Is “Anti-Semitism” In or Out in Lame-Duck Clinton Administration?

By Lucille Barnes

Kosovo so dominated American media this spring that Washington Report readers could be forgiven for not noticing the surprising results when two kinds of “anti-Semitism” seemingly arose in the Clinton administration. By “two kinds” we don’t mean real or fancied. We mean the anti-Jewish American and anti-Arab American kinds. We’ll let readers decide for themselves which are real and which are fancied.

The charges against 29-year-old Joe Zogby, a lawyer son of president Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute, arose in a familiar McCarthyite way from an all-too-familiar source, Morton Klein, who assumed control of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) a couple of years ago in what might aptly be labeled a hostile, right-wing takeover.

Klein, described by the Washington Jewish Week (WJW) as “a conservative gadfly within the community,” complained to Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Martin Indyk that Joe Zogby, when he was director of the Palestine Peace Project, a non-profit organization he founded to bring American lawyers and law students to Israel for volunteer work with Palestinian human rights organizations, wrote two articles “harshly attacking Israel.” One of the articles was printed in the October/November 1998 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and both are available on the Internet.

After Indyk indicated to Jewish leaders at a previously scheduled meeting in New York that Zogby, who was working on a one-year grant in Indyk’s State Department office, was planning to move to the Justice Department, Klein, according to the same Jewish weekly, began making “victory claims” for having “ousted” Zogby. Kenneth Jacobson, assistant national director of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League, also piled on, saying some of Zogby’s writings were “antithetical to the peace process.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) counterattacked with an April 22 press release blasting Klein’s ZOA for “an undisguised attack on a government employee for his political views, which they have shamelessly distorted with out-of-context quotations, and his ethnicity.” The ADC release went on to say, “The ZOA has a long history of using McCarthyite tactics to advance its extremist pro-Israel agenda. ZOA led the 1998 campaign to block the hiring of the distinguished Holocaust scholar John Roth as director of research at the Holocaust Memorial Museum because he had expressed sympathy for Palestinianian human rights. ZOA’s successful attempt to bully the Smithsonian Institution into excluding any hint of criticism of Israeli policies from its “Israel at 50” program was aptly described by Anthony Lewis in The New York Times as ‘Jewish McCarthyism.’ ZOA President Klein has condemned Mike Wallace, Thomas Friedman, Martin Indyk and Pete Seeger, to mention but a few, as ‘anti-Israel.’”

Could Klein have forgotten that one of his earlier targets was Indyk himself, who was a lobbyist for Israel before he joined the Clinton administration’s White House staff and later became U.S. ambassador to Israel? In any case, Indyk wavered at first, saying at an ADL conference called to discuss the matter that Zogby “wrote in anguish, not in anger…He was certainly critical of Israel and aspects of American policy, but he was not then and he is not now an Israel hater, as he has been depicted. The views he expressed then are not acceptable to me or to this administration.”

( Washington Report writer’s note: The ADL doesn’t invite us to its meetings with U.S. officials. But the above is exactly how Indyk’s seemingly contradictory response was quoted in the WJW of April 29.)

By April 24 something good had happened on the State Department’s sixth floor. An Associated Press report by Barry Schweid reported: “Martin Indyk said he was aware of Joseph Zogby’s sympathies for the Palestinians. ‘I believed he could make an important contribution to the work of the State Department, and that has proven to be the case,’ Indyk said. Also, Indyk said, ‘There are very few Arab-Americans working in the State Department in any area. The Clinton administration is committed to a diverse workplace, and in that context we do feel it is important to have Arab-Americans working in the State Department....He has been offered a position to continue here, with a promotion, based upon his performance here.”’

Despite the seemingly happy ending, Joe Zogby’s proud Arab-American activist father, Jim Zogby, couldn’t resist one dig: “Joe represents one Arab American in the bureau,” his father said. “There should be more for there to be real diversity.”

