Is the Pentagon Policy Shop Funding Likudist Fronts?

By Jim Lobe

"Remember the curious and intriguing interconnections between One Jerusalem, a Likud/settler group chaired by Natan Sharansky, and two U.S-led “NGOs” with overlapping or interchangeable directorates — the “Policy Forum on International Security Affairs (PF)” and the newly minted “Case for Freedom” — that we discovered in the participants list of the “Prague Democracy and Security” conference where George W. Bush appeared despite the concerns of his State Department last June? I wrote about the conference twice, once describing it as a “Neo-Conservative International” and a second time focusing on those very same connections under the title, “More on that Meeting in Prague.”

Well, there are some new developments that raise fresh questions about these groups, their provenance, and interrelationships....

What we’ve now found, however, is that onejerusalem.org, policyforumuk.com, and caseforfreedom.org are not only all hosted by the same Israel-based ISP, but they also share exactly the same IP address, 82.80.254.113 (along with carolineglick.com, the personal blog by the pro-settler editor of the Jerusalem Post by the same name). Theoretically, this could be a total coincidence, but experts I’ve spoken to insist that all of these sites are almost certainly managed, hosted and owned by the same organization or individual which, we believe, must be onejerusalem. (It was the first to register the domain, back in 2000.) One Jerusalem was the the only one of the three sites that listed an actual phone number on its registration, and, when we called it, the receptionist answered, “Allen Roth’s office,” presumably the same Allen Roth who last year was listed as One Jerusalem’s president nine months ago. This would add to the impression that we first gained last June: that the CFF and Cross’ PF work very closely with and may well be fronts for One Jerusalem.

Now, let us recall what One Jerusalem stands for and who its founders were, at least according to its website last June. It was founded during the Camp David negotiations in late 2000 to rally public opinion in Israel and in the United States, in particular, against any peace deal — indeed, any negotiation — that could conceivably result in ceding any part of Jerusalem, including Arab East Jerusalem, to the Palestinians. It is thus opposed to the official policies, at least in principle, of both the current Israeli and U.S. governments. Indeed, in the run-up to last November’s Annapolis summit hosted by Bush himself, One Jerusalem ran a well-financed (thanks to Netanyahu buddy, Ronald Lauder), public campaign designed to discredit and undermine it in advance. One Jerusalem’s founders included Sharansky, Netanyahu adviser Dore Gold, Feith (who even opposed the original Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt), David Horowitz (of Islamofascism Awareness Week); and David Steinmann, the former chairman of the ultra-hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), among other hardline Likudists.

So, you may ask, why is the Pentagon policy office awarding a no-bid contract to an organization whose institutional relationships and affiliations appear so opposed to official U.S. policy and which is so utterly lacking in transparency? And how is that such clearly pro-Likud individuals as Cross and Gedmin (not to mention the new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, James Glassman who, like Gedmin, is an AEI alumnus) are put in charge of U.S. public-diplomacy efforts in Europe, let alone the Middle East? How does this happen? "