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Hedge Fund-Bankrolled Emergency Committee For Israel Smears Occupy Wall St. Protests As ‘Anti-Semitic’

By Eli Clifton on Oct 13, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Daniel S. Loeb

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), has joined the pack of conservative groups working to discredit the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The ECI — a Bill Kristol-Gary Bauer-Rachel Abrams-conceived organization — launched a YouTube ad this morning, seeking to paint the Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic.

The ad, which was faithfully promoted by ECI’s go-to media outlets — Politico’s Ben Smith, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary — alleges that Democratic party leaders are “turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” and urges President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to “stand up to the mob.” Watch it:

While the anti-Semitic signs and clips shown in the commercial are deeply offensive, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have consistently rejected the attempts of a small number of extremists to hijack the movement. In fact, on Friday, “new media activist” Daniel Sieradski organized over 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters to participate in Kol Nidre, the prayers that begin Yom Kippur.

ThinkProgress reported in June that two-thirds of ECIPAC’s contributions in the past election cycle came from Daniel S. Loeb, CEO of Third Point Management, a New York based hedge fund.

Loeb’s $100,000 in support for ECI follows his track record of falling out of love with Obama after the White House pushed for financial regulatory reforms.

On April 26, the Wall Street Journal reported on Loeb’s change of heart and quoted from an email Loeb wrote and circulated in late 2010.

“I am sure, if we are really nice and stay quiet, everything will be alright and the president will become more centrist and that all his tough talk is just words,” Mr. Loeb wrote in an email about four months ago expressing frustration with the president’s posture toward Wall Street. “I mean, he really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it.”

Indeed, in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Loeb has contributed nearly $170,000 to a stable of Republican candidates including radical Islamophobe Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

And last week, the New York Times reported that Loeb had signed on to support Mitt Romney.

While the ECI appears to be in the business of taking any and all opportunities to paint the Obama administration and the Democratic party as anti-Israel, their attempts to smear the Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic closely aligns the right wing pro-Israel group with the domestic political and business interests of its biggest financial backer.

Ignoring World Wars And 9/11, Perry Says ‘The World Has Never Been As Dangerous As It Is Today’ Because Of Obama

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Oct 13, 2011 at 4:40 pm

Appearing on Bill Bennett’s radio show yesterday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) lambasted President Obama’s foreign policy as “incredibly naive,” saying, “the world has never been as dangerous as it is today, because of this administration”:

PERRY: So, you’ve got a president of the United States that I think is either incredibly naive about foreign policy or I don’t know else to take out of it. They’re aimless, they’re wavering, and I know this — the world has never been as dangerous as it is today, because of this administration’s lack of focus on dealing with these rogue nations.

Listen here:

It’s unclear how Perry sees today as more dangerous than any other point in the nation’s history, which has experienced foreign invasion, two world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, and the 9/11 terror attacks. Moreover, the number of armed conflicts globally is low and falling. It’s also unclear how Perry thinks — the day after the Obama administration foiled a terror plot from Iran — that the president has been too soft on rogue nations. It’s hard to see how Perry isn’t the “incredibly naive” one here.

Romney Mum On Alleged Iran Assassination Plot, Other GOP Candidates Fall Back On Stale Talking Points

By Ali Gharib on Oct 13, 2011 at 3:41 pm

Republican Party leaders in Congress and ideologically-allied think tanks struck a hawkish tone immediately after the revelation of an alleged Iranian-backed plot to assassinate diplomats in Washington. The Republican presidential candidates — with the exception of Mitt Romney who has kept quiet on the matter — followed suit with standard, and sometimes bizarre, right-wing bellicose rhetoric. Here’s a quick rundown:

HERMAN CAIN

Cain said he would have prevented Iran from considering such a plot with missile defense systems:

I would have done something earlier such that it probably would have encouraged them not to do something like this… We could place these Aegis ballistic missile defense systems in international water in that part of the world.

