Center for American Progress emails reveal censorship of staff on militarism, Israel
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33394-leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-group-reveal-censorship-of-staff-on-israel-aipac-pandering-warped-militarism
The recent CAP announcement of the Netanyahu event has generated substantial confusion and even anger among Democratic partisans. Netanyahu sacrificed much of his popularity with the Democratic Party by crusading against the Iran nuclear deal, the Huffington Post noted. Netanyahu has repeatedly treated the Obama White House as a political enemy. Indeed, just today, Netanyahu appointed as his new chief of public diplomacy a conservative academic who suggested President Obama was anti-Semitic and compared Secretary of State John Kerrys mental age to that of a preteen.
A core objective of Netanyahus trip to Washington is to re-establish credibility among progressives in the post-Obama era. For that reason, the Huffington Post reported, the Israeli government pushed hard for an invite to CAP and was joined by [AIPAC], which also applied pressure to CAP to allow Netanyahu to speak.
The article quoted several former CAP staffers angered by the groups capitulation to the demands of the Israeli government and AIPAC; said one: Netanyahu is looking for that progressive validation, and theyre basically validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the two-state solution, which is CAPs own prior work. Matt Duss, a former foreign policy analyst at CAP, said the idea that CAP would agree to give him bipartisan cover is really disappointing since this is someone who is an enemy of the progressive agenda, who has targeted Israeli human rights organizations throughout his term, and was re-elected on the back of blatant anti-Arab race-baiting. Yet another former CAP staffer, Ali Gharib, published an article in The Nation noting that Netanyahu has all but formally aligned himself with the GOP, writing: That a liberal institution feels the need to kowtow to AIPAC in a climate like this speaks volumes about either how out of touch or how craven it can be.