Plame's Blame

Back when the Left really, really hated President George W. Bush (after all, Bush defeated the Left's candidate in a manner that supposedly delegitimized his presidency ... hmmm, sound familiar), they made a hero out of a CIA analyst named Valarie Plame-Wilson. James Kirchick recounts the bogus claims that surrounded the Plame:

...the George W. Bush administration “outed” her to Washington Post columnist Robert Novak as revenge after her husband – former Ambassador Joseph Wilson–publicly disputed intelligence that the president had cited in his case for war in Iraq. That the entire story ended up being a load of bunk didn’t stop the couple from becoming liberal media sweethearts, replete with a Vanity Fair spread and frequent appearances at gala events and fundraisers. Plame wrote a bestselling memoir that inspired a film starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, and, just a few months ago, a stage play produced here in Washington, D.C.

This week, Plame resurfaced with a tired (but nonetheless dangerous) Leftist anti-Israel, anti-Semetic trope. Kirchick explains:

Plame put her progressive fans in a difficult spot when, on Thursday, she tweeted out an article entitled “America’s Jews are driving America’s wars” to her 50,000 followers. Published on the website of Ron Unz, an eccentric paleoconservative businessman, and penned by Philip Giraldi, like Plame a former employee of the CIA, the article – illustrated with the requisite photo of a smirking William Kristol–was as anti-Semitic as its title implied. “Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again,” Giraldi began. Having goaded the United States into war with Iraq, “American Jews,” he continued, “have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat” and “constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.” To mitigate this cancer at the heart of the American body politic, Giraldi proposes that Jews be barred from assuming “national security positions involving the Middle East” and that “those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity” be publicly identified in all media appearances “kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison” or, as were an earlier generation of problematic Jews, with a yellow star.

“We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver,” Giraldi concluded.

Although this anti-Semitic garbage is commonplace among denizens of the hard-left, it has now migrated into the polite society populated by the softer leftists of the progressive movement. The same social justice warriors who hyperventilate over "Islamophobia" seem to far less concerned about the overarching sentiment expressed by Plame (and Giraldi).

However, after a public uproar, some progressives did condemn Plame's comments. What else could they do? Their condemnation does not negate the fact that the Leftist ideology they embrace broadly has a virulent strain of anti-Israel, anti-Semite sentiment that cannot and will not be excised.