Best known for her husband’s claims that Iraq did not have a nuclear program in 2003, and her role in the ensuing scandal that resulted in the conviction of the vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby, the former CIA official Valerie Plame has now returned to the public eye by running for an open Congressional seat in New Mexico. Meanwhile, in covering her campaign. the press has ignored a different scandal, from 2017. Warren Henry writes:

While on the board [of the pro-Iran deal] Ploughshares Fund, Plame used her Twitter account to promote an article by another former CIA officer titled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” When decent people objected, she . . . added [that the article was] “very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish. . . . Read the entire article and try, just for a moment, to put aside your biases and think clearly.” The “thoughtful” article at issue asserted that Jews “own the media,” Jews should wear labels while on national television, and their beliefs are as dangerous as “a bottle of rat poison.”

Plame later claimed she “messed up” and only “skimmed” the article before sharing it. Her claim was laughable. She previously urged people to read the whole article. Plame also had a history of sharing articles from the same source, including one claiming “Israeli-occupied Congress confronts the White House.” Plame further shared a 9/11 conspiracy theory involving “dancing Israelis.” . . . For a former covert officer, Plame is not very good at cover stories. . . .

Now, the establishment media’s coverage of Plame’s announced candidacy ignores the bigoted stink that lingers on her. The New York Times omitted any mention of her anti-Semitism. [Likewise], the Washington Post ran an Associated Press story that ignores Plame’s support for anti-Semitism; the Daily Beast similarly ignored it. So did The Hill and Roll Call. . . .

Anti-Semitism has been a long-running scandal within the United Kingdom’s Labor party, particularly regarding its current leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The scandal has been long-running because party members and the media spent years arguing over whether Corbyn was an anti-Semite, no matter how many incidents piled up in public. America’s establishment media should strive to do better.

While roughly a third of Saudis are willing to cooperate with the Jewish state in matters of technology and commerce, far fewer are willing to allow Israeli teams to compete within the kingdom—let alone support diplomatic normalization. These are just a few results of a recent, detailed, and professional opinion survey—a rarity in Saudi Arabia—that has much bearing on current negotiations involving Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. David Pollock notes some others:

When asked about possible factors “in considering whether or not Saudi Arabia should establish official relations with Israel,” the Saudi public opts first for an Islamic—rather than a specifically Saudi—agenda: almost half (46 percent) say it would be “important” to obtain “new Israeli guarantees of Muslim rights at al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Haram al-Sharif [i.e., the Temple Mount] in Jerusalem.” Prioritizing this issue is significantly more popular than any other option offered. . . .

This popular focus on religion is in line with responses to other controversial questions in the survey. Exactly the same percentage, for example, feel “strongly” that “our country should cut off all relations with any other country where anybody hurts the Quran.”

By comparison, Palestinian aspirations come in second place in Saudi popular perceptions of a deal with Israel. Thirty-six percent of the Saudi public say it would be “important” to obtain “new steps toward political rights and better economic opportunities for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” Far behind these drivers in popular attitudes, surprisingly, are hypothetical American contributions to a Saudi-Israel deal—even though these have reportedly been under heavy discussion at the official level in recent months.

Therefore, based on this analysis of these new survey findings, all three governments involved in a possible trilateral U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal would be well advised to pay at least as much attention to its religious dimension as to its political, security, and economic ones.