The lobby is far from dead and buried

The Zionist lobby strikes again:

In a dramatic conclusion to a building political fight over his selection as the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, former U.S. Ambassador Charles “Chas” W. Freeman, Jr., asked that the appointment not proceed, the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, announced Tuesday.

Freeman, 66, is a widely experienced former State Department diplomat who gained attention in recent years for his criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians and Jewish settlements and for his biting analysis of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan explains the message heard loud and clear:

There are a couple of things worth noting about this minor, yet major, Washington spat. The first is that the MSM has barely covered it as a news story, and the entire debate occurred in the blogosphere. I don’t know why. But that would be a very useful line of inquiry for a media journalist.

The second is that Obama may bring change in many areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden. Even if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.

When Obama told us that the resistance to change would not end at the election but continue every day after, he was right. But he never fought this one. He’s shrewder than I am.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald continues:

In the… U.S., you can advocate torture, illegal spying, and completely optional though murderous wars and be appointed to the highest positions.…  But you can’t, apparently, criticize Israeli actions too much or question whether America’s blind support for Israel should be re-examined.

Quite.

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