I’ve heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank’s smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday’s Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That…
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Monthly Archives: August 2006
Gershom Gorenberg’s Great Book on the Settlements, and What It Says About Ideas in the U.S.
Consider the following condemnations of the Israeli settlement policy in the occupied West Bank: It would create “some kind of South African Bantustan” by frustrating Palestinian rights to self-determination. It would cause international condemnation because at a time of “decolonization…
The Washington Post Attacks Walt and Mearsheimer as Teutonic Antisemites
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today attacks Walt and Mearsheimer’s appearance in D.C. yesterday on racialist grounds, saying that they are blue-eyed and have Germanic names, and he wonders about their motivation for saying what they do about the…
Something Else About Dana Milbank’s Attack
Dana Milbank thinks that it important that John Mearsheimer mispronounced a congressman’s name, or two of them. Mearsheimer says we need a “freewheeling” debate about the role of the Israel lobby in our policy. Freewheeling means mispronouncing a politician’s name,…
The Israel Lobby Stifles Another Israel-Questioner
One big price exacted by the Israel lobby is that it tries to shut down free debate when Israel’s motives are questioned. This is the lesson of the furore over comments on CNN by Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s Pentagon…
Israel’s Interest in Leaving Occupied Territories
In the Houston Chronicle, Professor Michael Desch makes the argument that Israeli withdrawals from occupied territories save Israeli lives. Israeli Foreign Ministry figures reveal that while Qassam rocket attacks increased marginally from 2004 to 2005 (309 to 377), the total…
Chris Matthews Should Talk About the Israel Lobby Because It’s All He Thinks About
I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It’s the 1980s and the height of the violent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American…
Robert Pape’s Theory of Suicide Terrorism Continues to Reverberate
While visiting my mom, I took in a fine talk on U.S. dilemmas in the Mideast by Retired Ambassador William A. Rugh. The talk was sponsored by a local peace group and was remarkable to me for the use Rugh…
Are Yuppie Meritocrats Killing Summer?
I’m just back from visiting my mother on the Cape and it’s with sadness that I report that all the families seem to be leaving now and heading home. That regretful process used to happen in September. Kids would prolong…
The Mideast: Hope Amid the Ashes
The Forward has a great editorial this week that makes the 1973 analogy. The humiliation to Israel of the 1973 Yom Kippur war led to the peace treaty with Egypt, and the humiliations to Israel of this latest war might…
I Wasn’t Nice to Some Guy on the Train
I got on a crowded commuter train yesterday and a biggish guy sat down next to me wearing shorts, with a big bag. I was reading the Forward, an article headlined, Bush Riles Muslims With ‘Islamic Fascist’ Remark, when the…
The Torture of Patsy Ramsey
It’s been so long, and gone thru so many bizarre turns, that the JonBenet Ramsey case seems to have lost all reality and become pure entertainment, like a history-channel crime, where no one gets hurt anymore. But I think about…
Chris Matthews Says We Conflate Israel’s Interests and Our Own in the Middle East
Chris Matthews is on fire these days. Joe Lieberman’s loss has freed him to offer pitiless critiques of Democrats who voted for the war. Last night he said that they knew it was a bad decision in 2002 but went…
The True Definition of Privilege: Protestants and Jews Sharply Underrepresented in U.S. Military
The death the other day in Lebanon of Uri Grossman, 20, an Israeli soldier and the son of the novelist David Grossman, who has been a peace activist in Israel, underscores a big difference between Israeli society and ours: In…
Jill Carroll’s Second Abduction: The Christian Science Monitor Turns Her Into a Potboiler
The abduction of Jill Carroll in Baghdad in January, along with the murder of her interpreter, Alan Enwiya, was an important event. Her ordeal demonstrated that the Islamic world has friends in the WestÂpeople like Jill Carroll, people who went…
Why They Hate Us? The 9/11 Question, Still Unanswered After 5 Years
In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel’s Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid…
My Trip to Israel/Palestine: Pride, Militarism, Xenophobia, Pessimism
I’m freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I’ll begin with the personal. The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full…
David Brooks Can’t Use the Word “Iraq”
In his column yesterday on the Lamont victory in Connecticut, Times columnist David Brooks took up his new causeÂsaving the Democratic PartyÂand said that Joe Lieberman, and not the “net roots,” has the wisdom to see that “The civilized world…
Why Does the American Enterprise Institute Give $384,000 to an Israeli ‘Scholar’?
Two nights ago on CNN, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dore Gold in Jerusalem and identified him as Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. The polished Gold offered, as usual, an articulate statement of Israeli attitudes toward the war effort. “Well for…
How Muslims Are Prevented From Visiting a Holy Site in Jerusalem
Lauren Likkel If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau…
In Hebron, a South African Compares Israeli Occupation to Apartheid
Every now and then in life, and maybe just when you want it, god throws down a thunderbolt. It happened to me on Friday in Hebron, in the Occupied Territories. A group of seven Israelis and I were sitting in…
Wrong Again, This Time About the Bible
Joey Cavod has pointed out Biblical errors in an article I wrote for the Observer this past week. In explaining the ancient attachment of Jews to the West Bank, I wrote, “David bought Shem, and that is Jerusalem. Joseph bought…
Medium Rare, in the War Zone
I’m in a little town in Israel near the Lebanon border, full of reporters. They’re flirting, over their expense accounts, as the shells are fired nearby, and the rockets land. At dinner, the restaurant’s dog shoved in under my table,…