A recent remark by the head of the U.S. administration’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, has sparked a wave of harsh criticism in Jerusalem.

Rosenthal told Haaretz earlier this week that comments made by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, against the liberal Jewish lobby J Street were “most unfortunate.”

Senior government officials told Haaretz on Friday that “We were surprised at Ms. Rosenthal’s remarks, as reported in Haaretz.” The officials stressed that he comments “don’t reflect the nature of the relations between Israel and the U.S., nor do they reflect the great respect and appreciation of the ambassador and his staff felt both in Jerusalem and in Washington.”

J Street was established a few years ago as a new pro-Israel lobby to counterbalance the strong, veteran group AIPAC, considered to be toeing a more right-wing conservative line. Under the motto “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” J Street began to promote issues like a freeze on settlement construction and a two-state solution. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Notice this article refers to the “U.S. administration’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.” I also know of the White House Liaison to the Jewish Community. Do other communities enjoy this privilege?

Encouraging that they were even allowed on the air. I listened to Anna Baltzer speak once and met briefly with her. She inspired my own visit to the holy land.

Check out Anna’s website www.annainthemiddleeast.com.

Seven United States senators have sponsored a bill that would abolish the “security” waiver that American presidents have used to prevent implementing a 1995 law declaring that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback, a long-time supporter of Israel, introduced the bill and said, “It is long overdue for America to recognize the sovereign right of Israel to choose Jerusalem as its capital city.”

The proposed Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act law, number S. 2737, is “a bill to relocate to Jerusalem the United States Embassy in Israel” and has six co-sponsors–five Republicans, from Kentucky, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana and Independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. (Read more from myantiwar.org)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Israel’s Ambassador to the United States on Sunday told American Jewish groups that they must press for sanctions on Iran, and condemned the findings of a United Nations commission on the Gaza conflict between Israel and Hamas, which he said helped to “cast widespread doubts about Israel’s legitimacy.” (Read more from Haaretz.com)

It did not take the Israel Lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements“ position. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the US government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

In May President Obama read the Israelis the riot act, telling the Israeli government that he was serious about ending the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians and that a lasting peace agreement required the Israeli government to abandon all construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

On November 10 Obama’s White House chief of staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, surrendered for his boss at the annual conference of the United Jewish Communities.

The ongoing Israeli settlements, he said, should not be a “distraction” to a peace agreement.

This is like saying that me continuing to steal from you should not be a “distraction” to us getting along.

A few days, ago the US House of Representatives voted 344 to 36 in favor of disavowing the UN report by the distinguished Jewish judge Richard Goldstone that found that Israel had committed war crimes in its attack on the civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto. The Israel Lobby demanded that the House repudiate the fact-filled report, and the servile House did as its master ordered.

US Rep. Dennis Kucinich spoke to his colleagues for 2 minutes in an effort to make them see that their vote against the Goldstone report would be a great embarrassment to the US government and demean the House in the eyes of the world.

. . . .

Retribution quickly fell upon Kucinich for his 2 minute speech. On November 9, Kucinich was forced to withdraw as the keynote speaker for the Palm Beach County (Florida) Democratic Party’s annual fundraising dinner. The Israel Lobby gave the order—dump Kucinich or there’s no money and no one is coming to the dinner. County Commissioner Burt Aaronson called Kucinich “an absolute horror.” (Read more from prisonplanet.com)

Eleven organizations from the US, Palestine and Israel have called on baseball’s New York Mets to cancel a 21 November dinner at the Caesars Club at Citi Field for the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund. The dinner is a fundraiser for Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank City of Hebron. In a letter sent to the Mets on 3 November, the groups said, “The New York Mets will be facilitating activities that directly violate international law and the Obama administration’s call for a freeze in settlement construction, and that actively promote racial discrimination, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in Hebron.” Seven hundred Israeli settlers, living amidst 150,000 Palestinians in Hebron, are expanding their hold on the historic old city by driving out the Palestinian residents. (Read more from electronicintifada.net)

Jewish Republican party officials and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) are among several groups that have called on U.S. President Barack Obama to rescind his appointment of former senator Chuck Hagel as co-chairman of his Intelligence Advisory Board.

Hagel made clear his attitude towards Israel when he spoke at the pro-Arab and self-proclaimed pro-Israel J Street lobby last week. He echoed President Obama’s previous statements that meeting the demand of the Palestinian Authority for a new Arab state within Israel’s current borders “is central, not peripheral, to U.S. vital security interests in combating terrorism.”

He also said that the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel “must not come at the expense of our Arab relationships.” (Read more from israelnationalnews.com)

The US House of Representatives has condemned the Goldstone Report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. The resolution, which defined the report as “one-sided and distorted” was supported by a wide majority of 334 delegates against 36 who opposed it. Twenty-two delegates abstained.

