The anti-Israel CIA
There was quite a bit of discussion of this Tablet article (author Justine El-Khazen) yesterday in the comments here. So I decided to take a look at it. It begins this way:
My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.
I found it to be an oddly disjointed article. It took me a little while to understand – and the author never made it 100% clear – who in the author’s family was Jewish and what religion the other parent was. It seems to have been her father and not her mother who was Jewish, but the author never says whether her mother was Christian, or atheist, or what (other than a CIA analyst).
Much of the latter part of the article is a discussion of the current Middle East situation, but it says nothing particularly unique. On the CIA, however, the author seems to have been strangely naive, and seems to still be naive about John Brennan, whom she seems to trust. But I see no reason that anyone would trust Brennan (do a search on this blog for “Brennan” and you’ll see why I say that).
Why would the author be surprised at the anti-Israel bent of anyone connected with our foreign policy or intelligence community these days? The State Department, the CIA, all of it? When this stance started I don’t know (I think it got worse during the Obama administration but I think the trend predated that). The only person I personally knew who went into the diplomatic corps was definitely a leftist, and I knew him in the 70s when he was in grad school shortly before he entered that profession.
She writes this about her father, who was Jewish (at least ethnically):
Never mind that my father hated visiting Israel. The story he told me was that he’d talked to a woman in a bar when he was there in his 20s, a “working girl.” When he found out she was Jewish, that was it. The dream of a Jewish homeland was done. He never wanted to go back …
This doesn’t make much sense to me, unless her father was extremely strange. In Israel there are Jewish plumbers, Jewish police, Jewish thieves, Jewish prostitutes, Jewish whatever. It’s a society. Did he, a Jew, think Jews had to be perfectly pure?
More from the article:
My mother and I had dinner one night in April 1996 at the CIA station chief’s house in Israel, north of Tel Aviv. There was some kind of minor war underway. Fighter jets kept skidding above us as we ate. The IDF and Hezbollah were trading fire again, which was not that remarkable in itself. This time, the IDF bombed a U.N. compound, killing 106 civilians.
This event might not have made news here, but it rocked the Arab world. Mohamed Atta committed his life to jihad that very day. Osama bin Laden was none too pleased, either. “You supported the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon,” he explained in his “letter to America,” which, since Oct. 7, has gone viral in the TikTok feeds of America’s youth. Anti-Westernism has always been closely entwined with antisemitism in the Arab world; these days it’s closely entwined here too.
But she’s talking about this event and leaves out some very important (and relevant) facts (emphasis mine):
Israeli artillery fire strikes a U.N. compound where at least 800 Lebanese civilians are sheltering in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. At least 13 shells hit the compound, killing 106 civilians and wounding more than 100 other people, including four Fijian U.N. peacekeepers.
The artillery attack comes during Operation Grapes of Wrath, an Israeli response to the collapse of a cease-fire with Hezbollah that had lasted nearly three years. The Israel Defense Forces issued a warning April 11 for civilians to evacuate from towns and villages to avoid the fighting. As a result, the roads are crowded with refugees fleeing northward, and civilians crowd into the U.N. compound in Qana.
Hezbollah uses several positions within 700 yards of the U.N. base to launch mortar and rocket attacks on IDF positions and northern Israel on the afternoon of April 18. An IDF commando unit commanded by Naftali Bennett calls in an artillery strike on one Hezbollah mortar unit firing from a cemetery less than 200 yards from the U.N. base, but none of the 36 shells fired by a four-gun battery of 155mm howitzers hits the mortar site. Instead, carnage within the U.N. compound results.
Israel apologizes for what it says are the accidental civilian deaths and blames Hezbollah for violating international law by using the U.N. compound as civilian shielding for its forces. A U.N. investigation finds that the Israeli attack on the base likely was likely not an accident, and a separate Amnesty International investigation concludes that what comes to be called the “Qana Massacre” was intentional. Israel rejects those reports, which it says are biased.
