Is Sullivan an Anti-Zionist? Part 2

As I asked below, here, Sullivan's swipes against Israel have been getting more frequent and irritating. It's like he's gone enough to the left because of Bush-Cheney that he now has to hate Israel like a J-Streeter.

So thank goodness Jeff Goldberg has been on top of the case. First here in August 2008 he gives Sullivan some pro-Zion backing:

I know Andrew as a supporter of Israel, a Zionist, even,

Fine, but just a few days later he notices the glimmering of a problem:

But "unregistered Israeli lobbyist"? This is vile, like Pat Buchanan-vile. Robert Wexler is pro-Israel, too. Is he an unregistered Israeli lobbyist? What about Rahm Emanuel, and Barbara Boxer, and Frank Lautenberg, and Henry Waxman, and Howard Berman? Are they dual-loyalists as well? Or is their tribal-based treason excused because they're Obama supporters? I wish Andrew would go back to bashing the Jew-baiters, rather than reveling in their smears.

I'd say that it's one of the early signs that Sullivan is equating the GOP with Israel (a problem that I warned about back in 2001 with the stupid frummie love of the evil GWBush) and thus to repudiate the GOP (like Sullivan's been doing) means also attacking Israel.

But in the year since, Sullivan has gotten worse. 'Goldblog' is still defending him, be in doing so we brings up some disturbing counter-proof:

I've gotten a fair number of hostile e-mails for stating that Andrew, in my understanding, is a Zionist. Here's Andrew on his own understanding of what "pro-Israel," or "Zionist," means:

My own definition of pro-Israel would simply be, I think: support for the existence of a secure Jewish state in Palestine. That's my position, and it is as deeply held as it is open to all sorts of arguments about what is best for its security and the interests of the US. I think it should easily be enough to earn one's credentials as a Zionist, as I proudly and passionately remain.

I would make only two points about this. One is small (but actually consequential); the word "Palestine" was invented by the Romans as a deliberate attempt to erase the word "Judea" from the map. So I wouldn't say that Israel is a Jewish home in Palestine; if anything, the future state of Palestine could be called the Arab state in Judea. I know this sounds like a nitpick, but names matter, and chronology matters.

The second, larger point: Zionists generally hold Israel to the same standard they hold every other country. People who don't like Israel very much hold it to a special standard, created for one scapegoated country alone. On this count -- and only this count, so far as I can tell -- Andrew sometimes fails the test. There are times lately when he seems to single out Israel for special excoriation, and times when he holds Israel to a double-standard. By the way, this doesn't make him an anti-Semite, as some marginal figures claim he is. It makes him, if anything, normal. Most of the world holds Israel to a higher standard than it does other countries. Many Jews do, as well. One of our specialties is self-criticism. But even when it comes from Jews, it isn't fair. Context is everything. I'll continue with these profound thoughts on Andrew later on.

I'm not as charitable as Jeff here. Just off-the-bat anybody who casually uses 'Palestine' like Sullivan does is the first strike (he also does a related strike by constantly referring to an 'Israel Lobby' as if it exists as the bogeyman the Looney Left desires it to be). Sullivan's well-known friendship with the scummy anti-Semite Christopher Hitchens is strike two.

And while I have growing respect for Goldberg, I definitely break with him about self-hating Jewish anti-Zionism (J-streetism, for now, until they redeem themselves). Jstreeters hate Israel because it makes them look bad to their imagined goyish friends and neighbors. It's not OK when they do it and definitely not when it's done by goyim.

I'll take this up more later, but there's just something very British about Sullivan's take on Israel - it's a combined paternalism and moral hauteur, as if the Europeans (any of them) have taken the proper moral path on anything.

Backpost finished 2009-12-02.

What Kind of Lies Constitute Anti-Semitism?

Another response to the werid TNR/Judis argument about the Israel Lobby:

What Kind of Lies Constitute Anti-Semitism?
by Jeffrey Herf & Andrei S. Markovits
Post date: 02.13.07

John B. Judis minimizes the radicalism of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's arguments about the Israel lobby in their now much discussed attack of 2006 ("Split Personality," February 8). In a letter to the London Review of Books at the time, we wrote that Walt and Mearsheimer's assertions did evoke comparison to an older tradition of anti-Semitic argumentation. Judis recognizes that Mearsheimer and Walt argued that an "Israel lobby" exerted influence not only over American policy toward Israel but toward the Middle East as a whole and thus was instrumental as well in the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. Yet Judis then writes that Mearsheimer and Walt's case would be "similar to older anti-Semitism" only if they had claimed that the Israel lobby "controls, rather than influences, foreign policy and that its reach extends to all regions and not merely the Middle East."

