The American Spectator

J Street, the anti-Israel “pro-Israel” organization — caught last week obsfucating about its connection to George Soros — has been caught in another lie, this time regarding its connection (and the consequences of its connection) to Richard Goldstone — best known for a slanderous report about Operation Cast Lead (the 2008-09 campaign in Gaza) that took Hamas claims at face value. Former Labor MK Colette Avital told Washington Times reporter Ben Birnbaum that she broke with J Street over its decision to arrange meetings for Goldstone on Capitol Hill. She later denied having said this, but the Times has posted audio proving that she did (and that she was the one who brought up the Goldstone issue).

Meanwhile, J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami claims that “J Street did not host, arrange or facilitate any visit to Washington, D.C., by Judge Richard Goldstone,” then says “J Street staff spoke to colleagues at the organizations coordinating the meetings and, at their behest, reached out to a handful of congressional staff to inquire whether members would be interested in seeing Judge Goldstone.”

Ben-Ami is either too stupid to know what the word “facilitate” means or too dishonest to make accurate statements of fact in response to straightforward questions. I don’t think he’s stupid.

Jeffrey Goldberg writes that what’s going on is that “J Street is made up of liberal Zionists, as well as non-Zionists, and even a few anti-Zionists, and it has been difficult for it to please its differing constituencies,” hence the obsfucation. Goldberg finds J Street’s dishonesty “terribly dispiriting to people who thought that J Street was going to make a useful contribution to the debate over the future of Israel.” But people who thought that J Street would make such a contribution were quite foolish. An organization that claims to be “pro-Israel” while catering to non-Zionists and anti-Zionists is, by its very nature, fraudulent to the core.