Democrats. Republicans. It seems everyone agrees President Obama is not pro-Israel.

The campaign, which features a smiling handshake between Obama and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (not unlike the one pictured upper right), got picked up at all the usual places, including by Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post. Rubin previewed the 60-second cut of the ad on Friday. But between her post and the ad’s scheduled runs today and tomorrow on local New York stations and cable news channels, something remarkable happened. A very important person to the neocons — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — came out and contradicted the ad. Speaking after Israel’s embassy in Cairo was nearly overrun by Egyptian demonstrators, Netanyahu gave a brief speech during which he said:

Immediately at the beginning of the incident, I ordered that all the Embassy staff and their families in Cairo be put on a plane and returned to Israel.  At the same time we worked together with Egypt and the American government [sic] to assure that our remaining staff at the Embassy would be rescued without harm.

I would like to express my gratitude to the President of the United States, Barack Obama. I asked for his help. This was a decisive and fateful moment.  He said, “I will do everything I can.”  And so he did. He used every considerable means and influence of the United States to help us. We owe him a special measure of gratitude. This attests to the strong alliance between Israel and the United States.  This alliance between Israel and the United States is especially important in these times of political storms and upheavals in the Middle East.

As it turns out, not everyone agrees that Obama is anti-Israel. Perhaps Netanyahu had in mind the international diplomatic cover the U.S. gives — and has pledged to continue giving — to Israel. Or perhaps it is Obama’s work within U.S. policy and international diplomacy to slow Iran’s nuclear program — a top priority for Netanyahu’s government. Maybe it was Obama’s close cooperation with Israel to reportedly develop and deploy the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, a broader part of the program that prompted Netanyahu himself to comment this May at the AIPAC summit that “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”

While Netanyahu thanks Obama and praises his pro-Israel record, ECI and Jennifer Rubin choose to ignore that reality for one that better suits their hardline partisan worldview. Funnily, you won’t find the last two sentences of the above block quote in Jennifer Rubin’s write-up of the speech, in which she lavishes praise on the right-wing Israeli prime minister. No – Rubin cut those two sentences to interject a short introduction to the immediate next lines of the speech. She can’t seem to bear to tell her readers that someone — and someone quite important at that — actually thinks Obama is pro-Israel.

Well, Jennifer Rubin, perhaps the most passionate blogger at Commentary‘s Contentions blog, is ready to tick those items off the list and move into the final agenda. This is not news, since she has been making essentially this proclamation for some time.

In “Keep Our Eye on the Ball — Iran,” Rubin picks up a New York Post editorial which accuses the UN of bashing Israel while soft-pedaling IAEA accusations by Iran. Rubin naturally agrees. In her mind, no one is harsh enough on Iran and everyone is too harsh on Israel.

Calling the “‘peace process’” — which is always in quotes — “a giant and dangerous distraction,” Rubin writes that “much of the media have lost track of what’s important: Iran and the mounting evidence that the sanctions have been, as conservatives predicted, useless.” She goes on to deride the UN as ineffective, before declaring  it’s “[n]o wonder Obama loves the place.”

Then, she finally gets to the point:

[I]t might be a good idea for Jewish organizations to show the same focus as the Post. Forget the “peace process” sideshow and give up the fantasy that the UN or the IAEA will solve our national-security problem for us. The options boil down to : 1) The U.S. uses force; 2.) Israel uses force; or 3.) the Iranians get the bomb. The first is the best of the disagreeable options. It would be swell if American Jewish leaders started making that point.

In her overly-simplistic neoconservative worldview (recalling Dick Cheney’s 2003 proclamation “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators“), there are only three options: U.S. bombs, Israel bombs, or Iran gets the bomb.

Most notable is her shot at Jewish organizations for being insufficiently hawkish. Rubin’s seeming disdain for Jewish group fits with here recent meme that American Jewish liberalism and its uncrititcal support of Democrats is a “sick addiction.” The phrase is borrowed from a blog post by Rachel Abrams, which Rubin has quoted at least three times. Yet the problem is while Jews have supported Democrats and Obama with overwhelming numbers, many mainstream Jewish organizations are not on board with this sentiment of liberalism. That was exactly the debate raised by Peter Beinart this summer in his New York Review of Books essay — “The Failure of the Jewish Establishment.”

Many Jewish organizations, particularly those with clout in Washington, indeed have a hawkish bent. Consider the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which releases among the most bellicose newsletters one can get in their inbox. Just this month, in fact, JINSA called on Obama to do almost exactly what Rubin prescribes — to “blunt Iran first.” To be  fair, JINSA called for a “peace process” after that; Rubin obviously does not.

AIPAC, Washington’s more powerful and somewhat less neoconservative Jewish organization, takes on Iran on a near daily basis, devoting an entire section of its website dedicated to the topic. Rubin has been known to call out organizations and individuals, most recently Hilary Clinton, when the  the buzz words she finds in others’ comments aren’t repeated in a way she finds acceptable. A few of those phrased: that an Iran with nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and that “all options remain on the table” (a wink at U.S. military strikes on Iran). Interestingly, AIPAC uses exactly this language in two policy briefings on Iran.

So Rubin’s criticisms of Jewish organizations seems less sound than her haranguing of Jews in general. But the takeaway here is important: She is ready to call out anyone who is not for the immediate bombing of Iran as  the way to go, the only way to go. If Commentary is a bellwether of the neoconservative movement — and it is — then their intentions are laid bare by Jennifer Rubin.

