.S.-Israel ties. But use of “Zionist Lobby” is the sort of terminology that one finds only in the precincts of the isolationist Right, the Arab press and, apparently, within the pages of The Nation magazine. “The Zionist lobby roared–and President Obama blinked,” Dreyfuss writes. In certain circles — the ones Dreyfuss travels in — “Zionist” is a slur, an insult, not a term of pride. Stripped of its ulterior meanings, “Zionist Lobby” is such an imprecise term that it naturally includes the sorts of peacenik groups that The Nation loves (hey, even J Street claims to be Zionist).

Are we to believe that these groups are implicated in Dreyfuss’s attack? Dreyfuss is dog-whistling to his conspiratorial followers who believe Zionism itself to be a crime, and to Jews on the soft-left who are willing to believe that what he really means by “Zionist Lobby” is the collective influence of  right-wing Jewish organizations or AIPAC. But given Dreyfuss’s history in the  LaRouche movement there’s little question about what he’s doing. He’s consciously using the phrase as a slur.

The Nation wasn’t always this way. For more on the magazine’s history in regard to  Zionism, be sure to read Ron and Allis Radosh’s excellent piece from last summer’s World Affairs Journal.

The New York Times today essentially reprints Chas Freeman’s conspiratorial view of how his appointment as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council went down, in a story headlined “Israel Stance Was Undoing of Nominee for Intelligence Post.” There is no mention of Nancy Pelosi’s anger at Freeman’s support for the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the 87 Chinese dissidents and human rights activists who signed a letter in protest of his appointment. No mention of Frank Wolf’s angry package. “The reality of Washington is that our political landscape finds it difficult to assimilate any criticism of any segment of the Israeli leadership,” the Times quotes Robert W. Jordan. Who’s he? Like Freeman, a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, one who now works in the Middle East practice of Baker Botts. Go figure. Having largely ignored this story for the past two weeks, the Times now puts this misleading piece on page 1.

A Washington Post story by Walter Pincus, meanwhile, is no better. Pincus, like the Timesmen, makes no effort to look past Freeman’s claims that he was done in by the “Israel Lobby,” ignoring the China angle. In this sense, both the Post and the Times were scooped and outshone by Newsweek, whose Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball discovered the real story, which is not as simplistic as Freeman or his defenders in the Juicebox Mafia would have us believe.

One of the most amazing things about the appointment of the Tiananmen Square Massacre enthusiast Charles “Chas” Freeman as National Intelligence Council Chairman is how liberals have completely avoided any discussion whatsoever of the man’s romanticizing the Chinese Communists and Saudi Royal Family. The debate over Freeman has become a game for these liberals, a game in which point-scoring against the dreaded “neo-cons” has subsumed matters of principle, policy, and decency. Thus it’s all a discussion over the motives of those criticizing him and they have nothing to say about the man’s truly illiberal political views.

Maybe Eli Lake’s story in the Washington Times today, detailing the latest congressional protest against Freeman, will remind liberals of what they used to stand for. Lake reports:

Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, spoke with Mr. Blair on Monday to oppose the appointment. He said he would be sending Mr. Blair a pair of socks made by Tiananmen protesters in a Beijing prison that Mr. Wolf visited in 1991. He also will send Mr. Blair a videotape of two women from a Darfur refugee camp describing how they were raped by Sudanese forces.

“I elaborated a little more on why having visited Darfur and having seen what the Chinese have done, and CNOOC has done, how the oil money has helped fund [Sudanese President] Omar Bashir to kill innocent people,” Mr. Wolf said.

So the cause of human rights has fallen upon the shoulders of the Republican congressional minority, while liberals follow a script of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” There was a time when the American Left could be reliably counted upon to raise its voice in protest against the likes of Chas Freeman and his shilling for authoritarians. That day is sadly no more.

Itinerant actor and political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell is none too pleased with New York Governor David Paterson’s appointing Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacant Senate Seat, thus passing over O’Donnell’s personal friend Caroline Kennedy. Here’s what he told The New Yorker this week, displaying a coastal contempt for rural Americans that is beyond parody:

“Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”

There’s a lot to unpack in this statement, including the remark that Gillibrand is “better at representing cows than people.” What exactly does that mean? That Gillirand is herself bovine in appearance, or such a rural hick that she identifies more with cows than fellow humans? More importantly, how is Gillibrand — yes, the daughter of a lobbyist — any more of the “hack world” than Caroline Kennedy, scion of the…Kennedys? Apparently if you come from a liberal political dynasty that’s the closest thing we have in this country to landed gentry you get spared criticism for being a “hack,” although that’s exactly what the Kennedy machine continues to produce. But for liberals of the Lawrence O’Donnell type, the Kennedy Mystique™ precludes this sort of language, which is then easily applied to less-romantic Reagan Democrats.

O’Donnell has launched a personal war against Paterson since he made his decision. Here he is typing away furiously at the Huffington Post, referring to his new-found nemesis as the “accidental governor.” But if this is an accurate descriptor for Paterson, what exactly would that have made “Senator” Caroline Kennedy, whose privileged station in life — the only reason why she was ever considered for the Senate appointment in the first place — is due to her select membership in the lucky egg club?

