Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il solito sospetto

Jeffrey Goldberg è un americano che ha fatto alya, è vissuto in un
kibbutz, e ha prestato servizio miliare in una prigione, dove ha
conosciuto un detenuto palestinese di cui ha cercato di diventare, se
possibile, amico. L'amicizio è continuata anche dopo la scarcerazione
e ha portato Goldberg a visitare molte volte i territori palestinesi.
Ne è nato un libro famoso (Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the
Middle East Divide). Amareggiato per quel che ha visto, Goldberg si è
poi trasferito negli USA ma ha continuato a visitare il Medio Oriente,
come giornalista.  e si è fatto un nome per le sue analisi
disincantate, decisamente non filo-governative, che spesso sono
comparse anche sui siti antisionisti italiani.
Sentite un po' cosa ha da dire a proposito del libro di Walt e
Marsheimer
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20071008&s=goldberg100807
The Usual Suspect
by Jeffrey Goldberg
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 484 pp., $26)
Click here to purchase the book.
In October 2002, Osama bin Laden issued a statement in which he
analyzed America's inexhaustible number of sins and prescribed ways of
repenting for many of them. The statement was, by the standards of bin
Laden's cave encyclicals, unusually coherent. (Unlike, say, his most
recent video, released in early September, which ranged across the sub-
prime mortgage crisis, America's high rate of taxation, and the work
of Noam Chomsky--the latter treated sympathetically, of course.) The
2002 letter laid out in a somewhat deliberate fashion bin Laden's main
complaints, and it helped to answer a question that Americans often
ask: Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do?
Bin Laden's answer was, why choose? In his epistle to America, bin
Laden asked Americans to submit to Islam, which he called "the
religion of showing kindness to others." He excoriated us for our
immorality: "We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor
and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality,
intoxicants [and] gambling." He condemned us for manufacturing AIDS,
which is a "Satanic American Invention." He also declared himself in
opposition to the pervasive practice of incest in America, "in the
face of which neither your sense of honor nor your laws object." He
plangently concluded that "it is saddening to tell you that you are
the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind." We are
the worst because we "invent" our own laws to govern ourselves, rather
than embrace God's law, or more precisely, his God's law, sharia; and
because we mandate the separation of religion from politics; and
because we allow usury.
The American addiction to usury is most upsetting to bin Laden. As is
well known, the charging of interest--at usurious rates or otherwise--
is banned by Islam. The institutions of "Islamic banking" were
developed to find a way to conform to Islamic law and still prosper.
Bin Laden's view of usury, and of Western banking practices, is
characteristically unsophisticated. And he has a theory about its
historical origins: Western banking is Jewish banking. "As a result of
[usury], in all their different forms and guises, the Jews have taken
control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of
your media, and now control all aspects of your life, making you their
servants and achieving their aims at your expense."
The Jews, of course, are a preoccupation of bin Laden's. They are an
important source of immorality, and, in their union with Christianity--
the "Zionist-Crusader alliance" of which he often speaks-- they have
for centuries propagated falsehood and heresy. In conjunction with the
Christians, the Jews also advocate policies that undermine the
interests of Islam. It is not merely American financial and political
support for Israel that frustrates bin Laden, but, crucially,
America's role in perpetuating the idea that Palestine was once a
Jewish homeland, and that the Jews of today are, in fact, proper Jews
at all: "It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not
yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a
historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the
Torah."
In the 2002 letter, bin Laden blames America for providing support to
the usurping Zionists, but a careful reading of his rant will show
that American support for Israel is only one of his many grievances
against America. "You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the
Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression
against us in Kashmir," he writes. "You steal our wealth and oil at
paltry prices.... This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever
witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.... Your forces
occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them;
you corrupt our lands." And in the Al Qaeda heartlands of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, it is often Hindus--and, in some places, Shia--who are
the unfortunate focus of Islamist zeal. ("The polytheists"--the
Hindus-- "are Satan's agents in the world," the Al Qaeda terrorist
Fazlur Rahman Khalil once told me.) The Al Qaeda worldview is a
fevered jumble, in which hatred never lacks an object and infidels are
infinite.
It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite.
He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy
about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody,
regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice,
let me begin by describing bin Laden's view of history less
inflammatorily--not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes
that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and
that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the
Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as
the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is
a single- cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by
definition, a conspiracy theory. Moreover, Judeocentrism comes in
positive forms and negative forms. The positive form of Judeocentrism
is philo-Semitism, the negative form is anti- Semitism. (There are
philo-Semites who regard the Jews as the inventors of modernity, and
there are anti-Semites who do the same; but the idea that Spinoza,
Freud, and Einstein are responsible for us is as foolish as the idea
that their ideas are jüdische Wissenschaft.) In both its positive and
negative forms, Judeo- centrism is always a mistake. Human events are
not so neatly explained.
In the inflamed universe of negative Judeocentrism, there is a sliding
