Eric Alterman on why so much of the world despises the U.S. because of the special treatment given by the Bush Administration to Israel:

Think of it: The American people were purposely misled and are paying for it dearly, in both blood and treasure; The war was planned by neoconservatives, many of whom worked directly with their counterparts in the Israeli government, who helped perpetrate the deception; The war did improve the security of Israel, but not that of the United States. No other country’s population thought it was a good idea, including Britain, save that of Israel. Some of the very people who helped perpetrate the deception, most notably Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, have used the opportunity to make millions for themselves in the process. Pentagon neocons were spying for Israel and using the Israel lobby as a conduit. (How perfectly paradigmatic is that?) It seems to me all of the above constitutes a gift of enormous generosity to those who seek to blame Jews for divided loyalty, dishonesty, and duplicity in the service of their own financial interests. Of course, those of us who point this out, just as the people who recognize the fact that Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians endangers Jews all over the world-- will somehow be tarred as anti-Semites or “self-hating Jews” rather than those who, like the Neocons, have themselves poured gasoline on the fires of anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred the world over. On this issue of Israeli endangerment of Diaspora Jews, as well as the cost to America of its perceived unwillingness to reign in Israel’s behavior—made worse recently by the Bush administration’s reversal of policy and, alone among civilized nations, endorsement of the expansion of the West Bank occupation- see this report in The Forward on the Jewish Agency's newly created policy-planning institute, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, chaired by the former U.S. Middle East special envoy Dennis Ross. Add that to yet another spy scandal in which it appears that the Israel lobby is directly implicated and have the entire package, sealed with a blue and white ribbon in the shape of a star of David, delivered directly to the anti-Semites, bought and paid for by Neocon arrogance, incompetence, and perhaps we shall also see, disloyalty....

Neocons and Jews... strange bedfellows.