Two representative views on the article...the first written by Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review:

The recent Time piece on Israel by a Karl Vick is probably the most anti-Semitic essay I have ever read in a mainstream publication.

Among Vick’s interviewees is Heli Itach, a modern-day Shylock who brags about the money to be made selling condos in Jerusalem (“‘Even when the Qassams fell, we continued to sell!’ says Heli Itach, slapping a palm on the office desk”). The accompanying photo shows carefree Israelis on the beach…..You see, Vick has discovered that the rather worldly Israelis, after stealing their land from Arabs, don’t much care for the hard negotiations that the Obama administration is now engaged in (“big elemental thoughts”), not when it is a matter of — yes, making money: “With souls a trifle weary of having to handle big elemental thoughts, the Israeli public prefers to explore such satisfactions as might be available from the private sphere, in a land first imagined as a utopia.”

And a second view from Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest:

The thrust of the Time piece, however, is not altogether new. It’s that Israelis are enjoying the good life–a booming, high-tech economy means that it has other concerns than trying to placate the Palestinians. It can afford to ignore them. One peace activist interviewed by Vick observes, “We’re not really that into the peace process. We are really, really into the water sports.”

What’s wrong with that?….If Israel is going to become a normal country, then there’s no reason its citizens shouldn’t enjoy the fruits of prosperity. A more accurate title to Vick’s piece would probably be something like “Why Israel Doesn’t Need To Care About Peace.” But it wouldn’t sell as many newsstand copies or create buzz.

Israel’s prosperity gives it  a stronger negotiating hand when negotiating with the Palestinians. It’s not desperate for a deal.  Israel continues to have the best military in the region, and a powerful economy is only going to help ensure that that remains the case.

No doubt the Time piece exaggerates the extent to which Israelis are indifferent to the prospect of peace. This kind of trend-spotting is always somewhat suspect. But Vick surely captures an aspect of Israel, one that isn’t hostage to wider events in the Middle East. If Time is anti-Semitic, Vick’s piece does not provide evidence of it.

You can read an excerpt of the article here. The full version is available in print or on the Revolutionary iPad. (Apple pays me 5 cents every time I write that.)

Having read the full article on my Revolutionary iPad (ka-ching!), I’m going to side with Heilbrunn on this one. I do find the cover misguided and offensive, since it conveys the impression of Israel being opposed to peace—-and the image of the daisy Star of David suggests a country populated entirely by hedonistic, sun-tanning lotus eaters. But, like Heilbrunn, I find the article more guilty of “trend-spotting” than spreading hate speech.

Ironically, for those criticizing Time, the article addresses a number of points that supporters of Israel (including yours truly) say are typically missing from magazine stories. At a time when people throw around the term “Apartheid Wall,” the Time piece credits the security fence with effectively preventing terrorism and allowing Israelis to finally enjoy a semblance of a normal life. And while other articles portray the Israelis as obstinate and uncompromising, the Time article notes that Arafat rejected a “striking package of Israeli concessions,” leading to the second Intifadeh, when Israelis began “watching and suffering waves of suicide bombings.” And while other pundits smugly predict the failure of the “Zionist Project,” the Time article portrays a country that is thriving and vibrant, even within previously impoverished communities.

Sorry, but I think the kvelling over this article is much ado about not so much. The “most anti-Semitic essay” ever published in a” mainstream publication”? We should be so lucky.

Cohen is a frequent “guest expert” on various cable news shows whenever something ugly goes down. So, it was not surprising to see him on CNN when, last week, a gunman named James Jay Lee took a small number of hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in Maryland. Lee had posted a crazed Internet “manifesto,” and  insisted that the Discovery Channel air his views.

Philip Weiss, always obsessed with “Jewish power” in the United States, saw Cohen’s CNN appearance as yet another manifestation of the Israel Lobby:

“What do I mean by the Israel lobby? Well for one thing, I mean the routine inclusion of a pro-Israel point of view in our media, without contradiction….For the better part of an hour this afternoon, during the hostage crisis at the Discovery channel HQ in Silver Spring, MD, CNN featured commentary by Aaron Cohen, who was described as a trainer of Israeli commandoes. Cohen repeatedly explained how Israel handles such situations. When the anchor asked whether the police could just wait till the guy wears down, Cohen said that in ‘terrorist’ situations people don’t just wear down. So an advocate for one side in a terrible cycle of violence is given a platform on American television.”

In the end, Lee was killed by police and all the hostages were evacuated safely. Perhaps, to provide balance, CNN could ask someone from Hezbollah to explain how he would have taken the hostages more effectively.

