Tablet is edited by Alana Newhouse, the wunderkind behind the Forward‘s old Arts & Culture page, with assists from Jesse Oxfeld of Gawker and New York Magazine, and Gabriel Sanders, also of the Forward and Vanity Fair. I handle our politics coverage, which includes editing our two op-ed columnists Victor Navasky (The Nation) and Seth Lipsky (the much lamented New York Sun).  If that’s not a highbrow form of Crossfire in digital media, I don’t know what is.

Jeff Goldberg, too, is slated to write a regular column for us, serializing his forthcoming book from Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series, on Judah Maccabee. (I’m also the liaison between the magazine and the publishing arm, overseen by the excellent Jonathan Rosen).

What else? Oh yeah, our spiffy design is explained in a slideshow here.

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“In the version examined [in 2005] by JTA staff, the "Notebook" described Jerusalem as unequivocally "Arab," deriding Jewish residence in the city as "settlement"; cast the "question of Jewish lobbying" against "the whole question of defining American interests and concerns"; and suggested that the Koran "synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations."

Leave aside the ethnographical and political dubiousness of that paragraph (Jerusalem has never been wholly “Arab,” even when it was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and a Jewish lobby “defining” American interests is more categorical a judgment, you’ll agree, than its unduly influencing American interests). If one were to assess Freeman’s viability for the NIC chairmanship only from the standpoint of national security, how would one look on his endorsement of the very sort of religious chauvinism (“perfects earlier revelations”) that our soft and hard power apparatuses are now marshaled to combat? The equivalent would be hiring a Sovietologist during the Cold War who consented to the belief that Kapital was the final word on all matters pertaining to political economy. Yet here is how M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum reacted to news of Freeman’s Saudi affinity on Talking Points Memo:

So what if Freeman is close to the Saudis. Why should that disqualify him for the intelligence post? Unless he has done something unethical or illegal, these smears are more evidence (if any more is needed) that being deemed overly critical of the occupation is today’s equivalent of being called a Communist in 1953. It’s a career killer, used to ensure that policymakers adhere to the neocon line."

The “occupation” here refers to the one maintained by Israel over Palestine, and by “overly critical” Rosenberg means Freeman applauds the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis that the U.S. alliance with the Jewish state is undeviating and self-defeating and only driven by an obsessive lobby made up of Jewish and Christian Zionists. Mearsheimer and Walt’s careers have never been better since they published their notorious essay, which the Middle East Policy Council also ran in an unexpurgated version. Freeman found the authors "brave," and the fact that their scholarship was widely discredited across the political spectrum—including within the “realist”  establishment from which M-W claim discipleship—impinges not at all on their courage, of course. Freeman today thinks that because Israel is the bête noir of the Arab world, supporting it means “universalizing anti-Americanism” and incurring more terrorist attacks against the U.S., but this is a belief he did not always hold. In 1998, he was of the opinion that

Mr. bin Laden’s principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

Bin Laden would, by this assessment, have a serious grievance with enthusiasts for the Saudi regime, making Freeman and his ilk part of the problem, no?