Recognize the pattern? I certainly do. Hezbollah violates a ceasefire. Hezbollah places munitions near the UN base, purposely putting all the civilian inhabitants at risk. Israel mistakenly hits the base and causes civilian casualties (all the people there may not have been civilians, but I’m going to assume that a great many were). The extremely anti-Israel UN and the extremely anti-Israel Amnesty say Israel did it on purpose, and Israel says it did not.
If Israel wanted to kill civilians it had much better ways to do so than this – to warn civilians to leave, and then to hit some while trying to take out a mortar launch site placed very nearby by Hezbollah. Hezbollah counts on a certain number of such mistakes on which it can capitalize in the propaganda war, after it has purposely put its civilians in harm’s way.
I think the author means well, but I found the piece very confusing and very incomplete, as well as naive.
Yeah, my takeaways from that article were the same as yours. This person seems incredibly naive. Her mother seemed like she was a fairly anti-Isreal to me, which seems par for the course for people high up in the CIA for decades now. Maybe I’m just jaded, but to me it seems likes a barely hidden hatred of Isreal has been a prerequisite for anyone involved in US intelligence for (likely) several decades now. As to when and how it started, I have no idea.
I had the same reaction. On her identity, it seems she regards herself as Jewish because her father was nominally Jewish, or at least as having the option to raise her kids “Jewish.”
What I took from the piece, though I found it hard to follow, was that her mother was fairly neutral and objective (at least relatively), but found herself surrounded by anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which led her to urge her daughter not to identify her kids as Jewish. But since this is a daughter speaking about her mother, it’s likely she was seeing her through rose-colored glasses, and maybe the advice not to raise her kids as Jewish also revealed some hostility to Jews on her part.
It was hard to tell if her mother was Jewish. If not, she isn’t Jewish according to Jewish law.
Interesting reaction, Neo. I started reading the piece, got four or five paragraphs in and started having the same reaction to the vagueness and confusion, decided I didn’t want to take the time to sort it out, and bailed.
While I’m at it, not directly related: some years ago (20+) a friend of mine related to me a report about Nixon being asked about the future of Israel. I guess it was while he was president. Supposedly he said that Israel would be all right for the next X number of years–25-50, I think–but that in the long run was doomed. A quick search yielded no reference to such a remark. Has anyone else heard of anything like that? It’s rather disturbing. Whatever you think of Nixon, he was very shrewd about international politics.
It’s a sh!tty agency. Shut it down.
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Her father was a physician, one Kenneth Alex Kessler, MD. (b. 1943, d. 2022), a native of Philadelphia. He was a psychiatrist who practiced around Washington, DC and later retired to south Florida and Delaware beaches. He would have been trained at a time when insight-oriented therapies influenced by psychoanalysis were the order of the day. Her mother was Martha R. Neff (b. 1945, d. 2023). Her mother grew up in an exurb of Columbus, Ohio and married Dr. Kessler in September 1975. The author was born in December 1977. Her mother had a rather unprepossessing education for the work her obituary attributes to her. Her mother was a resident of DC at the time of her death and her father is unmentioned in her mother’s obituary, so they were apparently divorced some time ago.
As far as I can tell, her mother was no relation to Donald L. Neff, the Time magazine bureau chief who spent much of his career in journalism attempting to damage Israel’s reputation.
Art Deco:
I will then assume that “El-Khazen” is her married name and she is married to a man of Christian Lebanese background.
Kate:
Her mother wasn’t Jewish. But the “mother has to be Jewish to be Jewish” law does not apply to Reform Judaism, which accepts either martilineal or patrilineal descent.
All forms of Judaism accept converts, by the way, although they have different rules for completing the process.
Jimmy:
It’s hard to tell because the piece is so unclear, but I did not get the idea that her mother was actually neutral towards Israel; she just tried to be neutral in her work despite her pro-Palestinian biases. I am basing that on this:
“Hardened in her views” – what views? I think the author is reluctant to say unequivocally. The article goes on to say that although her mother felt the need to be neutral in her views on the job, she nevertheless:
So her mother was like the others in the CIA, the ones the daughter later interviewed. So why was the daughter so shocked by what they said? It makes no sense. Was she merely shocked because they said it post-10/7?
