“What's striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that ‘it is not permitted for anyone in the United States’ to describe Israel's nefarious influence.
“But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges -- and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world.”
Yet, what is striking about the Post’s up-is-down rant is that it was made in the context of a successful neoconservative campaign to blackball Freeman from a job in the U.S. government, where he had a long and distinguished career.
In other words, the Post’s editors pretend that the termination of Freeman’s government career (which they helped destroy) and the smearing of his reputation (which they contributed to) were, in some way, the advancement of his career and his fame.
They also left out that they commissioned one of the most influential attacks on Freeman, a Feb. 28 op-ed by Jon Chait, an editor at The New Republic, an important neoconservative journal whose publisher Martin Peretz has been a staunch supporter of Israeli government actions for decades. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Wage War on a ‘Realist.’”]
Piling On
Over the weekend, the Post’s opinion section delivered two more coup-de-grace shots to Freeman’s reputation by publishing columns by Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Virginia, and Post editorial writer Charles Lane – articles that alternatively linked Freeman to the Taliban and to the Darfur genocide – and blasted him for complaining about being subjected to “libelous” accusations.
“Freeman's charges of an elaborate conspiracy to derail his nomination are disingenuous,” Wolf wrote in his op-ed, picking up the theme of no formal AIPAC action. “The ‘Israel lobby’ never contacted me.”
However, Wolf made clear that he had read and absorbed much of the anti-Freeman propaganda that Washington’s neoconservatives were spreading.
Wolf links Freeman to the Taliban’s Mullah Omar (via Saudi financial support both for Islamic madrassas and for a Middle East think tank run by Freeman) and to the Darfur atrocities (via a Chinese-government-backed oil company which paid Freeman $10,000 a year for advice and which has invested in exploration for Sudanese oil).
While such Kevin-Bacon-style guilt by tenuous association might seem over the top in other circumstances, the Post’s editors appeared determined to go to any lengths to ensure that former Ambassador Freeman would face permanent scarring for having mentioned the Israel Lobby – or as they would put it, the “Israel Lobby.”
Using Wolf’s logic, one could accuse nearly every American of supporting the Taliban (because we use Saudi oil) and of complicity in the Darfur atrocities (because we as a nation buy billions of dollars in Chinese goods each year).
Up-Is-Down
Despite the Post’s extraordinary devotion of editorial space to demonize a little known ex-diplomat who had been appointed to an obscure job, the Post’s piling on wasn’t over. The newspaper next published an op-ed by one of its own editorial writers, Charles Lane.
Lane’s chief point was that President Barack Obama must join in the destroy-Freeman campaign.
“The President needs to knock Freeman's insinuations down hard -- for two reasons,” Lane wrote. “The first is to stop them from gaining any more currency than they already have in the rest of the world, especially in Arab and Muslim regions. The second has to do with the United States itself and the quality of our political culture [which Obama has vowed to improve]. Letting Freeman's comments pass unchallenged would undercut it.”
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