The secretive nature of the briefing reflected the fact that the allegations being made were simply innuendo that the IDF did not wish to attach itself to in public. (The Israeli Government’s press office did, however, subsequently disseminate the central allegation; they have since removed the offending tweet without a trace.) The main claim was that Abu Rahmah had died of leukemia, and that her death had nothing to do with tear gas. This claim was quickly discredited, but not before it had raced through the right-wing blogosphere. (Here’s one example.) In my mind, an even more galling innuendo was this one, courtesy of the same participant in the briefing:

IDF has heard about the honor killing theory, that Abu Rahma was stabbed to death for being pregnant as a family “honor killing”, however they cannot confirm this and the direction they currently are progressing is more in towards death from a chronic illness.

Who had discussed the possibility of Abu Rahmah’s death being an “honor killing?” As far as I can tell, no one. Here Gen. Mizrahi appeared to be engaged in what is referred to in rhetoric as “paralipsis” — that is, bringing something up under the pretense of not bringing it up. (“I won’t even mention that my opponent beats his wife.”) By gratuitously bringing up the mention of honor killing, the IDF seemed to be trying to raise the specter of Muslim Barbarism in the public mind while appearing high-minded and generous by dismissing it in favor of the leukemia theory.

In any case, now that these allegations have been discredited, a more interesting question is: who was in the “exclusive group of bloggers” that the IDF chose to disseminate its innuendo? It would be helpful, for future reference, to know which public commentators have been chosen for the role of unofficial IDF spokespeople.

For example, one of the most persistent propagators of the since-discredited claims about Abu Rahmah has been Noah Pollak, head of the right-wing advocacy group Emergency Committee for Israel. He was one of those who disseminated the cancer story, as well as numerous other IDF innuendos (it wouldn’t even be fair to call them IDF talking points, since the IDF itself was unwilling to get behind them in public.) Now, if Pollak wanted to mention the rumors, while making clear that they were unverified claims by an anonymous IDF official with a vested interest in the story, that would be one thing. Instead, he simply repeated each claim as fact. After the cancer story was discredited, he refused to offer any correction, and instead appears to have stopped talking about Abu Rahmah at all.

According to David Frum, Pollak (who understands that “modern warfare is PR by other means”) was instrumental in convincing the IDF to step up its media efforts. Yet the exact nature of the Pollak’s relationship with the IDF is a bit unclear. Given that Pollak is the head of an American advocacy group that was formed to intervene in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, it would be helpful to know exactly what his relationship to the Israeli military is. Answers to the following questions would be a useful start:

1) Has Pollak made aliyah?

2) Has he ever served in the IDF? If so, when?

3) Does he have a formalized professional relationship to the IDF? If so, what?

4) Has he ever been paid by the IDF for services rendered? If so, what were they?

5) Has he consulted with the IDF on an unofficial basis?

Lest I be accused of making claims about “dual loyalty,” let me make clear that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with U.S. citizens having sympathies for other states, including Israel. An active relationship with the military of a foreign state, however, is a somewhat different question — while it should by no means disqualify Pollak from working in American politics, it is certainly the sort of information that the public deserves to know, particularly it he aims to be a player on the U.S. domestic political scene.

“The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life,” then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared in a televised statement just after midnight on September 12. “I believe that together we can defeat these forces of evil.”

A spate of Israeli pronouncements proclaimed Israel’s own foreign policy priorities. They drew upon a decade of Israeli assertions of Iranian complicity in all things terrorist, and warnings of imminent Iranian nuclear weaponization. A war of civilizations had begun. 9/11 was just the first strike of Islamic fundamentalists. The next might be a nuclear attack by Iran.

The pronouncements constituted the opening salvo in a months-long back-and-forth about how the U.S. would frame its new “global war on terror.” Would the U.S. choose to court the cooperation of regimes in Muslim majority countries — even enlisting governments like Iran who might sympathize with the dangers of transnational terrorism – in preference to its steadfast strategic partner and loyal ally Israel?

