Reply #8: Eric Edelman, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Dan Senor [View All]

[starroute]

That's certainly a fun list. Half PNAC and half Bush administration.

But the Emergency Committee for Israel has a somewhat different slant -- part Neocon and part Christian conservative, without the obvious military or Bush administration connections. So the impression it gives is of being simply a private organization that's worried Obama might actually do something like trying to make peace.

It's just that with these guys, you can never tell for sure, and I'd really like to know who else is behind them and where their funding is coming from.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_rachel

Rachel Abrams, a U.S. writer and blogger associated with the militarist “pro-Israel” group the Emergency Committee for Israel, is a member of a well-established neoconservative family. Her spouse, Elliott Abrams, is a veteran of both the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations who was convicted (and later pardoned) for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal; her mother, Midge Decter, is on the board of the Center for Security Policy and was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century and the Reagan-era Committee for the Free World, which she codirected with Donald Rumsfeld; her step-father, Norman Podhoretz, is a former editor of the neoconservative flagship magazine Commentary and a widely recognized trailblazer of the neoconservative “tendency.” . . .

Abrams serves on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel, a neoconservative advocacy group established in mid-2010 in part to counter the Mideast policies of President Barack Obama. Other board members include William Kristol, editor and founder of the Weekly Standard and cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative; and Gary Bauer, a well-know Christian Zionist who leads the lobby groups American Values and Keep Israel Safe and serves on the executive board of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. Although his name did not appear on the group’s website as of July 2010, Noah Pollak, a contributor to Commentary and former assistant editor at the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center, has been widely reported to be the group’s executive director.]

Abrams’s writings, which also appear on her blog, reveal a fervor for Israeli right-wing politics closely in line with the country’s Likud Party. For instance, observers have noted her tendency to always place the term Palestinians in quotes, as if to question whether the Palestinians exist as a people and thus call into question their claim to Palestinian lands. Additionally, as Daniel Luban of the Inter Press Service has noted, Abrams “constantly adopts the argot of the Israeli settler movement by referring to the West Bank as ‘Judea and Samaria.’