Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: non esattamente un successo

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/10/20/1008619/j-street-drops-poets-fights-off-conservative-attacks-as-conference-approach
Attacks on J Street as parley approaches
By Eric Fingerhut · October 20, 2009
WASHINGTON (JTA) – Days before the inaugural conference of the left-wing 
pro-Israel group J Street, critics’ attacks on the organization are 
having an effect on the planned event.
At least 10 members of Congress in recent days have removed their names 
from the conference’s 160-person congressional host committee, many 
after inquiries from a writer at a prominent conservative magazine. J 
Street canceled a poetry session scheduled for the conference after 
controversial remarks made by one of the planned participants were 
publicized in that same magazine. And the Israeli Embassy announced it 
would be sending only an observer, not Ambassador Michael Oren, to 
attend the conference.
Meanwhile, J Street announced it had secured a high-ranking Obama 
administration official to keynote the Oct. 25-28 event in Washington: 
President Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones.
The criticism underscores the controversy J Street has stirred in the 
Jewish community, particularly given the warm reception it has gotten 
from Obama administration officials. Many pro-Israel critics say J 
Street’s advocacy – including for U.S. intervention to support a 
two-state solution and against further Iran sanctions right now -- 
undermines the Israeli government and Israel’s welfare. J Street, which 
calls itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” says the policies it pursues are 
in Israel’s best interests.
The pro-Israel group Stand With Us was planning this week to place 
advertisements expressing concern with J Street in the Washington Post 
and Washington Jewish Week.
The trouble for J Street’s poetry session came last week, when the Web 
site of The Weekly Standard posted a video in which poet Josh Healey, a 
scheduled participant, talks about how for his friends "Anne Frank is 
Matthew Shepard" and "Guantanamo is Auschwitz.” In another poem the 
Standard reprinted, Healey wonders whether "the chosen people" have been 
"chosen to recreate our own history, merely reversing the roles with the 
script now reading that we're the ones writing numbers on the wrists of 
babies born in the ghetto called Gaza?"
J Street canceled the poetry session on Monday. The group’s executive 
director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said that “as J Street is critical of the use 
and abuse of Holocaust imagery and metaphors by politicians and pundits 
on the right, it would be inappropriate for us to feature poets at our 
conference whose poetry has used such imagery in the past and might also 
be offensive to some conference participants.”
Another a session, which is not officially part of the conference but to 
which J Street is giving hotel space during the event, will include 
writers who have harshly criticized Israel and questioned its right to 
exist as a Jewish state. It is sponsored by blogger Richard Silverstein; 
J Street officials said they have nothing to do with the program.
Members of Congress began taking themselves off the conference host 
committee last week. Most of the 10 who removed themselves blamed 
staffers who they said were not knowledgeable about the positions J 
Street espouses before agreeing to put their boss on the committee. (J 
Street acknowledged that the presence of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand 
(D-N.Y.) on the list was an error; Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) 
originally agreed but pulled out before J Street released the committee 
list last month.)
In an e-mail to supporters, J Street blamed The Weekly Standard for the 
withdrawals, saying the magazine’s “thuggish smear tactics” were having 
an impact on Capitol Hill. The e-mail urged supporters to fight back by 
calling members of Congress to thank them for being a part of the 
conference host committee.
Michael Goldfarb, the editor for The Weekly Standard who wrote about J 
Street, said he takes J Street’s attack against him as a compliment.
“They say the 'thuggish smears are having an impact,'” he said. “They're 
not having an impact because they're smears, they're having an impact 
because they're true.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli Embassy in Washington released a statement 
saying it would send an observer to the conference and would "follow its 
proceedings with interest," but Ambassador Michael Oren, whom J Street 
had invited, would not attend. The statement added that the embassy has 
been "privately communicating its concerns over certain policies of the 
organization that may impair the interests of Israel."
J Street’s director of policy and strategy, Hadar Susskind, said he sees 
the attacks on the organization and its conference as “a sign that we 
are waking people up,” and making a mark on the U.S.-Israel relationship.
He also noted that more than 1,200 people had signed up to attend the 
conference.

 Attacks on J Street as parley approaches
minchia quanto ti fanno rosicare questi falliti...non oso immaginare
se cominciassero ad avere successo che fine faresti....