MICHELLE BACHMANN

Similarly to Cain, Bachmann said she would have kept Iran high on the foreign policy agenda:

Well if I was president, I wouldn’t have taken my eye off the number one issue in the Middle East which is Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.… So the president unfortunately sent signals of weakness and focused on Israel building apartments on their own land as opposed to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Asked directly about a military strike on Iran, Bachmann said that her position on the House Intelligence Committee required that she “be a certain amount of circumspect about the comments that I make about this.”

RICK PERRY

Perry seized on the alleged plot’s focus on getting help from Mexican drug cartels to carry out the assassination. The AP reported that Perry said the plot was “business as usual” for Iran before shifting to border security. “We cannot have national security until we have border security,” he said. He called for an increased troop presence and more security fences on the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as the use of unmanned surveillance vehicles.

JON HUNTSMAN

Huntsman, who’s been hawkish on Iran lately, called for the U.S. to impose more sanctions on Iran, hinting at a proposal being pushed by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) to sanction Iran’s central bank and collapse its currency. Huntsman said the U.S. should act unilaterally on sanctions:

[W]e have to make sure that people know that this is a time for American leadership. And we need to ratchet down those sanctions, those economic sanctions very, very aggressively. We ought to be targeting the Iran central bank.

NEWT GINGRICH

Gingrich told Fox News that he would implement a program aimed at regime change by isolating the Islamic Republic’s government, saying he’d deploy resources to dissident groups and run extensive propaganda operations:

We should be actively funding every dissident group in Iran.… You have to do what Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II were doing [with the Soviet Union]. They were bringing pressure to bear from every angle. Psychological pressure; information pressure; economic pressure; helping dissidents organize; providing them resources, developing, for example, a Radio Free Iran, a Television Free Iran, an Internet Free Iran.

MITT ROMNEY

The former Massachusetts governor hasn’t said much about the alleged assassination plot, but he did talk about Iran in his recent foreign policy address. In that speech, he struck a hawkish posture toward Iran, not far off from where many of his advisers stand, including one who advocates for a controversial dissident group considered terrorists by the U.S.

Watch the clips of Cain, Bachmann, Gingrich, and Huntsman:

Some of the concrete proposals seem like they have little or nothing to do with the alleged assassination plot. And programs aimed at sanctions and regime change are, as we’ve seen in the past three decades of U.S.-Iran relations, tough to implement in an effective way. Iran already faces tough sanctions and U.S.-sponsored Radio Farda and VOA Persian (TV) already exist. While the Republican presidential candidates are using this incident to attack Obama’s Iran policy, they don’t seem to be proposing anything new and concrete that could actually have an impact.

Clinton Warns That GOP’s U.N. Cuts Threaten U.S. Troop Withdrawal From Iraq And Afghanistan

By Marie Diamond on Oct 13, 2011 at 2:30 pm

On Wednesday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned congressional Republicans that their plan to slash funding for the United Nations will have serious consequences for the armed forces. The proposed budget cuts could jeopardize the return of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, she said in a letter:

“We cannot depend on United Nations missions … to help American troops return home safely and successfully, while taking actions that will decimate the budgets that underpin those important missions,” Clinton wrote to Rep. Ileana-Ros Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “In the end, engagement through the United Nations comes at a fraction of the cost of acting alone.”

Democrats have warned before that they oppose Ros-Lehtinen’s bill on United Nations reform but have not until now warned the bill could threaten troop safety overseas.

Ros-Lehtinen’s committee will markup the bill today. It would require the U.S. to withhold 50 percent of its funding to the U.N. until the international organization moves to a voluntary funding arrangement for most of its programs.

Clinton said that if the bill is presented to President Obama, she will recommend that he veto it.

Panetta Outlines Specifics Of ‘Draconian’ Spending Cuts: A Reduced U.S. Presence In Latin America And Africa

By Ben Armbruster on Oct 13, 2011 at 1:20 pm

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been using frightening rhetoric when talking about further cuts in military spending, often times claiming they will be “dangerous” or a “doomsday scenario,” or he says more reductions will “hollow out” the military. Yesterday he referred to plans for more cuts as a “goofy meat-axed approach.” But Panetta never really offers any specifics. He never says how exactly more military spending cuts will be “devastating” to the military. He just says it, without any evidence; and he is never asked to back up his claims. Until today.

