By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | September 3, 2013
When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry invokes the specter of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in order to scare Democrats into voting for war on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, it seems like a good time to recall George Bush’s pre-Iraq War “axis of evil” association of Saddam Hussein with Nazi Germany’s Holocaust against the Jews. Although Bush was initially credited — and ultimately discredited — with the hyperbolic reference to the defeated World War II powers, it later leaked out that the phrase had been carefully crafted by the president’s speechwriter David Frum. Frum’s passionate attachment to Israel — a country with an unfailing record of casting its Middle Eastern enemy du jour as the reincarnation of Hitlerian evil — no doubt helped inspire the Canadian-born writer’s creative process.
Perhaps someday we will discover too that Kerry’s “Munich moment” was scripted by another partisan of the supposedly besieged “Jewish state” with hegemonic pretensions. The Secretary of State’s chief speechwriter, Stephen Krupin, is, after all, a former intern of the Solomon Project, a pro-Israel think tank affiliated with the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). While working on a 2004 book entitled “Jews in American Politics,” Krupin’s director of research was Ira N. Forman. Forman, the NJDC’s longtime executive director, previously worked as legislative liaison and political director of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. With people like Krupin working inside the State Department, it makes it just that little bit easier for the Israel lobby to maintain the pretense that it has no position on U.S. intervention in Syria.
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