Now, it would be easy to file Rosenberg’s emission as a one-off were it not so characteristic of a broader leftish response to Freeman’s appointment. The Center for American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias also welcomed the addition of this lifelong Republican, classifying circulated concerns about Freeman’s fitness for the NIC chair as a “war” initiated by those who suffering from a blindingly pro-Israel bias. Citing the Jewish sources for the contra position (these include Marty Peretz and Jonathan Chait, both of the New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard), Yglesias wrote: “I’m not sure whether or not the Obama administration will ultimately stand behind Freeman. I hope they will. But whether or not they do, I think it’s very clear that the lesson here is that if you’re a veteran policy hand who hopes to return to government one day and you believe something that you think AIPAC wouldn’t approve of, that the smart thing to do is to keep those views to yourself.” AIPAC didn’t approve of Hillary Clinton’s public smooch of Suha Arafat in 1999, and it doesn’t much approve of her proposed aid package to Gaza now. But there she still is, a high-octane secretary of state. As for the official AIPAC comment on Freeman, as of this writing, it consists of no comment at all.  (Steve Rosen, a former AIPAC official who was charged with spying on behalf of Israel, and another former anonymous AIPAC member did speak out against Freeman. If their being voluble only as ex-officials testifies to anything, then it is to the restraining nature of that organization.) As for the appointee’s own disclosed statements on Israel, these have not been so terribly shocking to anyone who follows the debate closely, an admission the JTA (one of Yglesias’s bugbears of Zionist-orchestrated career destruction) explained in the article I quoted earlier.  His late-formed belief that reducing terror attacks against Americans is moored to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict — a prescription sometimes derided as the "Jerusalem Syndrome" — was the position maintained by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their Iraq Study Group Report, a white paper commissioned by the Bush administration and thankfully unheeded over the ultimately successful "surge" strategy. That Freeman managed to retain the aura of bureaucratic respectability while holding such traditional realist positions attests more to the endurance of those positions than it does to his ability to pass himself off as something he is not. He believes himself to be a true Burkean conservative when in fact he is an “ideological fanatic,” as Chait rightly put it in the Washington Post. Sometimes – just sometimes – ideological fanatics don’t write for Commentary or the Weekly Standard. Do Rosenberg and Yglesias really believe that Freeman’s compromising “closeness” to Saudi Arabia is only a threat to Israel and that alarm over this proximity is the exclusive property of a dislodged cadre of policy intellectuals or an ethnic lobby?  That would mean that Craig Unger’s bestselling critique of the Bush family’s warm relationship to the House of Saud and Michael Moore’s darkly traced filiations between Riyadh and Halliburton have now metamorphosed into Mossad conspiracies. It would also mean that the amnesiac left is now intent on doing what no one would have thought it capable of eight years ago: retroactively rehabilitating the legacy of George H.W. Bush. If Rosenberg means to say that a tendency towards a foreign government does not necessarily impair one’s ability to think strategically on behalf of the United States then I wonder how dispassionately he would react if it were discovered that the NIC appointee regularly vacationed with Avigdor Lieberman, or was the head of a think tank that received a generous endowment from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Interesting, too, that those who have tossed around the “McCarthyite” label were quick to accuse Freeman’s opponents of harboring dual loyalties or engaging in "smear" campaigns. This was Stephen Walt’s tack in a Foreign Policy blog post wince-makingly titled “Have they not a shred of decency?,” in which he cited, without a whiff of irony, Jeffrey Goldberg’s former service in the IDF as a sign of his un-American motive for questioning the patriotism of one Charles Freeman. (Though in his sentimental comparison of Freeman to blacklisted Communists the supposedly hard-headed Walt does tacitly allow that Freeman’s political views are troublesome.) The Nation‘s Robert Dreyfuss, who also warned of a "coordinated" neoconservative assault, goes further in his defense of Freeman, stating that he "is a one-of-a-kind choice: with an impeccably establishment pedigree, Freeman has developed over the years a startling propensity to speak truth to power, which is precisely what one would want in a NIC chairman." I had not known until now that The Nation esteems establishment pedigrees and believes oil-rich sheiks are latterday wretched of the earth.

Leftists who praise Freeman on the single issue of Israel-Palestine, ostensibly out of a concern for justice and human rights, say it’s beside the point to confront his endless euphemisms and evasions on other human rights abuses. An unintended consequence of this maneuver is that these same leftists appear even more obsessed with the Jewish state than do the “neocons" they purport to monitor. They also look especially stupid in this instance because they’re effectively arguing that what goes on in the West Bank is more crucial to U.S. national security than what goes on in the one country which produced fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. How’s that for realism? As it happens, Saudi Arabia is not the only oligarchy toward which Freeman has a strong tropism. Here is what he had to say, on a 2006 listserv, about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, and it’s worth keeping Dreyfuss’ "truth to power" encomium in mind:

