J'accuse! Is anti-Zionism within federal agencies working to vilify Israel-philic and Jewish Americans?

NASA scientist Stewart Nozette was set-up in a sting by the U.S..Dept of Justice to sell secrets to Israel without Israel's knowledge. Did this reveal spying by America's ally, Israel?  

Or are Christians in federal agencies taking it upon themselves to discredit Jews' 
(and U.S. ally Israel's) loyalty?

Stewart Nozette, NASA scientist

A former US official has said that both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are extremely paranoid about the Israeli secret service Mossad and Jews, and adds that the charges of espionage against US Defense Department scientist Stewart Nozette reflect this fear and "extreme view".


(Pictured: Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman - acquitted of Justice Department charges)

"One of the things that our case revealed is the very extreme views that are held by some in counter-intelligence agencies of the CIA and FBI about Israel," Rosen said.

"They believe that the Mossad spied on the US on a huge scale and they believe that the Pollard case was the tip of some sort of iceberg," he added.

"When you keep repeating that the Mossad is spying on America, Israel is harming the United States, of course it harms the alliance between Israel and the US," he continued.

"The current case is even more peculiar because the government of Israel did nothing. It's revealing that they used Israel for the sting. They could have used China, or others. But they chose Israel," he says.

Describing an "obsession" with Israel within certain parts of the CIA and FBI, Rosen said if his own case had gone to trial, details reflecting the extreme views of his investigators would have come out.

"There was no wrongdoing," he said, reflecting on the case against him and Weissman.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the Nozette case is part of a "troubling" pattern of targeting Israel and Jews as potential spies against the United States.

The US Defense Department has repeatedly singled out Jewish employees for possible disloyalty, Foxman said.

The situation has escalated, with increasing cases of Jews having difficulty obtaining security clearance. If you have relatives in Israel, speak Hebrew, or practice Orthodox Judaism, he said, "changes are, you won't get clearance. That's the mindset out there."  (ANI)

Larry Franklin, the Pentagon analyst on Iran (a Roman Catholic) - who plea-bargained to FBI charges of inappropriate disclosure to AIPAC, revealed in an interview with the Washington Post's Bill Gertz:  "But that [anti-Semitism] dimension was part of this investigation (of Jews within the government) and may have been an initial incitement of this investigation."

A former U.S. counterintelligence official familiar with the AIPAC case said the case was handled "extremely carefully" from the beginning.

"The case was handled by numerous agents and supervisors over a period of time, so the allegations of anti-Semitism are either wildly out of line, or a large portion of the bureau is anti-Semitic, which would come as a great surprise to a very large number of Jewish agents and analysts," said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the case."

Morris Amitay told the JPost's Hilary Leila Krieger that the interest of law enforcement officials in Israeli ties stems largely from the case of Jonathan Pollard, a former US Navy analyst who is serving a life sentence for passing secrets to Israel. Some officials have maintained that Pollard worked in collaboration with another, never-found, spy.

Steven Rosen said the Jewish community needs to do more to counter the attitude toward Jews and Israel found in US counter-intelligence agencies.

"There needs to be a systemic campaign" against these attitudes, he declared. "The organized community as a whole has left this job undone and it's time to do the job."

Should Muslims Integrate into the West?

"...Nevertheless, because Islamist jurists in the Arab world have considerable resources, they at times drown out or wear down more pro-assimilation voices. The collision between Western interpretations of personal freedom and some Islamist interpretations of Muslims' rights and duties is inevitable. For mainstream Muslim jurists, Islam trumps all aspects of human activities.

Herein lays the challenge. Many ethnic and religious minorities seek to establish an autonomous sphere within multicultural societies, but only Arab Muslim jurists consider such an autonomous sphere to constitute a substitute for the liberal state itself. Many ethnic and religious minorities attempt to speak for their countries of origin through the political systems of their adopted countries, but only Arab Muslim jurists regard their Muslim nation as overstretching the boundaries of all nation-states in its political
demands.

How then should liberal nation-states, using the principals of liberalism and multiculturalism as their shield, deal with individuals who resist their very existence? How can Western societies distinguish between those Muslims who seek a place for their beliefs and traditions within a pluralistic framework and those who adhere to a school committed to the destruction of that framework? Perhaps a good point of departure would be to understand that it is not veils that matter, but the individuals and ideas that are behind them."

Author, Uriya Shavit, is currently a scholar of the Minerva Foundation, a subsidiary of the Max Planck Society, and author of the forthcoming Wars of Democracy: The West and the Arabs from the fall of Communism to the War in Iraq (Dayan Center, Tel Aviv). Published in the Middle East Forum's fall 2007 issue of "The Middle East Quarterly."