Anti-Semite in a cheap suit?

The Weekly Standard has a scathing piece on Michael Scheuer, the former CIA bin Laden hunter turned glory seeker who anonymously wrote Imperial Hubris which attacked the Bush administration's war on terror. Thomas Joscelyn defrocks him as nothing more than a rabidly anti-Israel hack, probable anti-Semite and a fool to boot.

In a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations last week, Scheuer asserted that the Israel is not a valuable ally in the Middle East, but instead the author of a vast conspiracy to hijack the direction of American foreign policy. He went on to say , "we can no longer afford to be seen as the dog that's led by the tail." Scheuer further warned, "I don't think we can afford to be led around, or at least appear to be led around by them."

How does Israel accomplish that?

Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

Israel influencing Congress - sure. Covertly? Maybe. But the Holocaust reference is contemptible.

I haven't read Imperial Hubris. Well, if its replete with anything like the following passage I doubt I will.

Surely there can be no other historical example of a faraway, theocracy-in-all-but-name of only six million people that ultimately controls the extent and even the occurrence of an important portion of political discourse and national security debate in a country of 270-plus million people that prides itself on religious toleration, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech. In a nation that long ago rejected an established church as inimical to democratic society, Washington yearly pumps more than three billion taxpayer dollars into a nation that defiantly proclaims itself "the Jewish state" and a democracy--claims hard to reconcile with its treatment of Muslims in Israel, its limitations on political choice for those in the occupied territories, and the eternal exile it has enforced on those camped in the refugee diaspora across the Levant.

Theocracy? Israel is extraordinarily secular though through the fractious parliamentary form of government certain small parties, some of whom are religious can sometimes exert greater influence than they should.

Unsatisfied, Scheuer took on the wall:

A symbol, one might add, whose luster is only enhanced by the arrogant racism symbolized by the wall Israel is building to separate Jews from Muslims, and our own obtuseness in seeing the wall as a means of Israeli self-protection and not, as Muslims see it, as further persecution of the Palestinians twined with yet another Israeli land grab.

Let's ignore the precipitious drop in suicide bomb casualities where the wall is complete and operating. If this is the type of analysis we've been getting from the CIA, no wonder they got WMD wrong.

ADDITION (from The Monk):

I noted Scheuer's crackpot view of the world six months ago here after his book was released. My assessment was:

Basically, the Clinton and Bush Administrations were relying for their bin Laden information on the analysis of a unit headed by someone who sees no value in the only democracy in the Middle East (and instead likens it to the Taliban, much like any International ANSWER activist would), cannot identify an unquestionable terrorist as such, and gives credence to the anti-Israel and anti-western grievances of the Arab world by saying that the US should address them to take away the underlying reasons for Islamic anti-Americanism. The problems in the CIA therefore go far deeper than whether this man should have been allowed to publish his book whilst supposedly working on the same issues he discusses for the US's prime intelligence agency.

His comment on Israel's "clandestine influence" is yet another paranoic delusion of the Left. Israel has ambassadors, and there are Jewish lobbying groups in Washington DC that discuss issues with Congressmembers just like CAIR and other Muslim groups do. When the JEWS are singled out like this, it means Scheuer is a classic anti-Semite.