During a House Armed Services Committee Hearing today, Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) asked Panetta for specifics as to how more spending cuts “increases the risk” to the military and U.S. national security. “What risk specifically?” Smith repeatedly asked. But Panetta didn’t really have much. After meandering through a series of fillers — “we’re going through the process,” “we’re still shaping” a strategy — Panetta finally admitted that “no decisions have been made” on what they need and eventually said the greatest risk would be to have to reduce the U.S. military presence in — Latin America and Africa:

PANETTA: Obviously we’re going through the process now of, what we want to do is establish, what is that larger strategy? So this isn’t just numbers driven, it’s not budget driven, it’s driven by a strategy that we can shape that tells us, ok what kind of force do we need, we know it’s going to be smaller. We want it to be agile. We want it to be deployable. We think we have to have multi-mission weapons systems to help support that force. If that’s the larger strategy and we’re still shaping that in conjunction with the service chiefs but also with the president. Once we’ve done that, then obviously we’re going to have to start making specific decisions about where the reductions are made.

Without telling you that decisions have been made, and no decisions have been made, I can give you an example. For example, if we decide that we’ve got to maintain our force structure presence in the Pacific in order to deal with China and China’s expanding role in that part of the world and because of the other issues that exist in that very sensitive part of the world. And if we decide that the Middle East is also a very important area where we have to maintain a presence as well then just by virtue of the numbers that we’re dealing with, we will probably have to reduce our presence elsewhere, our presence perhaps in Latin America, our presence in Africa and so if you’re talking about risk, part of the risk would be having less of a presence in those areas.

Watch the clip:

So for all Panetta’s fear mongering in the past few months over military spending cuts (yesterday he called them “draconian cuts that are part of this crazy doomsday mechanism”), the biggest risk he can think of is reducing — not eliminating — reducing the U.S. military presence in Latin America and Africa.

The Defense Department could easily make reductions beyond $350 billion over the next decade. Last year, the Sustainable Defense Task Force (SDTF) — which was chaired by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and staffed by “scholars from a broad ideological spectrum” — identified nearly $1 trillion in military spending cuts. Even Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (OK) said last month that cutting $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget over the next 10 years would not be “super hard.” And CAP’s Larry Korb, Laura Conley and Alex Rothman identified $400 billion in cuts over the next 4 years.

NEWS FLASH

Rep. Walter Jones To Panetta: How Many More U.S. Soldiers Have To Die In Afghanistan? | Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, appearing before the House Armed Services Committee today, faced tough questions from Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Jones, quoting from an email he received from a Marine Corp. general in Afghanistan, asked, “What do we say to the mother and father, the wife of the last soldier or Marine killed to support a corrupt government and a corrupt leader in a war that cannot be won?” Jones went on to ask Panetta if, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates committed, the Pentagon still plans to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2015. Watch it:

By Eli Clifton on Oct 13, 2011 at 12:03 pm

National Security Brief: October 13, 2011

By ThinkProgress on Oct 13, 2011 at 9:36 am


– Officials said that the Obama administration does not plan to shift its policy toward Iran, despite harsh calls for Iran to be held to account for allegedly leading an assassination plot against the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S.

– U.S. officials became convinced that Iranian regime figures were behind the assassination plot because of the money trail and they now consider it likely that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was aware of the plan.

– Senior administration officials are struggling to explain why the Iranian elite Quds force would orchestrate such a “risky attack in so amateurish a manner.”

– Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey predicts that U.S. forces will still be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq when his tenure as the military’s top officer expires in two years.

– The U.S. embassy in Baghdad says that Iraq took control of its airspace earlier this month, the first time since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

– Amnesty International is calling on Canadian authorities to arrest former President George W. Bush for “crimes under international law including torture” when he attends an economic summit in British Columbia next week.

– Nineteen people were arrested in Poland as the result of an investigation launched after the recent Norway right-wing terror attacks. Norwegian authorities had asked the Poles to look into killer Anders Breivik’s possible bomb-making contacts.

– Libyan rebels reported the capture of Muammar Qaddafi’s son Mo’tassim as they advanced on Surt, one of the last strongholds loyal to the now-deposed dictator.

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