I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than — as would have been both wise and efficacious — to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo’s response to the mob scene at "Tian’anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action. For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans’ "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government’s normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang’s dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

This is why Human Rights Watch – evidently the latest bastion of neoconservative dogmatism, as Reason’s left-libertarian editor Matt Welch mordantly observed – opposes Freeman’s appointment.  It’s also why 87 Chinese dissidents have written President Obama protesting it without so much as a winking allusion to Oslo or road-maps. As for Rosenberg and Yglesias, where they do concede Freeman’s ugly c.v. it is more out of cynical (and partisan) resignation than real horror. Yglesias helpfully admits that defending Freeman on principle is not a cause he wishes to stake his bloggerly reputation on. (That might hurt his career more than rebuking AIPAC.) But this grudging concession was then followed by another change of subject: back to the motives that impelled the discovery of Freeman’s China problem in the first place.

Andrew Sullivan, who himself has come around to legitimizing the Mearsheimer-Walt perspective on his popular blog, assembled a time-line of Freeman complaints, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the chorus of criticism did indeed begin with Israel. Yet left out of Sullivan’s recapitulation of events is Eli Lake’s Washington Times coverage of Freeman’s unexamined foreign ties, a series of articles that provided the journalistic cui bono for vetting further a man tasked with compiling the nation’s annual intelligence estimates. (Lake’s biggest scoop, in fact, was showing that the White House had not even been privy to Freeman’s appointment; Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair undertook it autonomously, according to Blair’s spokesman Wendy Morigi.)

So it must be out of willful credulity that Rosenberg emailed Jeffrey Goldberg:

None of the bloggers in question had any interest in Freeman’s views on China until Steve Rosen (and some of his colleagues) decided to stir up the opposition to Freeman because of his alleged lack of fidelity to the occupation. In fact, I hear that the offending China quotes were only discovered in the context of a Google Nexis/Lexis search to find incriminating material to block Freeman’s appointment because of his Middle East views. China was not even an afterthought.

The Weekly Standard first uncovered the Tiananmen Square excerpt (not using Google or Nexis/Lexis, by the way), and that magazine has in the past run editorials calling for continued U.S. trade restrictions on China on the basis of its appalling human rights record. To my knowledge, this policy has no discernible link to Jerusalem, although it does tend to chivvy die-hard Nixonians who believe morality has no place in foreign policy calculations.

In Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin tells of how the search for Chaney, Goodman and Schwirner proceeded in Mississippi. The police had to drag the lake in which the bodies of these murdered civil rights activists were rumored to have been dumped. The police didn’t discover those bodies, but they did discover other corpses no one had been seeking. Does it not miss the point to focus on what motivated Freeman’s detractors from doing due diligence on him when he is provably an inveterate excuse-maker for totalitarianism?

By way of a more immediate example: I have no idea where the Armenian lobby stands on Tiananmen Square or Saudi Arabia, but I nonetheless credit it with tipping me off to the Anti-Defamation League’s denial of the Armenian genocide, an erasure of historical truth deriving from a callous geopolitical consideration–and one that benefited Israel, at least according to Abe Foxman. (James Fallows, who inveighed against a Congressional resolution acknowledging the first holocaust of the 20th century because he, too, didn’t want to upset Turkey, deserves no credit for standing up for Freeman now. If this is what Fallows considers a robust "contrarianism," I prefer the tired blood of conventional wisdom, thanks.)

At minimum, this strange affair that has seen liberals and not a few conservatives joined in martyring a true reactionary has indicated the level of political maturity of a certain breed of thinker, who, still reeling from the last administration, wishes to make his sole conviction for the next one doing whatever makes the dreaded "neocons" angry. A vice of electoral victory is said to be hubris, but this reeks of insecurity. It also signals just how short-lived the left’s hold on power may be.

