What Does 'Pushback' Mean? An Email from Dersh

Some time back I reported that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, said at the Middle East Institute (responding to Jim Lobe actually) that Walt and Mearsheimer's paper contained the "blinding flash of the obvious," and that he had taught their ideas in his seminars and gotten "pushback" for doing so. This was back in '06, when Walt and Mearsheimer were still just the paper that went 'round the world, in the LRB.

I spoke with Wilkerson today, for a magazine story I'm working on, and asked him what pushback meant. He said that he didn't even teach Walt and Mearsheimer, just mentioned their ideas in national security seminars he taught at the College of William and Mary and George Washington University. "I just mentioned the paper. I mentioned it in the guise of 'Here are some fairly credible scholars and this is what they think.' Because of political correctness, in its most vicious sense, these things are rarely ever talked about."

Within 48 hours of mentioning the duo, Wilkerson got an email from Alan Dershowitz. If he was mentioning Walt and Mearsheimer, he "needed to present" Dershowitz's view of their paper. "Here I am, getting an email from the man who advocated torture," Wilkerson chuckles. "I gave him a piece of my mind." Didn't hear back. Wilkerson suspects that pro-Israel Jewish students on campus dropped the dime to Dershowitz. Because, "There is a network."

All I'd add is that this is real pressure, and Wilkerson is tough. A lot of other teachers would quail under it. Some time back a scholar at Yale told me he avoided Israel/Palestine, though he felt moral qualms about the U.S. position, because who needs Dershowitz jumping down their throat.

Also, re Dershowitz, thanks to Hilda Silverman for reminding me that when I quote Dershowitz calling the pre-67 borders "Auschwitz borders," Dershowitz is quoting Abba Eban...

Comments

[Charles Keating]

Former PFC Dershowitz?

[Jim Haywood]

I wonder what Col. Wilkerson thought about Colin Powell going before the UN Security Council and presenting intelligence about "Saddam's WMDs" which Powell almost surely knew was falsified by Douglas Feith and laundered through George Tenet's CIA.

Apparently Powell was willing to walk the plank for his C-in-C. But the story behind the phony intelligence is a great open cesspool -- far bigger than Watergate -- which neither Congress nor the media want to touch. There must be several dozen people in Washington who know how it really went down. Perhaps Col. Wilkerson is one of them.

[LanceThruster]

Dershowitz is a most repulsive shill for the official Zionist narrative.

[Chuck]

Of course there is a network. Mandated deportations of the networkers will probably begin the day after the American public discerns the network's depth and reach.

In the meantime, the financial markets continue to utter their commentary upon American leadership. Between Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Romney, McCain, Ghouliani and Huckabee, there is not one who is truly committed to shifting the financially unsustainable course we continue upon. Eventually the chickens will come home to roost, just as they did in the Soviet Union 18 years ago.

[Ed.]

'Wilkerson suspects that pro-Israel Jewish students on campus dropped the dime to Dershowitz. Because, "There is a network."'

Everyone who is a regular here knows he is right, of course. But let's get specific: it is a Jewish Zionist network that uses authoritarian statist techniques to harass, intimidate, bully and suppress those inclined to blow the whistle on their existence. These are the heirs to the Jewish Communists who, with their Stalinist partners, murdered so many millions of dissidents in the Soviet Union in pursuit of a totalitarian vision.

Today, their spearhead for totalitarianism is Zionism instead of Communism, and they haven't (yet) reached the level of impunity that they once enjoyed in the Soviet Union, but they're working on it.

But patriotic Americans like Wilkerson, Walt, Mearsheimer and Weiss are pushing back against their evil designs. And perhaps even the likes of Dershowitz is seeing the writing on the wall: not long ago he was quoted, while speaking in Israel, as saying Israel should “be prepared to go it alone" because Americans were getting fed up with the Jewish state.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200701/INT20070123a.html

I read that as an admission that he might be getting ready to make Aliya (Jewish Zionist emigration to Israel). Hopefully he will take his network of Zionist student spies with him. God knows they aren't wanted in America, given their totalitarian proclivities. And really, they just don't fit in in any open society that values liberty and truthful inquiry. They're all about deception, mindless greed, fascist networking, statism, and racial supremcy; in short, they are anti-American.

[anon]

to: Ed
great post Ed....normally I read such "warnings" by Zioniost leaders as efforts to enourage an even more brutal crackdown on dissidents who oppose Zionism.

But just as the USSR fell fast so may the U.S. It wont be pretty for our elite.

WHAT idea iolds the country together? HVE you read Huntington's Who Are We?
BTW has Huntington commented on the Mearsheimer book?

[lester]

I'd hardly call getting an email "harassment". who cars if someone sends you an email or you get 6000 emails?

[Charles Keating]

Good question: What idea hold the USA together? LOL. No idea at present, just ignorance--the MSM keeps it so.

[Ed.]

"I'd hardly call getting an email "harassment"."

Look at what Dershowitz did to Finkelstein at DePaul: by waging a fanatical, obsessive campaign against the professor, he played a decisive role in coercing the university to deny Finkelstein tenure, which precipitated his forced departure from the university. Dershowitz’s was thus successful in denying Finkelstein the right to an honest living all because Dershowitz disagreed with Finkelstein's political positions on the question of Zionism. He was truly able to extract a pound of flesh.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/358/

If that kind of behavior isn't an assault on academic freedom and indicative of authoritarian, thought-control tactics, techniques and intent, I don't know what is.