Having just visited the U.S. on September 10, and stopping over in London on his way back to Israel, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that, while it was “probable,” he couldn’t say with certainty that the attacks were linked to Osama Bin Laden. He offered his expectation of a global response to September 11: “The very scale of these acts and the challenge they pose are such that they should evoke a worldwide fight against terrorism,” he declared, citing Europe’s effort against piracy. According to Le Monde, Barak [currently Israel's Defense Minister], saw a “a new and clear demarcation line,” where the “fight” must go beyond Bin Laden and Palestinian resistance groups to include countries that support and harbor them, including “Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, to a certain degree North Korea and Libya, Sudan and a few other regimes that play a secondary role.” (2)

Benjamin Netanyahu, then between his stints as prime minister (he currently holds the office), warned that the attacks on New York and Washington could be a harbinger of the deaths of millions of people once Iran or Iraq acquired nuclear weapons. He emphasized that he personally had warned of such attacks soon after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and in his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism (reissued in 2001). The Jerusalem Post reported Netanyahu’s call for a coalition against “terrorist states like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian entity” that want to “devour the West.” (3)

Opinion pieces derided Russia and its export of “nuclear know-how and equipment to Iran.” (4) An Iran with a bomb, an editorial in the business daily Globes declared, meant that terror organizations could gain access to it. (5) Dan Meridor, an Israeli government minister without portfolio in charge of Israel’s secret services, dismissed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and spoke to Globes instead about a wider war between the free world and countries that support terror that would span “from Ramallah to Gaza, through the Al-Biqa Valley in Lebanon, the mountains of Iran and Afghanistan, all the way to Manhattan.” (6) The war would come quickly: Yosef Lapid of the Shinui party declared in the Jerusalem Post, once Iran had a nuclear bomb in its possession “within three or, at most, five years.” (7)

Whereas George H. W. Bush had kept Israel on the sidelines during the fist Gulf War, an unnamed “Western diplomatic source” now told the Jerusalem Post that Israel would be a full partner in George W. Bush’s anti-terror coalition. Israel might now be allowed to even “participate in attacks against Iraq, as well as Iran and Afghanistan.” (8)

A few days later, however, Efraim Inbar, Director of Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Institute of Strategic Studies (BESA), suggested in a radio interview that  the inclusion of Muslim states in the U.S. “coalition against terrorism,” among them Iran, might require some “compromises” on the part of the U.S. (9) Subsequent reports in the Israeli media built on this apprehension that the participation of Muslim countries would not only restrict Israel’s membership in the anti-terrorist coalition, but might pressure the U.S. to demand Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Alon Pinkas, the Israeli Consul in New York, informed the Foreign Ministry in a cable eight days after the attacks that a “paradigm shift” was taking place in American thinking that could raise questions about the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and criticism of Sharon in major American newspapers might be early warning signs of an anti-Israel backlash.

Pinkas noted that the U.S. media was beginning to link Israeli policies and Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the September 11 attacks, and predicted that “this topic will gain currency on the U.S. agenda… and it becomes clear that Israeli and U.S. interests on the matter are not identical.” (10)

Foreign Ministry officials accused Pinkas of being an “alarmist.” But Israel did not appear on any of the televised maps of the “coalition against terror,” and none of the 27 terrorist-supporting organizations whose assets had been frozen by Bush were groups linked to terror against Israel.

Adding to growing concern in Israel was the news that then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair had phoned Bush to inform him of a “remarkable conversation” with Iranian President Mohamad Khatami, and that he was dispatching his foreign minister to Tehran for a three day trip in late September. The Bush administration, the Jerusalem Post worried on September 23, “has no formal links with Tehran but regards Iran as a critical element in legitimizing the coalition and cloaking it in Islamic credibility.” (11)

Israeli politician Efraim Sneh complained on Israeli radio that Iran “will buy itself legitimacy at very little expense.” After the campaign against Bin Laden was over, Sneh predicted gloomily,  “[Iran] will continue  its support for terrorism, but with a kosher certificate from the United States.” (12)  Just before his arrival in Tehran, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw wrote in an Iranian paper that “events over the years in the Palestinian territories” were a root cause of terror. Sneh called the article “an obscenity,” and denounced the trip as a “stab in the back” of Israel. (13)

Israeli President Moshe Katsav refused to meet with Straw during his visit to Israel. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres canceled a dinner in Straw’s honor, but met with him briefly. During their meeting, Peres accused Iran of both funding and directing Hizbullah, publicly calling for the destruction of Israel and of developing nuclear weapons. In the hands of extremist ayatollahs, Peres said, these weapons are “a danger to the entire world.”

