Not the first time he's trotted this out: in February he blamed the genocide in Darfur on the Jewish State. But that was theoretically the old bad Gaddafi. This is the rehabilitated Gaddafi who's reaching out to the West in response to Obama's super-sophisticated engagement. This is the re-legitimized Gaddafi who gets to hug returning arch-terrorists released by Western countries.

Turns out, once a batshit crazy antisemite always a batshit crazy antisemite:

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi blasted Israel at a special African Union summit on Monday on the eve of celebrations to mark his 40-year rule, accusing the Jewish state of causing all the woes facing Africa. Israel is "behind all of Africa's conflicts," Kadhafi told some 30 African leaders gathered under a huge tent at Tripoli airport for the summit focused on the continent's trouble spots, including Sudan's Darfur and Somalia. He demanded the closure of all Israeli embassies across Africa, describing Israel as a "gang" and saying it uses "the protection of minorities as an excuse to launch conflicts."... "As African brothers we must find solutions to stop the superpowers who are pillaging our continent," he said.

Sure he's coming from a place of frothing pathological hatred. The desire to find a central villain whose removal would solve everything the central impulse behind conspiracy theories.

But is the upshot really all that different from the central assumption of Obama's Mideast foreign policy, which blames regional instability on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on insufficient Israeli concessions? There's certainly not much daylight between Gaddafi's garbage and Chas Freeman's wild-eyed histrionics about "The Lobby" that controls US publishing and distorts the close alignment between the "values" of the US and Arab States.

The degree to which Freeman's visceral sensibilities line up with the rest of the Obama administration is something that people might want to debate. But the degree to which "linkage" is the official policy of this administration is a lot less cloudy.

References and previously after the jump...