After a speech on Friday by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that implored Israel to make moves to thaw its cool relations with strategic partners and overcome its growing isolation, neoconservative commentators went bananas. Former Bush Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, speaking with neocon Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, wondered, “Does anyone wonder why Israelis don’t trust this administration to guard their security?” (In September, Abram’s himself said it was “true” that Israel and the U.S. enjoy “the best military-to-military relationship ever.”)

The most overblown response, though, came from right-wing don Bill Kristol. Speaking through a press release from the far-right-wing pressure group he heads, the Emergency Committee for Israel, Kristol attacked President Obama’s comments last weekend to Jewish donors that his administration’s security cooperation with Israel had reached new heights in the partnership. Kristol said:

Nobody believes President Obama when he claims, as he did last week, that he “has done more for the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.” That’s because he hasn’t — and because President Obama and his administration keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.

The problem with Kristol’s statement, and one he seems to willfully ignore, is that there are at least a few people who don’t hold his stated opinion about the Obama administration’s work on Israel’s security, among them Israel’s leaders.

In a speech delivered to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) national convention in May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called American security cooperation with Israel during the Obama administration “unprecedented”:

Yesterday President Obama spoke about his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security. He rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented. He spoke of that commitment not just in front of AIPAC. He spoke about it in two speeches heard throughout the Arab world. And he has backed those words with deeds.

In September, Netanyahu personally thanked Obama in a speech for his attentiveness and support in resolving a crisis when demonstrators overtook Israel’s embassy in Cairo.

The various U.S. security commitments to Israel are legion. In the same speech Kristol criticized, Panetta announced that “the U.S. armed forces and the [Israel Defense Forces] will conduct the largest joint exercises in the history of that partnership.” This spring, Israel used an expanded aid package from the Obama administration to develop the Iron Dome missile defense system that protects citizens of southern Israel from rocket attacks with a 93 percent success rate. And the U.S. has worked closely with Israel in slowing Iran’s nuclear progress, even reportedly partnering up to create the Stuxnet virus that hampered Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and selling Israel bunk-busing bombs. All the work has included unflinching diplomatic support for Israel in international fora.

In August, former Israeli prime minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that he could “hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.” Last month, Barak said Obama is an “extremely strong supporter of Israel in regard to its security” and that his administration was “excelling in this.” He added: “I don’t think that anyone can raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel.” Maybe someone should tell Bill Kristol.

Last week, a well-connected neoconservative pundit and board member of a high-profile right-wing pressure group wrote, after the prisoner swap deal that freed an Israeli soldier, that Israel should now take Palestinian militants — and their “devils’ spawn” children — and “throw them… into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.”

When the blog post, by Rachel Abrams (wife of top Bush adviser Elliott Abrams), got some media attention — highlighted by both liberal and conservative writers — the progressive Jewish-American group J Street demanded that the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) cut ties with the neoconservative doyen.

ECI responded to J Street’s criticism with a statement from former John McCain campaign adviser Michael Goldfarb (who advises ECI) to the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo. Goldfarb said:

J Street chooses to deliberately and viciously slander Rachel Abrams, accusing her of directing her words at all Palestinians when she was clearly speaking about the terrorists who abducted [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit and those who celebrated that deed and other acts of terror. ECI supports Israeli efforts to kill or capture terrorists, including those responsible for abducting Gilad Shalit.

Despite the fact that her original post said Palestinians’ children should also befall the fate she prescribes for their parents — something the denial took no heed of — Abrams would unequivocally demonstrate shortly thereafter that she does not, indeed, limit her call for gruesome physical harm to be done only to Palestinian terrorists. Her list of those slated to become “food for sharks” also apparently includes liberal American writers with no ties to terror or a record of supporting or celebrating such acts.

After the Washington Jewish Week piece, this reporter asked Goldfarb on Twitter if he personally thought it would be alright to drop Palestinian prisoners in the sea as shark food instead of taking them to Israeli prisons. Goldfarb dodged, writing back that he’d “have to check with [Rachel Abrams] re official ECI position.” It was at this point that Abrams herself chimed in, writing in a Twitter post that she would feed this reporter “and all his friends to sharks.”

