Prominent American jurist and defense attorney Alan Dershowitz blasted former CIA agent Valerie Plame for retweeting an anti-Semitic article claiming that American Jews are pushing for war in the Middle East.
Plame found herself in hot water after she retweeted an article on Thursday titled "America's Jews are driving America’s wars". Written by notoriously anti-Semitic former CIA officer Philip Garibaldi, the article accused Jewish people of "controlling the politicians", and claimed that "they own and run the media and entertainment industries." American Jews, Garibaldi added, should not be allowed anywhere near positions where they might deal with Middle East policy because it could be a “conflict of interest.”
Plame took the article down and apologized after coming under severe criticism. "I messed up. I skimmed this piece, zeroed in on the neocon criticism, and shared it without seeing and considering the rest" she tweeted.
Alan Dershowitz, however, was having none of it. "Valerie Plame had to know what she was doing," he wrote on Fox News. " The unmasked former CIA officer retweeted a virulently anti-Semitic article by a well-known bigot on the Jewish High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah, which she characterized as “thoughtful.” Now she's trying to make excuses, but they don't wash."
"The retweeted article by Phillip Giraldi itself contains the usual anti-Semitic tropes: Jews are guilty of dual loyalty; they control politicians, the media, and entertainment; they want the U.S. to fight wars for the country to which they have real allegiance – Israel; they are dangerous to America. Giraldi has been pushing this garbage for years and Plame is one of his fans" Dershowitz continued.
"But this particular article goes much further in its neo-Nazi imagery. It states: “The media should be required to label (Jews like Bill Kristol) at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up …. That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril."
"In other words, Jewish supporters of Israel – like Kristol and me – should have to wear the modern-day equivalent of the yellow star Nazis forced Jews to wear before we are allowed to appear on TV and poison real Americans. Nice stuff that Plame was retweeting and characterizing as thoughtful" Dershowitz concluded.
Dershowitz was not the only public figure to criticize Plame - condemnations poured in from all across the political spectrum.
"Guess what the Democrats’ favorite former CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was up to last week? Peddling anti-Jewish propaganda on Twitter — and on Rosh Hashanah, no less.At least she was until her tweet sparked outrage and she apologized — while conveniently pretending it was a simple oversight, rather than just the most outrageous instance of her extremism" wrote the New York Post.
Valerie Plame was a CIA officer whose identity was famously revealed by Washington Post columnist Robert Novak in 2003.