Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: More on the Likudist Fronts

More on the Likudist Fronts
April 28, 2008 in News by Jim Lobe | 29 comments
Just to add a little to last month’s post, “Is the Pentagon Policy Shop
Funding Likudist Fronts?”, on Devon Gaffney Cross’ London-based Policy
Forum for International Security Affairs, Jeffrey Gedmin’s (?) Case for
Freedom, and Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.org, all of which appear to
have as a common denominator — and a common, Israel-based IP address —
interlocking directorates, their participation at last June’s Prague
Conference on Democracy and Security Conference (about which I’ve written
twice, here and here) and OneJerusalem’s director, a New York-based
attorney named Allen Roth, who, it turns out, is a long-time aide and
adviser to Ronald Lauder. It was Lauder, a major supporter of former
Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chief Binyamin Netanyahu, who reportedly
gave $1 million to OneJerusalem to launch a campaign against President
Bush’s Annapolis conference last fall, apparently because he feared that
renewed, U.S.-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians
could lead to a divided Jerusalem. It was also in his capacity as
president of the World Jewish Congress, a post to which he was elected in
2007, that Lauder appealed in a controversial open letter to the current
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, not to do anything that would compromise
Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.
The first thing worth noting is that both the Policy Forum and Case for
Freedom websites appear to be moribund. Despite the $79,000 Pentagon grant
it received last September and its new mandate to reach out beyond the
elite media “to the active, curious, and engaged public” in Great Britain
and Europe, the Policy Forum site — which is entitled Policy Forum for
International Affairs but which refers to itself internally as Policy
Forum for International Security Affairs — apparently hasn’t been updated
since last June when it ran some opinion pieces on the U.S. presidential
campaign. 
The Case for Freedom site, which describes itself as a “dynamic community
for dissidents and freedom’s advocates across the globe,” appears nearly
as dead as Policy Forum’s. Its last news entry is a link to a February 26
article from the Daily Telegraph entitled “China Mounts Dissident Assault
before Games.” Aside from its dynamic self-description, the inactivity on
the Case for Freedom site is particularly remarkable given the fact that
it was launched at Sharansky’s Prague Conference (at which Bush himself
gave a high-profile address over the objections of the State Department)
and the peculiar role played by Gedmin, the president of Radio Free Europe
and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), in the launch. Indeed, ten months after the
group’s founding, Gedmin’s interview of Gary Kasparov remains the featured
item on the group’s home page. 
Gedmin, of course, is the former director of the New Atlantic Initiative
at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (which sent a five-person
delegation led by Richard Perle and Michael Novak to the Prague
Conference). Shortly after 9/11, in November, 2001, Gedmin became head of
the Aspen Institute in Berlin where his job, according to right-wing
Philanthropy Roundtable’s “National Terror Guidebook,” was to “explain key
Bush administration policies (and) …challenge the more common assumptions
held by Europeans about the United States.” In other words, his role was
somewhat similar to that of Devon Gaffney Cross’, who began operating her
Policy Forum in London in 2002. As I noted in last month’s post, Cross and
Gedmin have been close colleagues for quite some time. In addition,
however, I’ve been told by two sources acquainted with the Berlin office’s
activities that, on taking over the office, Gedmin boasted to his new
colleagues that he was bringing to his new job a $1 million grant — from
Lauder’s foundation. (It’s worth noting that the Berlin office in FY 2005
was also awarded a $1.7 million grant to “bring together key policy
makers, opinion leaders, NGO representatives, media, and human rights
activists from the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. to discuss practical
steps toward the promotion of civil society and democracy in the region”
from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, then
overseen by Liz Cheney). Among the main activities of the office under
Gedmin was to bring prominent neo-conservatives and other hawks to Berlin
to meet with prominent Germans.
Once again, one has to ask how much sense it makes for a prominent
neo-conservative, Iraq war advocate and staunch defender, and beneficiary
of Lauder’s largesse to be placed in charge of U.S. government
broadcasting to Arab and Iranian audiences on issues such as U.S. policy
in the Middle East and the Gulf. (Of course, another AEI alumnus, James
Glassman, is chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the RFE/RL’s
oversight body, and has been nominated to serve as undersecretary of state
for public diplomacy.) Surveys of regional opinion have consistently shown
overwhelming frustration and anger with Washington’s steadfast support for
Israel in its conflict with Palestinians. So why place someone in such a
high-profile government post who is so clearly part of a network of
individuals who are so as closely associated with Likudists like
Netanyahu, Sharansky, and Lauder? Why, indeed, place someone in such a
high-profile post who is so clearly part of a network that even opposes
negotiations of the kind promoted by Bush himself?
Meanwhile, you’ll remember that the IP address that is home to One
Jerusalem, Case for Freedom, and Policy Forum also hosts the personal blog
of Caroline Glick, the hard-line deputy managing editor and columnist of
the Jerusalem Post and one-time Netanyahu foreign-policy adviser. As a
correspondent pointed out, Glick is also senior fellow for Middle Eastern
Affairs at the Frank Gaffney’s ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy in
Washington, DC, where, according to her blog, she “travels several times a
year to Washington (to) … brief senior administration officials and
members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.” Gaffney,
of course, is Devon Cross’ brother and a beneficiary of casino king Irving
Moskowitz, although it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Lauder and Roth were
also CSP contributors. 
Finally, another correspondent pointed out that the mysterious Zacharias
Gertler, who served with Roth as a director of Cross’s Policy Forum until
last May, was credited by yet another close Netanyahu and One Jerusalem
associate, former Israel Amb. Dore Gold, with being “the real force who
inspired” his 2003 book, “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the
New Global Terrorism.” In Gold’s acknowledgments section, Gertler’s help
and encouragement are noted directly before those of Yigal Carmon, the
president and co-founder (with Meyrav Wurmser) of MEMRI, and of Allen Roth
and Steven Schneier, a major Netanyahu fund-raiser who also attended the
Prague conference as a representative of the Policy Forum. Gold’s writings
are a frequent feature on 
onejerusalem.org
’s website.
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 Jim Lobe
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