Daniel Luban, February 20, 2010
This week saw the publication of a two-part hit piece in Tablet magazine purporting to expose the machinations of the “Iran lobby” in Washington. The author, Lee Smith, is apparently not the great baseball closer, but rather a former reporter for Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard and a current fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute (also the home of such luminaries as Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, and Norman Podhoretz). The first piece (titled “Iran’s Man in Washington”) targets Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, while the second (bearing the equally classy title “The Immigrant”) goes after Trita Parsi and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). While pitched as an analytical treatment of its targets’ careers, Smith soon slips into overwrought emotional mode, accusing the Leveretts of “trad[ing] their government experience and intellectual credibility for access to the worst elements of a regime that continues to murder its own people in the streets” while arguing that Parsi was “corrupted” by immigrant ambition and a taste for political power.
Cont. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/02/20/neocons-go-after-iran-lobby-again/
Just The Messenger 