As a general rule they have been at best indifferent to the Jewish state, Angleton, was perhaps it’s leading champion, as Aaron Latham relates in his roman a clef, the Egyptians were to breach the sand berms that divide Sinai from Israel, there was a miscommunication, and the info never got anywhere,
more often you have the likes of Charles Freeman,* Edward Walker, William Eagleton,** (all of these were name checked by Kaplan in the Arabist) you have the Close-Eddy clan, the patriarch the late Ray Close was so close to the Arabs, like St John Philby he went to work for them directly, later he formed the VIPS to oppose the Iraq War
*freeman sells out to chinese as firmly as Arabs
** he was the Ambassador when Saddam gassed the Kurds
Kai Bird, the other sherpa she consulted was among other things, the son of a State Department official in Cairo, Jeddah and Jerusalem, he wrote that curious bio of Robert Ames, I mentioned earlier, most recently he wrote the basis for the Movie Oppenheimer American Prometheus,
Yes, Neo, I am familiar with Jewish conversions. I have a second cousin who felt called to move to Israel forty years ago. He underwent an Orthodox conversion, married a nice girl from a Yemeni refugee family, and has at least one son now serving in combat in the IDF.
This CIA daughter gave no indication in the essay of having ever practiced any form of Judaism; quite the reverse, since her mother was opposed and told her father so. I believe that Israeli law at this time would not consider her Jewish.
I do wonder this magical place, they imagine would arise if Israel wasn’t around, Jordan killed 30,000 for real, when Arafat tried to take over, hence Black September, maybe in a world where Arabia was run by the Hashemites, but then they likely would not have the oil deal, so much of the world would be uninterested, Of course the Turks would probably be largely in charge, but the Kemal version not the Erdogan one,
Kate:
But she doesn’t live in Israel and never has, so Israeli law is irrelevant. And if she were to be a practicing Jew, my guess is she would be Reform, and therefore considered a Jew by birth and would need no conversion.
By the way, having a Jewish father would give her the right of return under Israeli law, so she would be allowed to become a Jewish citizen (Correction: I mean “an Israeli citizen”). All a person needs for that to happen is a single Jewish grandparent of either sex.
I didn’t know that, Neo. I thought one had to have Orthodox connections.
With respect to this CIA daughter, this is all quite hypothetical, since she was not raised Jewish and shows no sign that she wants to be Jewish. Commenter “Esther” here says that although she no longer attends any synagogue because of the politics, she’s Jewish and she always knows she’s Jewish. I take people at their word. Esther is Jewish, the CIA daughter is not.
The “Christmas trees and Hanukkah prayers” part suggests her mother was of Christain origin (get the feel they were not religious).
I think the author means well, but I found the piece very confusing and very incomplete, as well as naive.
I found it to be interesting insight into the establishment left, particularly related to our intelligence community.
It’s also interesting to see her naive view. I wonder if this plays out to redpill American Jews.
yes that story would have been right after the ’67 war, when Jews were naturally exuberant, after the victory, the hated ‘settlements’ came later,
By the way, having a Jewish father would give her the right of return under Israeli law, so she would be allowed to become a Jewish citizen. All a person needs for that to happen is a single Jewish grandparent of either sex.
She would have that right, but I don’t think Israeli law, in terms of things like marriage, whether her kids would be considered Jewish, etc., would consider her to be Jewish, absent Orthodox conversion. She would be considered “without religious status,” as are many immigrants from Russia and other places.
Marriage and conversion are controlled by the Orthodox rabbinate. For example, if her kids wanted to marry a Jewish Israeli they would probably have to go offshore (Cyprus is a popular destination for this), as it wouldn’t be allowed in Israel unless they converted.
I found both parents’ obituaries. They’re odd, the obituaries, that is.
