"Leftist" English Prof Publishes Propaganda Excuses for Obama in the Nation Mag

When fascism comes to America,
it will be called anti-fascism.
attributed to Huey Long, governor of Louisiana

The Nation mag today is a rag publishing support for State Dept postions in the name of Leftism [whatever that means today]. At one time, back in the 1940s, it criticized the State Dept for its anti-Israel policy . Now it supports State Dept policy. This may be due to a series of ownership changes that the weekly underwent back in the 1970s. One purchaser was Hamilton Fish IV [or the III or the V?]. Young Fish's grandfather was Republican Senator Hamilton Fish who, to be honest, provided some help to the campaign to save Jews during the Holocaust, going so far as to criticize President Franklin Roosevelt [as I recall]. Where young Fish or his successor owners stood I don't know. As far back as 1979, the Nation supported Ayatollah Khomeini's takeover of Iran, which was also supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski, at that time, Jimmy Carter's national insecurity advisor. Zbig is now advising the Obama campaign for president. Zbig's presence in his campaign indicates the fraud of Obama's claim to represent the new, the fresh, the innocent, untainted by Washington's corruption. That fakery by Obama shows just how dangerous he could be.

Obama's campaign of fraud & imposture has thankfully run into some snags, including a silly Harvard Professor who can't keep her mouth shut. Samantha Power embarassed Obama repeatedly during her European tour and has since resigned. Curiously, Zbig wanted Samantha Power to stay with the Obama campaign. Maybe he wanted her as a soft-feminine face to cover his brutal plans to bring the world more Khomeinis, more Hamas gangs, and more Hizbullah.
Here's a gem from a Nation editorial in support of the Khomeini takeover of Iran in 1979. After Khomeini's takeover of Iran in early 1979, supported by the Brzezinski/Carter team, a committee was appointed in Iran to draw up a new constitution. The Nation described the members of this committee as men of:

"impeccable civil libertarian credentials."

Today, everyone can judge the civil libertarian nature of the Iranian regime for himself.

Be that as it may, recently, a Nation columnist Eric Alterman, an English prof at Brooklyn College, has written a propaganda tract defending Obama, Zbig, & Company. Alterman exemplifies several propaganda techniques in his article: appeal to authority, omission of vital information, sneering at opponents and critics rather than answering them substantively..

Here is a column by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, of all papers, that details Obama's offensive relationship with a Judeophobic minister who admires the Judeophobic demagogue, Louis Farrakhan.

Debbie Schlussel uncovered evidence of "Nation of Islam" personnel on the Obama staff in DC and in his campaign.

Alterman defends Obama by omitting information & misrepresenting Obama's critics.

During the past few months a small group of neoconservative Jews, many of whom hold key positions in the world of official Jewish institutions, have been working to undermine the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama with a series of carefully planted character assassinations and deliberately misleading innuendo.

So the opposition to Obama is based on innuendo and character assassination. No mention of his minister, Rev Wright's attacks on Israel appears in the article. Indeed, Rev Wright does not appear at all in the article. Nor does Tony Rezko, a Chicago slumlord and Obama's Syrian financier, appear in the article. But further down in the article, Alterman mentions the concerns that some Jews have over Zbigniew Brzezinski being one of Obama's advisors. We ought to conclude that Zbig is his main foreign policy advisor, since he has already undertaken a trip to Syria on Obama's behalf. What does it mean that Obama's foreign policy advisor goes to visit Syria, a bloodthirsty Arab dictatorship which just happens to be the junior partner in an alliance with Islamofascist Iran, a country where the present regime was helped to take power by that same Brzezinski in 1979??? Alterman treats all this as mere "guilt by association," like the often reckless guilt-by-association charges made by Senator Joseph McCarthy back in the early 1950s.

. . . the neoconnish campaign against Obama was not able to gain much traction. Perhaps as a consequence, as the Forward {Alterman quotes the "leftist" Jewish paper, once the major Yiddish newspaper in the United States-Eliyahu} has editorialized, "the attacks on Obama have metastasized into a wide-ranging assault on his associations." These attacks, as blogger Matthew Yglesias notes, have largely amounted to the following: "First Obama was an anti-Semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-Semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to [Commentary's Noah] Pollack [sic] it's Samantha Power who's tainted by Jew-hatred."