The Washington Report will resist the temptation to speculate on whether Jim Zogby’s long-standing friendship with President Bill Clinton affected the outcome. Or was it the knowledge that there are about 7 million Muslim Americans and perhaps another 1.5 Christian Arab Americans, and their community leaders are urging them all to register and to vote? Both, we expect.

And here’s one of the things that Joe Zogby wrote that were so upsetting: “The American government, by virtue of its role as Israel’s largest donor, has significant leverage over the Jewish state, which it could use to convince the Israelis to ameliorate their policies toward the Palestinian people.” Dare we now hope for such straight talk from the State Department?

Oh yes, we also promised a tale about the anti-Jewish kind of anti-Semitism, or allegations thereof, but we won’t go on if readers start laughing before we finish. Adam Ciralsky, a lawyer with the CIA, has asked the Justice Department to investigate his charge that he was denied a position with the National Security Council because of his religion and close family connections with Israel. (Yes, the NSC is the White House department headed by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, but we warned readers about laughing.)

Ciralsky’s lawyer is Neil Sher, who used to head the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. The OSI’s job is to track down the last remaining Nazi war criminals. While Sher headed it the OSI sent the wrong guy, a Ukrainian immigrant resident of Ohio named John Demjanjuk, to Israel to stand trial on charges he was a sadistic, murderous Nazi concentration camp guard called by inmates “Ivan the Terrible.” Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. But later he was quietly released by the Israeli government after testimony surfaced that Ivan the Terrible had been killed in an inmate uprising in 1945, and that the identity card used as evidence against the Ohio retiree had been forged in the former Soviet Union and brought back to the United States by the late Armand Hammer, a U.S. industrialist who was often an apologist for the Soviet Union as well.

But we digress. Sher, who left the Justice Department to be the executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s principal Washington, DC lobby, and since leaving that position has been a columnist for the Washington Jewish Week, submitted CIA documents that, Sher says, show agency officials raising questions about Ciralsky’s family’s contributions to Jewish causes and his contacts with Israelis, and Ciralsky’s alleged failure to disclose such information fully under questioning.

This, Ciralsky charges, is why the CIA placed him on “indefinite administrative leave” in October 1997, when he was a 24-year-old member of the CIA’s honor program for lawyers and just two months before he was scheduled to rotate into the National Security Council to work for one year on the staff of NSC “terrorism expert” Richard Clark. (No one is charging Clark with being part of an anti-Semitic cabal. Au contraire! He left the State Department after its then-Inspector General, Sherman Funk, charged him with looking the other way when Israel illegally transferred secret U.S. Patriot missile technology to China. (You can look it up in this column on p. 95 of the April/May 1999 Washington Report, and you’ll also realize what we’ve known for years. Funk, who is Jewish, is a real American hero who put his country ahead of his career.)

As we were saying, Sher and his client now allege that the CIA maintains a double standard for American Jews, who are put through more rigorous security checks because of possible ties to the state of Israel. The issue was given added media impetus by charges in a newly published book by Welsh author Gordon Thomas that an undetected Israeli mole, referred to by Mossad handlers as “Mega,” currently occupies some very high U.S. government position, possibly in the Clinton White House (see the review on p. 122 of the April/May 1999 Washington Report of Thompson’s book, Gideon’s Spies, now available from the AET Book Catalog).

Ciralsky’s charges of CIA anti-Semitism set off a flurry of denials. CIA public affairs director William Harlow said he could not discuss the specifics of Ciralsky’s case because of privacy concerns. CIA Director William Tenet —who irked America’s Israel lobby last October at the Wye Plantation meeting by allegedly threatening to resign if President Clinton made a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon to free convicted U.S. spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard in exchange for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians—issued a statement saying: “I will not tolerate anti-Semitism, or any other form of discrimination, at the Agency.” (Qualified Muslim Americans looking for a government job might check out that pledge about not tolerating “any other form of discrimination.”)