The parents seem to have been married for over forty years when the father died. It did say that he was survived by his wife of forty-six years… There is a single photo of the father and no “memories” posted at the obituary. The mother died later. There’s no mention that she was predeceased by her husband of so many years. They’re are a gazillion photos and oodles of “memories.” BTW, highly likely that the mother was raised Christian as her sister is an Episcopal priest.
The “Jewish prostitute in Israel” is an old joke that people made. It was still kind of making the round as late as the eighties. So I seriously doubt that it was any actual observation made by the father.
The author was apparently married to an Arab, but had since divorced. Another Tablet article she wrote is about her husband. I read that article, also. It, too, is disjointed and a bit naive — she misses the point that the reason her Christian Lebanese husband was lumped in the “Arab database” (which she refers to as “Muslim Database”) is that political correctness (and the islamophilia of the Brennan crowd) didn’t want to target Muslims.
On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish.
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The daughter is 46 years old. How old are these children?
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I will then assume that “El-Khazen” is her married name and she is married to a man of Christian Lebanese background.
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The mother’s obituary indicates the son-in-law’s name is ‘Zander Mackie’. Mr. Mackie lives in New York City. Various sources identify Justine Whatsherface as a resident of Brooklyn. The other daughter, Lauren Genevieve Kessler, is a resident of DC. It would appear Mr. El-Khazen was the previous husband. She was using the name ‘El-Khazen’ as early as 1996, when she was 18 years old.
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Martha Kessler was mentioned in Dr. Kessler’s obituary. (Text so mentioning unknown).
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Jimmy:
In addition:
So they can get married on Zoom? And in Egypt, Muslim women can get divorced by text message. What a world.
Please note, the Arab sympathizers to which she refers have to ignore the absence of constructive objects manifest in the Arab population.
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1. Offered an Arab state in 1947. Spurned.
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2. Municipal elections on the West Bank and Gaza in 1972 and 1976. They elected revanchists.
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3. Camp David Accords in 1978. Spurned.
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4. Oslo process: 1993-2000. They turned it into an opportunity for Arafat et al to set up criminal syndicates on the West Bank and Gaza and spurned an offer of an Arab state in 2000.
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5. Unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005: their first response was destroying infrastructure left behind for vegetable production. You can see what their most recent response was.
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6. Ehud Olmert’s offer of an Arab state on the West Bank and Gaza spurned.
There is a single photo of the father and no “memories” posted at the obituary. The mother died later. There’s no mention that she was predeceased by her husband of so many years.
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I’m guessing they used different undertakers.
Whooo boy, well.
So while reading that article, what kept popping into my head was reading about Alice Walker and her daughter by a Jewish father. Though at least this mother considered her daughter fully human and not half shape shifting alien lizard.
Israel would consider her Jewish for citizenship purposes, should she be so inclined, as Neo said.
If there is a mystery of her mother maybe also having Jewish ancestry- and she sounded obsessed enough about Jews that it’s a possibility- a DNA test would show that.
Funnily enough, I too went Sherlock Holmes after my mother died. In fact, my mother seemed to have deliberately left clues and told my brother I would figure it all out. All, being not just family drama and personal tragedy, but also the suffering of humanity and the sweep of geopolitical turmoil.
So, from the perspective of trying to understand antisemitism, wondering whether the parents were spies, or possibly just mild mannered, neurotic world destroyers — and then trying to place your family into the puzzle of history… this essay did not seem that disjointed to me.
Got to say, all things considered, it’s way better if your mother’s last words were “Esther is dressing so nicely and looks so beautiful.”
Best I can discover, Martha Neff’s maternal-line ancestry was Dutch and German.
I also found the article confused. It took me a while to understand who in the family was Jewish and who wasn’t and that the Arab surname probably came from a husband or ex-husband. It’s strange — or perhaps not so strange — that she is a professional writer/poet and teacher of writing, yet her writing can in places be so hard to follow. I also don’t understand this web page which seems to imply that she has been married since July 21, 2024.
