NPR’s “Morning Edition” had a pretty annoying piece setting up the Netanyahu-Obama meeting today. It struck me as a weird mix of water-carrying for Obama and blame shifting to politically conservative Jews for creating all of these unfair problems for Obama and America and I guess for Israel too. Here’s one bit from Ari Shapiro’s report:

But when one asks how the American Jewish community views the Obama administration’s handling of Israel, Jeremy Ben-Ami of the group J Street says, one needs perspective.
“American Jews care about the economy,” Ben-Ami says. “They care about health care. They care about banking regulation, the oil spill. Those are the things, just like all Americans of other faiths and backgrounds — that’s the basis on which they form a view of a president and an elected official.”
There is a vocal minority of Jews for whom Israel is the most important issue. These people tend to be more religious, more politically conservative and more troubled by the way things have gone under the Obama administration.

Really? Is AIPAC a hot bed of political conservatism? The ADL? What about Marty Peretz and Mort Zuckerman? I don’t know that they all consider Israel the “most important issue” but I don’t know that these apocryphal politically conservative Jews do either. Either Shapiro’s phrasing means something — i.e. conservative Jews have something like a dual loyalty problem – in which case it’s pretty nasty or the phrasing amounts to nothing other than spin and water-carrying for the White House. Either way, it hardly strikes me as an accurate or evenhanded piece of reporting.

Here’s how Shapiro’s piece ends:

“The degree of light between the Obama administration and the Israeli government has been nonexistent,” [former Democratic Rep. Robert] Wexler says. “I think there is a narrative that has been portrayed, that is different than the one that I have portrayed, yes, but the facts speak for themselves. So to the degree that people have concern, please, I would respectfully suggest, review the facts.”
For Ben-Ami of the liberal group J Street, the tone from the White House is right, but the action is not there yet.
“We give the president really high marks on vision, on rhetoric and on intention,” he says. “We give him an incomplete on results. We’re 18 months into the presidency; it is time for the president to put his foot on the accelerator. If there’s going to be a resolution to this conflict by the end of this first term, there has to be progress in the next six to nine months.”
On Tuesday, Obama will meet with Netanyahu one-on-one in the Oval Office, followed by a working lunch with staff. And this time, the White House says, there will be photographs.

Ah well, there’s no problem then. The entire political spectrum from Robert Wexler (!) to the folks at J-Street say this has all been a false narrative and Americans who disagree — Jewish or otherwise — just don’t know the facts. I wonder how it is then that Obama’s approval rating among Israelis themselves has been as low as 4 percent. I guess 96% of Israelis (are they all politically conservative too?) didn’t know the facts because they were relying on the rightwing American press, and its false narrative.