Hurray for The New York Times. Today it covered Walt and Mearsheimer’s forthcoming book fairly (a piece penned by the wonderful Patricia Cohen, who broke the AJC anti-Zionism fatwa story last winter). The story is demoralizing. We learn that many venues have now turned their backs on the eminent profs, refusing to even have them come and talk about work that everyone is talking about behind closed doors.
Most significantly, the City University of New York will not do an event because J.J. Goldberg of the Forward refused to moderate a panel with W&M. He says he doesn’t want to appear to be endorsing the book, and "I don’t think the book is very good." He says that the authors didn’t interview anyone in the lobby or anyone who was lobbied.
Goldberg’s comments are sad for a few reasons. First, he is the most important editor of a Jewish publication in the U.S. Consider, even the City University took its cue from him. Second, Goldberg moderated a panel I was on two months back, sponsored by progressive Zionists, having no objection apparently to shaking my hand, though I share many of W&M’s views. I’m a nobody; Walt and Mearsheimer’s book is extremely important. It requires an airing. It requires combative New York Jews and non-Jews discussing it at the City University. Third, Goldberg’s trashing of the book is unfair. The authors are not journalists; their job was not to interview people (though surely they have talked to many of the lobbyists and lobbied, in their fancy universities). They are scholars; and I can tell you that their book (which I have seen) is thunderously impressive on scholarly grounds. Its range and depth of reference are tremendous. Compare them for a moment to another eminent scholar, Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis anatomizes the Arab psyche. He says the 9/11 killers bombed the World Trade Center because they came from failed societies and missed the glory of the Caliphate. He offers these psychological stretchers on the basis of extensive research. I don’t think he has ever interviewed an Arab. Certainly not for What Went Wrong, which I was reading today. And Bernard Lewis is invited to the White House; he wrote for the New Yorker; he has a birthday party introduced by Dick Cheney. Notwithstanding his erudition, Lewis has wretched judgment about current events (he says in What Went Wrong that the world will not exhaust oil supplies but will "supersede" them with other resources; meshuganah). Walt and Mearsheimer have superb judgment about current events; they would have stopped us going to Iraq. Lewis was all for it.
I feel that J.J.’s response is reactive. The author of a great book on Jewish Power, J.J. has worked honorably to advance the conversation in Jewish circles. That’s why he will do a panel with me, a wayward Jew, in a synagogue, organized by progressive Zionists. That’s a Jewish discussion. But he is, I think, afraid of what will happen if the mainstream press starts to argue whether there was not a neoconservative/Israel interest in invading Iraq; afraid that this argument will take hold, and that our people will be hurt. A year back, J.J.’s newspaper trashed Walt and Mearsheimer’s article in an editorial called "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews."
Enlightened Jews must ask: are we willing to give up our intellectual freedom out of a fuzzy fear of pogroms in the United States– when our country is in crisis over an unmitigated foreign-policy disaster and the Arab world is in flames? Are we too afraid to have a discussion? I wonder whether J.J. does not agree with Ari Ben Canaan, the hero of Exodus, by Leon Uris. Says Ari:
Don’t be fooled by [sympathetic gentiles] all over the world. They weep crocodile tears and they pay lip service to our millions of slaughtered, but when the final battle comes we will stand alone. Mandria will sell us out like all the others. We will be betrayed and double-crossed as it has always been. We have no friends except our own people, remember that.
It’s time to trust the United States. Give Walt and Mearsheimer a hearing.
Related posts:
- Did Jeffrey Goldberg (Bravely) Damage His Friendship With Wieseltier by Embracing Walt & Mearsheimer Position?
- Peretz Says NIE Shocker Re Iran Was Enabled by… Walt & Mearsheimer
- Yivo Owes Walt and Mearsheimer an Apology. Or a Stage
- Legendary ‘NY Review’ Hasn’t Gotten Around to Walt & Mearsheimer, Now Out for a Year
- At a Philadelphia Synagogue, Fear of Walt/Mearsheimer (and the Myth of Jewish Powerlessness)
{ 7 comments }
they are dodging this issue because they know they have no case. there is no good reason for our israel centric foreign policy and the neo cons know it best of all. anyway, let them drown in their own irrelevence. they can book abe foxman to talk about the "new new new anti semtism" to a half filled room of people who have heard it before
The concept of a university is now anathema to the pro-Israel lobby (comprising the Zionists plus the cowards like Goldberg). Welcome to the madrassas of Dershowitz's Harvard, Brandeis and DePaul.
Walt must be drummed out of Harvard and Mearsheimer ditto out of Chicago. Both utterly mainstream, their degree of intellectual independence is clearly too great to be tolerated. How has CHomsky remained at MIT – outrageous. Welcome to the New Inquisition.
About Goldberg:
"He says he doesn't want to appear to be endorsing the book, and "I don't think the book is very good." He says that the authors didn't interview anyone in the lobby or anyone who was lobbied."
It appears (from Phil's comments) that G.s judgment is factually incorrect. But even if it weren't would it hold much water? I doubt it. This criterion would condemn any work of historical political sociology (such as for instance Lewis Namier's "The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III")in advance. But not only that. It could also be held against classics of contemporary political sociology such as for instance Lipset's "Political Man".
