Mondoweiss

Reporters Project Their Own Power on to Those Wily Jewish Voters, Laying in the Weeds in the Everglades

I always feel guilty when I make posts like this. I feel that I'm arming anti-semites. Then I say, I can't care, and the only question is whether what I'm saying is true. And I think it is true. So here goes.

This piece in the Forward contains the usual argument about Jewish voters in Florida playing on the minds of the presidential candidates. Again I have to insist that Jewish voters are far less meaningful in the presidential process than Jewish donors and Jewish reporters. Ari Berman said this the other day at the Center for Jewish History, and I applaud him for his candor and urge journalists to think about this and drop the hypocrisy.

'New York Times' Flexes Its Moral Muscle for Palestinian Freedom

I often criticize the New York Times on this site, in fact I am about to get out my rusty Judy Miller popgun later for the Scott McClellan story. But today we really must celebrate the Times. Yesterday it ran Ethan Bronner's superb report on the U.S. State Department withdrawing 7 Fulbright grants to young Palestinians because the Israeli siege of Gaza won't let them go. And not just ran the story: but ran it across five colums at the top of the front page, with a huge photograph of a doelike Palestinian woman who cannot come here to study. Hearts and minds in one shot! The Israel Policy Forum promptly blasted the blockade. And now JTA is reporting that Condi Rice is looking into the outrage.

Glory be to the Times. Here is the greatest newspaper in the world using all its power to change things. I know, you say, what about reporting on cluster bombs in Lebanon or the siege of Gaza, or the widespread support for "transfer" in the Israeli polity. What about Bill Kristol and Friedman and Brooks rationalizing the cycle of violence. Patience, patience. The world is changing, and yesterday's noble decision by the Times editors was in fact licensed by us, by Jimmy Carter, by Walt and Mearsheimer, by the stirring shifting spinning tectonic plates of the discourse...

Tough Israelis Tell Mearsheimer, 'Give the Palestinians a State in Jordan'

John Mearsheimer isn't entitled. He went on Israel National Radio to answer questions from two raving Israeli Zionists, Jeremy Gimpel and Ari Abramowitz, who start out by accusing him of "not necessarily the oldfashioned antisemitism" but "the sophisticated antisemitism... anti Zionism."

Mearsheimer: "We're not anti-Zionist... We think it's a wonderful thing that there's a state of Israel..."

Memo to '60 Minutes' Producers: Take 'The Israel Lobby' to the Israel Lobby

To the guys and gals of Black Rock:
Respectfully, it's just a matter of time before you do the Walt & Mearsheimer story. It's just too important, and every week that goes by it becomes less radioactive and more conventional-wisdom. Also, after November, the story won't be quite as hot-button (or, sadly, as relevant) as it is now.
Yesterday I mentioned that W & M are going to Hebrew University next week, as Marty Peretz has helpfully reminded us. That should be a wild time. I expect them to be treated with respect at the school Judah Magnes founded.
And here's another angle you'd have to jump on now. AIPAC is holding its annual policy conference in Washington, June 2-4. A lot of passionate Jews, a lot of well-heeled lobbyists, a lot of people who hold no brief for Walt and Mearsheimer. You should send a producer over to the conference with a copy of the book. Have him--her, sorry!--just walk around with it and get a reaction. Or you could go up to folks and ask them about the book. You'd be sure to get some interesting reaction shots. Classic 60.

'J Street' Adopts a Position Goldberg Deems 'Anti-Semitic'

In a Newsweek interview, Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the new Israel lobby, takes a position that Jeffrey Goldberg says is antisemitic: that 9/11 flowed in part from our policies in supporting Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

Q. You'll have to face, I imagine, Israelis who will say, 'wait a second, you don't live here, you don't send your children to the military here, you don't pay taxes. What right do you have to dictate or even to influence the debate?'

A. I think that's extremely fair [to argue]. But I think as long as the situation in Israel and Palestine is directly related to recruitment by extremist forces, by Al Qaeda, of the terrorists who then come here, I think it is an issue that has ramifications here.

I agree a hunnert percent with Ben-Ami. What interests me is the jockeying for position against AIPAC. Ben-Ami mildly bashes Walt and Mearsheimer in this interview--he has to cover his right flank, of course. While Goldberg, taking a position to the right of Ben-Ami and to the left of AIPAC, bashes Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites because they say just what Ben-Ami says. Wow. One of these guys is falling between two stools.