scale of obsession. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, seems
at times to view the world entirely through the prism of a Jewish
conspiracy, and he regularly breaks new ground in the field of state-
supported Holocaust denial. In Cairo, the activities of Jews, Israeli
and other- wise, are a continual source of worry. Many of the monarchs
in the Gulf countries, by contrast, will sometimes exploit anti-Jewish
feeling for political reasons, but they do not seem to be personally
obsessed by Jews. They are too worldly for that. In Europe, too, one
finds great variations in the expression of Judeocentrism. There are
still traces of Holocaust-induced philo-Semitism in places like
Germany; but there are also figures such as Clare Short, the former
British cabinet minister, who recently blamed Israel for global
warming.
America, too, has a history of Judeocentrism, and also of the negative
kind, the essence of which has been the belief that Jews, in order to
advance their own interests, are responsible for entangling America in
unnecessary wars--what we now call "wars of choice," which the Jews,
it is alleged, have chosen for us. In the years leading up to World
War II, the Jewish desire for war against Hitler was a constant theme
of Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and Joseph P. Kennedy. "Instead
of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in
every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences,"
Lindbergh said in a speech in Des Moines on September 11, 1941. In
more recent times, figures such as Patrick Buchanan, Louis Farrakhan,
and David Duke have updated the notion and explained America's woes--
Buchanan cleverly, Duke crudely, Farrakhan insanely--as the work of
the Jews. (In 1990, as the first Bush administration was building up
to war against Iraq, in order to expel Saddam Hussein's forces from
Kuwait, Buchanan stated that "Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied
territory.") Perhaps the best and most succinct expression of this
school of American Judeocentrism was offered by Mel Gibson when he
explained, upon his arrest for drunk driving, that "the Jews are
responsible for all the wars in the world."
It is an odious tradition, and I do not see how any thoughtful or
decent individual would wish to belong to it. (I say thoughtful
because the theory has no analytical value, and decent because the
theory has harmful consequences.) But the tradition has now found a
couple of unexpected new tribunes. The Judeocentric understanding of
America's foreign policy is now the special province of two ostensibly
reputable scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago
and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University. The two men gained their
fame--which is wildly disproportionate to their achievement--last
spring, after the publication of an article in the London Review of
Books that condemned the activities of Jewish-American supporters of
Israel and argued that those activities are responsible for an
astounding number of world-historical developments.
In the article, the word "lobby" was ominously capitalized, Robert
Ludlum style, as "the Lobby," to connote the perfect grip of pro-
Israel activists upon Washington. In their new book, which builds on
(and worsens) that earlier work, Mearsheimer and Walt lower-case the
word "lobby," as a small tribute, I suppose, to the reality-based
community. They have also excised some of the rougher language of
their original blast. They have corrected some, though not all, of
their errors of fact. But otherwise the book remains true to the
malignant and dishonest spirit of the article. It represents the most
sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political
enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.
The villains in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are almost
entirely Jewish. Many of the chapters of the book contain extensive
lists of Jews (even Rothschilds) who, the authors claim, act against
the best interests of the United States. And act effectively: the
Israel lobby in this book is an invincible juggernaut. In some of
Mearsheimer and Walt's pages, AIPAC resembles SMERSH or THRUSH. The
America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, you see, "has an almost
unchallenged hold on Congress," and therefore on the United States.
(In the London Review article, the "hold" was described as a
"stranglehold.")
And how do we know that AIPAC has a hold on Congress? This is a very
good question. For Mearsheimer and Walt are so thoroughly under the
spell of their own assertions that they do not seem to notice the
circular (or more precisely, agit- prop) quality of what they have
written. Consider a typical sentence: "The real reason why American
politicians are so deferential [to Israel] is the political power of
the Israel lobby." That is not a proof. That is what requires a proof.
So what are Mearsheimer and Walt's methods? A hasty survey of a vast
literature on Israel and the Middle East, clearly unfamiliar to them
until very recently, so as to cite every and any remark that suits
their purpose, its context or its veracity notwithstanding. Most
significantly, and by their own admission, Mearsheimer and Walt did no
reporting. They did not interview a single member of Congress for
their book about Congress. Perhaps it is beneath them as scholars to
behave like journalists. But their methodological arrogance, their
failure to meet any serious standard of empirical inquiry, their
slavish reliance on second- and third-hand works, is astonishing. The
truth of what they say is just completely obvious to them. At an
appearance in September at the bookstore Politics and Prose, in
Washington, Walt confidently asserted that "I think if we had
interviewed every member of Congress and every lobbyist at AIPAC we
would not have found a substantially different story than the one we
reported." How does he know?
After baldly declaring, in the manner of conspiracy theorists, and
over and over again, also in the manner of conspiracy theorists, that
AIPAC dominates Congress (at the same time claiming, risibly, that "we
do not believe the lobby ... controls important institutions in the
United States"), Mearsheimer and Walt then proceed to catalog all the
mistakes and the crimes for which AIPAC and the many other groups that
make up the pro-Israel lobby are, in their omnipotence, responsible.
Mearsheimer and Walt are not alleging the existence of a secret Jewish
plot to control American foreign policy; they are alleging the
