A week after giving op-ed space to a Hamas thug’s propaganda, the Washington Post rehashes the Zionist Conspiracy trope: A Beautiful Friendship? (Hat tip: morgan.)

Thanks to the work of the lobby and its allies, Israel gets more direct foreign aid — about $3 billion a year — than any other nation. There’s a file cabinet somewhere in the State Department full of memoranda of understanding on military, diplomatic and economic affairs. Israel gets treated like a NATO member when it comes to military matters and like Canada or Mexico when it comes to free trade. There’s an annual calendar full of meetings of joint strategic task forces and other collaborative sessions. And there’s a presidential pledge, re-avowed by Bush in the East Room, that the United States will come to Israel’s aid in the event of attack.

On Capitol Hill the Israel lobby commands large majorities in both the House and Senate. Polls show strong public support for Israel — a connection that has grown even deeper after the September 11 attacks. The popular equation goes like this: Israelis equal good guys, Arabs equal terrorists. Working the Hill these days, says Josh Block, spokesman for the premier Israeli lobbying group known as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “is like pushing at an open door.”

Not everyone believes this is a good thing. In March two distinguished political scientists — Stephen Walt from Harvard and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago — published a 42-page, heavily footnoted essay arguing that the Bush administration’s support for Israel and its related effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East have “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.”

Why don’t these newspapers ever examine a much more troubling and much more genuine conspiracy—the Arab lobby with its unlimited oil money, financing the subversion of America by radical Islam?