The voice may be Bernie Sanders, but the animus in what Sanders says about Israel—including inflating by a factor of ten how many Palestinians died as a consequence of Israel’s allegedly “disproportionate” use of force to defend itself from missile attacks and suicide tunnel incursion’s from Gaza’s Hamastan—comes from James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute.
Over the weekend, Zogby ventilated about internal Israeli coalition politics resulting in the appointment of a controversial new defense minister as if this was a cause celebre justifying a rupture in U.S.-Israel relations.
This should come as no surprise.
At the fortieth anniversary of MLK’s 1963 March on Washington, Zogby condemned Israel for “imprisoning” Palestinians “in a situation that is worse than ever existed even in the bantustans of South Africa.” In 2012, he defended Ralph Nader for denying (the quote is Zogby’s) that “the word ‘anti-Semitism’ can refer only to Jews.” According to Nader—and Zogby—Arabs and Muslims are equally the victims of “anti-Semitism.” This despite the fact that the term was invented in 1879 by Jew-hating German publicist Wilhelm Marr because he believed a new appellation was necessary for a movement dedicated exclusively to fighting a racial war to the death between superior Germans and inferior Jews. Arabs and Muslims had nothing to do with it.
Zogby is the man that Sanders has chosen to inject “balance” into the Democratic Party’s platform position on Israel’s right to survive as a independent state and its friendship with the U.S.
Sanders over the weekend also said he expects the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia to be “messy” because of the outcry from disinherited voices. If Sanders’ guru Zogby has his way, no doubt that Democratic platform will mess up seven decades of bipartisan U.S. support for the Mideast’s only democracy, Israel.