In late September, the Jerusalem Post offered the view of a senior IDF intelligence officer, speaking anonymously, that Iran “could have had a hand” in plotting the attacks on the U.S. “We don’t have any information to support the possibility that Iraq is part of the plot,” the officer said. “But we can’t say the same for the Iranians. They are very deeply involved in everything that carries the label of Islamic radical terrorism.” The anonymous officer declared that Osama bin Laden, Hizbullah and Hamas were all from the same school of thought, but Iran was unique as a nation state seeking weapons of mass destruction. (14)

Not surprisingly,  81 percent of nearly 13,000 respondents to a reader survey on the Jerusalem Post website said that they thought Iran was in some way involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. (15)

In Washington, when addressing Congress on September 20, Netanyahu lumped together Bin Laden, Syria, Iran, Hizbullah and Palestinian groups as a terror “network.” The catalyst for the network, he said, lay in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution: “This created a sovereign spiritual base for fomenting a strident Islamic militancy worldwide, a militancy that was often backed by terror.” (16)

Sharon’s domestic priorities — including containment of his right wing coalition partners who demanded he get tough on terrorists, expel Arafat and reject once and for all the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza — were on a collision course with growing U.S. concern about how Israeli actions might affect the dynamics of the U.S.’s new coalition.  Foreign Minister Shimon Peres [now Israel's president]  proposed that Israel reaffirm its agreement with U.S. aims in the “war on terror.” Several cabinet ministers agreed that “the [Palestinian Authority] should be presented in the U.S. as ‘Israel’s Taliban,’ which gives aid and succor to terrorists.”

In subsequent weeks, a series of Israelis came to Washington for visits with Bush administration officials. In a single week in mid-October, over a dozen government officials, envoys and senior military officers visited Washington. The Director General of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission briefed the U.S. administration on Israel’s ent estimate of the progress being made in Iran’s nuclear research, and urged the administration to make Russian support of Iran a foreign policy priority.

During talks with Condoleezza Rice, Sneh complained to reporters that the U.S. seemed to be ignoring Iran’s terrorism record, and that Iran should be disqualified from any role in the U.S. alliance against terror. “Iran stands in first place as a sponsor of terrorism,” Sneh said. “If someone forgets that, we are willing to remind them.” Sneh expressed his certainty that Russia was damaging Israel’s security by supporting Iran’s nuclear weapons program.  “We believe they cannot be considered as countries that fight terrorism,” he said.

The Israeli visitors were assured that the U.S. would win its war against terrorism and that Israel would benefit from the new international order that would follow. Iran and Syria would be watched carefully, and Hizbullah and other groups fighting Israel would be added to the list of terrorist organizations. However, senior U.S. officials expressed concern that Israel was trying to force the Palestinian Authority to collapse, a move the U.S. would not support because it would undermine regional stability and endanger American strategy by creating friction between the U.S. and moderate Arab states.

Iran was recognized among the “six-plus-two” states that met in New York on November 12, 2001, the day before the fall of Kabul, to decide Afghanistan’s future. Iran’s support of the Northern Alliance was credited with helping the U.S.-led forces seize large swaths of the country. But U.S. insistence that Afghan forces not enter Kabul aroused Iranian suspicions that the U.S. might attempt to install a puppet regime composed of Pashtun remnants of the Taliban hostile to Tehran.

In early December, Sharon met with Bush for a “working visit” that would discuss, according to the White House Press Secretary, “the international campaign against terrorism and the pursuit of peace in the Middle East” (17). Although analysts had expected little from the meeting, what emerged was Israel’s inclusion, at long last, in the frontline of the “war against terror,” and an unprecedented affirmation of Israel’s right to act both defensively and proactively against terrorism.

During the months following the events of September 11 and the proclamation of the “war on terror,” Israel played an active and discernible role in trying to prevent any possible warming of relations between the U.S. and Iran. The pinnacle of its success was Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address on January 29, which, in a passage authored by neoconservative David Frum, declared Iran (and Iraq) to be part of an “axis of evil” comprised of regimes that sought to acquire nuclear weapons so they could provide them to terrorists.

This branding not only pushed Iran further beyond the U.S. foreign policy pale, it also undermined the domestic political position of Iranian leaders who had advocated the possibility of rapprochement with the U.S. While the denunciation of Iran by Bush may have delighted the exponents of the “Iranian threat” in Israel and the U.S., it also blurred, in American eyes, the boundaries between Iranian hardliners and moderates, conservatives and reformists. The failure of the Iranian reformists to achieve and sustain any substantial economic or political gains between 1997-2005 led directly to the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the current hardliners’ hold on power.