Before Abrams and ECI start issuing convoluted denials that relay implausible defenses or alternate intended meanings, it should be noted that the context of Abrams’ Tweet seems unambiguous as to the target of her comment. Take a look at a screenshot of her tweet, along with Goldfarb’s to which she was responding:

In his condemnation of the original blog post, J Street chief Jeremy Ben-Ami said Abrams’ screed was an “unhinged rant filled with incitement and hate.” The term seems to apply to her twitter feed too. If Abrams is, as her brother Commentary editor John Podhoretz posited, the “neocon id,” then perhaps that school of thought has its issues to work out as well. Looking at her tweet, one wonders what this reporter and Abrams’ mutual friends must think, for she said she’d consign them to becoming shark feed, too.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — a right-wing “pro-Israel” pressure group — attempted to paint the Occupy Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic. But while plenty of evidence runs counter to the ECI’s far-reaching assertions that politicians are “turning a blind eye to anti-semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” the ECI is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance.

ECI board member Rachel Abrams — wife of George W. Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams — litters her blog, “Bad Rachel,” with homophobic, anti-Palestinian, innuendo-filled screeds about political opponents.

Last year, she focused on Christopher Hitchens’ bisexuality in a post titled “Giving Homosexuality a Bad name.” She wrote:

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford.

And following the death of Sen. “Teddy” Kennedy (D-MA), she offered the following innuendo-filled limerick:

An amorous sot name of Teddy
Lost control when things got a bit heady.
He went over the side,
Left his ride in the tide,
And his squeeze giving head to an eddy.

But Abrams saves her harshest, most dehumanizing, words for Palestinians. Abrams writes that after Israel finishes celebrating the release of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, they should:

…round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.

Abrams’ violent fantasies are protected under the first amendment, but the organization’s leadership might want to look in the mirror before smearing the Occupy Wall Street protests as intolerant. (HT: Media Matters)

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta sharply criticized members of Congress who put holds on funds slated for development projects in the West Bank and Gaza and security assistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Panetta added his voice to the list of politicians and policy experts expressing frustration with congressional efforts to penalize the PA. Speaking at a Tel Aviv press conference, he emphasized that the White House opposes withholding the funds.

This is a critical time. This is no time to withhold those funds, at a point in time where we are urging the Palestinians and Israelis to sit down and negotiate a peace agreement.

Americans for Peace Now (APN) breaks down the blocked funding and concludes that while $200 million in 2011 funding has already been spent, the blockage will hold up $192 million in funds for humanitarian programs for Palestinian residents in the West Bank and Gaza. These programs include USAID projects and other development assistance programs which have long been kept completely separate from aid to the PA. In addition to the humanitarian aid, $150 million in funding for security assistance to the PA will be withheld.

CAP’s Peter Juul reported last week that Israeli and American officials expressed “deep concern” about defunding the PA:

Both Israelis and Americans stated that a cut off of U.S. aid or Israeli tax transfers could lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority itself. For their part, Israelis viewed an aid cutoff as a threat to Israeli security given the near-certain likelihood that such a move would lead to the breakdown of security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. 

The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Anthony H. Cordesman warned that cutting military aid to the PA could badly damage Palestinian and Israeli security interests. And even neoconservative pro-Israel hawks have voiced opposition to holding up the funding. Responding to the aid blockage, former Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliot Abrams told a Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Hudson Institute conference yesterday that cutting off aid to the PA could result in a collapse of the government in the West Bank.

The blockage in aid has already resulted in the elimination of 50 jobs, according to Palestinian economics minister Hassan Abu Libdeh. The PA has twice failed to pay employees on time in recent months, raising tensions in the West Bank as spending on public works and civil servant salaries become increasingly unpredictable. Concerns about the cutoff in funding go beyond the West Bank and Gaza as American and Israeli officials are growing increasingly vocal with their warnings that a cutoff of assistance could lead to a breakdown in security cooperation with the PA and undermine attempts to build up the West Bank economy.

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Middle East media watchdog closely aligned with U.S. neoconservatives and Israel’s hawkish security establishment and rightist Likud Party. The grant was awarded “to conduct a project that documents anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East.” The announcement continues:

This grant will enable MEMRI to expand its efforts to monitor the media, translate materials into ten languages, analyze trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and glorification, and increase distribution of materials through its website and other outlets.

Finding examples of anti-Semitism is already a robust MEMRI project and one wonders why exactly they needed the cash: According to publicly available tax filings, MEMRI had nearly $5 million in revenue in 2007 and more than $4.5 million in revenue in 2008.

What’s more troubling, MEMRI has faced accusations of mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources to portray regional media and attitudes in an overly-negative fashion. One of the most common issues has been with MEMRI’s mistranslations which appear to show anti-Semitism on thin evidence. In 2007, CNN correspondent Atika Shubert checked MEMRI’s translations of a Palestinian children’s program against those provided by the cable news channel’s own interpreters:

Media watchdog MEMRI translates one caller as saying – quote - ‘We will annihilate the Jews.’ But, according to several Arabic speakers used by CNN, the caller actually says ‘The Jews are killing us.’ MEMRI told us it stood by its translation.

