Jonathon Tobin of Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent notes that the moment the US started running into trouble in Iraq, the Jewish members of Bush’s inner circle became scapegoats:
It is a rule of thumb that has been tried and tested many times over the last 2,000 years. When things go bad, blame the Jews. So it can hardly be termed a surprise that the problems that have arisen for the United States in Iraq have led some of the conflict’s fiercest critics to trot out the same bag of tired tricks. When in doubt, they always turn to the familiar refrain of thinly and not-so-thinly veiled canards directed at Israel and the Jews.
Some recent examples: BusinessWeek, Sen. Fritz Hollings (it’s Perle, Wolfowitz and Krauthammer’s fault — Bush hoped that “spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats”), and Gen. Anthony Zinni on 60 Minutes. Then there are those who claim the lack of Israeli concessions to Palestinians doomed the Iraq mission: Anthony Cordesman in the Baltimore Sun (“the United States must abandon the surrealist illusions of those neoconservatives who have done so much to undermine U.S. interests”) and Zinni as quoted by the NY Times Nicholas Kristoff, in Kristoff’s recent anti-Sharon screed.
Haaretz also addresses this issue today:
…certain members of the U.S. Jewish community are beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.
“The fact is that this claim is out there,” says the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, on the charge that the Jews and supporters of Israel were the ones who pushed the U.S. into the war. “We were pointed out at the beginning, and it’s easier to blame us when things go bad,” he adds.
Here’s what Foxman means by ‘pointed out at the beginning’ of the war.
UPDATE Via Judith Weiss: It’s happening in Greece, too.
