When U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman commented last week that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exacerbates European-Muslim anti-Semitism, GOP politicians and right-wing pro-Israel pundits and organizations seized on an inaccurate paraphrase from the totality of the remarks and called for him to be recalled.

The right-wing assaults on Gutman and the Obama administration misrepresented the thrust of his remarks. Mother Jones’s Adam Serwer, while lamenting Gutman’s lack of clarity, offers this accurate assessment of the comments and how they don’t mean what the right says they do:

Gutman’s suggestion that anti-Semitism would subside if a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be reached isn’t the same as saying Israelis or Jews are “responsible” for anti-Semitism.

That portrayal is a far cry from those who claim Gutman “directly blamed Israel for anti-Semitism.” Now, other commentators are questioning whether or not the actual issue addressed by Gutman is controversial at all.

Sources as widely varied as academia, Jewish organizations, and even the Israeli government itself openly address the subject of “spill over,” as it’s sometimes called, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into anti-Semitic incidences against the Diaspora (roughly meaning Jews who don’t live in Israel). At the venerable Jewish Daily Forward, writer J.J. Goldberg blogs that the Israeli government’s civilian and uniformed security branches discussed the impact of Israeli actions on the security of Diaspora Jews in the 1990s:

The problem of spillover attacks on Diaspora Jews was discussed as early as 1994 by the Israel Defense Forces and Ministry of Defense. I heard about it from Sallai Meridor, who was a Defense Ministry official in 1994 and took part in discussions…

He goes on to address, at length, a study by the Jewish People Planning Institute (JPPI), a Jewish nationalist organization created “in large part in order to have an institutional body that could help analyze the impact of Israeli security policy and action on Diaspora Jews,” according to Goldberg. So, an Israeli think tank was founded on the basis that, as the group’s first paper posits, the “Israeli-Arab dispute… carries important implications for all Jews wherever they reside.” The same 2004 paper (PDF) also says:

The rise of antisemitism in Europe in the last three years, largely correlated with the rise of Islamic activism and developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The IDF and the JPPI, though, aren’t the only Jewish organizations who’ve discussed the connections between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and flare-ups of anti-Semitism. Salon’s Justin Elliott points out that the British group Community Service Trust (CST), whose slogan is “Protecting the Jewish Community,” establishes correlations between a “trigger event” — like the late 2008 and early 2009 Israeli war on Gaza or the 2010 Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for the Strip — and flare-ups of anti-Semitic incidences in the U.K. A report (PDF) from CST establishes a causal link between the Mideast events and the British incidences:

Clearly, it would not be acceptable to define all anti-Israel activity as antisemitic; but it cannot be ignored that much contemporary antisemitism takes place in the context of, or is motivated by, extreme feelings over the Israel/Palestine issue. Drawing out these distinctions, and deciding on where the dividing lines lie, is one of the most difficult areas of CST’s work in recording and analysing hate crime.

As Elliott observes: “This point by Community Service Trust echoes Gutman’s sentiments almost exactly.” But don’t hold your breath for Commentary Magazine to condemn the IDF, JPPI, or the CST. They’re not, after all, part of the Obama administration.

The American Enterprise Institute has a new report [PDF] outlining the challenges of containing and deterring a nuclear Iran. But while the report claims to be looking down the road to the imminent scenario of a nuclear weapons-possessing Iran, the neoconservative authors push an agenda of increased military spending justified by what they questionably claim will be a new and unparalleled containment challenge.

For starters, the presumption that “sound American strategy thus requires assuming that Iran will have a weaponized nuclear capability when the next president takes office in January 2013″ manages to completely ignore most intelligence estimates about Iran’s nuclear program. AEI’s report offers no evidence of this claim. To construct a nuclear weapon by 2013 would require Iran to have already begun producing highly enriched uranium (HEU). Neither the IAEA nor any other reputable intelligence estimates have made this assertion. Moreover, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in February that the U.S. government believes that it would take Iran a “few years” to acquire enough HEU for one nuclear weapon, “if it chooses to do so.”

