Neoconservative bloggers have yet to come up with a single name of a major Jewish Democratic donor who says that he or she intends to abandon President Obama — or even other Democrats — because of the (mis)perception that Obama’s forceful push for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is either anti-Israel or a major policy shift.

As Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent points out, the right-wing meme started to ramp up after a CNBC interview with Democratic donor Haim Saban, who supported Hillary Clinton in the last election primaries and then didn’t give to Obama after he emerged as the party’s candidate. This fact, however, didn’t stop Alana Goodman at the neoconservative flagship Commentary from claiming that Saban “decided to break with the president” — implying that Saban once financially supported Obama.

As ThinkProgress has extensively reported, this sounded an awful lot like an attempt by neoconservatives to gin up a controversy about Obama and Jewish donors in order to use a false premise to set off a chain reaction. Goodman responded to ThinkProgress’s reporting by basically admitting that’s what was happening (and using the term “breaking” again):

[T]he fact that he’s breaking with his party’s candidate over Israel is something that will be widely noted in the Jewish community.

Today, Sargent interviewed the major Democratic donor in question — billionaire  Haim Saban — and confirmed that Saban would still be willing to give money to Obama if the campaign asks despite minor criticisms of the administration:

“If solicited, I will absolutely write a check to the level allowed by law,” Saban said. “I don’t agree that he’s anti-Israel.”

The first part of this statement echoes almost exactly Saban’s comments toward the bottom of his interview with CNBC, raising again the question of whether Commentary was simply seeing whatever it wanted in Saban’s interview. “Will I donate if I am solicited? I will donate,” Saban told CNBC.

Saban does predict that Jewish donations to Obama will fall off. But if, as Commentary claimed, the billionaire is a “bellwether for Jewish voters and donors,” then the status quo of Jewish support for Obama — like Saban’s positions — are likely to hold steady.

What’s more, Sargent reports that Saban himself sees right through the right wing’s ploy of distorting Obama’s positions — as revealed by Emergency Committee For Israel executive director Noah Pollak‘s support for Obama’s big Middle East speech just weeks before his organization came out and blasted it. Sargent writes:

Saban said Obama’s right wing critics were painting Obama as anti-Israel and misrepresenting his positions for political reasons.

“They are twisting his words,” Saban said. “They want to move Jewish votes from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.”

That’s exactly why Democratic organizers and fund-raisers are already defending Obama against the smears — oh, and, according to Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, that includes a fundraiser hosted by two former AIPAC heads in the next two weeks that is expected to raise $1 million in a single night. This is in addition to other major Jewish donors that have already pledged fealty to Obama in the coming election cycle.

So, which way exactly are the Jewish donors breaking again?

An expert on Middle Eastern military affairs at a think tank with a pro-Israel bent said airstrikes on Iran would be difficult and dangerous to pull off. Even if the strikes were successful, said Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy, they would only delay the Iranian nuclear program for two to three years.

“The attack itself is a complicated thing. It’s not something you can easily gloss over the complexity of,” said White at a panel convened by the Arms Control Association. He added:

You could make the argument that we could go for a very limited attack on just nuclear facilities, but I think that’s less likely. If we make a decision to do it, we’re going to make a big attack.

Iran hawks, especially neoconservatives, often play the idea of airstrikes off the invasion and occupation of a country. When Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, who favors an attack on Iran, brought up a “credible threat of force” as part of a “reset” of Iran policy, she was quick to qualify it as “not occupation or invasion, but strikes sufficient to hobble Iran’s nuclear program, military and Revolutionary Guard.”

This prompted CAP’s Matt Duss to ask, “What’s Farsi for ‘cakewalk’?” Referencing the term used to sell the Iraq war because of its expected ease, Duss wrote: “[T]alk of ‘air strikes’ are for Iran what ‘cakewalk’ was for Iraq.”

White’s remarks on Tuesday only reinforced Duss’s point that hawks are once again minimizing the pitfalls and difficulties of engaging in yet another Mideast war.

Even if the attack is successful in extensively damaging Iranian nuclear sites, White said the Iranian nuclear program could only be delayed:

You can’t destroy knowledge and you can’t destroy the basic technology. The setback to the program would be measured in years I think — two years maybe three years.

White pointed out that, because of capability limitations, potential Israeli airstrikes would likely only delay the Iranian program by one year.

White acknowledged that the Iranian nuclear program also consisted of some difficult targets to reach, and suggested that using a small nuclear weapon might be necessary:

Burying a (nuclear) facility in a mountain does raise some issues and it raises the issue of using a small tactical nuclear weapon. It would be a possibility.

White also said such operations would be “phased” airstrikes — a sustained campaign of bombings over time — because “you cannot hit all these targets at the same time.”

Many other factors would complicate such an attack and its planning. Which countries would join or support the U.S. Would Western allies fly bombing missions alongside the U.S.? Would Gulf allies allow the use of bases on their soil to launch an attack or even to stage rescue operations in case U.S. or allied planes went down?

None of this even begins to address Iranian retaliation throughout the region, the alienation of allies, fallout from blowing up nuclear sites, or the effects of an attack on Iran’s fledgling democracy movement. But even the strikes themselves provide tremendous challenges. The hawks’ obfuscation of these details (again) should serve as a warning to the public to avoid the buyer’s remorse felt after the selling of the Iraq invasion.

 

As ThinkProgress reported earlier, The Nation magazine and the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté have announced a partnership where they will publish revelations from leaked American diplomatic cables made public by Wikileaks. Over the weekend, the papers published evidence that the U.S. aggressively worked to scuttle a gas development deal on behalf of Big Oil and to counter the influence of left-wing governments in the region. Now, The Nation has published a report detailing efforts by the United States under the Obama administration to successfully defeat a hike in the minimum wage in the textile industry to $5 a day.

