Andrew Sullivan: 'Israelis Got U.S. Media to Spin Obama's Middle East Speech as an Attack'

May 22nd, 2011 11:40 PM

You've heard the paranoid, anti-Semitic claim that Jews control the press in this country?

Well, the Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan believes the Israelis got United States media representatives to spin President Obama's Middle East speech as an attack on the Jewish state:

The verbal formula that essentially repeats the standard position of every recent US administration on the two-state solution did not strike me as anything new; in fact, it struck me as a minimalist response to Israel's continued aggressive settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And yet instantly Drudge, Fox, Romney et al. blasted the "stunning" news that Israel had somehow been thrown under the bus.

None of this makes sense until you realize that Netanyahu had been given a heads-up by the administration. So it's pretty obvious that it was the Israelis who immediately got their US media mouthpieces to spin the speech as some sort of attack. So those of you who think Jeffrey Goldberg and Walter Russell Mead and Victor Davis Hanson are a foreign government's favored outlets should think again. These leftist radicals are far too unreliable a channel.

You got that?

Honestly, how can anyone publishing such paranoid conspiracy theories be taken seriously?

Then again, it won't surpise me in the slightest if one or more of MSNBC's prime time drones takes on this same theme Monday.

Stay tuned.

(H/T Doug Ross via @justkarl)