One day we’re presented with a treatise on how Jewish dentists are plotting to control the U.S. government. Next, we learn that Zionists are responsible for fomenting a coming war between the U.S. and China. Or, we’re told, Mossad death squads will soon be operating in the United States.

So, as to be expected, Petras’ latest screed, “The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America,” is a veritable goody bag of craziness.

First up, we learn that the Zionist fifth column has expanded to include not only dentists, but other members of the medical community:

The power of Israel in the US does not reside only in the influence and leadership of powerful Washington based “pro-Israel lobbies”, like AIPAC. Without the hundreds of thousands of militant locally based dentists, podiatrists, stockbrokers, real estate brokers, professors and others, the “lobby” would be unable to sustain and implement its policy among hundreds of millions of Americans outside the major metropolises.

I gotta ask: What disjointed firing of brain synapses compels him to focus on podiatrists? I mean, why not heart surgeons? Was he traumatized by a podiatrist at some point in his life? Or does he just have an unhealthy obsession with the human foot?

Next, Petras explains why the Jewish community has traditionally disapproved of intermarriage:

The Zionist power configuration rests on a declining population base: most young Jews marry outside the confines of the ethno-religious Jewish-Israeli nexus and many of them are not likely to form the bases for rabid campaigns on behalf of a racist state. The Zionist leadership’s high intensity and heavily endowed effort to fence in young people of Jewish ancestry via private schools, subsidized “summer programs” in Israel etc. are as much out of fear and recognition of the drift away from clerical chauvinism as it is an attempt to recruit a new generation of Israel First militants.

Teaching young people about their Jewish history and ancestry…the horror!

And, finally, Petras warns that the recent activities of the “Zionist Power Configuration” could provoke a mass uprising among the disenfranchised against capitalists, their Zionist cohorts and “innocent” Jews:

Today Jewish and Christian Manhattan rednecks are fermenting mass Islamic hatred (the so called “Mosque controversy”) as a distraction from the economic crises and rising unemployment. Zionist promotion of mass Islamophobia, so near to Wall Street, where many of their fat cats who profit from plundering the assets of America operate, is a dangerous game. If the same enraged masses turn their eyes upward toward the wealthy and powerful instead of downward to blacks and Muslims, some unpleasant and unanticipated surprises might rebound against, not only Israel’s operatives, but all those wrongly identified as related to a misconstrued Jewish Motherland.

Thank you, as always, James Petras for the unintentional amusement. Looking forward to your next installment.

In New York, the sale of whole bagels isn’t subject to sales tax. But the tax does apply to “sliced or prepared bagels (with cream cheese or other toppings),” according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance. And if the bagel is eaten in the store, even if it’s never been touched by a knife, it’s also taxed.

Folks are justifiably outraged—but perhaps this represents an opportunity.

As the NYT reminds us, taxes can shift consumer behavior. (One of the arguments for the high tax on cigarettes, for instance, is that it can help discourage smoking.)

So, my proposal: Let’s not tax all bagels, but only the bagels with offensive flavors: blueberry, chocolate, strawberry, even fuckin’ bacon.

Traditional bagel varieties: plain, onion, garlic, poppy seed, and (for the daring) “everything bagels,” will be exempt from this tax.

My goal is to further prevent the bastardization of Jewish culinary culture. Also, I consider these variations on the bagel to be an affront to the palate.

Bottom line: If you can’t put lox on it, then by definition it’s not a bagel.

Among the recommended articles is this compilation of ten of the most popular conspiracy theories currently circulating on the radical right and, “increasingly, on points of the political spectrum much too close to the center for comfort.”

Actually, more than a few of them can also be found on the left side of the political spectrum: 9/11 was a government plot, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is a secret weapon (and yes, I’m thinking of you Hugo Chavez.)

Also unsurprisingly, a common element among these theories is the nefarious Jewish/Zionist/Neocon Cabal. For instance, on the subject of “gun confiscations”:

Within Patriot subculture, the gun-confiscation fear sometimes dovetails with other conspiracies of an anti-Semitic flavor. Proponents of gun control in these instances are seen as representing a New World Order cabal run by Jews. At the website Real Zionist News, for example, a New York State gun control law aimed at protecting police officers was described as “the first step toward confiscation.” According to the site, “The real agenda is to disarm law-abiding GENTILES, whom Zionist Jews fear will soon discover Jewry’s anti-American, freedom-hating mission.”

But, what about the gun nuts who founded Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership? C’mon, rightwing conspiracy mongers, can’t we all get along?