(1) See, for example, Greer Faye Cashman, “Katsav Expresses Nation’s Sorrow.” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 12, 2001.
(2) Jean-Marie Colombani, Jean-Pierre Langellier and Georges Marion, “What Ehud Baraq Says About It,” interview. Le Monde, internet version, Sept. 13, 2001.
(3) Gil Hoffman, “Netanyahu: World Must Join to Crush Terror,” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 12, 2001.
(4) Shalom Rosenfeld, “Commentary:  Historical Leader.” Maariv Hayom Supplement,  Sept. 13, 2001.
(5) Editorial, “World Gets a Warning,” Globes, Sept.  13, 2001.
(6) Tzvi Lavi, interview with Dan Meridor, Sept. 12, 2001, “We Will Win in the End, And It’s A Pity That They Won’t Be There,”  Globes, Sept. 13, 2001.
(7) Yosef Lapid, “The Warning,” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 14, 2001.
(8) Gil Hoffman, “Gulf War-Style Anti-Terror Coalition to Include Israel.” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 14, 2001.
(9) Jerusalem Post Radio, interviewer by Miriam Shaked, Sept. 17, 2001.
(10) Herb Keinon, “US May See Israel as Obstacle to Coalition,” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 21, 2001.
(11) Douglas Davis, “British FM to Iran for Historical Visit,” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 23, 2001.
(12) Greg Myre, “Israel: Anti-terror Coalition Should Target Iran, Syria.” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 25, 2001.
(13) Steve Weizman, AP, “Sneh Launches Blistering Attack on British FM,” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24, 2001.
(14) Arieh O’Sullivan, “IDF: Iraq not involved in attacks; Iran maybe,” Jerusalem Post, Sept. 23, 2001.
(15) Online Jerusalem Post poll, Sept. 23, 2001.
(16) “We Are All Targets,” transcript of remarks to US  House of Representatives’ Government Reform Committee, Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24, 2001.
(17) White House Press Briefing, Nov. 21, 2001.

• Reuters: John Irish reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has warned Iran that, “If a credible agreement [over its nuclear program] cannot be reached, Iran’s isolation would only worsen.”  Sarkozy continued, “And in the face of worsening threat, we would have to organize ourselves to protect and defend states that feel threatened.”  Sarkozy has said he supported the start up of the new nuclear power plant at Bushehr, fueled by Russian fuel rods, as long as it adheres to international law. (Commentary‘s Jennifer Rubin is encouraged, calling Sarkozy’s comments “Better Than Nothing.”)

• Associated Press (via Yahoo): Nasser Karimi reports that Tehran is proposing to jointly assemble nuclear fuel for the Bushehr nuclear plant alongside Russian technicians. The U.S. and Western allies agreed to lift their opposition to the Bushehr on the condition that Russia handle all the nuclear fuel. “We have made a proposal to Russia to create a consortium under Russian license to do part of the work in Russia and part in Iran,” the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the Iranian state-run Press TV. Moscow is reported to be studying the new proposal.

• International Herald Tribune: Avner Cohen and Marvin Miller make the case for Israel ending its longstanding policy of nuclear opacity.  “International support for Israel and its opaque bomb is being increasingly eroded by its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and the policies that support that occupation. Such criticism of these policies might well spill over into the nuclear domain, making Israel vulnerable to the charge that it is a nuclear-armed pariah state, and thus associating it to an uncomfortable degree with today’s rogue Iranian regime,” they write. “Indeed, while almost all states publicly oppose the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, there is also growing support for dealing with this problem in an ‘evenhanded’ manner, namely, by establishing a nuclear weapons free zone across the entire region.”  The authors emphasize that international support for Israel and its policy of opacity is eroding as Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories drags on.  (Ali wrote about Cohen and Miller’s op-ed yesterday.)

At the core of Bayefsky’s reasoning is her claim that the project’s chairman, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf was photographed with a representative of the Iranian government in 2008 at a Cordoba Initiative event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

From this single photograph Bayefsky draws the following conclusions:

The Iranian connection to the launch of Cordoba House may go beyond a relationship between Rauf and Larijani. The Cordoba Initiative lists one of its three major partners as the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations. The Alliance has its roots in the Iranian-driven “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” the brainchild of former Iranian President Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Khatami is now a member of the High-level Group which “guides the work of the Alliance.” His personal presidential qualifications include the pursuit of nuclear weapons, a major crackdown on Iranian media, and rounding up and imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges of spying. Alliance reports claim Israel lies at the heart of problems associated with “cross-cultural relations,” since the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and “Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories … are primary causes of resentment and anger in the Muslim world toward Western nations.”

