[BRIGADE] PJB: Of Patriots and Assassins
Published: Tue, 03/17/09
Of Patriots and Assassins
By Patrick J. Buchanan
During Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972, his interpreter and
I, free for a few hours, conscripted a driver to take us on a tour
of Beijing. Somewhere in my files are photos from that day we
toured the grim city of Chairman Mao in the time of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The interpreter: Charles Freeman -- the same Charles Freeman Adm.
Dennis Blair chose to chair the National Intelligence Council that
prepares National Intelligence Estimates on critical national
security issues such as Iran's nuclear program.
Educated at Yale and Harvard Law, Freeman has served his country in
Delhi, Taipei, Bangkok and Beijing. He was Ronald Reagan's deputy
assistant secretary of state for Africa and Bill Clinton's
assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
George Bush I named him ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman was our
man in Riyadh when Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and 500,000 U.S. troops
arrived to evict the army of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern as president of the
Middle East Policy Council -- and he began to speak out.
He opposed the bombing of Serbia and said aloud what few privately
deny: Reflexive support for Israel's repression of the Palestinian
people is high among the reasons America is no longer seen as a
beacon of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world.
Freeman echoed the Obama of yesterday, who bravely blurted, "Nobody
is suffering more than the Palestinian people."
At MEPC, however, Freeman committed a great crime. He published
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by Stephen Walt and John
Mearsheimer, which went onto the New York Times best-seller list --
and put Freeman on AIPAC's enemies list.
Hence, when his name surfaced as Blair's choice to chair the NIC,
the Israel Firsters went berserk, with Steven Rosen declaring him
to be a "textbook case of the old-line Arabism" that infected the
Department of State when Gen. George Marshall was secretary.
And who is Rosen?
A former fixture at AIPAC, Rosen faces imminent federal criminal
prosecution under the Espionage Act for transferring top-secret
Pentagon documents to the Israeli Embassy. Rosen's accomplice,
Larry Franklin, is serving a 12-year sentence.
Picking up the Rosen dog whistle, the neocommentariat came howling.
To Gabriel Schoenfeld, late of Commentary, Freeman is a "China
coddling Israel basher." Tom Piatak of Chronicles found no fewer
than five blogs from National Review Online, in two hours, savaging
Freemen, two by Jonah Goldberg and two by Michael Rubin.
Rich Lowry of NR calls Freeman "Chas of Arabia," a diplomat of
"odious" views, a "lap dog" and "blinkered ideologue" who enjoys
"pandering to and making excuses for the world's dictators and
terrorists."
To The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, Freeman is a "fanatic." To
Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic, formerly of the Israeli Army, Chait's
piece was dead on. To TNR ex-publisher Marty Peretz, Freeman is a
"bought man." To Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard, Freeman
is a "shill for the Saudis," who defends "corrupt Arab states that
foment and support terror."
Freeman is denounced as a shill of Saudi Arabia -- by people who
have spent careers shilling for the Israeli lobby and Likud.
Within this smear bund (Murray Rothbard's phrase), who has given
America a tenth of the patriotic service and loyalty of Chas Freeman?
What were the specific charges? That, in private life, Freeman
advised a Chinese company. Would the Israel Firsters have used that
argument against Al Haig or Henry Kissinger?
Saudi contributions to MEPC should disqualify Freeman, they say.
But what did they say when Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, David
Wurmser and the rest with inextricable ties to Israel stove-piped
to the press the cherry-picked War Party propaganda lies about a
"Prague connection" between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence,
yellow cake from Niger, Saddam and al-Qaida, Saddam and the anthrax
attacks, "mushroom clouds," "aluminum tubes" and WMD?
Who among them questioned State's decision to hand the Iran
portfolio to Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, a creation and front of AIPAC?
Realizing the assaults would not end, Freeman last week withdrew,
saying, "I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could
function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by
unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a
political faction of a foreign country."
The foreign country is Israel; the political faction Likud.
Nor did Freeman shrink at naming the source of the noxious campaign
of slander against him.
"The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and
indecency and include character assassination, selective
misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication
of falsehoods and an utter disregard for the truth."
"A lobby," Steve Rosen confided in an AIPAC internal memo, "is like
a night flower; it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."
Yes, and long ago, Al Smith addressed the age-old problem of the
Rosens within: "The best way to kill anything un-American is to
drag it out into the open, because anything un-American cannot live
in the sunlight."
Well done, Ambassador Freeman.
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SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-of-patriots-and-assassins-1476