You don’t say. Someone catch me or surely I will faint.

Two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.

The Center for American Progress, the party’s key hub of ideas and strategy, and Media Matters, a central messaging organization, have emerged as vocal critics of their party’s staunchly pro-Israel congressional leadership and have been at odds, at times, with Barack Obama’s White House, which has acted as a reluctant ally to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.

The differences are ones of tone – but also of bright lines of principle – and while they haven’t yet made any visible impact on Democratic policy, they’ve shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters’ emails, on CAP’s blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as “Iraq war neocon liar” (the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) or having “dual loyalties” to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs.

These institutions have long been apologists for Palestinian (and other Islamic) terrorism against Israel. They’re outraged that Israel remains unapologetic about defending itself and its people.

“Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values,” wrote Matt Duss, a CAP policy analyst and the director of Middle East Progress, last year, after an Israeli raid on a flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza turned violent.

The flotilla raid turned violent when pro-Palestinian participants on the ship attacked Israeli soldiers who legally boarded the vessel. Photographs and video later showed the flotilla’s participants carrying weapons and discussing strategy for fighting boarders. A report by the United Nations concluded that the blockade is entirely legal and within Israel’s rights.

In one recent item, for instance, ThinkProgress National Security reporter Eli Clifton took issue with a Quinnipiac University poll that made reference to Iran’s “nuclear program.” The belief that such a program exists undergirds the Obama administration’s drive for sanctions, and was recently bolstered by a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which wrote of “increasing” concerns, though not definitive evidence.

“Such assertions, and the resulting polling statistics, serve to tilt public opinion toward preemptive military action when intelligence reports paint a far more complex picture of Iran’s nuclear program and the extremely risky outcomes of an Israeli and/or U.S. airstrike,” Clifton wrote.

In other words, they want officials and inspectors to lie and ignore reality in order to support their agenda. They want America to stick its head in the sand and pretend what’s happening isn’t happening. They’re actually saying reality undermines their positions, so we must lie about reality.

Over at Media Matters, Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer turned apostate, labels American Israel hawks “Israel-firsters” and recently blasted Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, for pushing a sanctions on Iranian civilian aviation that would be “the most ugly expression yet of this country’s almost bizarre obsession with punishing Iran, its people along with its government.”

Our bizarre obsession with punishing a state-sponsor of terrorism that’s pursuing a nuclear weapons program in violation of international law. A country that was recently implicated in a plot to conduct assassinations of diplomats on American soil.

A government that started off back in 1979 by invading our territory and taking our citizens hostage. A government that guns its own people down in the streets for protesting a rigged election. A government that literally hangs people for being not Islamic enough.

Bizarre obsession.

“With analysts and the media still scratching their heads over what to make of a convoluted plot alleged to have been hatched by an Iranian American in collusion with Mexican drug cartels,” Clifton wrote, “[conservative think tanks] – along with their friends in Congress — are quickly declaring the end of diplomatic strategies to curb Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.”

The allegations of an Iranian assassination plot were made by notorious conservative hawk Eric Holder – a longtime liberal Democrat and Obama’s Attorney General. ThinkProgress blames AIPAC for that, too.

Even lefties are getting tired of the crap promulgated by the Center for American Progress. Josh Block of the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute calls material put out by the group “borderline antisemitic”.

And then there’s this:

Duss’s deputies hail from farther to the left: Clifton and his colleague Ali Gharib came to CAP from Inter Press Service; their work is still published, by agreement with the Center for American Progress, on the blog of the Inter Press Service’s Jim Lobe, a stalwart of a range of foreign policy views well to the left of the Democratic Party. He was a fierce foe, for instance, of Bill Clinton’s Bosnian interventions, complaining bitterly in 2006 that “Abraham Lincoln was canonized for invading the South to prevent its secession, but [Serb leader and convicted war criminal Slobodan] Milosevic was damned for trying to protect Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity.”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they’re apologizing for Slobodan Milosevic and comparing him to Abraham Lincoln.

Apologia for terrorism, support for antisemitism, and defense of genocide. The braintrust of the left-wing, ladies and gentlemen.