I don’t agree with everything that she wrote, but what she had to say about the the CIA not recognizing the extent of anti-Jewish feeling in the Arab/Muslim world was illuminating and disturbing. I would point out, though, that “Arabist” originally meant someone who knew the language and was a specialist in the region. Arabists did tend to sympathize with the Arabs. For many people the word has come to mean partisan on behalf of the Arab world against Israel, but the term is ambiguous, so I wouldn’t automatically assume that it meant overly identifying with the Palestinians and being especially hostile to Israel. Being an Arabist likely does imply coolness towards Israel, compared to other views, but how far or how deep that goes varies.
Interesting reaction, Neo. I started reading the piece, got four or five paragraphs in and started having the same reaction to the vagueness and confusion, decided I didn’t want to take the time to sort it out, and bailed.
Mac:
Likewise.
It was one of those articles where I go down a couple screenfuls and not much makes sense. I skip to the last two or three paragraphs and nothing is summed up.
Abraxas: That webpage translation is “After 6 years of love and countless Paris-Geneva return trips, here we are finally: we are going to say “Yes”! We can’t wait to see you all on this special day for us… The countdown is on!” so why does she have his last name already? Also, the father’s 2021 obituary mentions son in law Zander Mackie so that must be the sister’s husband. Does this woman have children, or is she hoping to at 47 or older? It’s all quite odd.
Note: I didn’t read the article, just Neo’s summary and comments
The article seemed to me to be a timid expose of the politics in the CIA. She may be naive. But maybe she was just trying to be careful. She didn’t come right out and say, “The CIA is full of Israel haters, and all you Jews should be aware of this.” That was the message I got.
She dropped the names of known CIA brass. Not much of that kind of thing out there these days. Oh yeah, we assumed it’s true. She’s saying that it is, and her mother, as an insider, gave her access to these higher ups.
Maybe I’m too simple-minded. 🙂
@ J.J. > “But maybe she was just trying to be careful.”
Your explanation is pretty close to what I thought after reading the article, but Neo’s points are also well-taken.
As for the confusing-ness: it did seem a bit muddy at times, but I was interested enough to stick around and sort it out.
She was clearly “authoring a personal memoir” not “reporting a news story” — I have noticed a tendency among the writers of “human interest” pieces (think The Atlantic, or The New Yorker — I don’t know a conservative analogue) to delight in introducing important facts somewhere around the middle of the piece rather than at the beginning.
I was surprised that so many of the top-tier spooks were willing to tell her so much, and wondered why she had access to them just because her mother worked there.
On the other hand, maybe the post was written by Gemini or ChatGPT.
The origin of the “Israeli prostitute” meme is a well-known exchange between a hard-Left Israeli pol and a Rabbi who also served in the Knesset.
Alongside the Marxist breast-beating calls for “social justice” there was a another slogan -directly aimed at the religious nature of Jewish identity – that urged Israel to be “a nation like all other nations”… A similar slogan recycled from the Emancipation urged people to “be a Jew in your home and a Humanist in public.”.. these slogans obviously meant to uproot any notion of modern Israel as a vehicle of the divine Jewish mission.
…So during a discussion of the social ills resulting from mass immigration, the Labor Zionist MKs ignored their own “social justice” posturing and leeringly said “when we have Jewish prostitutes we’ll know we’ve brought Progress” – and the religious MK answered tartly “May it be your daughter!”
Pingback:Instapundit » Blog Archive » I THINK THEY ARE ANTI-HUMAN: The anti-Israel CIA.
The Liberal/Democratic elites and significant numbers of the rank and file have decided, as a result of Obama’s transformational political grammar, that an alliance with Iran and Iran’s friends, allies and proxies is the way to achieve a “better” future for the Middle East and the world in general.
The results of this landmark betrayal are there for all to see…though not necessarily to recognize or understand or comprehend.
Perhaps easier to understand is “Biden”’s even huger betrayal of the US, but even here, people don’t always see what’s in front of them (especially if the Media is sufficiently and effectively muddying the waters).
