

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson

This is so shocking it’s funny. LOL funny. ROTFLMAO funny. The New York Times has a long front-page story by Nicholas Confessore about Sheldon Adelson’s wife Miriam donating another $5 million to the Gingrich campaign and there is no mention of Adelson’s #1 issue, Israel. Not a single mention.

What is the Times doing to the discourse? Hollowing it out. Chris Matthews needs the Times if he is going to discuss this openly. The bloggers at the Center for American Progress need the Times if they are going to hold their positions.

The more shocking when you see that the Forward profiles Miriam Adelson as an Israeli-born doctor who has founded clinics and gives millions to Birthright, the program to propagandize American Jews for Israel.

Tablet is also forthright about Sheldon’s agenda.

But if [the nominee] does end up being Gingrich, it will be in no small part thanks to Sheldon Adelson, the richest Jew in the world (as he has boasted) and an extremely hawkish supporter of Israel. And this is quite important. Earlier this month, Adelson materially aided Gingrich and politically helped him by changing the narrative when he donated $5 million to a pro-Gingrich group, well over half of which was spent in South Carolina.

And David Bromwich at the New York Review of Books is trenchant (no wonder this was the quotation of the day for Andrew Sullivan):

The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with the help of an American party in an election year, for an act of war that it could not hope to accomplish unassisted; while an American opposition party complies with the demand of support by a foreign power, in an election year, to gain financial backing and popular leverage that it could not acquire unassisted.

Bromwich lauds New Yorker editor David Remnick for speaking frankly about Jewish donations on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show, GPS.

Remnick’s comment is especially notable because it gives up the euphemism “Jewish voters” and refers frankly to Jewish donors. It is millions of dollars and not just a few thousand votes that the pandering Republicans are trawling for.

And not just Republicans. Obama is also trawling. From the New York Post:

Obama had started his evening [last Thursday] at a reception and discussion with Jewish leaders at [Upper East Side restaurant] Daniel about relations between Israel and the United States. The event was thrown by UBS’s Robert Wolf, Aryeh Bourkoff, Dr. Daniel Fass and Jeremy Goldberg, among others. Before the discussion, there was a private reception where Obama met with Harvey Weinstein and Showtime’s Matt Blank…. During the discussion, Obama stressed his strong support for Israel, and discussed the peace process, energy policy and Iran. The event, attended by up to 100, raised about $500,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign.

I have to believe that the Iran talk at Obama’s events last Thursday night was less bellicose than it was during the Republican debate last night, in which two candidates seemed to relish a confrontation with Iran. I have to believe that there is a split within the Jewish (Israel-loving) community on this question, and that Sheldon Adelson’s money and Obama’s money-men are on opposite sides. Alas the Times is doing nothing to advance that process.

The Times’ omission is the more stunning because elsewhere in the same paper it does talk about Adelson’s big issue, apropos of an Islamophobic film from the Clarion Fund used by the NY police for training:

[Clarion’s] previous documentary attacking Muslims’ “war on the West” attracted support from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Israel who has helped reshape the Republican presidential primary by pouring millions of dollars into a so-called super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich.

P.S. Some gratitude to the Times. Here is Bill Keller, the former NYT editor, trying to calm the Iran talk with a piece called Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb-Iran. He goes after Matthew Kroenig’s recent article in Foreign Policy and seems to express misgivings for his own disastrous support for the Iraq war. The piece includes some hinting references to the Israel lobby.