existence of an open Jewish plot to control American foreign policy.
The most remarkable of their allegations--this one is actually quite
breathtaking--is that the pro-Israel lobby is causally related to the
attacks of September 11. They claim that AIPAC's control of Congress
forced America into an unnaturally close alliance with Israel, and
that this alliance infuriated bin Laden, as well as Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the mastermind of the operation, who acted against America
in large part because of its support for Israel.
This is not quite the view, commonly heard in the Arab world, that
Israel had a direct hand in the destruction of the World Trade Center;
but still it is heinous. The unmistakable message of The Israel Lobby
and U.S. Foreign Policy is that the destruction on September 11 was
caused in significant measure by the Jews. "The United States has a
terrorism problem in good part because it has long been so supportive
of Israel," Mearsheimer and Walt write. "Many people may not realize
how much America's one-sided policies have cost it over the years. Not
only have these policies helped inspire al-Qaeda, but they have also
facilitated its recruitment efforts and contributed to growing anti-
Americanism throughout the region." At Politics and Prose, Walt called
America's support for Israel "one of the key causes" of "America's
terrorist problem." He went on to say that "American policy gives some
individuals in the Arab and Islamic world cause to attack the United
States as happened on 9/11." Cause! Ponder that word.
Never mind that Mearsheimer and Walt exaggerate the centrality of the
Jews in bin Laden's worldview. (The transcript of his September video
makes this clear.) Al Qaeda's war on America is only one of three wars
that Mearsheimer and Walt blame on Israel and its mainly Jewish
supporters. They argue that pro- Israel Jews in America were "the
principal driving force behind the Bush administration's decision to
invade Iraq in 2003"; and they argue that it is only Jewish
organizations, and their patrons in the Jewish state, that are now
fomenting a war against Iran.
To support their preference for an American-Iranian détente,
Mearsheimer and Walt present a spectacularly partial rendering of the
pertinent history--they do not even consider that one barrier to
better relations with the theocratic dictators in Tehran might be our
inconvenient but painful memories of the hostage crisis. And in making
their case that it is only Jews who oppose reconciliation with Iran,
they neglect to mention, among other things, European opposition to
the Iranian nuclear program. Their Judeo- centric interpretation of
the Iran hawks does not consider the possibility that Nicolas Sarkozy,
the president of France, might have been motivated only by French
national security interests when he recently said that Iran's
obstinacy on the nuclear question would have "catastrophic
consequences." Or has AIPAC gotten to him, too? But wait--Sarkozy is
one-quarter Jewish. No wonder he is militant about Iran! (Mearsheimer
and Walt like to explain the pro-Israel attitudes of American
politicians in gross tribal terms. Howard Dean's "unabashed" pro-
Israel stance, for example, is explicable when you grasp that "Dean's
wife is Jewish and his children were raised Jewish as well.")
Mearsheimer and Walt stretch their Iran argument to the snapping
point. They contend that Israeli politicians and their supporters in
America exaggerate the existential threat to Israel posed by Iran,
because Iranian radicals have not actually called for the elimination
of Israel. They assert that "Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to vanish
from the page of time' (or to be erased from the pages of history') is
often mistranslated as a call for Israel's physical destruction (i.e.
to wipe Israel off the map')." Often mistranslated? I wonder how good
their own Farsi is. But Al Jazeera--no known Jewish control there--
reported in 2005 that at the "World Without Zionism" conference in
Tehran, Ahmadinejad declared that "Israel must be wiped off the map."
Ahmadinejad's own website described the speech this way: "He further
expressed his firm belief that the new wave of confrontations
generated in Palestine and the growing turmoil in the Islamic world
would in no time wipe Israel away." The official Iranian broadcast
service reported that "Iran's President ... on Wednesday called for
Israel to be wiped off the map.'" Surely there are clearer ways to
express a desire for coexistence.
It is mystifying that Mearsheimer and Walt would so easily destroy
their own credibility by stating as fact lies that are so easily
refuted. Perhaps it is because they have become dedicated enemies of
complexity. When did it become legitimate in American political
science to explain complicated phenomena by single causes? Not even
the blizzard of footnotes at the end of their book can disguise the
fact that it is an exercise in simplification. Or is their
intellectual imbalance owed to a different pressure--to the rage of
the realist, perhaps? Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent advocates of
the "realist" approach to foreign policy; and there is nothing a
realist despises more, from Henry Kissinger to Samuel Huntington (to
whom this book is dedicated), than domestic interference in the
crafting of foreign policy. What right does an ignorant and emotional
ethnic group have to disrupt the plans of wise statesmen and the
analyses of detached academics? But such disruptions are an integral
part of the American system--as America's Cubans and Turks and Greeks
and, yes, Jews have regularly, and quite legitimately, demonstrated.
Mearsheimer and Walt's Judeocentric view of American policy in the
Middle East is just a way of pinning the American system that they
dislike on the Jews.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a book of continuous
astonishments. Each chapter contains assertions of Jewish misbehavior,
or criminality. The history of the Arab- Israeli conflict recounted
here is comically one-sided, even by the standards of Israel's
revisionist historians. In Mearsheimer and Walt's telling, Israel is
perpetually the aggressor; it has never made a serious move toward
peace and compromise; and its existence has never been threatened by
the Arabs, who are portrayed as out-numbered, out-funded, and under-
armed victims of Zionist aggression. The Israel of Mearsheimer and
Walt is simply unrecognizable to anyone who is halfway fair and
halfway learned about the Middle East. Various scholars have already
demolished their recounting of Israeli history, most notably Benny