Never mind that recent polling confirms the fact that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a primary cause of resentment and anger in the Muslim world toward the U.S.. Bayefsky is clearly suggesting that a moderate, mainstream group of Muslims can’t possibly build a community center without subversive Iranian connections.

She writes:

In addition, a Weekly Standard article in July suggested that the idea of building an Islamic memorial in lower Manhattan may have originated back in 2003 with two Iranian brothers: M. Jafar “Amir” Mahallati, who served as ambassador of the Iranian Islamic Republic to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, and M. Hossein Mahallati.

The anti-Muslim campaign that is coming to a head in Manhattan is the product of years of grassroots efforts (see Justin Elliot and Alex Kane‘s excellent pieces on the origins of the campaign) to delegitimize and undermine Muslim Americans. But this attempt by Bayefsky to link the Cordoba Initiative with Iranian influences is particularly disturbing.

Implied in her article — in which she concludes ominously, “The unanswered questions keep mounting,” — is that the Cordoba Initiative, acting as an Iranian agent, is seeking to bring U.S. enemies — as Bayefsky would no doubt label Iranians — on to the “hallowed ground” of the World Trade Center site.

From this the reader can conclude that:

1.) Iran is an existential threat whose operatives seek to spread Iranian influence through community centers in Manhattan, and;

2.) Mainstream, moderate organizations of Muslims simply don’t exist. They can’t help but form links with subversive elements             seeking   to destroy the United States and Israel.

The intolerance directed toward the Park 51 Community Center, in combination with the United States and Israel’s increasingly troubling trajectory of policies towards Iran, has the potential to leave a lasting impact upon U.S. attitudes towards Muslims both domestically and around the world.

• The Washington Note: Steve Clemons says that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a conflict that matters, “…far beyond the Israeli and Palestinian populations and is a screaming, right now challenge.” As the United States remains committed to remaking Afghanistan and Iraq the urgency of resolving one of the region’s biggest historical grievances has never been higher. Clemons suggest that President Barack Obama, “sees the vital and obvious linkage between resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine and any sensible strategy rolling back and/or containing Iran’s nuclear and regional hegemonic pretensions.”

• The Wall Street Journal: The WSJ editorial board says that the sanctions against Iran are beginning to work but additional sanctions are needed and the United States and Europe should offer more assistance to Iran’s democracy movement. The op-ed also suggests that Obama should invite dissident Iranian exiles to the Oval Office. Now, argues the authors, is not the time to drop sanctions in exchange for negotiations with Tehran. “The risk now is that the modest success of the sanctions will lure the Administration into dropping some of them in exchange for another round of temporizing and inevitably useless negotiations with Tehran,” they argue.

• The Weekly Standard: Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn call attention to documents in the Wikileaks dump which claim that Iran is supporting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The authors say that reports of Iranian activity in Afghanistan show Obama’s August 2^nd statement the United States and Iran have a “mutual interest” in fighting the Taliban to be a dangerous fantasy. Hayes and Joscelyn seem to willfully ignore previous passed-up opportunities for rapprochement with Iran.

• The New York Times: David Sanger reports that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made comments indicating that sanctions against Iran have had a greater economic impact than anticipated by Iran’s government.  The administration’s statements appeared aimed at bringing Tehran back to the negotiating table but, Sanger points out, “Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton defined with any precision what steps Iran’s leaders would need to take to build confidence that they were willing to negotiate.”

• The Huffington Post: David Bromwich makes the case that the post 9/11 United States has developed a dangerous trend of always being at war.  Obama, says Bromwich, is both withdrawing from Afghanistan more slowly than many would like and moving towards a military strike on Iran more slowly than many would prefer. “Will Iran become our third war of the moment? Sanctions which, Benjamin Netanyahu has said, should soon become ‘crippling sanctions,’ already have us in lockstep on that path,” says Bromwich. He warns that after the November midterm elections, “The Likud, in both Israel and America, may prove itself ready for action sooner than President Obama would like, just as the Tea Party picked up energy faster and harder than he looked for in the spring of 2009.” (Ali blogged on Bromwich’s article earlier today.)