Well, maybe they are really Judeophobes, including Malley whose father was a Jewish Communist. Let's just wonder at this point at how the son of a prominent Communist becomes a high official of the State Department, whereas back in the fifties, Communists were anathema in the United States. Zbig was raised in Nazi Germany as the son a Polish diplomat there. While in office as jimmy carter's gray eminence [eminence grise] Zbig helped Khomeini takeover Iran, as said above, badgered poor Menahem Begin to make concessions to Nazi-sympathizer Anwar Sadat, and turned his back on the civil war in Lebanon, which the US could have done much to alleviate. Moreover, by supporting Khomeini, Zbig opened the way to all kinds of horrors, the Iranian bomb and the fanatic ayatollahs oppression of their own people and the Hizbullah, which killed hundreds of Americans in bombings in Beirut. By using fanatic Sunni Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Zbig helped to make Osama bin Ladin into a major threat to the world.
All this seems either unknown to Alterman and Matthew Iglesias or is unimportant to them. Of course, Alterman also tries to belittle Zbig's advisory relationship to Obama.

According to a report in Newsweek, Ann Lewis, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, made reference during a conference call with Jewish leaders to Brzezinski, whom she falsely labeled Obama's "chief foreign policy adviser." (In fact, according to Brzezinski, he has advised Obama on a total of one occasion.) While Brzezinski did anger some Jews with his endorsement of the controversial Walt/Mearsheimer book, his views are not only well within the foreign policy mainstream; they are also completely consistent with those expressed by a majority of American Jews--far more so than those hawks who profess to speak in their name.

Besides groundlessly belittling the Zbig-Obama relationship, there are other curiosities in this statement. First, our "leftist" Alterman lightly steps over the very deceitful walt-mearsheimer book, a propaganda tract written by two very Establishment political scientists, indeed w&m are State Dept consultants. Then, Alterman tells us that Zbig's views are "well within the foreign policy mainstream." How is it that our "leftist" Alterman defends a maker of foreign policy whose views are "mainstream," that is, Establishment?? Further, just which foreign policy views of Zbig are consistent with those of most American Jews. A few months after 9-11, Zbig was interviewed for the French paper, Le Monde. He was asked if he had any regrets for arming and aiding otherwise the Muslim fanatics fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, since some of them, led by Bin Laden, had carried out the 9-11 attack. No, he said, he had no regrets since Soviet losses in the Afghan war had brought down the Soviet Union. In other words, everything was OK. I hope those Americans who advocate a foreign policy based on "pure American interests" consider this answer by Zbig. Recall that the Soviets, however evil they were throughout the world, never carried out mass murder attacks on American civilians within the United States. That's how Zbig is loyal to the safety of American civilians.
Alterman makes another curious defense of Robert Malley mentioned above.

CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. . . [declared] that Malley's articles on Middle East issues "demonize Israel only slightly less than his father." This is nonsense, naturally. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and former State Department officials Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, all of whom worked with Malley, signed a letter denouncing "a series of vicious personal attacks" against him.

So "leftist" Alterman wants us to take the word of Malley's State Dept and National Security colleagues that "personal attacks" on Malley were "vicious" and presumably unjustified. Bear in mind that Sandy Berger is notorious for stealing and destroying US govt documents in order to protect himself from criticism. Berger was also the national insecurity advisor when the Clinton Adminstration went to war against Serbia, twice. Does "leftist" Alterman approve of those wars?? Could a "vicious" critic of US policy in the Clinton years see those wars as "imperialist"??? Those wars helped to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Croatia and Kossovo. They also helped to set up a govt of drug smugglers and white slavers in Kossovo. Is all that OK with Alterman?? By the way, I have put in boldface Alterman's remark that it's "nonsense" that Malley is less an enemy of Israel than his father, Simon Malley. Does Alterman's remark mean that Malley hates Israel more than his father did??

Let's conclude with some warnings about Obama that Alterman ridicules:

Morton Klein, who heads up the . . . Zionist Organization of America, . . . term[ed] the notion of an Obama presidency "frightening." He was joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group that professes to speak for all American Jews. Hoenlein told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Obama's talk of "change" could prove "an opening for all kinds of mischief" and gave voice to what he termed "a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign."

Now, full disclosure. I have met both Klein and Hoenlein. In fact, I first met Hoenlein many years ago. I have not always agreed with him, but I always believed that Hoenlein was an honest man who spoke his sincere beliefs. Further, Dr Hoenlein has a PhD in political science, whereas we are told that Alterman is a "Distinguished Professor of English." That alone does not mean that Hoenlein is superior in the knowledge of politics to Alterman. But since Zbig was and is a prominent political scientist, it is more likely that Hoenlein is familiar with Zbig's often terrifying writings than Alterman and it is likely that Hoenlein understands these matters better. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with Hoenlein that Obama's demagogic talk about "change" could open the door for "all kinds of mischief." Alterman belittles all of these very genuine concerns that an informed, intelligent and civilized man ought to share.
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Here is more on Obama, the Obama-Zbig connection and on Alterman:
Noah Pollak responds to Alterman on the Contentions blog.
Ted Belman of Israpundit on Zbig: here & here & here
Spengler, columnist for the Asia Times, examines Obama's character.
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Coming: More lies of the "peace process," peace follies, propaganda, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, the Land of Israel, etc.