Furthermore, the authors elide or downplay the existing efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Five years after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad anounnced plans to deploy a new generation of indigenous centrifuges, Iran hasn’t brought a full cascade of the devices online. Various other technical problems, including the Stuxnet computer virus, have plagued the Iranian program. None of this could have happened without the multilateral sanctions regime engineered by the White House. But harsher measures — such as those targeting the central bank — could threaten the international coalition against Iran.

The rest of the report relies on repeated calls for increased defense spending — a topic near and dear to the defense hawks at AEI — and repeating the claim that Iran will be particularly difficult to contain because Iranian leadership is irrational or suicidal. Despite the factual weakness of the “martyr state” myth, the report argues:

It is likely that the Iranians value nuclear weapons not only for their deterrent purposes but also, if delivered by a suicide terrorist, for the intoxicating promise of devastating effect and potential deniability. [...]

Questions about the rationality or apocalyptic visions of the current clerical leadership or Ahmadinejad must be considered as a reimagining of the past.

There is little evidence that Iran’s leadership is suicidal or irrational but this myth is an important argument in the toolkit for hyping fears about a nuclear Iran. It should come as no surprise that two of the report’s authors — Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly — were signatories on Project for The New American Century (PNAC) letters devoted to pushing for regime change in Iraq by force. The brain trust behind the invasion of Iraq is now warning of an “existential worry” (whatever that means) to the U.S. and its allies in the region. And much like in the buildup to war with Iraq, overstating the threat and misrepresenting facts on the ground is the first step in mobilizing support for incautious militaristic foreign policies.

At a time of continuing economic crisis in the U.S. and around the world, President Obama’s administration has amassed a record of successes in national security. Irrespective of controversies over some of the policies, Obama has pursued perceived threats in a broadened, borderless drone war; engaged in a NATO war to protect civilians in Libya; and is on the verge of ending one ground war and planning to wind down another even longer one. But this is just not good enough for some conservatives, who insist on portraying Obama as a stereotypical lily-livered liberal afraid to indefinitely continue large-scale U.S. military commitments abroad. The chosen line of attack relies on the now-commonplace trope that Obama doesn’t listen to his generals when formulating his security strategies.

The latest salvo in this assault comes from neoconservative legacy Fred Kagan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Kagan concludes a Weekly Standard piece — “The President & the Generals” — by writing:

Under no circumstances should the president of the United States ever take an important military decision simply because a uniformed officer has recommended it. But, when the president does overrule his commanders, he had better have an extremely good reason not only to reject their advice but to prefer his own wisdom. And if he finds himself doing it repeatedly, he would do well to consider what the source of the problem really is.

Given most of the Republican presidential field’s shaky understanding of civilian control of the military, Kagan’s “under no circumstances” caveat is welcome. Nonetheless, Kagan’s implication here is obvious: the real “source of the problem” is Obama himself. Kagan, then, would do well consider for himself that there’s been another overarching problem affecting government decisions over the past three years: a financial crisis of epic proportions that has, is, and will likely continue to bear on decisions made by a commander-in-chief, though, crucially, not on commanders on the ground. And while military commanders are charged with making tactical recommendations and informing on military strategy, the president decides the country’s overall national security strategy, a concept Kagan seems to have overlooked.

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who, in 2010, won AEI’s prestigious Kristol Award, hinted at such disparity between the purviews of a president and his generals when he explained the chain-of-command at a confirmation hearing to his current post atop the Central Intelligence Agency. Petraeus, at the time the top U.S. military officer for Afghanistan, said:

[A]t every level of the chain of command above me there are additional considerations, and each person above me, all the way up to and including the president has a broader purview and broader considerations that are brought to bear. The president alone [is] in the position of evaluating all those different considerations, including certainly those of the commander on the ground but also many others as well in reaching his decision.

Petraeus lamented that he wasn’t getting everything he wanted from a military standpoint, but acknowledged that he was “talking about small differences” and that the situation was “understandable in the sense that there are broader considerations beyond just those of a military commander.” He went on to say that no military commander gets everything they want:

The fact is that there has never been a military commander in history who has had all the forces he would like to have. Or all the time. Or all the money. Or all the authorities. Or, nowadays, all the bandwidth.

So, if Obama “finds himself [making different decisions than his generals] repeatedly,” that isn’t quite the extraordinary situation Kagan posits.