Jim Lobe wrote the poll up yesterday. He said:

Much of the disillusionment with Obama appears related to his failure to make progress in achieving a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, according to Telhami, who has conducted eight previous surveys of Arab opinion since 2000.

Asked what policies pursued by the Obama administration they were most disappointed with, 61 percent of respondents in the new poll identified the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That was more than twice the percentage of the next-most-cited example, Washington’s Iraq policy (27 percent).

“This is the prism through which Arabs view the Untied States,” Telhami said, referring to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Iran appears to have benefited, at least indirectly, from Arab disillusionment with Obama, the poll results suggested.

While a majority of respondents (55 percent) said they believe Tehran’s nuclear programme is aimed at developing weapons – a charge denied by Iran – nearly four out of five respondents (77 percent) said the country has the right to pursue the programme – a whopping increase of 24 percent since last year.

Of course none of this should come as any great surprise, and linkage has become an increasingly accepted way to view U.S.-policy in the Middle East after Gen. David Petraeus’s Senate testimony in March in which he stated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “…foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” and, “[t]he conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.”

Numerous pundits, academics and politicians have tried to deny that this linkage exists but, try as they might, facts on the ground make it very difficult to close the box which Petraeus, very publicly, opened this spring.

Eighty-six-percent of the poll’s respondents were “prepared for peace if Israel is willing to return all 1967 territories including East Jerusalem,” 39 percent held the belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be resolved through negotiations, and only 16 percent believed it will end through war.

One has to wonder how U.S. interests are served by continuing to ratchet up tensions with Iran via “Sanctions Plus,” “Economic Warfare,” or chest-pounding threats of military strikes. As U.S.-Iran relations deteriorate and Iran, via its allies, exacerbates tensions between Israel and its neighbors, Arab public opinion will, if the trends in the poll have any predictive power, swing in Iran’s favor and make the Obama administration even less popular in the region. That isn’t good for Israel which, if Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s dire warnings are to be believed, might find itself in another war before the end of the summer, and it isn’t good for a U.S. administration which is trying to figure out a way to extract the country from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course all of this requires that you believe that there is a linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East. If you suspend your belief in that linkage, then anything goes.

Early on in his term, Obama and his team adopted the idea that ending the Israeli-Palestinian and broader Israeli-Arab conflicts would go a long way toward helping the United States address its interests in the region — including combating extremism and terrorism, and dealing with the question of Iran’s nuclear program. The plight of the Palestinians is a consistent recruiting tool for extremists and a propaganda tool for the ethnically-Iranian Islamic Republic to make inroads in the Arab world, thereby increasing their regional clout.

Netanyahu, with all the organs of the right-wing U.S. Israel lobby behind him, publicly and vociferously battled this notion. While the Obama administration didn’t challenge Netanyahu’s rhetoric, it didn’t exactly give in either: Linkage has never been repudiated stateside and its pervasiveness in the military suggests it’s still very much the conventional wisdom in Washington’s strategic establishment.

Nonetheless, the Times gives space to Karsh to continue asserting that linkage is a bogus concept. Karsh writes, “[T]he best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.”

Yes, that would probably quite please Bibi. But, as Karon put it, by making that assertion, Karsh “reveals his ideological underwear,” because as Karon goes on to note, “even the U.S. military acknowledges that American support for Israel in the context of its treatment of the Palestinians is perhaps the most important determinant of Muslim attitudes towards the United States.”

Even Karsh, two paragraphs above his talk of the “spurious link,” acknowledges that there exists a never-ending “history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring the fate of the Palestinians.” The important point here is that these “Arab leaders,” for whom Karsh seems to have nothing but contempt, clearly benefit from exploiting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them — not Arab, but I won’t bother Karsh with the distinction now — is the Iranian president.

Can anyone doubt the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran’s support of what is now being termed the “Axis of Resistance” — namely Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria? If Hezbollah, whose dangerous ceasefire-without-peace with Israel is on the verge of collapsing, was at peace with Israel, would there be posters of Iranian political figures up in Lebanon? Even the right-wing group The Israel Project never tires of mentioning that Iran supports Hamas and Hezbollah (any and all mentions of these groups seem to be prefaced with the phrase ‘Iranian-supported/supplied/funded/backed’) — but do they insist that the only connection to be had between the parties is alleged anti-Semitism?