The Dulles Brothers loved Nazis. Allen Dulles served as head of CIA under 8 presidents.
Takeaway: Even this person, blinded and confused by ignorance, incuriosity, and filial/familial lore, loyalty and lies, has figured out that something ain’t quite right in the milk. There seems to be some anti-semitism going on here!
Only two presidents but had influence during trumans term behind the scenes
Dulles created the agencys culture which was strongly arabist the likes of kermit roosevelt and miles copeland who toppled farouk and mossadecq athough the latter role was less than it seems or wilbur eveland crane anotjer curious character
What no one seems to talk about here is – despite all of the post-WWII show of disavowing anti-Semitism and the success of Jewish Americans, the State Department, the CIA and its predecessor the OSS, were profoundly anti-Semitic and have remained profoundly anti-Semitic…the earlier incarnation of American elite anti-Semitism wasn’t the ‘burn the Jews’ or the ‘River to the Sea’ variety, rather that of the Ivy League quotas, separate town, country, and yacht clubs, and keeping out Jewish refugees before, during and after WWII variety.
As an historian who has dabbled a bit in American military, political, and diplomatic history, I can’t think of any serious historian of the American establishment who has ever suggested it hadn’t been, and isn’t still, more or less significantly anti-Semitic.
The current open anti-Semitism of many in the elite is just ripping off the band-aid, I fear.
I’m neither Jewish nor do I “play one on tv”, and I’m not one to trash America because it beats the alternatives by a country mile – even for minorities, but I think we would all be better off to be honest about things like anti-Semitism.
If the mother was insisting constantly or at random moments that Justine not raise her children Jewish that does seems strange, but Justine writes:
I still don’t know why my mother left me with this burden: Don’t raise your kids Jewish, don’t honor the past, don’t remember your great-grandparents, don’t tell their stories, don’t, don’t, don’t …
Maybe Martha thought her daughter could honor both pasts and both sets of grandparents, and thought Justine’s raising her children as Jewish meant choosing one side of the family and rejecting the other. Maybe El-Khazen’s parents had made some kind of pact to raise their children a certain way. This is all just speculation, but we only have Justine’s side of the story. She only recreates one side of their interactions.
El-Hazen tells us what her mother’s CIA colleagues thought — going all the way to Brennan, who was once at the top of the hierarchy — but did she ask her mother’s surviving relatives, and her mother’s surviving friends from her younger days? The information they provided might have been more relevant to solving the mystery.
In 1983 the US State Department pretended that there was no confirmation that Islanic Jihad was a front for Iran (via Hezbollah), and so the Reagan administration never retaliated for the truck-bombing of the USMC compound in Beirut. The DC establishment viewed it more important to appease islamists, than to protect Americans, especially those unimportant Americans in Uniform.
Later, in the same US involvement in the Lebanese civil war, the USMC was ordered to block Israeli counterattacks against Hezbollah.
While the US public is generally pro-Israel, the DC goons are uniformly pro-arab. This was apparent throughout my service in the USMC from 1978-2004, and blatant as I progressed in rank and took more senior positions in proximity to general officers.
Our Intel services were flawed during the cold War, but I think they have become as corrupt as the State Department.
Allen Dulles served as head of CIA under 8 presidents
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The CIA was founded in 1947. The 1st eight Presidents to supervise it were Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Mr. Reagan took office in 1981. At the time, Allen Dulles had been out of office for 19 years and dead for 12 years. He actually held the position for 8 years, seven years and change under Pres. Eisenhower and 10 months under JFK.
the State Department, the CIA and its predecessor the OSS, were profoundly anti-Semitic and have remained profoundly anti-Semitic
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This is a fantasy.
My feeling about the piece is similar to yours, Neo, and other respondents’.
I don’t just attribute it to naïveté. It looks to me like another instance of a person who is unable to think clearly and engage in sober-minded analysis, and is so unaware of their inability that they expose it to the world in a widely-published piece with no hint of apology or awareness.