One figure who has received less attention is the group’s fourth principal, Rachel Abrams — wife of Elliott Abrams, daughter of Midge Decter, stepdaughter of Norman Podhoretz. This is a shame, because she is almost certainly the craziest of the lot.

I must confess that when I began reading her blog, I was primarily looking for evidence of her Revisionist Zionism. And, to be sure, such evidence is not in short supply — e.g. this poetic ode to the Israeli landscape, which concludes “I know why we cannot let go of any part of this land.” She also constantly adopts the argot of the Israeli settler movement by referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”. Her sympathy for the settlers is not terribly surprising; the only question is how much it is shared by her husband, who as the Bush administration’s top Middle East advisor was supposedly in charge of implementing a two-state solution. Certainly, Elliott Abrams’s disastrous tenure at the National Security Council raised the strong suspicion that he was doing everything he could to destroy the possibility of a viable Palestinian state, but unlike his wife he is always careful to couch his arguments in the pragmatic and bureaucratic language of Washington peace process-ese rather than the ideological language of Revisionist Zionism.

But as I continued reading Rachel Abrams’s writings, what jumped out at me was not so much her predictably crazy views about Israel, but her strange obsession with (and apparent hostility to) homosexuality. This first jumped out at me in her response to Peter Beinart’s New York Review of Books essay, a long rant in which Abrams pretends to write in Beinart’s voice. While most of her Beinart “parody” is devoted to accusations that he is insufficiently devoted to the state of Israel, a large chunk of it is spent on rather bizarre and gratuitous insinuations that Beinart is gay. Thus she has fake-Beinart complaining, about a focus group of Jewish students, that “an insufficient number were gay and too many were broads,” and espousing his support for “open debate that of course excludes those who would advance anti-feminist or anti-gay or pro-Israel argument”. (It’s striking that she equates “pro-Israel” with “anti-feminist” and “anti-gay” arguments.) Then she has fake-Beinart condemning Orthodox Jews for homophobia before defensively reasserting his own heterosexuality: “they condemn gays, though I want to reassert that I have children,” a trope that she repeats throughout the piece. One has to wonder why she is so intent to insist that Beinart is gay, as if this fact would have any relevance whatsoever to the content of his piece.

I was initially inclined to dismiss Abrams’s homophobic attack on Beinart as simply a failed and sophomoric attempt at humor, but the more of her writing I read, the more I noticed that this strange obsession with homosexuality seems to be a recurring feature of it. For instance, in a post claiming that Christopher Hitchens is “giving homosexuality a bad name,” and professing disinterest in the sexual pasts of “old Tory buggers,” Abrams writes:

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford.

I’m not entirely sure what it means to be “agnostic” about “the homosexuality question”. (Agnostic about whether it’s natural? Whether it’s moral? Whether it should be legal?) The upshot seems to be that Rachel Abrams would prefer not to think about “the homosexuality question” except that the dastardly gays and their quote-unquote community keep “trying to shove legislation down [her] throat”.

Similarly, Abrams is deeply offended by the Obama administrations’ human rights policy, but her complaint goes beyond the standard neocon one that Obama is not aggressive enough in pushing regime change against Israel’s rivals — what’s really galling is that the administration has identified LGBT rights in the U.S. as an important human rights issue. She froths that it’s Hillary “Clinton’s fawning speech in honor of ‘Pride Month,’ which she delivered the other day to members of the ‘LGBT community’ who have fanned out from the mother-ship of state, as it were…that’s the truly breathtaking expression of this perversion of a policy.” For telling this quote-unquote community such wildly controversial statements as “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights,” Clinton is responsible for this “perversion” — I can’t imagine the word choice is accidental — of a policy.

I could go on. There’s her speculation, for instance, that the problems of the Afghan war originate in the rampant homosexuality of Pashtun males, which leads Abrams onto a long tangent about homosexuality among the ancient Greeks, concluding: “those ancient elitist pedophiles and narcissists, disturbingly fascinating as they are, will seem to many in our armed forces to have been people doing and suffering things that are very ‘base’ indeed.” There’s yet another rant about the Obama administration’s focus on LGBT rights, which she excoriates as an abandonment of America’s traditional “embracing of the rights of ordinary men and women,” (as opposed to perverts, presumably). There’s the way that Abrams throws a gratuitous warning about “a profitable surge in gay-couples-therapy sessions, as gay marriage, and divorce, become commonplace—nay, even humdrum” into an article on a completely unrelated topic. But you get the picture.

Conclusion: Rachel Abrams is a real piece of work, and seems pathologically incapable of hiding her obsession with (and distaste for) homosexuality. Perhaps it’s not surprising given her parents: Midge Decter was the author of the notoriously homophobic 1980 Commentary article “The Boys on the Beach,” while Norman Podhoretz’s particular brand of wounded, insecure, obviously-compensating hypermasculinity will be familiar to readers of essays like “My Negro Problem — And Ours” [PDF].

Israel’s defenders often contrast the state’s record on LGBT rights to those of many of its neighbors, and frankly this is one area where I think they have a point. Something tells me, however, that we won’t be seeing many of these arguments coming from Rachel Abrams.