The Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Ron Kampeas, has posted a screed against neoconservatives on that organization’s web site. “For eight years we in Washington lived in a bizarro world where the most obvious conclusions were not just ignored, but mocked, actively suppressed and made akin to treason,” he said. Now, “neoconservatives are losing,” because of “their failure, or their abject inability, to say ‘I was wrong.’” He writes, “The Bush administration had not merely an aversion but a psychotic fear of saying ‘We wuz wrong.’”

If anything is “bizarro,” it is Mr. Kampeas’s own accusation. There are at least two significant cases where President Bush himself admitted he was wrong. One was his speech on the surge, in which he said, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me. It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq…Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed.” Oh, and the president also ousted his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, (after such “neoconservatives” such as Max Boot and William Kristol had called for him to do so) to underscore the point.

On Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Saddam’s own denials of whose existence appear to be Mr. Kampeas’s jumping-off point as unquestionable fact, Mr. Bush also acknowledged error. “Much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Mr. Bush said. “As president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. And I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities.”

On the WMD question, Mr. Kampeas apparently puts more faith in Saddam’s denials to the FBI under interrogation, as reported by the Washington Post, than in the assertions I reported by Moshe Yaalon and by Ariel Sharon that Saddam’s chemical weapons were transported to Syria before the war. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s web site reports that the wire service is funded by some of the largest Jewish charities, including the United Jewish Communities, Hadassah, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, all of which do much valuable work, as does the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. You have to wonder whether they really want to publish this sort of stuff, or employ a Washington bureau chief who thinks it.

What an awful speech. Among the problems, one was the president’s claim that there are “nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today.” The true number is probably less than half that, as this page details.

Even when Obama was trying to be nice to Israel, he was tone deaf: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied,” he said. The missing words were those usually present in such passages about shared democratic values and strategic interests.

The sections about the Palestinian Arabs were even weaker. He said of the Palestinians: “For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.” This buys into the claim that it was 1948, not 1967, that was the original tragedy for the Palestinian Arabs, and feeds the idea that the Palestinian Arabs have a claim to all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza.

Then he said, “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.”

This places the Palestinian Arabs as the victims, equating their plight to that of enslaved American blacks, Poles subjected to Communist tyranny, or blacks under apartheid. In these analogies, the assumption, just barely left unsaid, is that Israeli Jews are the oppressors. Never mind that that doesn’t accurately portray the moral or historical situation. It isn’t even accurate. Violence is not a dead end. American slavery was ended by the Civil War. “America’s founding” was accomplished not by a peaceful insistence on ideals but by a war of independence. And, sadly, were it not for ongoing terrorist attacks against American and Israeli targets, President Obama would not be in Egypt comparing the Palestinian Arab cause to that of the captive nations of Eastern Europe or American blacks.

During the campaign I had actually defended Obama against those who felt he would be a disaster for Israel. This speech makes me think that may have been a mistake. The only chance now is that this speech will be mere rhetoric, like so much in the Middle East, intended only for public consumption. But if Obama really means it, it is bad news for the Jews in Israel and America, not to mention for American national security.

The New York Times Company held its annual meeting this morning, a ritual that appeared to function in large part in order to allow shareholders (I am a small one) to vent their frustration, in sometimes caustic terms, at the company’s management. One shareholder pressed the company’s chairman, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., about Roger Cohen’s opinion columns presenting a rosy view of Iran and portraying Israel as a menace. When the shareholder asked why the Cohen columns hadn’t been balanced by those offering an alternative point of view, Sulzberger replied that he would raise the issue with the editorial page editor. Another shareholder offered some suggestions on how the newspaper could cut costs, noting that the restaurant critic did not need to fly to Texas to review a “pork restaurant” that most of the paper’s readers would never eat at, and that the fashion critic could have interviewed Oscar de la Renta here in New York rather than flying to de la Renta’s vacation home in the Dominican Republic. A third shareholder mentioned the Times’s plan to give non-union employees a 5% pay cut in exchange for 10 days off, and expressed hope that the executive management would take 10 days off, implying that the company would be better off without them.

Sulzberger and the company’s CEO, Janet Robinson, did their best to defend their performance, saying the company’s results — the dividend has been suspended, and the share price has plummeted over the last five years to the $5 range from about $45 — must be compared with other foundering newspaper companies. They named Lee, McClatchy, and Tribune. This is a game the Times’s business reporters wouldn’t let any executives they cover get away with. Neither Sulzberger nor Robinson mentioned other news and information companies that have outperformed the New York Times, such as the Washington Post Company, Pearson PLC (parent of the Financial Times), or Dow Jones, whose owning family sold at the top of the market to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Sulzberger did flash some of his famous wit, replying to one shareholder who inquired whether the company’s corporate jet had yet been sold, “If you’d like to, make a bid.” He isn’t yet prepared to hang the same for-sale sign on his company’s flagship news organization, at least publicly. But give it some time. The jet is on the market. The plush auditorium in which the meeting was held has already been sold, along with the rest of the Times’s fancy new Manhattan headquarters, in which the newspaper is now a tenant rather than owner. As for the paper, to the winning bidder falls the right to spike Roger Cohen’s next column.

It’s a rare book these days that gets one review in the New York Times, and an even rarer one that gets reviewed twice. As for books that get glowingly positive reviews in both the daily Times and the Sunday Book Review – well, it’s a select group indeed.

Into that choice category falls Beryl Satter’s Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. The Sunday Times called the book “revealing and instructive” and said the author had covered herself in “glory.” The daily Times raved, “Her book is transfixing from its first sentence” and said the book “feels like something close to an instant classic.”

So just what is the story that garnered such lush praise from the Times? It’s the tale of Beryl Satter’s father, Mark Satter, a Chicago lawyer who, the book says, fought “exploitative Jewish slum landlords” until his death in 1965 and whose “thinking was radical, not liberal.” The NAACP, the Urban League, even community organizer Saul Alinsky were too tame for Mark Satter.

The book reports that Satter joined the Communist Party USA in 1945. The author tries her best to make excuses for her father’s decision to throw in with the Communists, romanticizing, “he shared their anger at gross social inequality and was drawn to their understanding of class as the primary divide in society. He admired the intellectual elegance of Marxist thought and the idealism that seemed to drive it.” Also, she writes that her father credited the Soviets for having prevented the Nazis from murdering all of European Jewry.

The two Times reviews – all 1,750 words of them – manage to omit any mention that the hero of the book was a Communist. (He left the party after a year, not out of any ideological epiphany, but because, the book says, “the discipline and personal subservience were not for him.”)

To its credit, the Washington Post, in its similarly effusive review of the book (”the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North”) at least mentioned the Communist angle.

There are other issues raised by “Family Properties” that a reviewer might tackle. For instance, Satter parrots her father’s claim that exploitative landlords “were robbing Chicago’s black population of one million dollars a day,” then goes on to tell of how the slumlords were “big Israeli bond donors” and that another motive for the exploitation was to allow the landlords to make contributions to their synagogues.

Also, Satter the author claims the big problems in urban America are not deindustrialization or the culture of poverty but greedy landlords and rapacious mortgage bankers. One might ask, then, why was there so much crime and so little hope in the government-run public housing projects of Chicago such as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes? Neither housing project gets so much as a mention in “Family Properties,” which may be because their problems don’t fit neatly into the “intellectual elegance of Marxist thought,” with its conception that the problems of our minorities or our cities are the fault of “exploitative Jewish slum landlords” robbing the poor so they can donate more money to synagogues.