With use of this dubious redefinition of what constitutes an anti-Semitic argument, Judis minimizes the extent to which Mearsheimer and Walt ignored elementary facts. American foreign policy in the Middle East has been and remains a balancing act between support for Israel, on the one hand, and support for various states--most of whom are deeply inimical toward Israel, to say the least--upon whom we and the world economy depend for oil. The assertions that an Israel lobby also controls American policy toward Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or that it was pushing for an invasion of Iraq are blatantly false. For Mearsheimer and Walt to have made them in March of 2006--when more than 2,000 Americans had died in Iraq, thousands more had been wounded, billions of dollars had been spent, and the war was going badly--was also dangerous. It amounted to saying that Jews are at least partly, if not fully, to blame for these losses. Judis now wants to raise the bar for calling an argument anti-Semitic by insisting that it refer to control over American policy toward the whole world. We think elementary distortions of the facts regarding American policy in the Middle East suffice.

Further, contrary to the claims of Israel's critics, we do not see evidence that criticism of Israel is being stifled anywhere in the United States. It is not suppressed in the universities, in the print or electronic media, or in Congress. To the contrary, it is expressed frequently and with vigor in prominent places by people with influence, including tenured full professors at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and New York University, as well as a former president of the United States. These critics have access to the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. They have been able to write long essays critical of Israel in The New York Review of Books, probably the most widely read bi-weekly intellectual review in this country, as well as in the London Review of Books and many other leading newspapers in Europe. They have done so without having incurred the danger of losing their jobs, their voices, their prestige, or their incomes. To invoke, as some have, the specter of McCarthyism for the purpose of delegitimating the criticism that their views rightfully engenders conflates critique with persecution and represents an effort to stifle perfectly legitimate objections to their views. We have never tried to prevent anyone from using their constitutional right to free speech to make what we regard as outrageous claims about Jews or anyone else. Many people criticize Israel without anyone suggesting that either their intentions or arguments have any link to anti-Semitism.

It is ironic that Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, lends credibility to accusations of dual loyalty. If this is the case, then TNR is certainly guilty, for, more than any other journal of opinion, it has made the case that support for Israel should be a key component of U.S. foreign policy. Judis lends credence to a double standard. When some Jewish intellectuals in the 1980s made the case in favor of NATO's hard line in Europe in the face of the Soviet Union's "peace offensive," no one accused them of having dual loyalty to the NATO countries of Western Europe, even though they were supporting policies of extended nuclear deterrence. Then, as now, they argued that it was in the vital interests of the United States to take these measures. Moreover, on many occasions, the two of us, like many other liberal supporters of Israel, including the editors of this magazine, have criticized Israel's policy of settlements in the West Bank.

Israel's critics in this country have the freedom to say what they wish, including the freedom to exaggerate vastly the power of Jews and the Israel lobby. We who criticize some of their views also have the freedom and obligation to explain why we think such arguments are false, dangerous, and bear comparisons to older anti-Semitic traditions. In a period in which Iran's president threatens to wipe Israel off the face of this earth and Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda seek its destruction as well, a weakening of American support for Israel would be a catastrophe of the first order not only for Israel, but for its supporters in this country. It would also be both a strategic blunder and moral debacle from the perspective of U.S. national security in the conventional sense of that term.

Jeffrey Herf teaches Modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton University Press).

Backpost finished 2009-12-13.

Anti-anti-Semitism Defended

This is a very good TNR piece by Bret Stevens (former editor of the JPost and now at the WSJ) about the current fog of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism:

"Anti-anti-Semitism Defended: Loyalty Oath"by Bret Stephens
Post date: 02.12.07

John B. Judis calls the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an anti-Semite ("Split Personality," February 8). But how does he know this?

Certainly not from any of Ahmadinejad's public utterances. I've searched high-and-low for any instance in which the Iranian speaks specifically of Jews, and can find nothing overtly anti-Semitic. Yes, he has raised questions about the Holocaust, and further questions about why a Jewish state was not established somewhere in Europe. But that's just a matter of establishing historical facts and assigning historical responsibility, right? Yes, he has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," or, if you prefer another translation, "vanished from the page of time." But this, as a columnist in The Guardian has pointed out, is nothing more than an expression of anti-Zionism that admits of interpretations not embracing acts of genocide. Then, too, Ahmadinejad has boasted about the inclusion of Iranian Jews in the Islamic Republic's parliament. He's even been seen embracing the ultra-orthodox rabbis of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect.