In a newly-published interview with the Palestine Note, Chas blames the 9/11 attacks on U.S. support for Israel, and makes clear whom he believes was responsible for the decision to invade Iraq:

What distinguishes Iran from Iraq, where many of the same people were in the lead of arguing that there was some reason to attack, and generating disinformation, false intelligence and generally mischaracterizing the situation so as to promote the possibility of an attack, is that unlike Iraq where this was basically done by American partisans of Israel, when the Israelis themselves I believe had their own doubts about that target, this time the cooperation between the American flacks for Israel and Israel itself is open and entirely above-board.

Comments like that stick in my mind after reading Peter Bergen’s book, The Osama Bin Laden I know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader. In that book, Bergen recalls his reaction to a videotape released by Al Qaeda in mid-August 2001:

Osama Bin Laden:  “if we look into the most sensitive departments of the government, whether it is the Pentagon, the State Department or the CIA, you find that it is the Jews who have the first word inside the American government. Consequently, they use America to execute their plans around the world.”

Bergen: “This last comment from bin Laden is quite illuminating. I was always puzzled by the fact that bin Laden, who had declared war on the ‘Crusaders and the Jews’ in 1998, had hitherto not attacked Israeli or Jewish targets. After the 9/11 attacks, I came to realize that for bin Laden, and his rabidly anti-semitic colleagues, the Pentagon was a Jewish target.”

It’s a deadly circular logic: Pundits such as Freeman believe that the U.S.-Israeli relationship is not in America’s best interests. The only explanation or this continuing relationship, they reason, is the power of  “American partisans of Israel” in the U.S. government. And yet, the perception of “Jewish control” of the U.S. government is a prime motivator for terrorist attacks against America.

It never occurs to these people that a more effective anti-terrorism strategy would be to stop validating anti-semitic conspiracy theories.

Abbasi says that in the past six years, 23 baby girls had been trained as Basij members through “Koranic, cultural, educational, and military” classes.

“In this regard Basij mothers register their baby girls 40 days after they were born at the Hossein Haj Mousaee unit by presenting documents and IDs.”

She added that two babies have recently been born and that work is under way to prepare a dossiers for the new “Basij babies” and enroll them in the special program.

The best means of repentance and reparation, in my view, would be for the U.S. government to fund and build a new mosque at Ground Zero covering the entire World Trade Center site, with twin minarets looming above in memory of the Twin Towers’ destruction by genocidal Islamophobes. The minarets should be more than 700 feet in height, which would make the new structure the world’s tallest mosque. This mosque should house a 9/11 Truth Museum documenting the evidence that 9/11 was carried out by U.S. and Israeli insiders, not Muslims. It could include such artifacts as the laughably bogus “last will and testament of Mohammed Atta,” pieces of airplane wreckage from earlier crashes that were planted at the alleged 9/11 crash sites, WTC structural steel samples showing melting and evaporation caused by explosives, videos and other objects seized from the Israeli Mossad team that filmed and celebrated their colleagues’ destruction of the World Trade Center, unflattering wax figures of such 9/11 villains as Dick Cheney, Larry Silverstein, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and samples of nanothermite-laden World Trade Center dust.

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center has released a poll noting that a growing number of Americans (20 percent) believe that Obama is a (gasp!) Muslim. In response, the Washington Post provides this public service: “a majority said they learned this from the media. But the media are not alone when it comes to promoting or insinuating falsehoods about the president’s religion and, by extension, his birthplace. We’ve collected a list of lawmakers whose comments have helped fuel the debate. Most either said outright that the president is a Muslim, that he is not a U.S. citizen or appeared to leave open the possibility that either falsehood could be true.” (Top of the list, Sarah Palin).

Writing in the NY Daily News, Ramzi Kassem offers this view explaining the persistence of the “Obama is a Muslim” myth:

One must view it as commentary on his perceived “otherness.” As a black male, Obama belongs to what is arguably – from a historical perspective – the most reviled and oppressed group in our society. Moreover, he carries a foreign, even Muslim-sounding name. But explicit racism is no longer in vogue in mainstream America. These polls show that people are circumventing the taboo by using Islam as a proxy for race. The Muslim male, as he exists in America’s collective psyche, is today’s ultimate “other,” a menacing adversary with whom we are locked in existential struggle….For those who continue to feel estranged from a President who is not white, labeling Obama as Muslim is the sole available substitute for racial epithets that are no longer tolerated.

(That’s an argument I can sympathize with, given the tendency to use criticisms of Israel and Zionism as proxies for anti-semitism.) If you’d like to read classic example of this perceived “otherness,” check out this uber-creepy editorial from the conservative Washington Times on “Why Obama is a Cultural Muslim,” complete with this photo:

And, to complete the conspiracy theory community trifecta, we hear from the “Deaders” — the term I’ve created to describe folks, like Talibanette journalist Yvonne Ridley–who are convinced the Osama Bin Laden is still alive.