Morris in the pages of this magazine. Morris's research into the
origins of the war for Israeli independence in 1948 was put to
perverse use by Mearsheimer and Walt, and he reclaimed it with
authority. I will not dwell here on their many mistakes and
distortions, except to point out two of the most obvious ones: their
claim that Israel's Arab neighbors did not hope to destroy the Jewish
state in 1967, and their claim that Israel, under the leadership of
Ehud Barak, did not offer Yasir Arafat anything fair or interesting at
Camp David and Taba in 2000. Both are easily refuted. (An obscure
little volume called My Life, by Bill Clinton, makes a quick hash of
their account of the peace process.)
Like Jimmy Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt condemn Israel for behaving in
an un-Christian manner. "Christian Zionists may believe that biblical
prophecy justifies Jewish control of all of Palestine, but other
Christian principles--such as Christ's command to love thy neighbor as
thyself'--are sharply at odds with Israel's treatment of its
Palestinian subjects," they piously write. But the Palestinians, of
course, love their neighbors. Not willing to undermine their portrait
of the Palestinians as lambs before the Jewish wolf, Mearsheimer and
Walt only fleetingly acknowledge the existence of Palestinian
terrorism (without ever once mentioning the number of Israeli victims
of Palestinian terror--or American victims, for that matter), except
to observe that Palestinian terrorism was forced on the Palestinians
by Israel's unrelenting suppression after the 1967 war. "Not
surprisingly, Palestinian resistance has frequently employed
terrorism, which is usually how subject populations strike back at
powerful occupiers." Such an analysis assumes that the reader is
unaware that Palestinian terrorism against Israel predates the 1967
war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It is also an insult
to other subject populations: the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, in
an interview five years ago, was explicit about his rejection of
terrorism, saying that "we could have bombed movie theaters in Baghdad
and buses like the Palestinians, but we made the decision not to. It
would have been wrong." Like so many supporters of the Palestinians,
Mearsheimer and Walt have no use for their historical agency. The
Palestinians are always responsible for nothing.
In building their case against Israel and its supporters in America,
Mearsheimer and Walt prophylactically denounce anti-Semitism. But at
the same time they argue that it barely exists, or that its existence
has no bearing whatever upon this bitter discussion: "While the charge
of anti-Semitism can be an effective smear tactic, it is usually
groundless." Usually when, and usually where? No, not all criticism of
Israel or AIPAC is anti-Semitic. Wait, let me say that again. No, not
all criticism of Israel or AIPAC is anti-Semitic. But the idea that no
criticism of Israel or AIPAC is anti-Semitic is just as ridiculous. To
proceed with their generalized and somewhat defensive point,
Mearsheimer and Walt ignore an abundance of evidence about Europe,
including the well- publicized British parliamentary report on anti-
Semitism, issued in September 2006, which found anti-Jewish incitement
in Britain to have reached crisis levels. The leader of that
parliamentary inquiry, Denis MacShane, wrote in The Washington Post
last month that "Europe is reawakening its old demons, but today there
is a difference. The old anti- Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed
into something more dangerous."
Not so, say Mearsheimer and Walt. The number of anti-Semites in
Europe, they write, is "small and their extreme views are rejected by
the vast majority of Europeans." They do not deny, though, that "there
is anti-Semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by
Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and some of it
straightforwardly racist." This is a bizarre and foul passage, its
foulness easily clarified by a simple act of substitution. Imagine
Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing the following sentence: "We would
not deny that there is some racial prejudice among whites, some of it
provoked by the misbehavior of African- Americans, and some of it
straightforwardly racist." Mearsheimer and Walt are the sort of
scholars who think that if you wish to understand racism, study
blacks, and if you wish to understand anti- Semitism, study Jews. They
are chillingly unaware that such views are complicit with the
prejudice that they claim to abhor.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is premised on many such
nasty and false ideas, but underpinning them all is the belief that
America supports Israel only because the pro-Israel lobby forces it to
do so. Mearsheimer and Walt contend--we have heard this contention
many times before--that Israel has no strategic or moral value to
America, and that a proper foreign policy would cut Israel adrift.
What is unfathomable to them is that many Americans, Jewish and
otherwise, admire Israel. Forty years of polling has consistently
shown that Americans support Israel in its conflict with the Arabs.
Why? There are a multitude of plausible reasons. Both Israel and
America were founded by refugees from European religious intolerance;
both are rooted in a common religious tradition; Israel is a lively
democracy in a part of the world that lacks democracy; Israelis seem
self-reliant in the manner of American pioneers; and Israel's enemies,
in many cases, seem to be Amer- ica's enemies as well. And perhaps
some obstreperous Americans side with Israel simply because the
radical Islamists demand that they stop.
None of these possible explanations has penetrated the minds of
Mearsheimer and Walt. There is only one cause for America's support
for Israel, they say: the lobby, its money, its muscle, its
effectiveness at suppressing dissent about its activities and about
the depth of Israel's crimes and strategic uselessness. (More about
dissent in a moment.) The ultimate lesson of this book is that America
must free itself from the shackles of the pro-Israel lobby. It is this
message, more than any other, that makes Mearsheimer and Walt the
heirs of a certain American current. In 1940, Joseph P. Kennedy went
to Hollywood to address its mostly Jewish studio chiefs. As recounted
in Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented
Hollywood, Kennedy told his lunch audience to "stop making anti-Nazi
pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the
cause of the democracies' versus the dictators.'" He told the