So, again, on what grounds does Judis accuse Ahmadinejad of anti-Semitism?

The question is asked partly tongue-in-cheek. Of course Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semite, and anyone who doubts it is either a knave or a fool. Yet it also cuts to the heart of the argument Judis and many others have made about the so-called "anti-anti-Semites," myself included, which is that we brandish the charge of anti-Semitism too freely. "Anyone who criticizes Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy ... stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti-Semite," complain professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt in their notorious paper on the "Israel Lobby." For his part, Judis believes that we anti-anti-Semites "are attempting to suppress an important debate on American foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East." More about the latter below. The first point is to establish how it is we all just "know" Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semite. There aren't many anti-Semites today who will actually come out with it and say "I hate Jews." Even the Muslim Brotherhood's Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who ministers to the Sunni masses via his pulpit on Al Jazeera, tends to be careful with his utterances about Jews. Spotting an anti-Semite therefore requires forensic skills, interpretive wits, and moral judgment. Judis's theory is that the distinctive, tell-tale feature of real anti-Semitism is that it contains a "large element of pure fantasy." Thus Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denial/skepticism would qualify as anti-Semitic to Judis, as would the allegation, common in the Arab world, that Jews were behind the attacks of September 11. By contrast, to suggest that Israel is practicing apartheid, as Jimmy Carter has, or that the Israel lobby all-but runs U.S. policy in the Middle East, as Walt and Mearsheimer have, contains just enough by way of reality or plausibility to acquit them of the charge of anti-Semitism.

Yet plenty of anti-Semitic stereotypes are not simply fantasy-based. Do Jews run Hollywood? I haven't exactly made a study of it, but I'd wager Jews are disproportionately represented among studio executives and sundry movers-and-shakers. Wall Street? I'm guessing the same. Yet of the man who says "the Jews run Hollywood," or "the Jews run Wall Street," most of us would say he is probably an anti-Semite. To what end does he make the claim? Why, if Jews really do run Hollywood, should the fact be significant? Would Hollywood be a better place if Jews didn't run the place? And so on.

In other words, racial, religious, or ethnic prejudice is not so much a matter of libel as it is of malice. Take dual loyalty. "Critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own selves," writes Judis, noting the apparent contradiction between American Jews simultaneously denouncing accusations of dual loyalty while insisting that Jews everywhere support Israel. Yet what rankles about the charge of dual loyalty is not that it doesn't contain its share of truth--of course American Jews generally have strong, if subsidiary, loyalties to Israel. What rankles is that it is leveled as a charge. When given voice by the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer, it suggests that the loyalties of millions of American Jews are evenly split and that, in extremis, the Israeli loyalty could win out over the American one, posing a permanent risk of betrayal or treason.

Nor is this the only way in which Judis gets things wrong. Regarding Tony Judt, he writes that what most provoked the critics was Judt's call for the Jewish state to be replaced by a binational one. Please. Binationalism is too obviously stupid an idea to qualify as vile. What made Judt's polemic uniquely nasty was its curious indulgence of Arab youth whose violence against Jewish persons or property he defined as a "misdirected effort ... to get back at Israel." No anti-Semitism there, just legitimate anti-Zionism with the wrong mailing address! As for the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, Judis fails to understand that its real smear does not lie in its claims about The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Rather, it is in its claims that Israel is a nation based "on the principle of blood kinship," that it is a faithless ally to the U.S., that it was born by way of theft and ethnic cleansing and so on. The argument about AIPAC is offered merely by way of explanation for the premise that Israel is a rogue state.

Finally there is Judis's point about the supposed attempt to "suppress debate." How does joining a debate become an effort to suppress it? I am not aware that Mearsheimer and Walt have been sent from the field to cower behind the bleachers. Indeed, nothing so perfectly gives the lie to their claims about the vast power of the Israel lobby as the fact that they have now been contracted--by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, no less--to turn their article into a book.