Dershowitz is a modern day Jewish commissar in exactly the same vein as his Bolshevik precursors. The only difference is, Dershowitz doesn't work for the central government and thus couldn't have Finkelstein deported to a gulag. But if we continue down the road we're on much further, Zionists in the Dershowitz model (Chertoff?) will no doubt be granted the power of life or death over Zionist dissidents. And don't think for a second they won't use it. Hate-filled fanatics always do.

There is something very wrong with these people, and they are a threat to us all.

[Michael Blaine]

Anyone interested in Wilkerson should read Lewis Lapham's treatment of him in the January 2006 Harper's Magazine.

Michael Blaine
www.rudelystamped.blogspot.com

[Chuck]

Norman Finkelstein, as a moser to the Jewish people, should probably be punished by death.
http://www.forward.com/articles/12542/

[paul malfara]

Chuck,

Alan Dershowitz, Lev Leviev and their ilk, as apologists and blind supporters of the right-wing creeping settlement policies of modern-day Israel, should be labelled "mosers" and punished, for it is their words and actions that will ultimately result in indictments and punishment for the Jewish Israeli people, most of whom would be satisfied with a fair, negotiated two-state solution to the Isreal/Palestine problem somewhat along the lines of the Clinton Parameters.

[sword of gideon]

You know Ed, I have to admire the honesty here. Most people of your ilk jump through hoops to make the old "I don;t hate Jews I'm just an anti-zionist". You make no bones about the fact that your a low life scumbag, jew baiting, scum sucking asshole. Kudo's

[Charles Keating]

my,my,my...

[lester]

ed- getting someone fired is different than emailing them one email

[sword of gideon]

Wilkerson described the event with Dershowitz in the documentary on the lobby which aired on Dutch TV:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3994543425032066015
"Portrait of a Great Taboo"

He describes Dersh as "protecting the Jewish lobby in America like an attack dog."

[trouvere]

That article that Chuck linked to is fascinating and highlights all the questions that Phil has been raising. I recommend everyone read it.

"The issue of mesira, or informing, has prompted a round of collective soul-searching in segments of Los Angeles’s Jewish community.

“People are very shell-shocked about the whole thing on many levels,” said Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, a West Coast representative of the Orthodox Union. “Number one, that our neighbors and friends are implicated, and number two, that an act of mesira on this level was perpetrated by one of our own.”"

[trouvere]

That article that Chuck linked to is fascinating and highlights all the questions that Phil has been raising. I recommend everyone read it.

"The issue of mesira, or informing, has prompted a round of collective soul-searching in segments of Los Angeles’s Jewish community.

“People are very shell-shocked about the whole thing on many levels,” said Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, a West Coast representative of the Orthodox Union. “Number one, that our neighbors and friends are implicated, and number two, that an act of mesira on this level was perpetrated by one of our own.”"

[anon]

my, my, my,

What will become of Charles Keating's kiddies when Chuck and Ed come to deport them, or worse?

[Ed.]

What will become of all of our children when Judeofascist authoritarians come for American dissidents the way the way they came for Russian dissidents in the Soviet Union?

Judeofascists have more blood on their hands than anyone.

[Chris Moore]

I have more lotion on my hands than anyone.

Can you guess why?

[Chris Moore]

Because that's how your wife likes it, anon.

[Charles Keating]

Good question, anon. I honestly don't know. Why would my child be deported? He mostly thinks of his students and basketball players--he's a high school teacher and coach. He hasn't even thought about USA foreign policy and knows no more about history than any of his age.

[arrgh]

Ed has some very strange beliefs about the USSR. For example, when I studied in one of the Moscow's 5 (FIVE) institutions of higher learning where the Jews were allowed, we had one case of a dissident student who was expelled and even tried at a court for his political crimes of passing around some books critical of governmental policies.

Strangely for Ed's strange theories, he was a Jew.

But backtrack a little. Can Ed explain to himself how is it that in "Jew-controlled" USSR Jews were only allowed to learn in five places of higher education (none of them bearing the title of "University") in Moscow?

[anon]

arrgh, we're talking about pre-WWII Russia. how old are you?

are you really questioning the role of jews in bolshevik communism? read Slezkine then get back to us.

[arrgh]

Pre-WWII bolsheviks of Jewish descent in Russia were purged en masse by Stalin purges pre-WWII. They themselves purged tsiyonists en masse before that, and religious rabbis too, proving by that beyond any doubt they were communists first, and last (they weren't Jews second).

They had cut their ties clean from the Jewish communities. Having Jewish parents does not make one a Jew. A Jew is someone who professes himself to be a part of the People of Israel, same as it were for the last three millenia. Anyone professing themselves to NOT be a part of the People of Israel - the self-nomer (Eigenbezeichnung) of the Jewish people - is not a Jew anymore. He is a descendent of Jews, individually; he's not a part of a People of Israel, the Jews. As a people.

How is any of this at all relevant to anything remotely relevant today, except being a pet peeve subject of nazi sympathizers?

[arrgh]

"we're talking about pre-WWII Russia".

No you weren't. Ed's talking about his fears of "when Judeofascist authoritarians come for American dissidents the way the way they came for Russian dissidents in the Soviet Union". It can't be about pre-WWII stuff because then it would be completely irrelevant. Those party functionaries were all killed off pre-WWII.

His "Judeofascist authoritarians" clearly refers to "the Jews" or else who are those misterious creatures and why would an outspoken anti-Jewish bigot be talking about them?