Let’s hear it for Ralph Nader!

Whatever you may think about his potential spoiler role in the current presidential election, he has performed an important service by boldly stating the obvious: right-wing Israeli politicians and their backers in the U.S. at AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League have a lock on national politics and even on domestic media coverage of Israel and Palestine.

The ADL is fuming that Nader’s charge “smacks of bigotry” but there is nothing anti-Semitic about saying that U.S. politicians and U.S. editors and publishers are beholden to right-wing Israeli politics.

There is, as Nader points out, far more open debate about what needs to be done to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in Israel and in the Israeli media than there is in the U.S.

Any American politician—or journalist--who dares to suggest that Israel is committing war crimes or genocide against Palestinian civilians, or that its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or its settlements in those areas are illegal, or that pro-Israel lobbyists in the U.S. are unduly influencing U.S. policy or the U.S. media coverage of the Palestine-Israel crisis, is immediately labeled anti-Semitic (or the code-word “bigoted”), when in fact being critical of Israeli government policy has nothing to do with being anti-Jewish. Even American Jews who make such a charge—and there are many—end up being accused of being “self-hating.”

Now consider the situation with regard to Cuba.

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