Leading Neocon Says She Wants To Feed ThinkProgress Writer To Sharks

Reposted by arrangement with Think Progress

AbramsLast week, a well-connected neoconservative pundit and board member of a high-profile right-wing pressure group wrote, after the prisoner swap deal that freed an Israeli soldier, that Israel should now take Palestinian militants — and their “devils’ spawn” children — and “throw them… into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.”

When the blog post, by Rachel Abrams (wife of top Bush adviser Elliott Abrams), got some media attention — highlighted by both liberal and conservative writers — the progressive Jewish-American group J Street demanded that the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) cut ties with the neoconservative doyen.

ECI responded to J Street’s criticism with a statement from former John McCain campaign adviser Michael Goldfarb (who advises ECI) to the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo. Goldfarb said:

J Street chooses to deliberately and viciously slander Rachel Abrams, accusing her of directing her words at all Palestinians when she was clearly speaking about the terrorists who abducted [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit and those who celebrated that deed and other acts of terror. ECI supports Israeli efforts to kill or capture terrorists, including those responsible for abducting Gilad Shalit.

Despite the fact that her original post said Palestinians’ children should also befall the fate she prescribes for their parents — something the denial took no heed of — Abrams would unequivocally demonstrate shortly thereafter that she does not, indeed, limit her call for gruesome physical harm to be done only to Palestinian terrorists. Her list of those slated to become “food for sharks” also apparently includes liberal American writers with no ties to terror or a record of supporting or celebrating such acts.

After the Washington Jewish Week piece, this reporter asked Goldfarb on Twitter if he personally thought it would be alright to drop Palestinian prisoners in the sea as shark food instead of taking them to Israeli prisons. Goldfarb dodged, writing back that he’d “have to check with [Rachel Abrams] re official ECI position.” It was at this point that Abrams herself chimed in, writing in a Twitter post that she would feed this reporter “and all his friends to sharks.”

Before Abrams and ECI start issuing convoluted denials that relay implausible defenses or alternate intended meanings, it should be noted that the context of Abrams’ Tweet seems unambiguous as to the target of her comment. Take a look at a screenshot of her tweet, along with Goldfarb’s to which she was responding:

In his condemnation of the original blog post, J Street chief Jeremy Ben-Ami said Abrams’ screed was an “unhinged rant filled with incitement and hate.” The term seems to apply to her twitter feed too. If Abrams is, as her brother Commentary editor John Podhoretz posited, the “neocon id,” then perhaps that school of thought has its issues to work out as well. Looking at her tweet, one wonders what this reporter and Abrams’ mutual friends must think, for she said she’d consign them to becoming shark feed, too.