A classic Saturday Night Live skit of the 1980s, stolen from Howard Stern, presented a bizarre, patently offensive game-show with the title: "Guess Who's the Jew." Contestants would have to pick the Jew from an assortment of ambiguously-Jewish celebrity names. It was uncomfortably funny, and it created a minor debate within the Jewish community as to why.
The clearest answer was: Howard Stern and the SNL writers were unabiguously Jewish. The comedy was self-referential and would have been impermissable otherwise. "Guess Who's the Jew" was, in essence, a brilliant Jewish parody of the antisemitism pervasive in American life.
So let's get this established already: I'm a Jew. Moreover, I'm a Jew living in Jean Schmidt territory, Ohio's 2nd District, within that vast interior of the country where "eats" is a noun and "jew" is a verb.
Which brings us to the Sibel Edmonds controversy. Yes, this is a Sibel Edmonds diary.
Read on below the fold.
Edmonds has made very serious allegations about pervasive government corruption, and influence peddling by agents of Turkey. (Click on her tag below if you need background.) Yet the public discussion of her charges, including on DKOS, rapidly degenerates into an episode of "Guess Who's the Jew."
Neither the "left" nor the "right" comes close to a non-prejudicial evidence-based evaluation of the Edmonds allegations. Both sides are obsessed with this question of why so many of the named co-conspirators and their targets are Jews.
A scurrilous pseudo-diary posted on DKOS Thursday by one "Ned Soule," asked: "I want to know why a diary critical of Jewish neocons was erased?" The reference was to an earlier recommended diary on the Edmonds controversy, which did not mention "Jewish neocons," and was not "erased." (It rotated off the rec list, though suspiciously fast.)
On the other side, Kossack "Adamnuke" (oy) asked in the title of his comment to my latest Edmonds diary:
"How 'bout the old-fashioned Jewish Conspiracy?"
The implication was that Edmonds was intentionally naming Jewish names to create the classic libel of a Jewish cabal.
Many other commentators have implied that Edmonds is guilty of some kind of unspecified antisemitism, especially for outting Democratic congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as an extortion-plot target of Turkish agents around the year 2000. Schakowsky (D-IL)is one of the most liberal members of the House, and is Jewish.
It's important to say that no charge of criminality has been levelled at Schakowsky -- Edmonds identified her as a vulnerable target because Turkish agents were informed of her bisexuality. Edmonds also withheld the name for years, and disclosed it only after widespread rumor-mongering was causing needless anguish for other Democratic congresswomen, especially for the chief target of prior speculation, congresswoman Jane Harman, who is also Jewish.
There came a time toward the end of the empire, when it became the popular idea that virtually all Soviet leaders were really Jews, including especially Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (neither of whom is actually Jewish). The attribution of pervasive Jewishness to the national leadership at times of crisis has been a chronic phenomenon for over a thousand years. We might call it an end-of-empire hallmark, which ought to set off some alarm bells about why "the Jewish Question" has come to dominate the Sibel Edmonds discussion.
To get at the facts behind this latest rendition of the Jewish Question, let's start with the individuals mentioned by Edmonds as connected to the corruption web. Those individuals fall into four groups:
Group 1 consists of Turkish government officials and surrogates associated with Turkish-American lobbying groups, too numerous to list.
Group 2 includes academics and people who work at think tanks - primarily WINEP, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. These include: * Graham E. Fuller of RAND * David Makovsky of WINEP * Alan Makovsky of WINEP * Yusuf Turani (President-in-exile, East Turkestan) * Professor Sabri Sayari (Georgetown, WINEP) * Mehmet Eymur (Former Turkish Spy Chief MIT)
Group 3 includes current and former Pentagon and State Department officials, who stand accused of feeding information to the agents of Groups 1 and 2. These are: * Richard Perle * Douglas Feith * Eric Edelman * Marc Grossman * Brent Scowcroft * Larry Franklin
Group 4 includes current and former members of Congress who were more or less complicit as targets of the influence-peddling: * Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Ex-House Speaker * Bob Livingston (R-LA) * Roy Blount (R-MO) * Dan Burton (R-IN) * Tom Lantos (D-CA) * Stephen Solarz (D-NY) * Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
Now, let's play Guess Who's the Jew to learn some things.
Groups 1 and 2 are comprised overwhelmingly of Turks. Ms. Edmonds can hardly be accused of harboring anti-Turkish sentiment since she herself is Turkish -- Edmonds is her married name. The Makovsky brothers are presumably Jewish judging by the name, which is hardly surprising since they work at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Of the six supposed "Jewish neocons" in Group 3, four are Jewish. But those four -- Perle, Feith, Edelman, and Grossman -- are closely connected to one another, they came into the story as a group. Feith was Perle's protege. Edelman was Feith's replacement at the Pentagon, and Edelman later was named by GW Bush as Ambassador to Turkey. Grossman had also served as Ambassador to Turkey previously. Perle got started as an aide to Democratic war-hawk Henry Jackson, who was decidedly not Jewish. Perle was first caught disclosing classified intelligence to a foreign agent by a Nixon-Haldeman wiretap in 1969. Franklin pled guilty to the unauthorized disclosure of classified information in 2005, long after the period of Edmonds's first allegations and corroborating her story. The alleged "Jewishness" of this group results from nothing more than the fact that four of them came from the same social circle.
