After doing an item yesterday on Kenneth Pollack’s incredible endurance as an expert in the op-ed pages of the NY Times even after being dead wrong about Iraq, I went on the Times site and typed in the name “John…
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Monthly Archives: March 2008
Next Year in Jerusalem, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Too–Nakba Recognition Group Tours U.S.
The American Friends Service Committee has helped organize a tour in the U.S. of a Nakba recognition group from Israel/Palestine. Many Jews are involved in this effort, for instance Jewish Voice for Peace. So are many Palestinians. We all know…
Did Jewish Identity Stand in the Way of the Peace Process at Camp David?
First an apology. I can be narrow in spirit; and I think I went overboard yesterday with that poem. Jerry Slater has reminded me that words really do matter, words like genocide. He’s right. Though I would say that many…
Kenneth Pollack Misrepresents His Support for Peace Process Prior to Iraq War
Michael Massing (a friend of mine) has a great piece in the Columbia Journalism Review called “The War Expert,” marvelling at the fact that Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth M. Pollack still gets called up to opine in editorial pages about…
It’s Sunday. Read a Poem for a Change
I generally don’t mention Joachim Martillo’s stuff because it’s too out there for me, too crazily brilliant, too much racialism. True, I am constantly dipping into the racial bucket in my analysis here, but Joachim’s too pure in his thinking…
More Pussyfootin’ in the Media. Jews Qua Jews
Tim Russert has a politics show on MSNBC after Meet the Press and just now I heard him and guests Tucker Carlson and Ryan Lizza analyze the living hell out of Rev. Wright in Chicago and his black church and…
Jewish Press Is Honest About Hillary’s Jewish Money ‘Cadre’. MSM Isn’t.
The Jewish Daily Forward has openly identified “some of” Hillary Clinton’s biggest donors as a “cadre” of Jews with the power to “influence” the Democratic Party’s decision to prolong the fight between her and Obama until the convention, or not….
Still Blacklisted After All These Years (Walt & Mearsheimer in Chicago)
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is staging an endless series of talks by “leading foreign policy experts” under the title, “Road to 2008: American Leadership in an Uncertain World.” The series includes neoconservative Joshua Muravchik, the American Enterprise Institute…
Nakba Commemoration Builds; Barenboim to Shun Israel’s 60th Birthday Party
When I began collecting string on Jews calling for Nakba commemoration, I thought it was statistically aberrant behavior. Wrong. There is a real groundswell upon us. Ynet reports that Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim will shun festivities surrounding Israel’s 60th birthday…
Executions in ’08. Executions in ’48
Today’s a sad day. Per Haaretz, B’tselem has concluded that four wanted Palestinians who the Israeli army had said died in a firefight in Bethlehem last month were killed execution-style in a car. Richard Silverstein says that at least two…
Israelis Use the A-Word. Can Americans?
To its great credit, The Times has a piece today on Route 443 in the West Bank, a modern highway Palestinians can’t use. Based in part on Gershom Gorenberg’s research, the piece twice uses the a-word: The Association for Civil…
China Lobby Is Bigger
The Daily Lobo in New Mexico has a wonderful letter today from a Vicki Johnson comparing the Tibetan occupation to the Palestinian one. Israel has tortured Palestinians, and China has tortured Tibetans, including female monks. Perhaps inspired by ancient China,…
Jews, Including Noah Feldman, Need to Emulate the WASPs’ Discourse of Privilege
Last week two Harvard Law School professors had a fascinating debate over the Iraq war and American power. One professor was Duncan Kennedy, a pioneer in critical legal studies–i.e., a leftwinger. The other was a prof barely half his age,…
WWWFBJrD? Not Invade Iraq.
The latest issue of Commentary has a solemn black-bordered memorial to William F. Buckley Jr. as a “master” and “cherished friend” (and the magazine’s editor, John Podhoretz, offered this vaporous and largely meaningless eulogy). Buckley has also been fondly eulogized…
Hillary Agonistes
Everyone seems surprised by Hillary’s numbers tanking. I think water is finding its own level. Hillary has never been especially popular. People just don’t like her, this has always been true, and the Democratic race seems to be heading toward…
TNR Issues Fatwa Against McPeak for Criticizing Israel Lobby
The New Republic is calling for Obama to throw ret. Air Force General Merrill McPeak under the bus because of comments in ’03 about the Israel lobby. TNR’s Noam Scheiber, who describes McPeak as a loose cannon on two earlier…
A Historic Moment: Dovish American Jews Form Alternative to AIPAC at Last
The N.Y. Jewish Week is reporting that at long last progressive Zionists are forming an alternative lobby to AIPAC and will announce their plans next month. Under the working title, the “J Street” group (an inside reference to AIPAC as…
Paranoid Style in Jewish Politics: ‘Commentary’ Offers WORLD TERRORISM WALL MAP to New Subscribers
Though I dread what John Podhoretz might do to the editorial values, I just sent $79 to Commentary Magazine for a two-year renewal of my subscription. Now I’ve learned that new subscribers to Commentary are getting a free WORLD TERRORISM…
Will Obama Throw McPeak Under the Bus?
The Republican Jewish Coalition is calling on Obama to fire General McPeak because he blamed American Jews for the lack of progress in the peace process… Meantime James Fallows is shocked that the Clintons are circulating the American Spectator hitjob…
Shocker: ‘Jewish Advocate’ Publishes Blunt Description of Israel’s ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in ’48
Lucianne Goldberg had a wonderful expression for Bill Clinton’s predicament. She said that when he said, “I did not have sex with that woman,” he drank the Strontium-90. After that it was just a question of how long it would…
China/Tibet; Bad Guy: China. Israel/Palestine; Bad Guy: Palestine
Whenever I read about China’s horrifying crackdown on Tibet, I’m struck by the different ways the media report the Palestinian situation and the Tibetan one. There are several similarities between the two disfranchised peoples–60 years of statelessness, an utter imbalance…
My Wife Criticizes My ‘Intense,’ ‘Insecure,’ ‘Immigrant’ Behavior at Party
I blogged about a conversation about Palestine I had a dinner party last Saturday night. Well something else took place that my wife has brought up since. After dinner, at about 10:30, when people were slouching around drunkenly on couches,…
Obama’s ‘Dog Whistle’ Attraction to Critics of Our Israel Policy Brings Reaction From the Lobby
You remember Merrill McPeak, the tall, lean retired general and military adviser for Obama who said last week that Bill Clinton was behaving like Joe McCarthy? Well in The American Spectator, McPeak is accused of a lack of political correctness…
Upper West Side Jews Aren’t Singing ‘Hatikvah’
Like other progressive Zionist groups, Brit Tzedek is utterly engaged right now out of the belief that it’s now or never for the two-state deal. If it doesn’t happen now there will be chaos and Hamas on the Palestinian side…
At Last, Jewish Paper Calls on Jewish Community to Repudiate Neocons, Not ‘Cover Up’ for Them
The Philadelphia Jewish Voice has published a fine piece by Paul Maltby, an English prof at West Chester University, that calls on the Jewish community to repudiate the neocons as a “betrayal” of Jewish values. [Jonathan] Tobin [editor of the…