Valerie Plame, who was outed in a press leak as an undercover CIA operative during former President George W. Bush’s administration, soon became a darling of the Left for her anti-Bush stance. She was able to successfully portray herself as the victim of neo-conservatives’ payback for what her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, did in publicly challenging the Bush administration’s explanation for invading Iraq. Ms. Plame has not dropped out of sight. She campaigned for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election cycle and recently spearheaded an effort to purchase control of Twitter in order to ban President Trump from using the social media platform to communicate his messages. There is no room on Twitter for “hate,” she said. Like many on the Left, however, when it comes to anti-Semitism, Ms. Plame seems to have a blind spot. She used Twitter on the first day of Rosh Hashanah this year to re-tweet a blatantly anti-Semitic article entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” Only after Ms. Plame’s re-tweet began to cause her a major public relations problem did she seek to recant with some lame explanations and false apologies. She also resigned from the board of the Ploughshares Fund, which had condemned her original re-tweet of the article.
The article Ms. Plame re-tweeted last week was written by Phil Giraldi, a former CIA Case Officer and Army Intelligence Officer who has written other articles attacking American Jews for their support of Israel in the past. In this article, Giraldi reprised anti-Semitic stereotypes reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors control politicians, the media, and the entertainment industries, he wrote. Giraldi added that some American Jews go beyond “dual loyalty” and “only have real loyalty to Israel.” He attributed much of the criticism of Iran and of the nuclear deal former President Obama negotiated with Iran to “American Jews” who are fueling “the war engine” against Iran. He went after the neo-conservatives in particular, many of whom are Jewish.
Giraldi’s “solution” is the equivalent of bringing back the forced wearing of the yellow Jewish star to let everyone know you are a Jew. The media should be required, he wrote, “to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is ‘Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.’ That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as ‘ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.’”
In short, Giraldi’s article compared the opinion of a Jew on a matter of national security that affects the United States as well as Israel to “rat poison.” And Ms. Plame, who detests neo-conservatives for allegedly leaking her identity as a CIA operative to the press, sought fit to retweet a link to this hate-filled trope to her followers. When faced with criticism for her action, Ms. Plame at first blamed her critics for overreacting. “First of all, calm down,” she tweeted. She was not necessarily endorsing Giraldi’s article by re-tweeting it, she wrote, before going on to describe the article as “very provocative, but thoughtful.”
“Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish,” Plame declared. She counseled her Twitter followers to “read the entire article and try, just for a moment, to put aside your biases and think clearly.”
When Valerie Plame realized that she was digging a deep hole for herself, she backtracked and shamelessly claimed that she had only “skimmed this piece, zeroed in on the neocon criticism, and shared it without seeing and considering the rest.” Considering the title of the article, “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars,” and the article’s juxtaposition of its references to neo-conservatives and American Jews in an unfavorable light, Plame’s explanation is disingenuous on its face.
Finally, Ms. Plame came out with a fatuous apology for what she called a “doozy” of a mistake. However, far from being a mistake for which she felt sincerely sorry, Ms. Plame’s initial re-tweet of Giraldi’s anti-Semitic article was deliberate and represented her true beliefs. As Alan Dershowitz observed on “Fox and Friends,” “The interesting thing about Twitter, you do it so quickly, it often reflects your real, genuine beliefs. Then you realize what you’ve said and you say, ‘Uh oh. I’m sorry’…”
Ms. Plame has a pattern of re-tweeting Giraldi’s anti-Semitic articles. For example, she re-tweeted and commented favorably on another Giraldi article entitled “Why I Still Dislike Israel.” In that article, written in December 2014, Giraldi claimed there were “good historic reasons to dislike Israel.” Note that he did not limit his “dislike” to specific Israeli government policies. He wrote that he disliked the Jewish state itself, which he called “a racist apartheid style state.” Ms. Plame retweeted this article with the comment, “Well put, Mr. Giraldi.” She also re-tweeted yet another Giraldi article, this one full of conspiracy theories purporting to link Israel to the 9⁄11 terrorist attacks on America’s homeland.
Valerie Plame has plenty of company on the Left when it comes to harboring an anti-Israel bias that calls into question the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel. Leftists deride those whom they refer to as “Israel Firsters,” a slur that originated from far Right anti-Semitic sources and has since been popularized on the Left by such progressive outlets as Media Matters. Not surprisingly, some of these haters on the Left who throw around the term “Israeli Firsters” to impugn the patriotism of Jewish supporters of Israel are themselves anything but patriotic. Repeatedly condemning President Trump’s embrace of the principle of “America First,” they hate America as much as they hate Israel.
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