Israel and the American right

Take note of this Politico story by Ben Smith about the launch of the Center for American Freedom, a right-wing answer to the pro-Obama Center for American Progress that is setting up as a right-wing echo chamber ahead of the presidential elections. All of which is fair enough, but there's a passage revealing of the ties between the Israel lobby and the increasingly extreme (one might say proto-fascistic — note its militarism and eagerness for war with Iran) aspects of the contemporary American right:

A test run for CAF, Goldfarb said, was the Emergency Committee for Israel, which he also advised, and which waged a relentless guerrilla media campaign against the efforts of J Street – a national membership organization with a sizable Washington staff – to create a liberal counterweight in American Middle East policy.

“That showed that you can have a less well-funded organization but you can present a pretty devastating asymmetric counterweight to something much larger and more established on the other side if you go about it in an effective way,” Goldfarb said.