J-Street fizzle

By most accounts, last night's J-Street (spit) national kick-off event appears to have been largely a bust, attracting little attention beyond its own ardent supporters and most vehement detractors.  The live event was here (I used that term loosely) in Philadelphia and was reportedly attended by around two hundred people, few of them students in spite of being held on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.  Z-Street, a new, grassroots, genuinely pro-Israel organization founded, in part, to counter J-Street's propaganda, sponsored this alternative event, held in the same building at the same time, which attracted a sizable crowd of its own.

In spite of J-Street's dubious pretensions to being "pro-Israel," its rhetoric and the reactions of its acolytes always reveal a very different agenda.  Take, for example, the first major applause line of last night's speech by Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami:

Maybe you just believe that all people have a right to self-determination, to opportunity, to security - and you want to see an end to the occupation of the Palestinian people.

By contrast, there was nary a clap in response to this one:

We believe in the state of Israel and support the notion of a national home for the Jewish people.

Nor was any enthusiasm generated by this very odd formulation of J-Street's aspirations:

We will build a home together where our organizing and our advocacy around Israel lines up with the values and the principles of our people.

A community where it is acceptable to study and to learn about history and about competing narratives and claims to the land - where we can hug and wrestle with Israel at the very same time.

Hug and wrestle?  Is he serious?  Or this one

You'll help redefine and expand the very concept of being pro-Israel. No longer will this pro- require an anti-.

Mr. Ben-Ami, judging by this performance, is a pretty terrible public speaker, which I must say is a bit encouraging.  But his organization is a nasty, disingenuous scam designed to dress up patently anti-Israel rhetoric in the guise of "progressive" pro-Israel ("pro-peace," pro-democracy") advocacy.  It plays on the hopes and fears of the hopelessly naive and uninformed, and hopefully this latest initiative will die on the vine.  In short, J-Street is a wolf in sheep's clothing. 

(Hey.  It's a demon sheep!)

Shabbat Shalom.