Let's give Weiner the Benador of the doubt

A lot of people have presumed that I'm a blinkered fan of Anthony Weiner. Truth is, I admired his advocacy of single-payer health insurance, but felt infuriated by his inflexible stance on the issue of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

Juan Cole has written an excellent piece which details the "top ten" things Anthony Weiner has said and done that were far worse than consensual cyber-sex chat. He had called for the firing of a professor who dared to criticize Israel, he defended the Israeli attack on a relief ship in international waters, he has condemned Amnesty International, he refused to condemn the indefensible Israeli cluster bombing of civilians in Lebanon, he absurdly claimed that Israel does not occupy the West Bank, and he called the war in Gaza "humane."

Yeah, Tony. Humane. I was particularly impressed by the humane use of white phosphorous.

Cole:

A social liberal in American terms, Weiner is so blinded by his allegiance to Israel and so studied in his ignorance of the Middle East that he has played a uniformly sinister role in that aspect of foreign policy.

Eric Ulrich, the Republican vying for Weiner's spot, may be more even-handed on this issue.

On the other hand: The Middle Eastern aspect to this story is indeed a puzzlement. Andrew Breitbart himself is so thoroughly pro-Israel, one almost wonders why he hasn't protected the congressman.

Perhaps Weiner made some nasty enemies when he married Huma Abedin, of Saudi Arabian heritage. The cross-cultural match struck many observers as unlikely, even though neither party is particularly religious. I'm not positing any mondo-weirdo Huma-centric conspiracy theories here. My thinking is much simpler, much more basic: Isn't it possible that marrying an Arab woman might have convinced Weiner that Arabs are people too?

For example, Anthony Weiner made his reprehensible statement about Israel's "humane" war before he married Huma. If he repeated that claim now, he'd have to justify it to his wife.

All of which brings us to this troubling story by Max Blumenthal. Apparently, the notorious Eleana Benador is getting in on the act.

Remember Benador? I've written about her and her neocon PR firm before, here and here.

Eleanor's recent piece ran on the Washington Times website -- for a while, at least. It was soon taken down. A right-wing text must be pretty damned rank for the Moonie Times to disavow it. Here's a whiff of what Benador had to say:

When looking broadly at the Anthony Weiner–Huma Abedin union, we have to wonder if the coupling of a Jewish American man and a Muslim woman of her pedigree was fostered by love or by a socialist political agenda...

Not unlike President Obama, the Clintons, as well as powerful politicos such as George Soros, are devotes of Saul Alinksy, who is considered “the founder of modern Community Organizing.” From my position, I clearly see that the actions of this group signal their socialist agenda, which includes domination of the U.S. by a Muslim ruled world.

Orwell would have loved that "not unlike" formulation.

Which begs the question of whether Huma Abedin been groomed by family and political leaders to carry this agenda forward?

Yada yada. Even Benador can't truly believe this nonsense. Since when does any formulation of "socialism" link up with this imaginary vision of a "Muslim ruled world"? She's simply tossing unrelated scare words into her salad.

Neither the Clintons (who supported Yeltsin to the point of madness) nor Soros (who profited enormously from the breakup of the USSR) nor Huma Abedin (so for as I know) have ever shown any signs of favoring socialism. As we've noted in many previous posts, Obama's brand of "socialism" includes putting the economic recovery firmly under the thumb of Goldman Sachs alumni -- not to mention Chicago schooler Austan GHOULS-bee.

Well, there's no point in arguing with hallucinations of this sort. Benador herself must understand that her statements are nonsense.

Speaking of hallucinations, Blumenthal adds:

Also at the Washington Times, Eric Golub, a professional nobody who says he “only dates Republican Jewish women” (unsurprisingly, he is also an Andrew Breitbart blogger), claims that Weiner hates Jewish women. Golub goes on to compare Weiner’s marriage to the Holocaust, writing that Weiner and other Jews who marry non-Jews are doing “what Hitler failed to do.” As pathological as Weiner’s behavior might have been, the right seems determined to outdo him.

Wow. And they call me paranoid. Golub's racist pronouncements buttress my earlier point: Anthony Weiner's marriage to Huma struck some people as an affront, perhaps as a betrayal.

Let's get back to Benador. To a large degree, she bears responsibility for laying the ideological groundwork for the Iraq war. In an earlier column, I offered this quote from the Asia Times:

But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months.

New York-based Benador Associates is less than two years old, but has a star-studded client roster of 38 people, most of them Middle East specialists. Benador estimates that she arranges for her clients each week between 15 and 30 interviews on US and foreign television. In the same period, she places an average of about five op-eds by them in the most influential newspapers, such as the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

To which I added:

She acquired that kind of clout in two years? Such things do not happen by accident. Hard work alone won't do the trick. This woman is connected.

Incidentally, another Benador-linked neocon is the well-known propagandist Laurie Mylroie, who co-wrote a book on Saddam Hussein with Judith Miller. Dr. Barry Rubin, the proprietor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (often considered a MOSSAD front) is also in the Benador orbit.

Eleanor's husband is a renown Picasso expert, which means that he probably knows Arianna Huffington, whose credits include a Picasso biography which she wrote almost all by herself. Arianna also happens to be pals with...

Nah. Better stop here. People will accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist.