Checkmate

Benny Morris wipes the floor with the "Israel Lobby" in the New Republic (free reg. required), exposing their errors, as well as their misrepresentation of his work. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Company He Keeps

Our resident Middle East "expert" Norman Finkelstein continues to dig himself into a hole, this time by openly associating with a cartoonist (well, the cartoonist gave him a good portrayal, after all) who has rather strange political tendencies (I would think that supporting Osama Bin-Laden was beyond the pale...), and whose comparisons, well... (Hat Tip: Whacking Day)

An Hypothesis on the "Israel Lobby" Coverage

A writer for salon.com recently pulled an Alterman in mentioning only op-ed attacks on the "Israel Lobby" and not the ever-increasing amount of scholarly rebuttals, with the exception of Alan Dershowitz's much-publicized rebuttal.

I'm starting to sense a pattern here. The cynic in me says that, of course, "Israel critics" will only mention emotional attacks and ignore more temperate ones in order to set up a straw man of "hysterical ranting" on the part of Israel defenders. Still, I'm starting to think that there's a more prosaic reason for this behavior.

Put simply, the MSM only pays attention to itself. Only op-eds or newspaper articles, where there is very little space to conduct academic argument, are mentioned, as are "celebrities" such as Alan Dershowitz or "anti-celebrities" such as Norman Finkelstein. Rebuttals posted on non-MSM websites such as Jewish institutions or on (not necesarilly Jewish) blogs, are simply ignored - they don't count.

The fact that the author of the above-mentioned article makes no mention whatsoever of Martin Kramer's site, which has been covering the issue from day 1 and has provided at least two witty and informed rebuttals, says something about the self-contained nature of the MSM. It reminds me of similiar tendencies at academic conferences, where scholars repeat each other and refuse to actually step into the world, outside their little bubble.

Some thoughts on the "Israel Lobby"

1. We have already made mention of Norman Finkelstein's artificial 'scholarly consensus' on 1948, created by only mentioning the scholars who support his view and ignoring those who disagree with him. Lately, Eric Alterman has recently pulled the same shtick, mentioning only the virulent op-ed attacks on the "Israel Lobby", and ignoring the many scholarly rebuttals that make mincemeat of the paper's "scholarly" pretentions. One wonders why folks do stuff like this...
2. The most well-remembered self-defense of antisemites is that "some of my best friends are Jews". Now this has been replaced by anti-Zionists with "BUT we support the right of Israel to exist". To demonstrate the absurdity of this statement I have made a song, modeled on Dayennu (If you're interested, you could use this as a party game where you match lines with various anti-Zionists. I have added some of my own matches):

   We compare only Jews/Israelis to Nazis on the slightest pretext, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist. (Finkelstein)

   We deny both Zionism and the state of Israel any moral validity, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist. (Finkelstein)

   We swallow wholesale every libel ever made against the Jewish state uncritically, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist. (Walt+ Mearsheimer)

   We support, excuse or 'understand' all attacks against the country and its citizens, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist.

   We deny that the Jews have the right to self-determination as a nation, or that they even are a nation, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist.

   We believe against all contrary evidence that Israel is the sole, or one of the main causes of danger to world peace, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist.

   We support the Right of Return for Palestinian Refugees, which would demographically overwhelm the state and eliminate its raison d'etre, BUT we support the right of Israel to exist. (This is especially egregious) (Again Finkelstein...fill in others here)

   I'm sure I could add others, but I don't have the energy for it now.

Of Note - Fringe Lunatics and Actual Scholars

• Norman Finkelstein, Israel Shahak fan, goes off the deep end, yet again.
• Ali Abunimah joins the 'One-state' (No-Israel) crowd. Big surprise.

In other news,

• Michael Oren's book on America and the Middle East is slated for January of next year.
• Dr. Tamir Goren, whose expertise is Haifa in the Modern Period (and who teaches at Bar-Ilan) has recently come out with a book on Arab Haifa during the War of Independence (in Hebrew - see link to invitation to conference on the book). Recommended.

Agree or Disagree?

Today, instead of posting my own thoughts, I will present to you an interesting argument made in the recent issue of Azure. Readers are invited to discuss it in the Comments box. Emphases are mine.

Honest liberals know that they are not pluralists. They know that the liberal worldview does not recognize the validity of other worldviews, and that it aspires–using all the economic, media, and military means at its disposal–to make itself dominant. Liberalism is not tolerance, liberalism is not pluralism, and admitting this is not a mark against it; it is simply to recognize the difference between the perception of a liberal agenda as the just, indispensable agenda, and “let a thousand flowers bloom.”

But not all liberals are willing to admit this. The greatest teacher of those liberals who are convinced that they are pluralists was Isaiah Berlin. Berlin’s thought, more than any other liberal doctrine formulated in the twentieth century, reveals a conceptual confusion between pluralism and liberalism. At the end of the twentieth century, this confusion did not appear to be critical or potentially dangerous. In the 1990s, with the fall of the Eastern Bloc, with the euphoric rise of capital markets, and with the fashionable post-modernist discourse that flourished in academia, the West celebrated what seemed to be its final victory. For ten years it had no enemies, and when you have no enemies, it is possible to babble on about pluralism, denigrate the “oppressive” culture of the West, and demand that the “voice of the other should also be heard.” The multicultural discourse that flourished at the time did not stand up to scrutiny, because the “other” did not speak. On September 11, 2001, four years after the death of Berlin, we heard the clear voice of the “other.”

Since Osama Bin Laden made his voice heard, every liberal has had to figure out for himself if he really is a pluralist, as he imagined himself to be. This is no longer an academic or theoretical issue. To counter the clear voices of the enemies of the West, the West must speak out clearly, or else it will be defeated. This year, Europe has incurred Muslim riots in France and Muslim unrest in England and Germany; it has enabled the “others” to build mosques in its capitals that nurture hatred of the West. The repercussions of this foolishness in the name of pluralism were foreseeable but are still being denied. French intellectuals were quick to interpret–and justify–the riots in Paris by portraying them as acts of protest by the poor and the downtrodden. They presented the issue as a social struggle, and in so doing exempted themselves from the question of pluralism. When the Muslim “other” is portrayed as oppressed, his true and declared identity as a jihadist soldier is denied, and so the test facing multicultural pluralism in our time is rejected. Understanding Berlin’s philosophical doctrine, therefore, has become a pressing matter for our time.