executives that the Jews were already being blamed for the war. His
bullying was effective: the studio chiefs, uneasy about their ethnic
heritage and therefore susceptible to the call of assimilation, were
frightened into compliance by his message, until America entered the
war a year later. Mearsheimer and Walt have set themselves a similar
goal: to convince non-Jews that their Jewish fellow citizens do not
have their best interests at heart, and, further, to harass or to
rattle or to embarrass American Jews into silence. Their book is not
an act of scholarship, but an act of intimidation.
But wait. Isn't AIPAC the one that is in the business of intimidation?
"The lobby has gone to considerable lengths to shape public discourse
about Israel by putting pressure on the media and academia and by
establishing a tangible presence in influential foreign policy think
tanks," Mearsheimer and Walt insist. "Efforts to shape public
perceptions often include charging critics of Israel with anti-
Semitism." The publication of their article in the London Review of
Books certainly provoked controversy. It was designed to provoke
controversy. But our heroes' skin proved too thin for controversy.
Though they were extensively praised in Europe, where everybody is of
course much saner because they are beyond AIPAC's reach, Mearsheimer
and Walt experienced a good deal of withering criticism in America.
(And also some fair, even generous coverage here, including a
credulous Washington Post Magazine cover story about their work.) And
yet their ideas have been widely debated and discussed. And yet they
received a dizzying advance to turn their essay into this book. And
yet their book is already a best-seller.
They claim that they themselves are victims of the pro-Israel lobby,
but the existence of their book, and the sensation that attends it,
rather negates their self-pity. I mean, somehow The Israel Lobby and
U.S. Foreign Policy slipped past the lobby. When I visited Amazon.com
to check the book's ranking a few weeks ago--it was at number thirty-
five--I learned that customers who bought it also purchased The Power
of Israel in the United States; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-
Semitism and the Abuse of History; They Dare Speak Out: People and
Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby; and of course Jimmy Carter's
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. So there is a literature of this sort,
and a market for it. And yet in their own minds--this is the comic
dimension of this sad story-- Mearsheimer and Walt are dissidents.
They portray themselves, and the many American critics of the pro-
Israel lobby, as free-speech martyrs. In this way the fellows at
number thirty-five resemble their idol Jimmy Carter, who complained
about being muzzled even as his book was climbing the best-seller
lists. They seem to think that anybody who disagrees with what they
say is deny- ing their right to say it. The truth is that most of
Mearsheimer and Walt's critics do not want to suppress their ideas.
They merely want to refute them.
The pro-Israel lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt contend, goes to any length
to steer media coverage in Israel's favor: "If the media were left to
their own devices, they would not serve up as consistent a diet of pro-
Israel coverage and commentary." And whose devices, precisely, are
they left up to? We are awfully close to the Elders of Z. here.
Mearsheimer and Walt's opinion that the press in America is
robotically pro-Israel only betrays their ignorance of the American
press. They are apparently unacquainted with the work of the editorial
boards of, say, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. They might
recall the life and work of the late Peter Jennings. They identify
such columnists as Richard Cohen of The Washington Post and Thomas L.
Friedman of The New York Times as Israeli sympathizers, which is true
in the sense that Cohen and Friedman do not support the murder of
Israeli civilians or the extinction of the Israeli state. But when
Friedman's words suit their own tendency, when he writes critically of
Israeli policy, they cite him. So Friedman is an agent of Israeli
interests, except when he is not. At his Politics and Prose talk, Walt
said that American columnists represent a narrow spectrum of opinion
on Israel. "If you look at punditry in the U.S., there's no equivalent
of a Robert Fisk or a Patrick Seale," he said. This is true, but I
cannot lament the loss. Patrick Seale is the court biographer of the
Assad family, and the author of a book that identifies Abu Nidal, a
mass murderer of Jews, as an Israeli agent; and Robert Fisk is a rabid
anti-Zionist who has lately made common cause with the September 11
conspiracy movement.
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the pro-Israel groups have gone to
dangerous and unprecedented lengths to shut down "honest" debate--one
that would presumably credit the ideas of such fearless truth-tellers
as Fisk and Seale--about Israel. They provide numerous examples.
"Jewish Voice for Peace was denied a booth at a major Jewish community
event in the San Francisco area on the grounds that it was
insufficiently supportive of Israel, and the Hillel chapter at the
University of Texas refused to give an organization called Jewish
Students for Palestinian Rights space to conduct a study group." And
"pro-Israel groups were more active shaping media coverage than pro-
Arab groups were; in 1970, for example, the Conference of Presidents
distributed press kits (complete with photos and feature stories) to
more than seventeen hundred newspapers and to major wire services."
And "to discourage unfavorable reporting on Israel, groups in the
lobby organize letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations, and boycotts
against news outlets whose content they consider anti-Israel." And
"following the publication of our original article ... the president
of the War College received phone calls from several members of
Congress who questioned whether it was appropriate to have us speak at
the conference. To his credit, the president took no action in
response to these calls and we appeared without incident." And "a
subsequent invitation to Walt to speak in a lecture series at the
University of Montana also provoked heated denunciations by several
faculty members, who began a protracted but unsuccessful campaign to
have the faculty coordinator of the lecture series removed from his
post." Booths, press kits, letters, phone calls. Get it? The chilling