The idea that political analysis requires personal interviews is, indeed, as Phil points out, a journalistic idea.
By the way, I notice that Goldberg, in the Forward editorial denouncing M&W, claims that "they state, incorrectly, that Israel did not allow Palestinian refugees to return after 1948." I try to stay familiar with the Zionist interpretation of Israeli history, but this claim is new to me. Does anyone (Arie?) know what he is likely to be referring to?
There is a lot of this crap going on:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/16/yaleup
Yale University Press on Wednesday announced that a libel suit against it and one of its authors has been dropped, without any changes being made in the book or any payments to the plaintiffs. The book in question is about Hamas and comes just weeks after Cambridge University Press settled a libel case against it over a book about Islamic terrorism by promising to destroy remaining copies of the book.
Related stories
Sailing from Ithaka, Aug. 1
University Presses Take Their Stand, Feb. 28
Pressing On, June 21, 2006
The Shift Away From Print, Dec. 8, 2005
Publishers Sue Copy Shops for Alleged Infringement, Nov. 16, 2005
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The cases are notably different in that Cambridge was sued in Britain (where libel protections for authors and publishers are much weaker than those in the United States) and Yale was able to file motions in California courts, which have stronger libel protections for authors and publishers than much of the United States. But the fact that Yale took a strong legal stance on a book about Hamas is likely to cheer scholars of terrorism, some of whom have been deeply concerned that the Cambridge settlement would prompt other presses to back down if sued.
The book over which Yale was sued is Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, by Matthew Levitt, who is director of the Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence and Policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. While some observers have distinguished between Hamas’s terrorist activities and the group’s social service activities with Palestinians, Levitt’s argument is that they are in fact intertwined. Yale’s description of the book says: “Levitt demolishes the notion that Hamas’ military, political, and social wings are distinct from one another and catalogues the alarming extent to which the organization’s political and social welfare leaders support terror. He exposes Hamas as a unitary organization committed to a militant Islamist ideology, urges the international community to take heed, and offers well-considered ideas for countering the significant threat Hamas poses.”
The libel suit was filed in California in April by KinderUSA, a nonprofit group that says it raises money for Palestinian children and families, and Laila Al-Marayati, the chair of the group’s board. They sued over two passages and related footnotes in the book about charitable groups in the United States that the author believes are linked to terrorist groups. The U.S. government has investigated some Muslim charities in the United States for such links, but also said that such probes do not suggest that all Muslim charities have such links. The lawsuit specifically objected to this passage: “The formation of KinderUSA highlights an increasingly common trend: banned charities continuing to operate by incorporating under new names in response to designation as terrorist entities or in an effort to evade attention. This trend is also seen with groups raising money for al-Qaeda.”
According to the suit, suggesting that KinderUSA “funds terrorist or illegal organizations” was “false and damaging” and libelous. The suit also alleged that Yale “did not conduct any fact-checking” for the book. KinderUSA asked the court for an injunction on its request that distribution of the book be halted, and also sought $500,000 in damages.
Since the suit was filed, Yale has indicated that it and its author stood behind the book. (Levitt was out of town Wednesday and could not be reached.) But in July, Yale raised the stakes by filing what is known as an “anti-SLAPP suit” motion, seeking to quash the libel suit and to receive legal fees. SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” a category of lawsuit viewed as an attempt not to win in court, but to harass a nonprofit group or publication that is raising issues of public concern. The fear of those sued is that groups with more money can tie them up in court in ways that would discourage them from exercising their rights to free speech. Anti-SLAPP statutes, such as the one in California with which Yale responded, are a tool created in some states to counter such suits.
In Yale’s response, it noted that KinderUSA has been reported to be the subject of investigation by federal authorities, that these investigations have received detailed press coverage (prior to the book), and that the views of the book were legitimate and contained no errors of fact that meet the test for libel. Yale noted that the book was subject to peer review and copy editing and that the author verified that he had fact-checked the book. A Yale editor certified that he had no knowledge that anything in the book was incorrect. Yale’s brief called the suit a “classic, meritless challenge to free expression,” and sought the suit’s dismissal and legal fees. While Yale’s motion was not heard in court, the suit was withdrawn shortly after it was filed.
“I think this represents a win for free expression, and for university presses,” said Dean Ringel, a lawyer who worked on the case for the Yale press. Ringel said that Yale believed the book had not libeled anyone and that the suit needed to be defended.
Here's a college professor being threatened with a denial of tenure for exposing the fraudulence of Israeli archaeology:
http://chronicle.com/new/article/2866/alumni-group-seeks-to-deny-tenure-to-middle-eastern-scholar-at-barnard-college
I agree with you. J.J. was wrong here. He should've moderated the program and raised all the objections & criticisms he wished.
In the post I wrote about this I mentioned the e mail J.J. sent me trying to explain his perspective. I didn't find it convincing just as I don't find many of his criticisms of the book convincing.
Unlike you, Phil, I was critical of some arguments W-M advanced in their original essay. There were simiplistic arguments & overstatement which I hope are corrected in the book version. But aside fr. that this is a book worth reading & pondering written on a subject that is vital to Jewish, U.S. & Israeli interests.
I've linked to my post about this subject attached to this comment.
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