Of the named members of Congress in Group 4, all four of the Republicans were non-Jews, and they demonstrated the most complicity with Turkey's influence-peddling. They all come from ultra-gentile districts in Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, and Missouri -- hardly the soil in which to plant a Jewish conspiracy.
On the other hand, all three of the named Democrats were Jews. Lantos might be considered a super-Jew; he was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the U.S. Congress. Solarz and Schakowsky represented influential Jewish communities in the suburbs of New York City and Chicago.
And therein lies the explanation. The leading Jewish members of Congress were specifically targeted by the Turkish lobby for a specific strategic purpose. That purpose became clear in 2007, when leading American Jewish organizations belatedly endorsed the concept of an "Armenian Genocide" or an "Armenian Holocaust," thus giving moral and political weight to the very action that Turkish interests were trying desperately to avoid.
Vural Cengiz, the former president of ATAA, the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, put that strategy into words in an article in the September 3, 2007, issue of the Turkish Daily News titled "Why Turkish-Americans are Losing the Battle?" Cengiz wrote:
Finally the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) [of B'nai B'rith] accepted that the 1915 killings were an act of genocide. Executive Director of the America Jewish Committee (AJC), David Harris, wrote an article on Aug. 21 declaring that he would admire any Turk who admits the genocide. This is a big step to lose the political battle in Washington.
Jewish leaders don't only swing the Jewish community. Jews are looked to as the arbiters of the ethical debate about genocide, and the Turks have well understood this. The Turkish lobby's targeting of key liberal Jewish members of Congress -- Lantos, Solarz, and Schakowsky among them -- during the 1990s and early 2000s, a targeting which Sibel Edmonds has disclosed, was aimed at preventing just such an eventuality as major Jewish organizations endorsing recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
The targeting of Jews was a strategy of the Turkish agents, not of the reporter of those events, Sibel Edmonds.
As it happens, I had some personal experience with this Turkish strategy. Because of my study of and writing about Central Asia, as well as personal connections with the Turkic community, I was recruited to join the editorial board of Turkestan News, a pan-Turkic news service, in the mid-1990s. The principal editors soon approached me and asked me, as the representative Jew on the board, to render an opinion as to whether the term "Armenian Holocaust" was not offensive to Jews on historical and moral grounds.
I replied that the term was perfectly acceptable, since the genocide indisputably did occur, and it certainly represented a Holocaust to the Armenian people. It was not the answer they were looking for. I was promptly removed from the board.
Apparently the Turkish strategy of targeting key liberal Jewish members of Congress didn't work very well -- most Jewish and Democratic congressmen did wind up supporting an Armenian Genocide resolution. However, the Turks were very successful with Republicans, especially with House Speaker Hastert, who managed to keep a recognition resolution from reaching the floor for a vote.
And in 2005, the Turks found their Golden Girl when Jean Schmidt of OH-02 entered Congress. Schmidt was willing to do whatever bidding the Turks wanted of her, in exchange for a pair of Turkish-American fundraisers, a trip to Turkey, and other trinkets thrown the way of the congresswoman who has no Turkish community to speak of among her constituents.
Forgive me for saying that it's Old Testament justice that the man who has arisen to challenge Schmidt is an Armenian, all of whose grandparents survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915. And that his attorneys have retained Sibel Edmonds, a Turk, as an expert witness. The other expert witness is Sara Cohan, director of the Genocide Education Project, which focuses on the Armenian Genocide, which the Turkish lobby has fought so hard to deny.
Guess who's the Jew, Ms. Schmidt. That right, it's Sara Cohan!
The Schmidt v. Krikorian hearing before the Ohio Elections Commission resumes this Thursday at the Commission in Columbus. It's open to the public. At issue is whether David Krikorian's 2008 judgment that Schmidt had "taken blood money" from the Turkish lobby was true or false.
But the larger battle is that David Krikorian is running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Jean Schmidt for her congressional seat in 2010. Go to http://www.krikorian2010.com/ to find out more, and join the cause.
Because enough is enough already. Happy Day of Atonememnt everyone!
NOTE: Jan Schakowsky has issued a curious denial and counterattack aimed at Sibel Edmonds. The counterattack is curious because Edmonds has not alleged that Schakowsky did anything illegal, merely that she was vulnerable to targeting by the Turkish agents because of information that Schakowsky was bisexual. Since Schakowsky's speaks neither to her sexual preference nor to her alleged contacts with Turkish agents, I don't consider it pertinent to this discussion. Apparently, Schakowsky is upset at the idea of being called bisexual -- a matter that trivializes the actual criminal offenses involved in the larger scandal.