In the resolution, the House calls on US President Barack Obama to work to curb the report in international institutions. (Read more from ynetnews.com)

See Also:

A former NASA scientist was arrested on Monday for offering to pass along classified information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer.

Stewart David Nozette, who is credited with helping discover evidence of water on the moon, was arrested by federal authorities on Monday. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Ilan Shturman, deputy director of the Israeli foreign ministry’s hasbara department (!), told an Israeli business newspaper in July that US$150,000 had been allocated for the first stage of a campaign to seed the Internet with hasbarats:

“Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli foreign ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.”

. . . .

In January, Amir Gissin, Israel’s consul-general in Toronto, sent out a hasbara recruitment letter, which read in part: “If you are frustrated or concerned with the portrayal of Israel in Canadian News and with biased [sic] depictions, your voice can be heard. Now, think that you’re not alone 10,000 voices like yours can respond every day: praise, protest, inform, correct on leading Canadian news websites, in real time, effectively.”

The weakness with this tactic, as you probably figured out, is that hasbarats will inevitably shout and whine themselves into irrelevance. Eventually, intelligent people will tune out the zionist boilerplate, the anti-Muslim smears, and the interminable drone about the holocaust. Already, the once-dreaded epithet “anti-Semite” has lost all significance, as if it ever had any, and the person who hurled it is more likely to be mocked than feared.

. . . .

This tactic was tried at the recent Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as Tel Aviv was spotlighted in a City-to-City program with Toronto. The ostensible purpose was to use an apolitical, cultural event to obscure the tyranny that Tel Aviv represents, but more than 1,000 filmmakers and performers, weren’t fooled. They put their names to The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation, an open letter to the TIFF that protested the co-optation of the festival by the Israeli propaganda machine.

The protest accomplished precisely what the hasbarats tried to prevent. “Rather than talking about Israel’s rich cinematic culture, the buzz this week in Toronto has centered on the one thing Israeli officials had sought to avoid: the conflict with the Palestinians,” reported the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

Another major defeat for Israel came courtesy of Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert. After offering a knee-jerk condemnation of the City-to-City protests, he reversed himself the next day:

“I wasn’t prepared with enough facts about the events leading up to the Festival’s decision to showcase Tel Aviv in the City-to-City section. I [initially] thought of it as an innocent goodwill gesture, but now realize it was part of a deliberate plan to ‘re-brand’ Israel in Toronto, as a pilot for a larger such program. The Festival should never have agreed to be used like this. It was naïve for the plan’s supporters to believe it would have the effect they hoped for.”

. . . .

According to the authors of the Toronto Declaration:

“Many Palestinian artists and filmmakers, denied freedom of movement by Israel’s Occupation and pass system, are de facto boycotted, unable to communicate with their communities or travel freely. The double standard is mind-boggling and, slowly, these are the issues we are helping to put under a spotlight.”

Finally, it is important to note that the Declaration’s authors succeeded without any media help. They had no money to place ads, and no newspaper would publish their open letter. On the other hand, hasbarats had the full support (read: “obedience”) of Canada’s national media, and lost.

If a modest, unfunded, popular protest can effectively defeat an orchestrated propaganda campaign, what does that say about Israel’s ability to pose as a legitimate, democratic state? (Read more from usa.mediamonitors.net)

“The United States is ‘unyielding’ in its support for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, U.S. President Barack Obama said in a special video message to the Muslim world on Friday to mark the beginning of Ramadan.

Obama used the occasion to reiterate his desire to mend relations between the United States and Muslim countries, an effort he began with a major speech in Cairo in June to the Muslim world.” (Read more from haaretz.com)

There’s a lot of behind the scenes anger at Obama for taking such a strong stance, at least with rhetoric – not with his political appointees. Can it be???? Is this change that I do believe in?

See also: Democratic rep. criticizes Obama demand for Israeli settlement freeze

“Nearly seven months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, feuding among major U.S. Jews organizations is taking place behind closed doors and could be reaching its worst point in recent memory.

Left-wing U.S. Jewish organizations have been buoyed by the election of Obama, and according to some Jewish Democrats in Washington, tensions have been worsened by the lessening of right-wing Jews’ access to senior White House officials, in contrast to the near-monopoly they had on access to Bush administration officials for the past eight years.

The feuding may have become more personal this week, after left-wing Israel advocacy group ‘J Street’ published an open letter Anti-Defamation League Head Abraham Foxman.

The J Street letter came in a response to a full-page ad taken out by the ADL in the New York Times this week, which said, ‘The problem isn’t settlements, it’s Arab rejection.’” (Read more from haaretz.com)