Margaret O’ Brien Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, is no useful idiot. But with a lot of hard work she might one day achieve that upgrade in status. She should know it takes more than leftist anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment to give America’s enemies a proper boost. Consider Steinfels’s latest attempt, over at the blog of Commonweal, in a post titled, “51st: U.S. Iran policy in the hands of Likud–or maybe Peter Sellars?”
The arrest by the FBI of an Iranian-American used car dealer, Mansour J. Arbabsiar, for plotting to kill the Saudi Ambassador and blow up the Israeli embassy in Washington, while also setting up a deal between Mexican drug dealers and an officer in Iran’s Quds force, begins to sound like a plot for a Pink Panther movie. And perhaps it is, what with the plot provided by the FBI and fed to Arabsiar by a drug-dealer FBI informant. The improbability of the whole thing isn’t stopping the Amen Corner in our Congress calling for punitive actions against Iran, including booting out their ambassador….Is this a trade for Israel not bombing Iran (with the Bunker Busters we gave them)–at least not in October!
That won’t do. The risibly anti-American/anti-Israel lunacy is supposed to come from enemy regimes themselves. The useful idiot’s job is to then put a gloss of thoughtfulness and decency on it. Steinfels lets her vitriol get in the way of her mission and ends up sounding like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself. Fortunately for her, it seems there will be many opportunities to explain Iranian aggression in the near future. I’m sure she’ll give it another go soon.