Still, were it up to me Judt, Mearsheimer, Carter et al would be run out of polite society. What's wrong with that? A decade ago, Judis himself tried to do the same to Charles Murray for the "ominous racial theory" suggested by The Bell Curve. The plain fact is that some ideas simply foul our public discourse. Some "controversies" open doors to scoundrels. Some small truths serve as vehicles for big lies. It is not a resort to censorship to ask of the people who hold the keys to magazines like The New Republic or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal to exercise judgment and discretion. Indeed, it is the essence of our responsibility.

Bret Stephens is a Wall Street Journal columnist and a member of the paper's
editorial board.

Backpost finished 2009-12-13.

The World of Jimmy Carter

Backpost, but I'm keeping the original post-date because it's not so relevant to us in '08. 8/1/2008

This review of Carter's book from "The American Thinker" is too good to excerpt. Read the whole she-bang:

The World According to Jimmy Carter
November 14th, 2006

A review of: Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster, November 2006)

It is not difficult to understand why Democrats wanted the publication of Jimmy Carter’s slim new book (216 pages of text, large print and no footnotes), with its tendentious title and its superficial analysis, delayed until today, a week after the election. The anti-Israel bias is so clear, the credulous description of Arab positions so cringe-producing, the key “facts” on which Carter relies so easily refuted by public documents, that the book is an embarrassment to Carter, the Democrats, the presidency and Americans.

It is hard to decide which is more discomforting—what Carter put in or what he left out. Let’s start with his own words, and let him speak for himself, and then note what no knowledgeable observer of the Middle East could have ingenuously omitted.

Carter says he paid his first visit to Israel in June 1973 (when he was privately “planning a future role as president”), and he devotes an entire chapter to it. The trip “formed most of my lasting impressions of Israel”—and they do not seem to have been good ones.

On his trip, he traveled “along the paths of Jesus” around the Sea of Galilee and found that:

“It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities – the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier.”

He describes his visit to several kibbutzim and finds that Israel fails his religious test again (at least on one kibbutz):

“The next morning was the Sabbath, and at the appointed time we entered the synagogue, said a silent prayer, and then stood quietly just inside the door. Only two other worshippers appeared. When I asked if this was typical, [the guide] gave a wry smile and shrugged his shoulders as if it was not important either way.”

Later on the trip, when asked to participate in a graduation ceremony at an IDF training camp, Carter helps by presenting a Hebrew bible to each graduate,

“which was one of the few indications of a religious commitment that I observed during our visit.”

Carter states that he has

“to admit that, at the time, I equated the ejection of Palestinians from their previous homes within the State of Israel to the forcing of Lower Creek Indians from the Georgia land where our family farm was now located.”

(So far as the book indicates, he apparently has no plans to give any portion of his farm back).

At the end of his visit, he meets with Prime Minister Golda Meir and when asked to share his observations, responds to her as follows.

“I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government.”

Response to Mearsheimer and Walt

Finally, an academic puts out a reasoned point-by-point critique of a recent anti-Semitic screed. Acquire here:

Zealous Realism: Comments on Mearsheimer and Walt by Marc Landy, Boston College.

Israel Lobby Resources

Some resources and links about the article by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy":

1. Their article in the London Review of Books
   
2. The original piece [Direct PDF] from the Harvard Kennedy School
   
3. Info about Walt
   
4. Info about Mearsheimer
   
5. Response by CAMERA
   
6. A response by Ruth Wisse (Professor at Harvard)
   
7. A brief response from Daniel Pipes
   
8. Article in the Crimson which includes an Alan Dershowitz response
   
9. KKK's David Duke's endorsement of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis

Backpost finished 4/15/08

FBI entrapped AIPAC

Bush is the best friend Israel has ever had - at least better than Clinton - at least better than his father - or actually, I'm not sure if he's such a friend. A few months ago there was a celebrated case where a member of AIPAC was entrapped in a FBI sting. Ya see, it seems that the FBI investigated two members of AIPAC who have been accused of spying for Israel, giving them details of the secret US deliberations with the Iranians. [Recent reports accuse them of leaking the secrets of the McShwarma]. Here's the original story (CBS news)

However, as the Jerusalem Post indicates the FBI set the whole thing up. It's pretty complicated - but as far as I can tell, the FBI entrapped two AIPAC members as part of a strange paranoid witch-hunt. As this article indicates, there's a subtle double-standard against Jews in the intelligence agencies about loyalty to Israel.

Thank you Ashcroft for keeping America safe. How many terrorists have you caught yet? None?

Backpost finished, kinda, 2/17/05. This is still difficult to finish because I still don't have all the right details...