#rsrh So, this J Street foreign donors thing…

…that Walter Russell Mead brings up in passing while explaining why AIPAC succeeds and J Street fails*: does that mean that Barack Obama will start criticizing the organization until it discloses its donors list?  Personally, I don’t particularly care one way or the other, but it seems to be a bit of a preoccupation among Democrats contemplating their own political mortality these days; so practice what you preach, Democrats.

Moe Lane

PS: I am practicing what I’m preaching: I don’t care if they do.  But if advocating full disclosure is such an important moral stance for Democrats, why aren’t they pounding the table and demanding that J Street reveal its donor list?

Continue reading #rsrh So, this J Street foreign donors thing…

J Street apologist miscounts Israeli options.

Of course he does.

This is amusing, in a darkly humorous sort of way:

More recently, Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and a member of J Street, said in an interview: “America has three choices. Either say, it’s politically too hot a potato to touch, and just pay the consequences in the rest of the world. Or try to force through a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, so that the Palestinian grievance issue is no longer a driving force or problem.” The third choice, he said, “is for America to say, we can’t solve it, but we can’t pay the consequences, so we will distance ourselves from Israel. That way America would no longer be seen, as it has been this week, as the enabler of excesses of Israeli misbehavior.”

Via Hot Air. It’s darkly humorous because there are five options here, not three – which Daniel Levy knows full well. Continue reading J Street apologist miscounts Israeli options.

Weekly Standard counting coup on J-Street conference.

The Weekly Standard has been having a lot of fun whittling down support of J Street, which is a group that pretty much defines itself as the liberal answer to AIPAC – and that pretty much says it all, does it? Anyway, J-Street is having a conference, and TWS has been cheerfully shining a flashlight on the whole thing for the last month or so. Their current score?

With the departure of Kampeas, J Street has now lost five speakers — the three def poets that they cut for the “use and abuse of Holocaust imagery,” Geoff Davis, the Kentucky Republican whose name disappeared from the conference program today and whose office refuses to comment on the matter, and now Kampeas. In addition to the 12 members of Congress who’ve yanked their support, that’s 17 individuals who have either distanced themselves from J Street or have been thrown under the bus by J Street lest they provoke any more controversy.

List not including Senator John Kerry, who is being… John Kerry about the whole thing. Anyway: while I suppose that Marty Peretz is correct in his assessment of J Street’s actual power (and quite crude in the way that he refers to them); watching TWS smack them around like this is fun. Which is reason enough for them to continue.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.