Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly.
Last week, I wrote about a panel at the inaugural convention of the self-described "pro-Israel, pro-peace" organization J Street, in which former Bush NSC staffer Hillary Mann Leverett said the following:
This week I've been attending the first national conference of J Street, the "pro-Israel, pro-Peace" group which I first wrote about last year. I'm working on a longer piece about the organization's identity crisis that should appear sometime soon, but there have been two events thus far worthy of special note.
First was the speech delivered by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and one of the most prominent liberal Jews in the country. Yoffie, who had initially welcomed J Street's emergence, dramatically broke with the organization over its morally equivocating position on the Gaza War last December. J Street claimed that “While there is nothing ‘right’ in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” These words, the self-proclaimed "dove" replied, were "morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve."
So it is perhaps unsurprising that Yoffie was booed at this week's conference for condemning the United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes, known as the "Goldstone Report," as "fatally flawed." Furthermore, he said that "you cannot be a moral agent if you serve an immoral master, and Richard Goldstone should be ashamed of himself for working under the auspices of the U.N. Human Rights Council." This sort of passionate language in defense of Israel and critical of its defamers, unremarkable at mainstream pro-Israel and Jewish conclaves, has been almost entirely absent at this week's J Street conference. Indeed, the greatest applause lines at all of the panels I've attended are those that criticize Israel and lament the fate of the Palestinians. (Allison Hoffman of Tablet has more about the conference attendees's negative reaction to Yoffie).