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Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, who is in charge of training Iraq’s security services and military, told The Washington Times that some of the ordered equipment would not be delivered until 2012, even though a new status of forces agreement (SOFA) requires all U.S. troops to exit the country by 2011.

Gen. Helmick said the Iraqi military had already ordered 140 M1 Abrams tanks, up to 24 Bell Assault Reconnaissance helicopters and 6 C130-J transport airplanes. The tanks will not be delivered until 2011, and the helicopters and transport planes will not arrive until the end of 2012 or possibly in 2013.

"The government of Iraq does not have to purchase that kind of equipment from the United States; they have elected to do so," Gen. Helmick said. "To me that could indicate that the Iraqis would like to have a long-term strategic relationship with the United States."

Of course, this materiel requires training and that training can only be provided by the U.S. Army and Air Force. South Korea, according to Eli’s sources, is now Iraq’s model for a long-term military alliance.

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presented in a charming

but sometimes hard to read

"snaking" format like this —

about politics, culture, technology and everything in between. Today it’d be written up in a New York Times trend piece about "snark" because that was that general tone of the site, although Suck wasn’t mean for the sake of mean; it was mordant and smart. David Denby may have even assailed it in his misfire of a book, but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t read it, being just the sort of emblem of aloof disdain — calling it a "misfire" without having read it — Denby doesn’t like very much.  Anyway, among the contributors to Suck who have gone on to reach the dizzying middles of media celebrity is one Nick Gillespie, now editor and web TV wizard of the libertarian magazine Reason. (He and another former Suckster Tim Cavanaugh once participated in a Jewcy feature called Movable Snipe, wherein they read and made fun of preselected blogs.)

Nick’s slightly mocking tone doesn’t always come across in blog posts or learned essays about the Modern Language Association, but he’s found himself in ReasonTV. Check out the following episode of on-the-street interviews with Obama supporters on Jan. 19. They all somehow feel they’re the change they’ve been waiting for, yet can’t quite explain what they’d have done differently if John McCain had been elected president.

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The Republican Mau-Mauing of the stimulus package has reinforced a persistent critique from Obama’s left: that his strategy of focusing on bi-partisanship was naïve or simply nuts—because Republicans would inevitably do … well, exactly what they’ve done. But it strikes me that Obama’s quest for cross-party comity and collaboration isn’t what’s been most damaging. The problem has been the institutional deference that he and his team have shown to the congressional leadership, giving them guiding principles but also wide latitude to cobble together the bill. That meant ceding enormous power to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their posses, a move that even an untrained eye could have seen had three words written all over it: recipe for disaster.

Neither Obama nor (especially) Emanuel is remotely so myopic as to have missed that warning. So what were they doing? Partly behaving in that weirdly passive-aggressive way that is sometimes Obama’s wont—his propensity to try to float above the fray, keeping his fingernails clean. But another part was rooted in a distinctly Rahmian calculation: Let Pelosi and her peeps do their worst, leak word that Obama was displeased with the outré stuff that crept into the legislation, then rely on the Senate to pare back the effluvia, in the process creating a bill that would not only secure the requisite 60 votes (to avoid a filibuster) in the upper chamber but emerge as moderate enough to bring some of the saner House Republicans onboard in the end.

"I screwed up" perfectly nails Obama’s appointment of three tax defaulters to sensitive positions in an administration said to prize accountability and transparency. Falling on his sword immediately was the right thing to do, even if it was politically savvy (since when is being honest and self-promoting at the same time a vice?) But it was also a relatively negligible score for him: hiring snafus are far less important than what employees do once they get started. Heilemann compares the Geithner-Daschle-Killefer implosion to Clinton’s botched appointment of would-be attorney general Zoë Baird, a name hardly anyone remembers now, certainly not hard-to-displease Obamans for whom the Clinton years seem a distant dream. However, Janet Reno’s notoriety — from Waco to extraordinary rendition — lives on.