In 2009, the Haitian parliament unanimously passed a measure that would hike the Haitian minimum wage to $5 a day. Yet much as the United States government mobilized to protect Big Oil’s profits a few years earlier, American diplomats immediately protested the hike in wages.

Contractors for large American clothing firms like Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, and Levi’s began protesting the increase in the minimum wage, aggressively lobbying the parliament and the populist Haitian president, René Préval, to reverse course. They were soon joined by American diplomats who began to lobby the Haitian government as well, arguing that it would be too costly for textile manufacturers. As one cable noted, “more visible and active engagement by Préval” would be crucial to reverse the hike. Deputy chief of mission David E. Lindwall argued in one cable that the wage hike “did not take economic reality into account” and that the measure was intended solely to appease the “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development and the Association of Haitian Industry — the main trade organization for textile manufacturers in the country — both funded studies claiming that raising the wages would “make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.” Yet at the same time, in private cables the embassy noted that the wage “had support from a majority of Haitian private sector representatives” because of “reports that wages in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (competitors in the garment industry) will increase also.”

In August 2009, Préval partially conceded to the demands of the garment industry and the United States. He negotiated a new arrangement with his parliament that would offer a special carveout for the textile sector — allowing it to pay $3 a day rather than $5 a day — which marked a huge win for major textiles corporations like Hanes and Dockers.

Commenting on the revelations, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) calculates exactly how little it would’ve cost the clothing companies to comply with the new $5 a day wages. “Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year.” CJR notes that if Hanes had to comply with the new law, it would cost them about $1.6 million a year — yet it made $211 million in profit last year. Yet unfortunately for the people of Haiti, Hanes’ greed was too great to sacrifice so little to help so many.

Today, Rand Paul delivered a speech titled “A Conservative Constitutional Foreign Policy,” at Johns Hopkins University, where he outlined his own unique approach to the foreign policy issues that the United States faces.

Paul has distinguished himself among many Senate Republicans by actually advocating for a reduced military presence overseas and a downsized military budget.

At the speech, in response to a question from ThinkProgress about ending the Afghan war, Paul said he hopes the death of former Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden would lead to the “winding down” of the Afghan war:

TP: Recently, there was a Washington Post poll put out that said 73 percent of Americans wanted to see a substantial withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan this summer. There was also a letter put out by 12 senators to Obama calling on him to make those substaintial reductions. Do you think President Obama should start making major reductions to our troop size this summer?

PAUL: I’d like to introduce President Obama to candidate Obama, if we can get him to read some of what he ran on, things might change dramatically. [...] I would like to see a full blown debate in Congress and in the country about what is our presence in Afghanistan vital to our national security interest? [...] I think after ten years there needs to be much, much more and there needs to be a winding down of the war. I would hope the death of Bin Laden would accelerate that.

Also, in response to a question about what U.S. policy should be towards Iran, the senator said most Iranians actually are fond of the United States and that he would rather conduct cultural diplomacy with Iran — like, for example, sending Johns Hopkins University professors there — instead of going to war:

PAUL: In my mind, as a member of Congress, I’m reluctant to go to war. [...] I’d much rather send some of your professors around the world than I would our soldiers, if at all possible. Even in Iran, does anybody want to go to Iran? Iran has a large undercurrent of people who like the West. They like our music, our culture, our literature, and so I think we can influence people in those ways. I’d rather do that than go to war with Iran. That doesn’t mean we never go to war, but we should be reluctant.

Watch it:

Paul also spent much of the event critiquing the military intervention in Libya, criticizing it for not being explicitly authorized by Congress.

Yesterday, the Syrian ambassador to France, Lamia Chakkour, called in to a debate show on France 24 TV to discuss the current situation in Syria. But before the debate even began, she announced that she will resign her postion in protest of Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators there.

However, Syrian authorities immediately denied that Chakkour had resigned. Shortly after the announcement, an audio statement aired on Syrian state TV in which a woman’s voice was broadcast denying the resignation and saying she would sue France 24. Later, as the New York Times reports, Chakkour appeared on a French TV station to deny she had resigned:

But Ms. Shakkour appeared on camera early Wednesday on BFM TV, another French news channel, to deny that she had resigned and attacking France24 for disinformation.

Standing in front of a Syrian flag and a portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the Paris embassy, Ms. Shakkour said that France24 “is issuing a message in my name. Naturally, I will bring a lawsuit,” she said, “to condemn France24 for its acts of disinformation, which are part of a campaign of falsification of information and disinformation which began in March 2011 against Syria.”

The television images of her denial ended several hours of confusion following France24’s report.

The details of the story, however, have somewhat added to the confusion. Following what France 24 thought to be Chakkour’s resignation announcement, Reuters news service received an email from the Syrian embassy in Paris confirming her announcement. In its follow up story, France 24 explained what happened:

[France 24] invited the Syrian ambassador to France using the email address commonly used by our channel to contact the Syrian Embassy press office. Since Ms. Lamia Chakkour’s response was favourable, we called her at the appointed time on a number that was provided to us by the embassy press office.

Noting that Reuters had confirmed with the embassy, France 24 said, “It was to our enormous surprise therefore that Ms. Chakkour subsequently denied her comments on Al Arabyia, Al Jazeera as well as on Syrian state TV.”

“It seems that in all probability we were the victims of a manipulation,” Renee Kaplan, a deputy editor at France 24, told France Info radio.