pattern is clear. First they come for the faculty coordinator of the
lecture series at the University of Montana, then they come for you.
There is an interesting book to be written about the power of AIPAC,
and other pro-Israel lobbying groups, in Washington. There is also a
book to be written about the moral failings of Israel's occupation of
Palestinian lands. I myself wrote a version of that latter book. But
my recoil from Israel's settlement policy was not a recoil from Israel
itself: I remain a believer in the legitimacy and the necessity of a
national home for the Jewish people. I regard territorial compromise,
and the establishment of the state of Palestine alongside the state of
Israel, as the only solution to this savage conflict. And I am not
much of a believer in AIPAC.
I have three reasons for my distaste for AIPAC. The first is a matter
of style: AIPAC's leaders tend toward glibness and certitude, when the
Middle East is a dense and ambiguous place. The second is that I
dislike single-issue lobbies and single-issue politics--the duties of
American citizenship require more than that; and I worry about the
distorting impact of money in political campaigns. The third is that
AIPAC has leaned rightward in recent years, and today seeks to drum up
support for policies that do not seem to me to be in Israel's best
interests. On the issue of aid to Israel, AIPAC reflexively seeks from
Congress generous grants that also do not seem to me to be in Israel's
best interests. It is true that economic aid is being phased out, but
military assistance is being increased--Israel receives about $3
billion a year in direct aid, although it has become a well-off
country (even if the numbers of its poor are scandalously high). As an
American taxpayer, I would rather see some of that money go to poorer
countries. And I tend to think that Israel would be better off--more
independent, more responsible with its own money--if it paid for
American weaponry out of its own treasury, rather than with American
aid money. I believe Israel should slowly wean itself from American
aid, but AIPAC first has to agree to this.
Now, none of these criticisms requires any courage on my part. Indeed,
these opinions are all widely held and widely debated within the
exceedingly unmonolithic Jewish community, and they betray no
particular animus toward the Jewish state. (Mearsheimer and Walt have
no grasp whatsoever of the diversity of American Jewish life. In a
single sentence, they identify the Zionist Organization of America,
which is run by the revanchist Morton Klein, and the Religious Action
Center of Reform Judaism, which is run by the progressive David
Saperstein, as interchangeable cogs of the pro-Israeli machine.)
Mearsheimer and Walt are for the two-state solution, which is banal
but fine. Yet when did support for the two-state solution require
support for a Jewish conspiracy theory? Why couldn't these formerly
credible scholars have made their criticisms of AIPAC and of Israel
without demonizing Jews and demonizing Israel? And do they know
anything, anything at all, about lobbies in the nation's capital?
Of course AIPAC acts forcefully, even arrogantly: for lobbyists, that
is one definition of professional success. Several years ago, at
dinner with Steven Rosen, who was the foreign policy chief of AIPAC
until he came under suspicion of passing American secrets to Israel
(he has not yet been brought to trial), I mentioned the controversy
involving a former president of AIPAC who was caught on tape bragging
that he had "cut a deal" with the first Bush administration to provide
higher levels of aid to Israel. I asked Rosen if AIPAC suffered from
the affair. He reached across the table. "You see this napkin?" he
said. "In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy
senators on this napkin." As I say, arrogant. But there are a hundred
or more lobbyists in Washington who could pull off the napkin trick:
lobbyists for the gun lobby, and for oil companies and pharmaceutical
companies, and for the anti-Castro lobby and the Saudi lobby. And try
getting any administration to challenge China's record on human
rights. For China, the town is wired in a way that must fill AIPAC
with envy. Say the word "China" in Washington, and congressmen,
lobbyists, and Cabinet officials all hear the same thing: "summer
home."
Mearsheimer and Walt write about the lobbying activities of AIPAC and
other Jewish lobbying and advocacy groups as if they had never set
foot in the capital. Here is their description of the way in which
AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups do their work: "In addition to
direct lobbying on Capitol Hill, the lobby rewards or punishes
politicians largely through an ability to guide the flow of campaign
contributions. Organizations in the lobby also put pressure on the
executive branch through a number of mechanisms, including working
through government officials who are sympathetic to their views."
Imagine that!
One of the most serious charges that Mearsheimer and Walt level at
AIPAC and its neoconservative fellow travelers is that they were
indispensable in pushing America to invade Iraq. There is no doubt
that neoconservatives agitated for the war, and that many
neoconservatives are Jews; and there is no doubt that there were Jews,
in and out of the Bush administration, who argued for the invasion of
Iraq, including Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, and
Richard Perle. Is that really all we need to know about the origins of
the war? There were also some Christians at the scene, including
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell, Stephen Hadley, and Richard Myers. Some of those Christians
were even in positions to order the invasion!
The assertion that the Iraq war would not have happened except for the
lobbying of Jews is an echo of an ancient idea spread by anti-Jewish
ideologues: that Jews, operating in the shadows, manipulate gentile
leaders to unknowingly advance Jewish interests. In order to believe
this in the case of Iraq, the argument would have to be made that
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were not merely idiots, but also
uninterested in ruling. A couple of years ago I asked Rumsfeld to
comment on accusations that the Jewish lobby maneuvered the
administration into war. "I suppose the implication of that is the
president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell
off a turnip truck to take these jobs," he said. But Mearsheimer and
Walt mention Cheney and Rumsfeld only for fleeting instants in their
discussion of the origins of the war. They seem to think that William
