If you want to see the true heart and soul of the neoconservative style, go on over to Commentary—where else?—and direct your attention to one Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor, who is calling for former CIA honcho Michael Scheuer to be … jailed! Why? Well, you see, they jailed Larry Franklin, didn’t they? And Larry was just engaging in a little harmless espionage on Israel’s behalf—nothing serious, according to Senor Schoenfeld. Why, every body in Washington does it! Scheuer, on the other hand, did an interview with Politiken, a Danish newspaper, wherein he discussed the “renditioning” of a suspected terrorist, who had been granted asylum in Denmark and kidnapped by Rummy’s Rangers whilst in Croatia. According to Schoenfeld, this amounts to divulging secret information—just like Franklin, and his two of his cohorts: Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s top Washington lobbyist for many years, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC’s Iran expert, scheduled to go on trial in January.

The only problem for Schoenfeld, as Scheuer has pointed out, is that the Danish rendition case was well-known and public knowledge: a little research, and perhaps some familiarity with a web site known as Google.com, would have been helpful. Schoenfeld admitted error, seemed to apologize—and then changed his mind, after “someone in Washington” sent him a missive saying maybe there’s hope for jailing him after all.  He doesn’t even bother to hide his viciousness: it’s bared fangs all the way. The Forward was moved to remark on”Schoenfeld’s penchant for demonizing those with whom he is in disagreement,” and it’s true, but then this has always been the Commentary style under the reign of Podhoretz I, and Podhoretz II promises to be even worse.

The AIPAC spy scandal is a disaster for the neocons,  who are being outed as Israeli assets as well as prodigious liars. As the trial date approaches, however, and the defense threatens to blow the whistle on AIPAC’s behind-the-scenes machinations in Washington—including espionage, coupled with an unusually aggressive effort to influence on US foreign policy—the Lobby’s partisans are going a little crazy, as evidenced by the level of vituperation in Schoenfeld’s many posts on this subject. The latest is directed at me, and, in reiterating his litany of smears, once again sets himself up to look foolish. Schoenfeld pretends that he saw Scheuer’s work on some obscure web site of dubious provenance—“The Jingoist,” of all things— when he knows perfectly well it appeared on Antiwar.com, a website with 100,000-plus readers daily, and then does his demonization act:

“Readers can judge for themselves. For if The Jingoist is in Holocaust-denial territory, anti-war.com is not far behind. A good place to begin is the long series that anti-war.com has devoted to the many Israeli “€œart students”€ who in the run-up to September 11 came to our country ostensibly to sketch, draw, and paint, but were actually working deep under cover, spying on Americans.”

He links to and quotes from this piece, and then avers:

“What happened to these art students? And how did they make their escape? Why did all the Jewish employees stay at home on the day that the Twin Towers were destroyed? Is anti-war.com fringe or mainstream? Connecting the Dots is eager to know.”

Legitimacy is something that the neocons have always prized, and their main conceit is that they are the final arbiters of who is “mainstream” and who is to be relegated to the “fringe.” Well,  then, since he raises the issue of news sources and their legitimacy, then what about Fox News? Some would say that this is not really a news channel at all, but a propaganda outlet for the neocons, or, at least, for the Bush administration. Yet that is the source of the contention that the Israelis did indeed know something about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and was the theme of a special four-part series by Carl Cameron. (By the way, in bringing up the canard that no Jews showed up for work at the World Trade Building on the morning of 9/11, he is attributing to me remarks I never made, nor gave any credence to: this is typical, however, of the neocon method—muddy the issue with a stream of unsourced invective, in the hope that the sheer volume of lies will obscure the reality.)

Schoenfeld’s Commentary blog is called “Connect the Dots,” and all I have to say to him is connect these dots, buster:

<object width=“425” height=“355”><param name=“movie” value=“http://www.youtube.com/v/JWpWc_suPWo&rel=1”>

<embed src=“http://www.youtube.com/v/JWpWc_suPWo&rel=1” type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=“transparent” width=“425” height=“355”></embed></object>