Commenting on my post the other day on Pete Seeger, a blogger at The Nation notes that “James Kirchick has engaged The Nation in some spirited debate over the years, most recently taking on our publication of Sean Penn’s essay about Raul Castro. Normally we welcome the argument. Today, though, we had to ask ourselves if he’s running out of worthy targets.”

Forgive my decision-making talents (or lack thereof), but there’s only so much stupidity in that magazine that I can deal with on a week’s basis. However, I trust that in the months and years to come there will be no shortage of Stalinists, terrorists, and murderers praised within its pages to supply me with a never-ending series of blog posts.

One hates to dampen the feelings of national euphoria that have taken hold over the past few days, but there’s one moment from the week’s festivities that still sticks in my craw: the worshipful attention heaped upon Pete Seeger, icon of American folk music and lapsed Stalinist.

Seeger was a prominent campaigner in the struggle for African-American civil rights, and his legacy there ought be applauded. But racial equality was not the only cause to which Seeger committed himself. International communism, and in particular its Stalinist variant, was an equal, if not more, significant cause in Seeger’s public life. He was “Stalin’s songbird,” as David Boaz describes, writing about how Seeger zigged and zagged, with the rest of American communists in the 1930’s and 1940’s, in blind obedience to orders from Moscow. Seeger’s vaunted opposition to American “militarism” has persuaded him to oppose U.S. military intervention wherever and whenever it has occurred, including, for instance, the mission to displace the Taliban.

Fresh off his participation in Sunday’s “We Are One” concert comes a campaign, endorsed by the likes of CodePinker Medea Benjamin, Bonnie Raitt, and Cindy Sheehan to pressure the Nobel Prize Committee to bestow its award for Peace upon Seeger. I came across this effort on the Nation magazine’s “Act Now!” blog, late of endorsing such other worthy causes such as a website that publishes the results of chemical tests on children’s toys and a letter writing campaign “to major toy marketers urging them to target parents, not children, with their millions of dollars in advertising lucre.”

“Seeger has been an inimitable ambassador for peace, social justice and the best kind of patriotism over the course of a remarkable lifetime,” the magazine’s associate publisher Peter Rothberg gushes. One can understand how the folks over at the Nation would consider membership in the Communist Party and subsequent fellow-traveling with a variety of anti-American despots “the best kind of patriotism,” given that publication’s role in trying to redefine “patriotism” so as to include knee-jerk anti-Americanism and support for illiberal thugs and tyrants spanning the past century and up to the present day. Genuine patriotism, however, the kind felt by non-Nation-reading Americans, infers nothing more complicated than a love of one’s country and its fundamental values of liberty and individual rights, something that’s hard to glean in the pages of the Nation. Reminiscent of the way in which the old Left perverted language during the Cold War, the activist Peter Dreier writes on the Huffington Post that Seeger is “the world’s preeminent troubadour for peace and justice.” Like Seeger and communists before him, Dreier uses the words “peace and justice” to obscure the Soviet Union’s real agenda: slavery and murder.

Unsurprisingly, Seeger’s fellow-traveling appears nowhere in the recent encomia written in his honor (much attention has been given to his being blacklisted, without explaining why). As Ron Radosh, the great historian of American communism and a former banjo student of Seeger, recounted two years ago:

In the “John Doe” album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, “I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.” Another song, to the tune of “Cripple Creek” and the sound of Mr. Seeger’s galloping banjo, said, “Franklin D., Franklin D., You ain’t a-gonna send us across the sea,” and “Wendell Willkie and Franklin D., both agree on killing me.”

For years, Mr. Seeger used to sing a song with a Yiddish group called “Hey Zhankoye,” which helped spread the fiction that Stalin’s USSR freed the Russian Jews by establishing Jewish collective farms in the Crimea. Singing such a song at the same time as Stalin was planning the obliteration of Soviet Jewry was disgraceful. It is now decades later. Why doesn’t Mr. Seeger talk about this and offer an apology?

A few months after this article was written, Seeger wrote a letter to Radosh, in which he acknowledged, “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” Gee, ya think?

In that letter Seeger attached the lyrics for a song he had dashed off limply denouncing Stalin. So over 50 years after Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” detailing Stalin’s crimes, Seeger finally came around to realizing that Uncle Joe was not the benevolent man about whom he rhapsodized. But however welcome his belated acknowledgment (and a private letter to an individual is hardly the most honest way by which one repents for decades of public support for totalitarianism) of Stalin’s various and sundry monstrosities may be, Seeger has never sufficiently recounted or apologized for his support of the Soviet Union. To be sure, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter, men whose contributions to the cause of “peace” were nonexistent, and Pete Seeger would fit well within this rogue’s gallery. And admitting, however late, that one’s earlier political passions were mistaken is better than no acknowledgment at all. But whatever importance one may wish to attribute to his long overdue reckonings about Joseph Stalin, Seeger was for most of his life a conscious supporter of a global conspiracy to destroy free society. It may be difficult to comprehend this given the man’s warm and fuzzy exterior, but Pete Seeger is not, and never has been, a sincere proponent of “peace.”