In other instances, MEMRI has been accused of twisting translations to portray criticisms of Israel and its driving ideology, Zionism, as anti-Semitic. In 2006, Rima Barakat, a Palestinian- and Muslim-American activist and one-time Republican candidate for the Colorado state assembly, wrote in the Rocky Mountain News:

Halim Barakat (no relation), a professor at Georgetown University, published an article in Al-Hayat Daily of London titled “The wild beast that Zionism created: Self-destruction.” By the time MEMRI “translated” it, the title was distorted to “Jews have lost their humanity.” Barakat objected, “Every time I wrote Zionism, MEMRI replaced the word by Jew or Judaism. They want to give the impression that I’m not criticizing Israeli policy, but that what I’m saying is anti-Semitic.” It seems obvious that MEMRI is adamant on stigmatizing anyone who criticizes Israel and/or Zionism as being anti Jewish.

In a 2002 article, then-Middle East editor of the British Guardian newspaper Brian Whitaker criticized MEMRI for inaccuracies that reflected an agenda:

As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.

All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.

The organization was founded as a U.S. tax-exempt non-profit in 1998 by now-Hudson Institute Mideast policy chief Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American, and current MEMRI president, Israeli Yigal Carmon, a 20-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (where he spent five years running Israel’s occupation of the West Bank) and top adviser to two Likud governments. An early archived version of the “about page” of MEMRI’s website lists five staff members, three of whom (including Carmon) have backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence. The same page lists one of MEMRI’s missions as “emphasiz(ing) the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel” — though the line has since disappeared from the website.

In addition to providing journalists and the public with translations, the media watchdog has attracted the attention of burgeoning (and closely linked) European and American anti-Muslim movements. MEMRI was cited 16 times in the so-called manifesto of anti-Muslim right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, showing up even more when MEMRITV was included.

MEMRI’s board of directors and board of advisers read as a veritable who’s who of right-wing supporters of Israel — including many neoconservative figues and their close allies — such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Steve Emerson, Norman Podhoretz and Alan Dershowitz. (HT: Jim Lobe and Philip Weiss.)

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) contained an otherwise forgettable opinion piece by the Journal’s editorial board, except that buried in the fourth paragraph was a call for war with Iran.

The opinion piece, titled “The Battle Over Iraq: Tehran Kills America GIs and Undermines Iraqi Democracy,” offers a lengthy defense of military aid to Iraq and a long term security relationship with Iraq — “The U.S. has kept troops in South Korea and Japan for six decades after the end of the wars there, and a similar presence in Iraq might be as salutary” — but the fourth paragraph contains the following endorsement of what could only be considered acts of war against Iran. It reads:

The U.S. has chosen not to go after the militias directly to shield the government of Nouri al-Maliki from the domestic political fallout of unilateral American military action. Such considerations are cold comfort to soldiers under attack. The U.S. has a legal and moral responsibility to respond. We ought to go after the militias in Iraq as well as their backers in Iran who’ve decided to make Iraq a proxy war.

For the sake of clarity, the WSJ editorial board should explain exactly what it means by “going after” the Iranian supporters of Shiite militias. Do they propose cross border raids into Iran? Targeted bombing of suspected arms smugglers in Iran?

But such loose talk of a potentially disastrous war shouldn’t be so surprising coming from hawkish deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens, who is widely understood to author the unsigned foreign policy columns and referred to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a “Hitlerian figure.” Furthmore, Stephens attended a secretive, off the record 2007 conference in the Bahamas hosted by the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which included an entire session dedicated to the discussion of various military options against Iran’s nuclear program.

Indeed, recent statements from senior military and intelligence officials about Iranian support for Shiite militias in Iraq has been leveraged by neoconservatives to push for more aggressive, yet vaguely defined, action against Iran.

Former George W. Bush Middle East adviser Elliot Abrams hit a similar note on his Council on Foreign Relations blog, writing twice in the past week on the failure of the Obama administration to take “action” against Iran. On July 8, he wrote:

What credibility can we possibly have when they know we know that Iran has been killing American soldiers year after year without any significant American response.

Much like the Wall Street Journal, Abrams never bothered qualifying what “response” was appropriate. What seems inappropriate, however, is the calling for “action” against another sovereign country without bothering to define what action is actually being endorsed.

Perhaps more importantly, if countering the extensive Iranian influence in Iraq is the new metric for success, the U.S. should plan to extend its mission there forever.