Jamie

Weinstein

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March 17, 2009

Who Pushed Out Chas Freeman? Good People Everywhere

Last week, former American Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles “Chas” Freeman announced that he would not accept the post of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a position he had previously accepted in the Obama Administration. As Chairman of the NIC, Freeman would have become America’s top intelligence analyst. 

And why was Freeman, as he writes in a deranged rant, compelled to withdrawal his acceptance of the post? Well, the “Israel Lobby” of course.

In recent years, the so-called “Israel Lobby” has become a one-stop scapegoat shop for everything and anything Israel’s detractors in America dislike. Don’t like the Iraq War? Blame the amorphous and ill-defined “Israel Lobby.” Terrorism spreading around the world? Well, isn’t it obvious the “Israel Lobby” is somehow responsible? Chas Freeman makes comments supportive of the Tiananmen Square massacre and people don’t think he is the best choice to be the chair of the NIC? Duh. The “Israel Lobby” is obviously to blame.

“The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods and an utter disregard for the truth,” Freeman wrote in a memo explaining his decision to withdrawal.

Let’s be clear. There are many patriotic Americans who are strong supporters of Israel and believe that a strong U.S./Israel relationship is mutually beneficial. There are also American pro-Israel lobbies (composed of Jews, Christians and the non-religious) that are quite strong in the United States, partly because the American people generally and their representatives in Washington specifically happen to be naturally pro-Israel themselves. After all, Israeli society shares many of the values and characteristics of American society, including a free and open political culture that contrast quite starkly with the totalitarian dictatorships that surround the Jewish state.

Chas Freeman, on the other hand, happens to like those totalitarian dictatorships.

Freeman has suggested that the Saudi King was rapidly becoming Abdullah the Great. And great he is. He is a great dictator of a country that funds madrassas around the world that teach the Wahhabi vision of Islam, a vision of Islam that is responsible for indoctrinating many of the terrorists that threaten the West today. Abdullah is also great at implementing Sharia law, which often doles out the most barbaric of punishments.

Supporters of Freeman for the NIC chairmanship argued that Freeman was an iconoclast who would challenge groupthink and conventional wisdom that too often dominates elite circles of Washington, D.C. And to some extent, this argument has merit.

After all, Freeman has a proud history of challenging conventional wisdom. For instance, conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. and America at large holds that it was wrong for the Chinese government to massacre its citizens protesting for more freedom in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Don’t sell that baloney to Chas Freeman. No, if the Chinese government failed in 1989, it failed because it didn’t respond fast enough.

“I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible,” Freeman wrote in an e-mail to a foreign policy listserve unearthed by The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb, “i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than – as would have been both wise and efficacious – to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China.”

He continued by noting that demonstrators, “whether they represent a veterans' ‘Bonus Army’ or a ‘student uprising’ on behalf of ‘the goddess of democracy’ should expect to be displaced with dispatch from the ground they occupy.”

“Displaced,” I suppose, is a euphemism for massacred.

During a Middle East Policy Council forum, Freeman also turned conventional wisdom on its head by stating, “I simply want to register what I think is an obvious point; namely that what 9/11 showed is that if we bomb people, they bomb back.”

Against conventional wisdom? Check. Stupendously stupid, as in Ward Churchill stupid? Double check. If this represents Charles Freeman’s understanding of why the terrorists on 9/11 attacked America, then the scale of his ignorance with regard to the reasons America is threatened by global jihad is breathtaking. And this is the guy who was going to be analyzing intelligence in the Obama Administration?

I don’t know Charles Freeman personally and I don’t pretend to know the inner depths of his soul. But his record indicates he has a troubling penchant of siding with authoritarian regimes.

Sometimes American foreign policy interests require us to align ourselves with regimes that have less-than-savory human rights records. There is no obligation, however, for private citizens to run around calling King Abdullah great and defending the Tiananmen Square Massacre. 

There is little question that pro-Israel supporters weren’t particularly excited to see Freeman appointed to such an influential post, and many influential American supporters of Israel certainly expressed their dismay at the choice. So, in that respect, Freeman is partly right in saying that the American pro-“Israel Lobby” had some role in scuttling his appointment. But so did the anti-totalitarian lobby. And the decency lobby. And the pro-Tibet lobby. And the anti-massacre lobby. And a whole host other groups of people who were offended and dismayed at the possibility that a man with such a troubling record of being an apologist for totalitarian regimes was being appointed to such an important post. 

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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