Wednesday’s Times had an article on an arrest in a terror case that took pains to identify the suspect’s ethnicity: Federal authorities in New York announced that a Swede of Lebanese descent [my emphasis], wanted in connection with establishing a…
One of the interesting things about Walt & Mearsheimer’s book is their reliance on the left. Their citations overflow with lib-lefters, from Counterpunch to the Nation to J.J. Goldberg to Michael Massing. Leftwing rabbi Michael Lerner has embraced W&M. But…
The Hopkins event about Iran the other day in Washington was a Realist event. It was led by Francis Fukuyama, who has left neoconservatism for his own brand of realism. And the discussion revolved around realist scholar Trita Parsi’s book…
The greatest achievement so far of Walt & Mearsheimer is that they have knocked down a wall in the American discourse: They have licensed ideas and statements that would have been impossible to imagine even a month ago. On Monday…
I blew the post on Daniel Pipes yesterday. The point here is a simple one: Pipes says that the Oslo process is “appeasement.” Israel must defeat its enemies. “There is not a single active leading politician in Israel who talks…
A number of thoughtful people were shocked by the lengthy hazing Columbia President Lee Bollinger administered to Iran’s Ahmadinejad Monday in introducing him at the school. Chris Matthews said, “Who is this guy?” then laughed at the length of the…
Give the devil his due, the true star of the Philadelphia synagogue event I went to a week ago was Daniel Pipes. Pipes was the most physically impressive of the speakers, at about 6-6 it would seem, and true to…
On Huffpo the other day, David Bromwich gave Walt and Mearsheimer a laudatory read and expressed shock at the quote they offer from Bush’s Mideast policy guru Elliot Abrams: How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt…
The other day on “Meet the Press,” Senator Clinton told Tim Russert that there is no military solution in Iraq, that the war requires a political solution, presumably a just division of power and resources (as Ambassador Crocker said to…
–Bollinger shot down an invitation from leading school officials to Ahmadinejad a year ago, censoring a point of view that scholars wanted to hear. He has nobly reversed that judgment. –Ahmadinejad will be traveling to the heart of the Jewish…
Let us celebrate the moment. Today the great publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux has bought a full-page ad for Walt & Mearsheimer in the New York Times. Two years after The Atlantic refused to publish their work and they…
I had an emotionally-turbulent night at the neocon panel at Beth Hillel Wednesday. I was there with my liberal parents, with whom I have some disagreement over Middle East issues, and before the event, Chabad Rabbi Shraga Sherman, who wrapped…
A reader responded to my question of yesterday– Why hasn’t C-Span aired Walt & Mearsheimer’s appearance at Politics and Prose?– saying that the answer may be found in the Board of Directors of C-SPAN. http://www.c-span.org/about/company/index.asp?code=BOARD The reader noted that the…
C-Span filmed Walt and Mearsheimer’s event at Politics and Prose on September 5 and has not yet aired it. The event was so jammed, reports the WSJ (fairly), with 500 people, that people were turned away on the sidewalk. Why…
M.J. Rosenberg, of Israel Policy Forum, tried to post re the Philadelphia event I blogged about and wasn’t able to. Thank you, M.J. Here’s his comment: This is sad, actually. I read about this event in Philly and then read…
If you wanted to sense the power of Walt and Mearsheimer’s ideas, there was no better place than the conservative synagogue Beth Hillel outside Philadelphia last night, a panel discussion sponsored by the rightwing Jewish Policy Center on radical Islam…
Hurray for democracy. The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board has also given a forum to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (and apparently made up for this by reprinting Richard Cohen’s Hatikvah-humming attack on the pair from the Washington Post of…
God bless the LA Times Editorial board, it met with Walt and Mearsheimer and published the dialogue! That’s called journalism. It was a real give and take. The LA Times people were critical, at times even conservative: Nick Goldberg suggested…
I’m a big fan of former South Dakota Sen. James Abourezk, but I raised an eyebrow over his statement that he had collided with Wolf Blitzer, then of AIPAC, at the “Federal Press Club.” I didn’t know what that is/was….
The Washington Post has an attack on Congressman Jim Moran that is full of casual and dismissive invective, the suggestion that he’s an antisemite who is afraid of the bogeyman, and is a captive of the Arab lobby (when of…
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt begin a book tour this week, Dallas to California. According to Amazon’s report of the New York Times bestseller list, their book on the Israel lobby is at #12 this coming week. Katy, bar the…
A year ago Stephen Walt was invited by University of Montana History Chairman Richard Drake to deliver the school’s annual Presidential lecture in Helena. Drake writes that he experienced a fusillade of angry mail — from other professors. “I have…
It’s often pointed out that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer used to work for AIPAC. In a highly-favorable review of Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel lobby, former Senator James Abourezk relates the following anecdote: My real Middle East education began…
We’re beginning to see the Walt and Mearsheimer effect. Not in coverage of their book or celebration of their ideas in the mainstream. No, that is a ways off. Actually we are seeing their effect in a far more pervasive…
The Christian Science Monitor has published a bold piece by John Whitbeck, who has advised the Palestinians, calling for a binational state in historic Palestine, and an end to Zionism. Traumatized by the Holocaust and perceived insecurity as a Jewish…