Moonbat author Maidhc Ó Cathail publishes this Deader Manifesto in the Tehran Times, and detects a Jewish conspiracy:

According to U.S. and British intelligence officials, al-Qaeda’s media wing, As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication, has been run since 2001 by Adam Gadahn, a California-born convert to radical Islam who now goes by the name Azzam al-Amriki. Gadahn found his way to the Islamic Society of Orange County while living with his grandfather, Carl Pearlman, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League. Ostensibly a civil rights organization set up to fight anti-Semitism, the ADL is “little more than a de facto adjunct of the Israeli government” which has even been caught spying on American critics of Israel.

Adam’s parents changed their surnames to Gadahn in the mid-1970s. The name refers to the Biblical warrior Gideon who, with the aid of trumpets and clay jars, defeated Israel’s enemies.

As Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo put it, Adam Gadahn is “an awfully odd figure, whose sudden evolution from a nice Jewish boy into Osama bin Laden’s Goebbels is just a little hard to take.”

Equally inevitable was the response from the usual suspects, such as Glenn Greenwald and Juan Cole, who declared that the publication of the article made the magazine “a de facto party to the neoconservative and Israeli campaign to initiate a global war with Iran.”

Blogging over at Time, Joe Klein—a longtime critic of those proposing an attack against Iran— nonetheless defends the publication of Goldberg’s article:

Glenn Greenwald displays his usual inability to understand what journalism is all about in his latest attack on Jeff Goldberg–which is so flimsy that I assume Greenwald only undertook it in order to continue his recent vamping about Goldberg’s alleged politics. The boy does need his vendettas to amp the hits on his site.

In this case, he has taken a mistaken assumption from one of Jeff’s New Yorker pieces–that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program–and inflated it into the hilariously grotesque notion that Jeff’s excellent cover story in the Atlantic about Israel’s desire to take out the Iranian nuclear program is an act of propaganda.

It isn’t. It’s an act of journalism. Goldberg allows Bibi Netanyahu–who seems truly damaged in Jeff’s piece–to speak for himself. The result is chilling. Netanyahu compares Iran’s possible acquisition of a nuclear weapon to the holocaust. Can’t walk around the block with Bibi without hearing about the Nazis, apparently–but Greenwald stupidly mistakes Goldberg’s reporting of this fact for his agreeing with this fact (and whether he does or not is irrelevant)

I don’t know where Jeff Goldberg stands on attacking Iran. I suspect he may be more in equivocal about it than I am–but then, I’m vehemently opposed. No matter what Jeff thinks, his Atlantic piece has no secret agenda….

Juan Cole, however, does believe in a secret agenda. In what I believe is his most conspiratorial post ever written (which says a lot), Cole sees a Jewish-Military-Industrial-Complex plan to remove Obama from office:

What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do? This political grouping includes WASPS such as former CIA director James Woolsey and former UN ambassor John Bolton, but at its core is politically active and extremely wealthy Jewish former Democrats who broke with their party in the 1980s to become war hawks in Republican administrations, and most of whom are rooted in Rightwing Zionism as exemplified in the thought of prominent fascist theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky.

They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half of America’s 400 billionaires on their side. They have the enormous military-industrial complex on their side. They have the Yahoo complex of besieged lower middle class White America on their side. They have the Israel lobbies on their side. They have important segments of the Oil and Gas lobbies on their side. They have the whole American tradition of permanent war on their side. They should not be underestimated.

It is not so hard to get up a war. You position the war as inevitable. As Right. As Necessary. You reimagine the poor weak ramshackle enemy as a science fictional superpower, months away from possession of a Neutron Bomb that could Destroy the Universe. It has to be done. We are in danger.

Goldberg is trying to make an Iran war seem highly likely if not inevitable, if not now then in the near future….A Netanyahu attack on Iran would reduce Barack Obama to a one-term president, which may be what Goldberg and his fellow conspirators are really aiming for.

Sources add that Papandreou appears interested in promoting his policies both in Israel and the Arab world when moderate Arab powers are concerned about both Iran and what some analysts term Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “neo-Ottoman” initiatives, with Papandreou consequently seeking a mediating role in the Middle East peacekeeping process.

Aside from Greek diplomatic aspirations to play an expanded regional role…. the government is concerned to engineer a quick re-entry to world global financial markets to refinance its crushing debt burden and believes that the U.S.-Jewish lobby could play an important role in this effort.

Guess they didn’t read the news about Harvard dumping investments in Israel in favor of Turkish bonds. (Sorry, Greece.)