Yesterday’s Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) forum offered a venue for GOP presidential hopefuls to try to outdo one another’s pro-Israel credentials. While all the candidates professed their commitment to the U.S.-Israel alliance, all the speeches were similarly uniform in their promises of hardline policies towards Iran and, in many cases, suggestions that military action against Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program might be justified in the near-term.

During the speeches and Q&A with RJC’s membership, the candidates liberally threw around talk of U.S. air strikes against Iran or allowing Israel to lead the way for a joint war, imposing “suffering from sanctions” on the Iranian people, sabotaging refineries and doing “whatever is necessary” to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Watch a compilation of comments from the invited candidates:

But while the candidates and the RJC audience seem to think that the way to win over Republican primary voters is by promising military action, covert — though widely discussed — operations against Iran, and unconditional support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, there’s no consensus on these issues in Israel.

Last month, a Haaretz poll found that Israelis were nearly evenly split on whether Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, with 41 percent supporting a strike and 39 percent opposing. And former Mossad chief Meir Dagan has repeatedly warned that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could spark a devastating regional war and is the “stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

The RJC and the GOP presidential field claim to stand side by side with Israel, and are ready for war with Iran. But the views expressed at yesterday’s RJC Presidential Candidates Forum in Washington, DC, fail to reflect the diversity of public opinion in Israel and the potentially disastrous consequences of a U.S. and/or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A Politico article yesterday on CAP’s Middle East posture cited Josh Block, who described CAP’s bloggers as writing “borderline anti-Semitic stuff.” In a leaked email to a right-wing listserv, Block, now senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, disclosed he had compiled thousands of words of opposition research on CAP and Media Matters bloggers, while urging neoconservative journalists to “amplify” the Politico article.

Block’s message as reported by Politico was made even more strongly in his email sent out to the right-wing journalist listserv. He wrote, “These are the words of anti-Semites, not Democratic political players,” adding, “This kind of anti-Israel sentiment is so fringe it’s support by CAP is outrageous.” Ironically, Block’s own personal business and political interests find him frequently on the fringes of the Democratic party and mainstream political dialogue in Washington.

Last year, upon his departure from AIPAC as a spokesperson for the organization, Block told Ben Smith: “There is an important debate taking place inside the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, and I’m relishing my return to the political, as well as the policy, conversation, politics with Israel-centric policies.” But when not pushing a hard-line on U.S.-Israel policy within the Democratic party, Block partners with Lanny Davis — who represented business interests backing the 2009 coup in Honduras — in a joint lobbying practice.

Block’s firm has proven itself as one of the go-to lobby shops in Washington for human rights abusers such as Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo and the the new Honduran government.

Block’s firm’s willingness to represent unpopular interests in Washington, for the right price, is further exemplified by their status as registered lobbyists for Agility DGS, a company suspended from government contracts after it was accused of defrauding the U.S. government as a contractor in Iraq.

Block’s business acumen and pursuit of the next payday raises the question of whose account Block was working on when he compiled the opposition research document on CAP and Media Matters bloggers.

Yesterday, Politico published an article written by Ben Smith purporting to highlight a divide on the left on Middle East policy. The story quoted sources — including former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block — saying that bloggers here at the Center for American Progress are “borderline anti-Semitic” and “anti-Israel.” In the process, Politico also cherry-picked a few posts out of hundreds ThinkProgress has written on Middle East issues to back up its case. Yet Politico misrepresented the posts in question and CAP’s wider Middle East positions.

Salon’s Justin Elliott reports today that Block sent out an email to a neoconservative journalist list-serv called “The Freedom Community” urging members to read and “amplify” Politico’s story, promoting it because in his view it shows that CAP bloggers are “anti-Israel” and vilify “pro-Israel Americans, Jews, Members of Congress, and pretty much anyone who thinks Iran with nuke is a problem, or supports a strong US-Israe [sic] relationship.” He said of our writing, “These are the words of anti-Semites, not Democratic political players.” Block also said in the email — without offering any evidence — that we engage in “hate speech.” (CAP and its affiliated bloggers are pro-Israel, support a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship, believe Iran with a nuclear weapon is a serious problem and do not vilify Jews). While it’s unclear who is on this list-serv, Jen Rubin at the Washington Post, Commentary and the Weekly Standard amplified the Politico article shortly after it was published.

Block also accompanied his email with an extensive 3,000 word opposition research document against ThinkProgress bloggers — which appears to have been completed on Nov. 8 — that contains a number of ad-hominem attacks against us without any evidence backing up those attacks. Instead, Block simply links to dozens of previous posts this blog has written on the Middle East. Some examples:

The CAP writers are not above smearing Democratic politicians and mainstream journalists for being Israel-firsters, for carrying AIPAC’s water, etc. But the personal attacks speak to personal unprofessionalism and borderline libel, while the substantive stuff exposes how far out of the mainstream CAP’s work has actually gotten.