Kristol is the commander in chief.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy further asserts that the
Israeli government itself had been arguing vociferously for an
American invasion of Iraq since 2001. Mearsheimer and Walt point to
public-opinion polls that showed that, across the globe, only the
civilian populations of Israel and Kuwait supported the war. They
write as if mystified by these findings. It is worth noting that both
Kuwait and Israel had been attacked by Saddam Hussein--Kuwait by his
army, Israel by his missile force. Perhaps this explains the poll
results. And yet the fact is that the Israelis, and the pro-Israel
lobby, were focused mainly on the threat from Iran, not Iraq, during
the first years of this decade. AIPAC supported the administration in
its pursuit of Saddam Hussein, but only after the invasion seemed to
be a fait accompli. Last month, in an interview, Lawrence Wil- kerson,
who was Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, and who
is an adversary of administration neo- conservatives, told me that
Israel had been consistently warning the administration that Iran was
the main threat, not Iraq. "The Israelis tried their best to persuade
us that we were focused on the wrong enemy," he said, "and that they
were very leery of destroying the balance of power in the Middle East.
But once they understood that we were going to war, come hell or high
water, they weren't going to get on the wrong side of the president of
the United States." (Wilkerson, of course, makes no appearance in this
book.)
And yet even the charge that Jewish organizations took us to war in
Iraq is not the low point in Mearsheimer and Walt's book. Its most
sinister accomplishment is surely the accusation that Al Qaeda
attacked America because America supports the Jewish state. Again,
Mearsheimer and Walt are convinced that the America-Israel connection
is what moves bin Laden. At Politics and Prose, Mearsheimer uttered
this remarkable statement: "Osama bin Laden wanted very much to make
sure that the attacks struck at Congress, which he saw--quite
correctly--as the location of the critical support of the United
States for Israel." Mearsheimer seemed pleased, rather than appalled,
that bin Laden's analysis of Congress's priorities squared so
perfectly with his own.
Yes, bin Laden has Jews on the brain. But he also obsesses about much
else. Don't trust me on this; trust the (non-Jewish) experts. "You
could take Israel out of the equation and Al Qaeda would still want to
attack us," Lawrence Wright, the author of The Looming Tower, told me.
"Israel is a tremendously powerful recruiting tool, but there are
people who are drawn to Al Qaeda for many different motivations. For
Zawahiri, the main goal was Egypt. For bin Laden, the main goal was to
expel American troops from Saudi Arabia." Richard Clarke, the Al Qaeda
expert in the Clinton and Bush administrations, said that "if you look
at Al Qaeda's own writing and their public statements, Israel was not
a major theme. What they say is pretty clear. They want to eliminate
the presence of the far enemy'--us--from the Islamic world, because
the far enemy props up the near enemy,' the moderate Arab states. If
they increase the pain on us, they believe that they can topple the
Arab regimes. If Israel didn't exist, they'd be doing the same thing."
And Peter Bergen, the Al Qaeda expert at the New America Foundation--
one of just three Washington think tanks that Mearsheimer and Walt
praise for escaping the control of the Israel lobby--told me that,
while the Israel-Arab conflict provides strong recruitment, "Pakistan
is the epicenter of planning and training, and the Kashmir conflict is
the strong engine there." Mearsheimer and Walt claim that the "Zionist-
Crusader alliance," the Al Qaeda shorthand for Islam's main enemy, is
a reference to the pro-Israel lobby and its Christian Zionist allies
in Washington. Bergen disagrees. "I never take it to mean AIPAC. It
means Jews, Christians, the People of the Book, the entire West. It's
a big concept. I can't remember bin Laden ever mentioning AIPAC."
In their discussion of these matters, Mearsheimer and Walt seem not
just mendacious but also shallow. They are dilettantes in the subject,
tourists in the conflict. Consider an example. After cherry-picking
quotations from jihadists to support the view that America's ties to
Israel brought us the attacks of September 11, they raise the subject
of Sayyid Qutb's anti-Americanism. Qutb was a terribly important
Egyptian Islamist, and Al Qaeda's main intellectual inspiration.
Mearsheimer and Walt instruct that "Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian
dissident whose writings have been an important inspiration for
contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, was hostile to the United States
both because he saw it as a corrupt and licentious society and also
because of U.S. support for Israel." But wait. Qutb was executed by
the Egyptian government in 1966, almost a year before the Six Day War.
It was not until after that war that America replaced France as
Israel's chief protector and arms- supplier. In fact, throughout the
1950s, the Eisenhower administration was often quite hostile to
Israel. So Qutb's objection, then, was not to American support for
Israel, but to American recognition of Israel. If this is the case,
then Islamist anger at America predates our support for the usurping
Zionists. And if this is so, then Al Qaeda would have attacked the
United States whether or not America was Israel's patron, and whether
or not the pro-Israel lobby existed. Therefore, as far-fetched as this
may seem, the Jews should not be blamed for the attack on the World
Trade Center.
One would think that the editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux might
have harpooned this leviathan of a contradiction before it reached
print. Unless of course you believe, as I do, that Farrar, Straus and
Giroux has all along been allowing Mearsheimer and Walt to undermine
their own credibility by promoting their abysmal arguments about
Jewish power. The publishing house, you see, is not known to be a part
of the Jewish lobby, but its owner, the German company Holtzbrinck,
has been emphatically friendly to Israel, in part out of guilt that
its founder was a Nazi. Remember, everything is not what it seems.
This book about a malevolent conspiracy may itself be the work of a
benevolent conspiracy. I mean, cui bono? Who really benefits from
making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seem so indefensible? Come to
think of it, the name Mearsheimer does have a bit of a Jewish ring.