Getting rid of “linkage” is merely a way for Israel and its right-wing U.S. backers to solidify Israeli intransigence on the moribund peace process and absolve themselves of any blame when the time comes that Bibi finally decides, as he just may, that he needs to bomb Iran.

• The Washington Times: Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-MD) and Peter Vincent Pry, president of EMPact America, float the hypothetical scenario that Iran has already acquired a nuclear weapon. The authors suggest that former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei may have overlooked evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to strengthen his possible candidacy for the Egyptian presidency. Bartlett and Pry also argue that Israel’s nuclear weapons program proves that nuclear weapons-possessing countries no longer need to test their weapons (accounts of a secret joint Israeli-South African nuclear test in 1979 might contradict their assertion). The op-ed concludes with a rehashing of the long-discredited, but never quite dead, myth about the dangers of an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack.

• The Washington Times: Rowan Scarborough makes his case that the military is preparing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The article quotes Global Security’s John Pike who puts forward the particularly gruesome suggestion that, “Most of [the alleged nuclear facilities] have co-located staff housing. Bomb the housing, kill the staff, set back the program by a generation.” Scarborough finds very little additional evidence to support his thesis that a military strike would be easy or effective, so he turns chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen’s comments on Sunday’s Meet The Press that, “[w]e do” have a plan for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, into conclusive evidence that, “… Pentagon strategists have updated and finalized a war plan for Iran.”

• AEI Critical Threats Project: AEI’s Charlie Szrom reports that, “Iran’s nuclear and foreign policies rely upon a worldview that takes confidence from the support lent Tehran by allies in the developing world.” The reports cites as evidence the fact that over the past two years Iran has expanded its trade relationships with Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and Senegal. Szrom acknowledges that “a lack of American attention to West Africa” is partly to blame for the Iranian inroads.  While Szrom prefers to emphasize that Iran is fomenting anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments in the Muslim populations of West Africa, perhaps more importantly, the past two years have seen the introduction of broad sanctions against Iran. As these sanctions are implemented, it should surprise no one to see Iran searching for trading partners outside of U.S. and European spheres of influence. The economic concepts of “comparative advantage” and “gains from trade” may shed more light on why Iran insists on soliciting trading partners than an explanation predicated on Tehran’s desire to spread anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments.

In any case, Goldberg resorts to one of his frequent tricks, which is quoting from the over-the-top anti-Israel email he receives to try to prove that his adversaries are all anti-Semites. (His other trick is to quote from the over-the-top Likudnik email he receives to try to prove that he’s really a peace-loving liberal by comparison.) Now, some of the email that he holds up as evidence of anti-Semitism is perfectly unobjectionable, if a bit crude for my taste. For instance: “We’re tired of your warmongering ideology. Go apologize to the people of Iraq and Palestine.” I would only add that perhaps Goldberg should preemptively apologize to the people of Iran as well, since word on the street is that he will call for a U.S. war with Iran in the next issue of the Atlantic. Still, some of it goes past anti-Zionism to verge on anti-Semitism, and some is clearly anti-Semitic outright.

But so what? I can guarantee that anyone who writes about the Middle East online for any extended period of time receives plenty of deranged emails and comments from all sides of the political spectrum. Sometimes it is anti-Semitic email ranting about the Zionist Occupied Government of the U.S., and sometimes it is anti-Arab email ranting that there is no such thing as the “Palestinian people,” or that there can be no peace with Muslims because Islam is inherently a religion of war, or that the Palestinians should be ethnically cleansed from the West Bank and driven into Jordan. (Well, actually that last argument was from Mike Huckabee.) This means that if one wants to make the case that the “other side” is a bunch of crazed bigots, it’s quite easy to gather evidence by cherry-picking from the appropriate body of crazy emails. If I had Jeffrey Goldberg’s apparently immense capacity for whining and self-pity, and wanted to portray myself as the persecuted victim of intolerant and bloodthirsty right-wing Zionists, it would not be terribly difficult. I tend to think that this would be a waste of everyone’s time, so I haven’t done so.

Here at Lobelog, we make an effort to weed out both kinds of comments, whether it’s pro-Israel types calling for Arab blood or anti-Israel types calling for Jewish blood. Occasionally one slips through the cracks, as with the two comments that Smith cited in his piece. But it’s hard to think of any particular conclusion to draw from this barrage of loony emails and comments, except that these issues tend to draw out crazies from both sides. Certainly blogging has not done wonders for my faith in the reasonableness of the population at large.