Across everything, there’s a weird combination of sneering recklessness and smug childishness that underlies a lot of their rhetoric. On the recklessness side, there’s a degree to which they really don’t know how shrill they sound and how far off the reservation they’ve strayed. It’s almost as if, in talking to each other, it’s now just natural to talk about Jewish money in politics, about treasonous politicians, etc.

And on Twitter today, Ben Smith acknowledged that he accepted this research document before his article was published yesterday:

Salon’s Elliott notes that Block is a go-to for reporters looking for a right-wing view on the Middle East and that he now is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and also a partner in a lobbying and PR firm, Davis-Block. “It’s not clear,” Elliott adds, “whether Block is shopping the oppo trove on progressive bloggers as a personal project or as part of work for a client.”

Last month during the GOP presidential candidate foreign policy debate, Newt Gingrich suggested that he would order a military attack on Iran over its nuclear program. “You have to take whatever steps are necessary to break its capacity to have a nuclear weapon,” he said. Keeping with this militaristic tone — and perpetuating the GOP race for which presidential candidate loves Israel the most — the former speaker told Wolf Blitzer yesterday on CNN that as president, he would help the Jewish state should it decide to attack Iran.

“I think if I were president, the Israelis would have told us,” Gingrich said when asked what he would do if his national security adviser informed him of an Israeli attack. “I would rather plan a joint operation conventionally than push the Israelis to a point where they [the Iranians] go nuclear,” he added.

Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have recently stepped up their pro-Israel game, saying they would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (Romney said he would pretty much do whatever Israel tells him to do.) And in his interview with Blitzer, Gingrich followed suit but upped the ante, saying he’d order the move “on the first day” he becomes president:

BLITZER: Would you move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?

GINGRICH: The first day. It will be an executive order the day I’m inaugurated.

BLITZER: And what would happen if the Arab countries sever relations with the United States, Muslim countries, as a result of that?

GINGRICH: The Saudis aren’t going to sever relations with the United States. The Emirates are not going to sever relations. They’re too afraid –

BLITZER: They have threatened over the years if the U.S. were to do that, that’s what they would do.

GINGRICH: They are too afraid of Iran right now. And I would also say to them, fine, you want to prove to us how much you hate Israel? Prove it. This is nonsense.

Watch the clips:

No American administration since 1967 has recognized Israeli rule over Jerusalem. Since 1995, Presidents Clinton, Bush and now Obama have all invoked national security waivers preventing moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, probably because, as Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann told ThinkProgress recently, the move would mean “following Israel into abject isolation, and the United States into an weakened and marginal regional and global role.”

As for joining an Israeli attack on Iran, what Gingrich, his fellow GOP candidates (except for Ron Paul) and the right-wing war hawks always ignore is the “what next.”

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the United States Air Force, while overseeing the Dover Air Force Base mortuary that receives the bodies of troops killed overseas, had cremated and disposed some remains and sent them to a landfill in King George County, Virginia. At the time, neither military officials nor Post reporters could verify the number of body parts that had been handled in such a way.

But after combing through military and mortuary records, the Post found that partial remains of at least 274 dead American troops were sent to the landfill, and far more unidentifiable body parts were disposed of in the same manner:

This week, after The Post pressed for information contained in the Dover mortuary’s electronic database, the Air Force produced a tally based on those records. It showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel were cremated, incinerated and taken to the landfill between 2004 and 2008.

An additional group of 1,762 unidentified remains were collected from the battlefield and disposed of in the same manner, the Air Force said. Those fragments could not undergo DNA testing because they had been badly burned or damaged in explosions. The total number of incinerated fragments dumped in the landfill exceeded 2,700.

Knowledge of the practices outraged families of fallen troops and the owners of the landfill, who told the Post they were “pulled in unknowingly” to the situation, and that they wouldn’t want “any part” of troops killed defending the country buried in the landfill.

The practice began at a time when there was little public oversight over the Dover mortuary. President George H.W. Bush banned news coverage of the return of deceased troops during the Gulf War in 1991, and the ban remained until 2009, when President Obama ended it. The first record of such a disposal, according to the Post, is from April 2004, and the Air Force decided to end the practice in 2008. It now buries cremated remains at sea.

Dover AFB was the subject of federal investigation after whistleblowers reported stories of lost body parts earlier this year. On November 8, investigators announced that they had uncovered “gross mismanagement” at the mortuary involving the handling of war dead, and similar scandals have haunted Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, where graves were misidentified and urns containing troop remains were improperly disposed of. That incident is now the subject of an FBI criminal investigation.