http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20071008&s=goldberg100807
Dopo aver preso parte a una delle piu' tragiche ed efferrate truffe
della storia, una truffa costata un milione e passa di morti, Goldberg
deve solo scusarsi e rinchiudersi
su un'isola deserta per il resto della sua esistenza.
Comunque, Matthew Yglesias risponde a tono qui:
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/whose_jews_which_empowerment.php
GT

On 2 Ott, 23:15, 
lunog...@gmail.com
 wrote:
la solita paccata di link. un dossier sul personaggio.
Giorgino, ti secca se ti segnalo alla giuria del Bronfman prize? Il
tuo archivio,in cui collazioni ogni precisa parola di tutti quelli che
tifanno soffrire, deve essere un raro esempio di creatività ebraica.
Perché tu sei ebreo, vero?

nahum ha scritto:

ti ha sontato con un destro, non ha avuto bisogno del sinistro, sei 
stramazzato al suolo senza un lamento l'arbitro sta ancora contando ma 
tu riesci a sentire solo rimbombi.
Questa tua risposta lo dimostra.

 tu riesci a sentire solo rimbombi.
stavolta devo quotare il brunobruno....il tarabaralla di replica
sembra il vaniloquio del pugile che ha preso un colpo tale che non sa
più nemmeno dove si trova...

 stavolta devo quotare il brunobruno...
Io aspettero' a farlo quando le fallacie logiche saranno diventate 
argomenti. In campagna queste cose non le sanno, ma in provincia 
dovreste cominciare a esserne informati.
Tb

 Io aspettero' a farlo
scusate, non vedo la risposta di Torrieri agli argomenti di Goldberg,
ho per caso perso qualche messaggio?

 dovreste cominciare a esserne informati.
impossibile, lo sai benissimo che qui ancora ci ingozziamo di film di
Maurizio Arena

 ho per caso perso qualche messaggio?
c'è, c'è, se vuoi far finta di non vederla auguri e figli ciechi...

giovanni2 ha scritto:


Non toccare questo tasto. Sono stato severamente redarguito ed istruito 
dei meriti professionali e antifascisti di Maurizio Arena.
Approfitto dell'occasione per chiarire che non ce l'ho con Maurizio 
Arena, e non lo ritengo un condensato del peggio dell'Italia.
Dicevo semplicemente che qui qualcuno ha avuto un transfert, e a forza 
di guardarne i film su retequattro, che poi e' l'unica attivita' 
culturale possibile in certe desolate lande di provincia, si e' 
immedesimato un po' troppo nel ruolo di sciupafemmine ariane da spiaggia.
Ma nulla da dire su Maurizio Arena in se'. Tanto dovevo e segue in pvt 
con la parte offesa.
Tb

 culturale possibile in certe desolate lande di provincia
lande desolate dove, a titolo d'esempio, l'Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra è appena venuta a suonare (e senza scassarci i maroni con
Mahler come a voi milanesi) nell'ambito di una cosetta chiamata Sagra
Musicale malatestiana, che assieme a 2 altre cosette come il ROF e il
Ravenna Festival riempiono l'estate provinciale di ottima musica, cosa
che aiuta molto giovannino a conquistare le ariane che gli piacciono
di più, ovvero quelle che vogliono darsi un tono. In alternativa, le
ariane sofisticate apprezzano anche manifestazioni di second'ordine
come Santarcangelo dei Teatri o il Pesaro Film Festival, per cui
diciamo che, almeno in alta stagione, la provincia non è così
desolata...

giovanni2 ha scritto:

sperava che torrieri si leggesse tutta quella pappardella del cazzo, 
scritta da un propagandista neocon sputtanato alla grande. Non devo mica 
leggere tutto il mein kampf per poter dire che hitler era un pazzo, la 
sua biografia lo dimostra esattamente come quella di sto Goldberg lo 
pone al di fuori dei commentatori che vale la pena di leggere. Torrieri 
non solo ha "seccato" il coglione di nahum, ma gli ha anche tolto una 
della sue fonti primarie.