Leslie Cockburn is the 2018 Democratic nominee for Virginia’s 5th district in the U.S. House of Representatives. She is the author of Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, published in 1991. David Schoenbaum of The New York Times wrote that the book “is largely dedicated to Israel-bashing for its own sake. Its first message is that, win or lose, smart or dumb, right or wrong, suave or boorish, Israelis are a menace. The second is that the Israeli-American connection is somewhere behind just about everything that ails us.”
Dan Raviv, former CBS correspondent and best-selling author, notes in his Los Angeles Times review that in Cockburn’s book, “Washington’s interests are basically evil and Israel ministers to every ugly whim… While Israeli prime ministers, from David Ben-Gurion to the incumbent Yitzhak Shamir, are portrayed as expert manipulators of America’s political passions, some of Israel’s deadliest foes are made out to be reasonable fellows.”
In his review in Commentary, Angelo Codevilla writes, “As the Cockburns see it, Israel, playing Iago to America’s Othello, has brought out the worst in this stupid, great power. Israel’s leaders, unprincipled, cynical addicts to military force and dirty tricks, manipulate America through American Jews… These Jews have so corrupted America’s politics with their money that U.S. Presidents, too, have been led to betray our national interests by joining in massive coverups of Israeli misdeeds, including the illegal transfer of U.S. military technology on a scale ‘much bigger than Pollard.’”
Anti-Semitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories seem to run in the family, as the late Alexander Cockburn, Leslie’s brother-in-aw, ran Counterpunch, described by CAMERA as an “extremist anti-Israel website,” which has featured tirades including Roger Waters’ claims that the “Jewish lobby” is to blame for “Nazi-like” tactics in Israel.
Jonathan Tobin, now Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish News Service, writes that while Republicans have disavowed Senate candidate Corey Stewart due merely to his past ties with men who later showed themselves to be anti-Semitic, Cockburn, who has never disavowed her own anti-Semitic positions found in her book, is not considered a liability for Democrats. This alarming fact underscores the danger posed by Cockburn to the Jewish community.