Wednesday, September 18, 2013

A Tale of Two Jewish Groups

AIPAC sucks up to Obama like crazy--and gets the cold shoulder. ZINO outfit J Street balks at Obama's Syria strike--and gets rewarded (if you can call an appearance by Joe Biden at your annual convention a reward). What gives?:
Just two weeks ago, J Street withheld support for Obama’s plan strike Assad, but now they smell like roses.  
At the time, even J Street supporters thought it was a move destined to make the outfit irrelevant. “If it is true that @jstreetdotorg is not going to support @BarackObama,” Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted September 8, “then it shouldn’t expect the W.H. to care about its M.E. positions.” If J Street wants influence, wrote JTA’s Ron Kampeas that same week, “answering ‘We dunno’ on Syria is not the way to go about earning it.” 
“J Street is irrelevant to the policy conversation,” one senior official at a Washington-based pro-Israel organization told me. “They split their time between being redundant, or being losers, or not saying anything at all. Sometimes they support positions everyone already endorses, like the two-state solution. Other times they support losing positions, like advocating that the U.S. distance itself from Israel. Lately they’ve just refused to take positions on anything controversial, like Syria.” 
AIPAC, on the other hand, came out in full support of Obama’s Syria plan. Some 250 Jewish leaders and AIPAC activists were poised to storm Capitol Hill and lobby on behalf of the president—before he changed course, leaving AIPAC to twist in the wind.
And now it rewards AIPAC’s rival by sending the vice president of the United States. 
Last night, Pamela Geller said Obama has aimed all along to kill AIPAC. Too bad for AIPAC it's too clueless to notice.

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