M.J. Rosenberg is Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. Previously, he worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years. He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID. In the early 1980s, he was editor of AIPACs weekly newsletter Near East Report. From 1998-2009, he was director of policy at Israel Policy Forum.

Blog Entries by MJ Rosenberg

Why Is It Legitimate for Legislators To Oppose Abortion on Religious Grounds

20 Comments | Posted November 10, 2009 | 07:13 PM (EST)


Am I missing something?

On Saturday, I watched the House debate the Stupak amendment restricting access to abortion and noticed that most of the loudest anti-choices voices came from Roman Catholics and Christian fundamentalists who oppose abortion because that is what their faith teaches.

Why is that legitimate? Is not...

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Senate and House Doves Attend Israeli Settler Pep Rally On Capitol Hill

3 Comments | Posted November 5, 2009 | 03:59 PM (EST)


What a strange coincidence. On the very day the House was voting on the anti-Goldstone resolution, a far-right Israel group was meeting on the Hill to discuss how "to protect the rights of Jews to live in designated areas in Judea and Samaria (the 'West Bank') and all of Jerusalem."...

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Rep. Ellison Blasts Goldstone Vote -- Plus How Your Representative Voted

7 Comments | Posted November 4, 2009 | 04:05 PM (EST)


By a 344-36 vote (22 voting "present"), the House of Representatives condemned the so-called Goldstone report, which found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in Gaza. (See how your representative voted here)

The resolution basically adopted the Israeli view that the war was necessary and that its...

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Dems in House to Pass Resolution Defending Gaza War

339 Comments | Posted October 31, 2009 | 09:51 AM (EST)


The good news is that J Street is opposed to it.

The bad news is that the 800 pound gorilla, AIPAC, and its satellite organizations are pushing it hard.

The House resolution, which will pass on Tuesday, basically endorses everything Israel did in the horrific Gaza war while bashing...

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Young Palestinian Shot By IDF, Attends J Street Conference

11 Comments | Posted October 27, 2009 | 05:08 PM (EST)


Between sessions at the amazing J Street conference, people mill around talking to friends and, sometimes, just a person standing nearby.

I was lucky enough to find myself talking to a young man from Gaza, in Washington for the conference. He is not on the program. He is here to...

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Netanyahu Today: First Hell Freezes, Then the Settlements

251 Comments | Posted October 24, 2009 | 12:32 PM (EST)


In an interview in Sunday's Washington Post, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may go further than any of his predecessors in rejecting a settlement freeze -- this after President Obama went further than any of his predecessors in demanding one.

In the fifteen years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO...

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The Man Behind the J Street Smear Campaign

11 Comments | Posted October 20, 2009 | 11:11 AM (EST)


The hit-and-run attacks on J Street are pretty impressive, in a Joe McCarthy/Glenn Beck kind of way.

There sure is a lot of effort going into discrediting an organization that is, in fact, only a little to the left of the "mainstream" pro-Israel organizations and which is "guilty"...

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From Washington Post: The Iran Bomb Myth

8 Comments | Posted October 18, 2009 | 10:29 AM (EST)


You have to read this piece, featured in Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section. It is huge, or will be, I think, in terms of its impact.

It is written by Joseph Cirincione, an expert adviser of nuclear proliferation for the the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the...

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John Bolton: Israel Should Nuke Iran

18 Comments | Posted October 14, 2009 | 08:00 PM (EST)


The neocons are ratcheting it up a few notches. All the way to nuclear war.

Here is what former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said in Chicago on Tuesday.

"Negotiations have failed, and so too have sanctions...So we're at a very unhappy point -- a very unhappy point...

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Is Israel's New Ambassador Trying To Squelch J Street?

24 Comments | Posted October 14, 2009 | 12:16 PM (EST)


Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, is boycotting J Street's first annual conference. J Street is the new pro-Israel, pro-peace political action committee which has made remarkable strides in its one year of existence. 160 House members and Senators have signed on as "hosts" of the...

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Hate Speech from Glenn Beck: Likens Criticism of Fox News To Murder Of 6,000,000 Jews

300 Comments | Posted October 13, 2009 | 02:58 PM (EST)


The Obama administration offered some mild criticism of Fox News the other day. It called its reporting opinion, and not news, and labeled it a de facto arm of the GOP. Now Glenn Beck has responded by likening this onslaught to the murder of six million Jews.

Beck said: "When...

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Nobel Prize Means No US or Israeli Attack on Iran

117 Comments | Posted October 11, 2009 | 09:01 PM (EST)


I continue to be delighted that the President won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it was, in part, given not in recognition of past achievements but prospectively. The Nobel Committee wants him to be the kind of president who earns a peace prize. So do I.

And that pretty much...

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Nobel Honors America, Not Only Obama

11 Comments | Posted October 9, 2009 | 11:51 AM (EST)


Awarding the Nobel peace prize to President Obama after only nine months in office is less a tribute to him than a tribute to the United States.

That is because the President's indisputable accomplishment in his short time in office is to restore America's standing in the rest of the...

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Israeli Ambassador Explodes: Gaza War Critics Are Calling Us Nazis

99 Comments | Posted October 7, 2009 | 12:58 PM (EST)


Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, writing in The New Republic, says that the Goldstone Report "portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents--as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed."

This is...

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Why Do the U.S. and Israel Love Hamas So Much?

19 Comments | Posted October 5, 2009 | 07:25 PM (EST)


It is now common knowledge that, from the time of Hamas's formation, the Israeli government played a major role in building it up as a "safer" alternative to Fatah. In the 1970s and 1980s, successive Israeli governments feared that Fatah was moving in a "moderate" direction at that, accordingly, Israel...

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Marek Edelman: Great Pole, Great Jew, Dies in Warsaw

51 Comments | Posted October 4, 2009 | 10:42 AM (EST)


Marek Edelman died yesterday in Warsaw. Dr. Edelman was a great Polish and Jewish hero. The New York Times obituary describes a human being who makes you proud to be human, and humbled too.

He was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which almost all...

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Israelis on the Street Excoriate Obama (VIDEO)

12 Comments | Posted September 24, 2009 | 03:29 PM (EST)


This week Clayton Swisher interviewed Israelis on a Jerusalem street about President Obama. It is a very disturbing clip. Israel has been galloping to the right since 2000 or so but this particular type of racist attitude appears new.

Of course, there are many people who speak that way about...

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Steve Rosen, Former Indictee on Espionage, Lectures Obama

3 Comments | Posted September 18, 2009 | 10:28 AM (EST)


I'm not going to comment on Steve Rosen's ridiculous Obama and J Steet bashing piece in Foreign Policy today except to ask why this guy has any kind of platform whatsoever.

I know the espionage case against him was dropped. But that does not make him innocent. And he's...

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Israeli Government: Iran Not A Threat

92 Comments | Posted September 17, 2009 | 09:59 AM (EST)


The AIPAC crowd is going to have a hard time with this. Israel's uber-hawk Defense Minister (and the most highly decorated soldier in its history), Ehud Barak, says that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not pose an existential threat to Israel.

Today's New York Times reports that Barak told...

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Israel's 11th Commandment and How It Makes Peace Near Impossible

28 Comments | Posted July 2, 2009 | 11:17 AM (EST)


Today's Israeli press quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu as telling 27 EU ambassadors that he was willing to "make concessions to the Palestinians" but did not want to be a "sucker" if the Palestinians pocket his "concession" and give nothing in return.

Netanyahu was speaking to the ambassadors in English. If...

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