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Behind the Aegis

(53,823 posts)
Sat Sep 23, 2017, 02:32 PM Sep 2017

(JEWISH GROUP) The other problem with Valerie Plames horrible anti-Semitic tweet

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!! RESPECT!

Happy New Year! Or not.

On the first full day of Rosh Hashanah, unmasked CIA officer Valerie Plame tweeted out an article entitled, “America’s Jews are driving America’s wars.” As if the headline weren’t bad enough, the essay appeared on a website featuring such pieces as “It’s time to re-think David Duke.” Its argument mirrored a classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: Jews run everything in America, and because of their irrational love for Israel they’re running us into foreign conflicts, too.

It is nigh impossible to argue that the article was anything but vile. It called for identifying Jewish Americans as such when they appear on television (much as, it said, one might affix a warning label to a bottle of rat poison). That didn’t stop Plame from trying, at first — protesting that “many neocon hawks ARE Jewish.” Finally, she progressed to the last of the all-too-predictable stages of post-Twitter meltdown grief and issued a full-throated mea culpa. She has since deleted her initial tweet.

It’s also pretty clear that Plame’s apology was insufficient. Perhaps, as she said, she simply “skimmed” the piece before posting it. But did she make the same mistake with the other anti-Semitic musings she has shared over the past few months? “I never heard this story about 9/11: The Dancing Israelis,” reads one.

More interesting than the painfully obvious, though, is how the second Plame affair played into a broader debate about anti-Semitism in the United States. Conservatives crowed over Plame’s fall from grace because her unmasking in the 2000s and her antiwar advocacy in the years since have made her a hero in the eyes of many liberals. In their eyes, the left’s favorite member of the CIA had outed herself this time — as a bigot.

And that proved a point they’ve long been harping on: When it comes to Jews, liberals are just as “racist” as their neo-Nazi brethren. It didn’t matter that the piece Plame shared was written by a right-winger. What mattered was that she shared it. And by sharing it, she fit neatly into the narrative of the intolerant left.

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