Dan Fleshler Responds to Phillip Weiss
"There is nothing stopping you and all of your fans from organizing all Americans." Indeed! By all means, if your group is on the verge of ending the occupation and bringing a just and lasting peace to the Middle East, J Street certainly isn't stopping you... otherwise why not let someone else have a shot?
J Street has actually been extremely effective in its first few months of existence. It has received a tremendous amount of free publicity, had its Lieberman/Hagee petition plugged by MoveOn and DFA, sponsored a widely publicized and eye-opening survey on American Jewish public opinion, and most importantly, been attacked by The New Republic. So why is the Free Palestine crowd so eager to summarily dismiss it as 'AIPAC lite?' What have Jeremy Ben-Ami and his team done wrong? Exclusion of non-Jewish voices? (Are they filtering out non-Jewish names from their petitions or something?) Not expended their nascent political capital constantly denouncing IDF atrocities like a broken record? (Do we really need another group doing that?)
And in fact it's not just the Free Palestine folks who seem excessively aggrieved. People I know in the mainstream peace organizations (a.k.a. the "pro-Israel, pro-peace" bloc, namely APN and Brit Tzedek) mentioned by Fleshler are miffed that new-kid-on-the-block J Street is consuming all the media oxygen. Why doesn't Jeremy Ben-Ami mention in every one of his media appearances that APN and BTVS paved the way for J Street? How dare he?!?!
The left just never learns.
J Street has actually been extremely effective in its first few months of existence. It has received a tremendous amount of free publicity, had its Lieberman/Hagee petition plugged by MoveOn and DFA, sponsored a widely publicized and eye-opening survey on American Jewish public opinion, and most importantly, been attacked by The New Republic. So why is the Free Palestine crowd so eager to summarily dismiss it as 'AIPAC lite?' What have Jeremy Ben-Ami and his team done wrong? Exclusion of non-Jewish voices? (Are they filtering out non-Jewish names from their petitions or something?) Not expended their nascent political capital constantly denouncing IDF atrocities like a broken record? (Do we really need another group doing that?)
And in fact it's not just the Free Palestine folks who seem excessively aggrieved. People I know in the mainstream peace organizations (a.k.a. the "pro-Israel, pro-peace" bloc, namely APN and Brit Tzedek) mentioned by Fleshler are miffed that new-kid-on-the-block J Street is consuming all the media oxygen. Why doesn't Jeremy Ben-Ami mention in every one of his media appearances that APN and BTVS paved the way for J Street? How dare he?!?!
The left just never learns.
posted by hellisotherpeople at 10:12 AM
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