The ‘threat that dare not speak its name’

Alert JWN readers will recall that I wrote here just a couple weeks ago about ambitious Charlottesville hometown boy Phil Zelikow, who’s the Exec Director of the 9/11 Commission. (And also, most probably the subject of at least one string of its enquiries, since he was a leading member of the national-security portion of the Bush transition team.) Altogether a very well-connected guy…
So it should have been no small beer, back on September 10, 2002, when he told a hometown audience in Charlottesville:

Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 — it’s the threat against Israel…
And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

I wish I could have been the one to break that story! But I wasn’t. It was Inter-Press Service’s Emad Mekay who broke it March 29. See e.g. here.
Now, in a sense, this is not “news”, because it’s been easy enough to triangulate all along that with this particular bunch of neo-cons running the DoD, the attention paid to Israel’s needs would evidently be disproportionate. But hearing it from someone as very well connected as Zelikow–as he expressed it at a one-year-after-9-11 forum at U.Va. Law School–somehow gives this theory a lot more impact.
If I were working more wholeheartedly on this story, I’d love to do a follow-up interview with Zelikow now, that is, one year after this disastrous war against Iraq that was still, back in September 2002, just a twinkle in Wolfie and Doug Feith’s respective eyes. (Okay, maybe quite a bit more than that by then… )
But I have this book on Africa to write. Shoot. Still, maybe Mekay or someone else will be following it up.