Now, to be sure, she is speaking of the deaths of her mother and her father. If you catch someone right after the funeral, one doesn’t expect them to sound like, well, a Vulcan.
But I’m not making a heartless critique, here. It seems to me that she wants to understand, but keeps tripping on her own lack-of-clarity, making category-errors that prevent understanding.
Under those circumstances, the compassionate thing is to invite, call, or cajole her towards clarity-of-thought.
So: What does she mean by Jewish? Is she talking about distant ancestral bloodlines, or direct matrilineal descent, or affinity-for-bagels, or regular practice of Judaism, or what? The smart thing to do is to specify, at the top of the article, different terms for each of these realities, and then use them consistently throughout, so that we can know just what in the Sheol she’s trying to say.
And in fact, an editor should have stepped in to help her do this. A decent editor would be aware of the mind of the reader, and able to anticipate the frustrating questions the article might raise:
1. Her name is Justine El-Khazen. Is “El-Khazen” a surname associated with any particular ethnicity? Which one? Is that a married name, or her father’s last name, or her mother’s, or a pen-name, or what?
2. The dad, apparently, was ethnically Jewish…can we get an unambiguous confirmation of that? And the mom wasn’t, right? There are naturally-blond Jewish women, after all; and more that are less-naturally-blond; but are we supposed to derive from her mentioning her mother’s blond hair that the mother was, what? Swedish-ancestry non-practicing Lutheran?
3. What does she even think it means to be “raised Jewish?” She alludes to an almost apologetically-halfhearted celebration of seders; but, while a Hasidic family wouldn’t be described that way, I’ve seen some Reformed households who definitely call themselves “Jewish” but don’t seem, to my Goy eyeballs, especially religious at Passover-time. There’s a continuum. So, what’s the writer’s understanding? Does she think she was “raised Jewish?” If not, what does she think that would have looked like? If so, what does she think the alternative would have looked like?
4. …
Actually, I’m out of time, but I wanted to post at least these observations. And, yes, she’s in a fantasy-world vis-a-vis Brennan and other swamp-denizens and scions of the elite institutions of higher learning in the U.S.
I would love to see people think clearly enough to just draw distinctions. It’s frustrating to spend the effort to read so many words, and come away still wondering what I was reading about.
2. The dad, apparently, was ethnically Jewish…can we get an unambiguous confirmation of that?
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Dr. Kessler was the son of Jerome Kessler and Selma Klein.
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Selma Klein was the daughter of Jacob Klein and Betty Glasier. Jacob Klein and Betty Glasier were apparently born in New York and Philadelphia respectively. His parents were reportedly born in Russia whereas her father was born in Germany and her mother in Russia.
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Jerome Kessler was the son of Harry Kessler and Lena Goldman. Both were apparently born in Russia of parents born in Russia and both apparently spoke Yiddish at home.
Yes that was my mistake as well going by her married name yes ace lyons noted the iranian hand behind hezbollah one of the players was ironically part of the freedom movement in 2009 mohasteshimi-pur they were oart of the apparat, the man behind recruiting mugniyeh asghari was then recruited and he gave us that convenient 2007 Nie estimate
Tell of a pro israel cia executive sans angleton who was 50 years ago same for nsas bobby inman
Deco is correct, but: Allen Dulles was directly or indirectly involved in intelligence work (including covert/behind-the-scenes communications with foreign figures in the supposed furtherance of official American interests) from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 through the end of his CIA career in 1961. So:
Wilson
Harding
Coolidge
Hoover
Roosevelt
Truman
Eisenhower
JFK
Eight presidents. I took Pam’s comment seriously, not literally.
Allen Dulles was directly or indirectly involved in intelligence work (including covert/behind-the-scenes communications with foreign figures in the supposed furtherance of official American interests) from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 through the end of his CIA career in 1961. So:
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The elastic on your waistband just broke.
Yes he started at the bern mission where he avoided lenin then the inquiry than sullivan cromwell into the roosevelt years until bern again