Thanks to Dan Sisken of Mideast Brief for the tip.

Steinhardt's Hebrew Charter School in Brooklyn--What's the Agenda?

I took Michael Steinhardt and his daughter Sara Berman at their word when they said the charter school teaching Hebrew, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, is just about spreading Hebrew culture, not about pushing Zionism. Joachim Martillo sees a pro-Israel agenda, and notes the school's placement in a Russian Jewish neighborhood:

Professor Gray Provides Me His First Name and Administers a Spanking

Jonathan Gray has responded to my post that mentioned him and says I've misrepresented his views, and suggests that I made a racist comment, to boot. He writes:

As for your desire to have me attack Sam [Freedman] about the failures of Jewish culture vis-a-vis Black culture, or the role that Jewish neo-cons played in starting the Iraq War, um, the panel was about the Jewish vote and Obama. I didn't want to go down that path, tempting though it was. That's a conversation I would love to have another time. Perhaps you could moderate. And, "the intellectual Black community, such as it is..." Would you care to clarify your phrase? Are you denying that an intellectual Black community exists? Are you asserting that Black intellectuals are somehow second class thinkers? Please enlighten me

First: thanks much to Jonathan for publishing his comment here, I didn't even have his first name. Journalism 101. As to the criticisms.

Roll Over Ben-Gurion, and Tell Jabotinsky the News

William Pfaff, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, born 80 years ago in Council Bluffs, living in Paris, offers the now-almost-conventional-wisdom in international circles that Israel has destroyed the future of a Jewish state through its greediness for land. The 2-state solution is over, he says, and Israel/Palestine is now a defacto Jewish/Arab state. I don't think this column appeared in the IHT, just in truthdigg.. I believe that Michael Walzer had a conversation on a related subject with Moshe Halbertal, a philosopher at the Hebrew University, at Yivo last week (can't wait for this to go online). And speaking of Hebrew U, Walt and Mearsheimer are going there next week. I wonder where they are on this idea.

I sure hope '60 Minutes' is shooting B-roll on Mt. Scopus. "The hotly-disputed duo has even taken these ideas to Jerusalem." Who will be the correspondent? Safer, Wallace, or Bob Simon? I mean let's be realistic.

McClellan May Be the Everyman That Breaks the Neocon's Back

One of the pleasures of watching Scott McClellan is his sheer ordinariness. In the era of West Wing, the meritocracy, and the "overclass" (my new favorite expression, thank you Samuel Freedman), McClellan is an ordinary Joe. He's pudgy and not all that smart. He's also genuine and honest and likeable. His great achievement already is taking a truth well-known to us pointy-heads on the internet, that the war was waged not for WMD but for "ideology," and bringing it home. Paul Wolfowitz admitted as much in Vanity Fair years ago. Glenn Kessler and George Packer and Richard Clarke stated as much in their books. Walt and Mearsheimer showed us the intellectual scaffolding.

I was always amazed that Americans had tolerated that great hoodwinking. But all those guys are intellectuals writing in the end about policy. Comes now McClellan, an ordinary guy who has a noble reason for his betrayal, and we all want to hear his story. That personal tale is bringing the point home in a simple affecting way. For a good story is more compelling than any investigation (let alone any great theory; check this one out). At long last, the chickens are coming home to roost. Before long the networks will be doing features on the neoconservatives, and the president and reporters that loved them. Next stop, the Hague.

British Paper Publishes Jewish Anti-Zionist

How refreshing to read, in the Guardian, a piece on Ahad Ha'am, the cultural Zionist who opposed Herzl's dreams of a Jewish state in Palestine. The writer, David Goldberg, is plainly an anti-Zionist, and urges readers to go past the Nakba to the root cause, the original Zionist colonists, who were never welcome. Wrote Ha'am on a visit to Palestine in 1891:

"We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow."

I learned something from this piece. Here, meanwhile, the media allow the Israel lobby to maintain the near-universal delusion that being anti-Zionist is antisemitic. This is a form of intellectual thuggery. In Australia, Antony Loewenstein is often published in the mainstream press. And how often is Joel Kovel given an Op-Ed here?