Yesterday’s Senate stunner — a filibuster blocking President Obama’s nominee to head the Defense Department — isn’t the final act in this drama. At least two Republicans say they’ll let Chuck Hagel’s nomination go through later in the month — provided no new shoes drop.
But that’s not such a good bet.
The case against Hagel is coming together like a pointillist painting, with data points like tiny dots that join to form a distressing overall portrait of a disreputable whole.
The latest dot is a talk he gave at Rutgers University in March 2007, uncovered by Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon. A friendly blogger covered the talk the next day, noting — with approval — that Hagel had said the State Department was under the control of Israel.
“The State Department,” the blogger quoted Hagel as saying, “has become adjunct to the Israeli Foreign Minister’s office.”
This should be disturbing for two reasons. First, like many other data points emerging since Hagel’s nomination, this one emits a faint but distinct odor of a classic anti-Semitic stereotype — Jews as secret marionetteers, pulling the strings of unsuspecting Gentiles.
Second, it should trouble everyone who must vote to confirm Hagel — because the remark is spectacularly stupid.
The notion that the State Department, of all places, might be a servant of Israel is among the most bizarre and ludicrous statements any notable American politician has ever uttered. Historically, as anyone who knows anything knows, State has been unfriendly toward Israel.
There are many reasons for this bias, so I’ll go with the least offensive: Our diplomatic corps must deal with 22 Arab nations and one Jewish state that angers its 22 neighbors. So it’s not much of a surprise that State would have an institutional bias in favor of the region’s supermajority.
In the George W. Bush administration, which was unquestionably the friendliest to Israel in history, it was the State Department’s leaders who expressed the greatest degree of skepticism about Israel’s intentions and the need to rein in Israel’s responses to the terror war launched against it by Yasser Arafat in late 2000.
At the time Hagel made his gobsmacking remark about State and Israel, Condoleezza Rice had taken charge at State. She’d first served as Bush’s national security adviser — but the move to Foggy Bottom actually led her to adopt her new institution’s bias against Israel — as her former White House deputy, Elliott Abrams (my brother-in-law), details in his remarkable new account of those years, “Tested By Zion.”
The news of Hagel’s 2007 remark is also a direct challenge to the New Yorker who, more than anyone, made it appear that Hagel’s journey to the Pentagon was a sure thing.
I’m referring to Sen. Chuck Schumer, whose endorsement of Hagel after a 90-minute meeting seemed to take the wind out of the sails of those who thought the nominee’s various offhand comments over the decades about Jews and Israel and the United States might disqualify him.
What will Schumer do now?
In February 2010, at a New York event sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, I heard Schumer give a rather extraordinary speech. In Hebrew, he told the crowd, his name would be “shomer,” or “guardian.”
A shomer, he noted, was a watchman guarding the gates of ancient Jerusalem and the Temple. And that was his mission: defending the Jewish people and Israel from those who’d attack it or wish it ill.
It’s a few weeks since Schumer gave Hagel the thumbs-up. Give him the benefit of the doubt; maybe Hagel told him the things he wanted to hear. Schumer supports the president, who wants Hagel; the president should have the Pentagon nominee he wants. (That is a view, by the way, with which I agree almost all the time.)
But Schumer’s support came before this poisonous pearl (and others) surfaced. And before Hagel’s disastrous confirmation hearing, when it appeared the trouble with his nomination wasn’t only some problematic views, but also his intellectual fitness for this crucial job.
That was then, this is now.
Schumer’s job, as we know, is to serve the Constitution and the people of New York. A man who could say something as stupid as Hagel did about Israel controlling the State Department is not fit to be defense secretary.
Schumer’s personal mission, or so he told 2,000 people at the Marriott Marquis in February 2010, is to serve as a guardian of the Jewish people. Mind you, this is Schumer’s claim about himself; I’m not imposing it upon him. Assuming he wasn’t just, oh, blowing smoke for campaign contributions, one must ask: How does such a guardian vote for a man who traffics in anti-Semitic cliches?
Nu, Shomer?