Meanwhile, a five-member panel set up to investigate Ciralsky’s charges, which included former CIA and FBI director William Webster, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Adm. William Crowe, and attorneys Ely Jacobs, Henry Rosovsky, and Nicole Seligman, reportedly found “nothing whatsoever to substantiate the charges of anti-Semitism in this case.”

Nor did former AIPAC director Morris Amitay, who now heads Washington PAC, one of 126 pro-Israel PACs with non-descriptive names identified by this magazine and like-minded groups over the years. At times Amitay can be almost as abrasive as Morton Klein, but in this case Amitay told the Forward newspaper in New York, “You’ve had two DCIs (Directors of Central Intelligence) who were friendly to Israel, a lot of the top people were Jewish.” (If this column said that, we expect we’d be hearing from both Mr. Amitay and Mr. Klein.)

Two other former CIA directors, Robert Gates and John Deutch (who is Jewish), joined Judge Webster in a separate statement denying that there is anti-Semitism at the CIA.

But the matter didn’t stop there. Executive vice chairman Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said his organization was working behind the scenes for a settlement between Ciralsky and the CIA. ADL national director Abraham Foxman said his group was working with the CIA to create a “diversity program” (Muslim and Christian Arab Americans take note!). Meanwhile Sandy Berger’s and Richard Clark’s (and “Mega’s”?) National Security Council referred all calls to the CIA.

Newly elected New York Sen. Charles Schumer, a long-time New York Democratic congressman, is a lot smoother but can be just as predictable and tiresome as Morton Klein when it comes to carrying water for the state of Israel. According to Forward’s Washington, DC columnist, Seth Gitell, Schumer recently told the State Department’s Middle East peace coordinator, Ambassador Dennis Ross, that if the Clinton administration does not begin building a U.S. embassy building in Jerusalem, Schumer will introduce bi-partisan legislation ordering the administration to do so. (Actually, he didn’t have to say it. Congress passes the same legislation every election year, and 2000 will be no exception.)

According to Gitell, Schumer practically took the words right out of the mouth of Connecticut Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who reportedly had urged AIPAC to hold a briefing on the subject for Senate staffers. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, who has done a lot of chores for Israel himself over the years, as befits a New York Democrat, but who is retiring at the end of his current term, charged that his office was excluded from the meeting by AIPAC because it was unhappy that he had not gotten its approval for a letter he sent to National Security Adviser Berger suggesting a compromise on the Jerusalem issue.

The hard words passing between Senate staffers over whose boss is the most zealous on behalf of AIPAC and its dozens and dozens of fund-donating political action committees will help liven up this year’s AIPAC convention, scheduled for Washington May 23 to 25.

One of this column’s all-time favorite subjects is Judge Abraham D. Sofaer, a man for all seasons. He was the New York judge hearing Israeli Gen. Ariel Sharon’s libel suit against Time magazine back in the early 1980s. He managed to make Sharon’s loss look like a victory by ruling in Sharon’s favor on three insubstantial counts on three successive days. Then, finally, he ruled in Time’s favor on the most important count on the last day of the trial and after the media had lost interest.

Next he was State Department general counsel during the Reagan years. But now that he’s back in private life he’s been formally admonished by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals for seeking to mix public sector business with private sector profit after he left his State Department position.

The DC Bar alleged in 1997 that Sofaer broke “revolving-door” ethics rules by agreeing to represent the Libyan government in matters relating to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Libyan authorities deposited $3 million in a Swiss bank account as a one-year retainer for Sofaer. But after it turned out that Sofaer had been briefed about Libyan issues, including whatever the State Department knew about Libya’s alleged role in the bombing, Sofaer withdrew from the case and returned the money. The Court of Appeals upheld the DC Bar decision. Sofaer, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, far outside the Beltway, said he will “fight this unjust decision until I have no other recourse.” Tell us about unjust decisions, Judge!