A spokesman for Media Matters for America, which communicates directly with the White House in a weekly “strategy call,” boasted in 2010 of President Obama’s mistreatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a forum held by Al-Jazeera.
The Daily Caller has published a report linking Media Matters for America to the anti-American, anti-Israel news network Al-Jazeera, primarily through the work of author M.J. Rosenberg, who has come under fire from Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz for using antisemitic language and alleging that American Jews display greater loyalty to Israel than the United States. Jamie Weinstein writes:
Media Matters Action Network senior foreign policy fellow MJ Rosenberg’s column for the liberal organization regularly appears on Al-Jazeera’s website and, in 2010, Rosenberg represented Media Matters at a forum hosted by Al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar where he praised the news outlet as “mainstream.”
Media Matters Action Network is part of the organization’s political arm.
According to two Daily Caller sources, the then-director general of Al-Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar, also visited Media Matters’ offices in Washington in 2010 and met with the organization’s two top leaders, David Brock and Eric Boehlert.
Representing Media Matters at the first Al-Jazeera “Unplugged” forum on social media at the Sheraton Hotel & Resort in Doha on May 22, 2010, Rosenberg explained that Khanfar invited him to the forum during a meeting in Washington earlier that year.
In his stunning speech at the forum, Rosenberg praised Al-Jazeera as a “mainstream network,” bashed Fox News, suggested that the U.S. government intentionally bombed an Al-Jazeera bureau and expressed unreserved joy that President Obama was treating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so poorly.
Rosenberg expounded on the topic, claiming that the Obama Administration no longer considered America and Israel’s relationship more special than with any other nation:
“When Netanyahu came to Washington, no president has ever treated an Israeli prime minister as coldly as Netanyahu was treated by Obama,” Rosenberg said, with obvious joy, to what was presumably a largely Arab audience.
“Suddenly Israel today is, even though it gets what it wants to a certain extent, Israel is treated as another country, a foreign country, which makes it no different than all the other foreign countries. That is what Obama is trying to do: take Israel away from being the 51st state and make it a foreign country like Lebanon or France or any normal foreign country.”
“He has done that,” Rosenberg added. “You know, he has sent the Arab world signals from day one of where his heart is.”
Rosenberg asserts that the President of the United States intentionally mistreated the Prime Minister of Israel to “send signals” to the Arab world. Since Rosenberg works for an organization that holds weekly “strategy calls” with the White House, it stands to reason that he may have been drawing upon insider information to make that claim.
It’s unlikely that the mainstream media will follow up on this story and press Obama on his “signals” to the Arab world or his true feelings on Israel. But from this information alone, it’s apparent that the president’s closest allies are not in the pro-Israel–or pro-American–camp.