The stimulus snafu is more revealing because, while we are comparing 44 to 42, it hints at Obama’s first "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Moment," a miscalculation derived from his tendency to try and have things both ways. He knows the economy is the issue that will challenge his re-election bid in 2012 (he’ll begin campaigning, amazingly, in fewer than 18 months), so he seeks to be able to claim credit for all successes on this front, but responsibility for none of the failures. "I screwed up" will likely not be the refrain if the jobless rate continues to plunge.

Heilemann’s point about a machiavellian tactic to play the Senate against the House might have been better served had Obama not taken the opportunity, when grilled by Brian Williams and other television interviewers, to explain that the "effluvia" in the Dem-drafted stimulus represented less than 1% of the bill’s total sum. (One could likewise claim that the self-arrogated bonuses on Wall Street that so infuriated the president are mere chicken scratches of red ink. Waste is waste is waste should be the point Obama hammers home, especially as he forces a much-resented pay cut on White House employees.) Also, the bill actually grew in pelf in the Senate, from $819 billion to $937 billion. So much for Rahmbo’s budgetary war of attrition.

Obama is nothing if not self-assured. It’s time he started acting like it. Ceding so much authority to a Congress less popular than the last president counts as a bigger blunder — more naive, too — than neglecting to dial up the IRS to make sure everyone on his proposed team was on the level.

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Myra sits typing notes of love With romantic pianist’s fingers. Dick turns his eyes to the heavens above Where Fran’s divine perfume lingers.

Nicky is rolling eyes and tits And flaunting her wiggly walk Everybody is thrilled to bits By Clive’s suggestive talk. Sex suppressed will go berserk, But it keeps us all alive. It’s a wonderful change from wives and work. And it ends at half past five.

— Gavin Ewart

[Painting, "The Once Over," by Pieter Schoolwerth.]

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Over 30,000 people marched in Catalunya’s streets in support of Hamas, during the three-week campaign, burning Israeli flags and handing out flyers threatening local pro-Israel journalists.

The overwhelming public support for the Palestinians has prompted the government to cancel the Holocaust Remembrance Day service. This was to be the only public event marking the day, and was scheduled to take place in Barcelona’s central piazza. 

As Norm Geras puts it: "Quite apart from the fact that Israel’s attack on Gaza is hereby put down to the discredit of millions of Jews, you have to contend with the special idiocy that these are Jews long dead, their memory not now to be respected because of a conflict in 2008-9."

Nothing to see here, folks. Just another example of deranged "fringe" opinion in no way reflective of a creeping zeitgeist. By indicating the action of a regional European government as an instance of how anti-Zionist sentiment has fused with classical anti-Semitism, I might as well be directing you to Stormfront’s online forum.

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Now comes word that Jobs has islet cell cancer and everyone who can type AskDoctor.com has been furiously trying to figure out if it means the end of the visionary businessman.

I asked a radiation oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard, about Jobs’ chances. She was spot-on about Ted Kennedy before the official diagnosis came out (she had nothing to do with his case, however), and so her email ought to be heeded by anyone with Apple stock:

Islet cell cancer is a funny disease. Relatively rare, sometimes curable. In this case, doesn’t look like it. His appearance is one of advanced cancer. He unfortunately tried to cure it in 2004 with "diet" so delayed getting to surgery.

Jobs isn’t just a chief executive, he’s a tech svengali, rightly credited with reinventing his company and pushing must-have goodies, from iPods to iPhones, that have since become talismans of cultural interconnectedness. His declining health is of course tragic, and no one should feel good about playing the actuarial market that most business sections have been frantically doing all week (this, more than a housing implosion or a multi-billion dollar bailout, would have put a diabolically affirming grin on the face of Karl Marx). But Jobs’ health not just the private matter he and Apple flacks have been insisting it is. As goes he, so goes Apple, and in this economy, bourgeois callousness and calculation can seem a virtue.

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