The Passionate Attachment

That’s not the title of a Foreign Policy article on the letter sent to President Obama last August praising him for calling on Assad to step down and urging him to ramp up the pressure on his regime — but it would be much more accurate that Josh Rogin’s “Conservatives suggest Syria next steps.”

Who does Josh think he’s fooling by mis-labelling the signatories of the hawkishly pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies-sponsored letter which includes the likes of Elliott Abrams, Max Boot, Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Leon Wieseltier as “mostly conservative national security experts”? The American public, perhaps.

Rogin is hardly a disinterested party. The National Endowment for Democracy’s Democracy Digest reported that he moderated an FDD session on December 8 entitled “The Syrian Factor: The Middle East With and Without the Assad Dynasty,” featuring FDD fellows Ammar Abdulhamid and Tony Badran, Brian Katulis from the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, and Andrew Tabler from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the think tank created by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “do AIPAC’s work but appear independent.” Both Abdulhamid and Badran were signatories of the Israel partisans’ letter to Obama.

The covering for Israel by its friends in the media such as Josh Rogin appears to have been quite successful. The other day, when political commentator James Morris raised the Israel lobby’s role in pushing for regime change in Syria on Russia Today’s excellent Crosstalk programme, the other guests dismissed the idea as if it were the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard.

If only Foreign Policy had used my title, things might be a little different.