Walt & Mearsheimer Crack NYT Bestseller List

.
Sorry I am posting this a second time. It is also at the end of the previous commentary and I think it might get buried. It was considerable work to get the links together.

I'm glad M&W is having an impact but I know I couldn't read it. Looking at it on Amazon I was referred to Joel Kovel's 'Overcoming Zionism' and ordered it. Have only had time to read the beginning but I am very pleased with it. It gives a unique (psychoanalytic) point of view on the history and motives of Zionism.

Then I found that the book, published in England, had been suspended by its US distributer, the U Michigan Press, because of Zionist pressure on the U. It has since been reinstated but the U is now considering whether to end its distribution of all books by the publisher. For news on this see:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=29839248&postID=887452129804271410

Also there is the action of UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake of revoking the offer to Erwin Chemerinsky to head their new Law School. Here is the excellent editorial on it in the Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/opinion/14fri3.html
and here is Drake's statement:
http://www.chancellor.uci.edu/lawschool_dean_070913.shtml
in which he insinuates that Chemerinsky would intimidate the students.

The reason for this reversal is not known, but the best guess is that it has to do with Chemerinsky's representation of the family of Rachel Corrie, since nothing else about him seems to be particularly controversal.

I wish there were more people like Richard Drake. Unfortunately the Zionists have usually been successful in intimidating academic institutions.
See the excerpt from M&W on Amazon, and also DePaul's dropping of Finkelstein, which happened too recently to be mentioned in the book.

All of which reflects on Phil's strange espousal of elitism. US elites are mostly either deaf and blind, and/or co-opted. I can have no respect for them, especially the 'intellectuals' who should know better.

Me,

I'm tired of seeing my tax money awarded to the top 5% of property owners in the US.

I'm not particularly tired of my tax money spent (with guidelines, not micro-management), to support the defense of a vibrant democracy, periodically under military assault.

Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

When I was in the Reagan administration, America had a lively press that never hesitated to take us to task. Even the “Teflon President” received more brickbats than Bush and Cheney.

The lively press disappeared along with its independence in the media concentration engineered during the Clinton administration. Shortly thereafter all the liberal news anchors disappeared as well. Today the US press a serves as propaganda ministry for the government’s wars and police state. Yet, some conservatives continue to rant on about “the liberal media.”

That other conservative bugaboo, liberal academia, has also been crushed. Universities once controlled their appointments, but no more. Recently, the political science faculty at DePaul, a Catholic university, voted to give tenure to the courageous scholar and teacher Norman Finkelstein. The department was unable to make its tenure decision stick over the objections of the Israel Lobby and their conservative allies, who were able to reach in over the heads of the political science department and the College Personnel Committee and force DePaul’s president to block Finkelstein’s tenure. Finkelstein had angered the Israel Lobby with his criticisms of Israel’s misuse of the holocaust sufferings of Jews to oppress the Palestinians and to silence critics.
On September 14, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that the appointment of the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the Dean of a new law school at the University of California at Irvine had been withdrawn by the university’s chancellor, Michael V. Drake, who gave in to the demands of conservatives outside the university. Conservatives are outraged at Chemerinsky because he criticized Attorney General Gonzales. In withdrawing Chemerinsky’s appointment, Drake told him: “I didn’t realize there would be conservatives out to get you.”
Gonzales is the attorney general who wrote memos justifying torture and denying that the Bush administration was bound by the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales told a stunned Senate Judiciary Committee that the US Constitution did not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.

To experience an attorney general of the US fiercely attacking the US Constitution, rending its every provision, is the most frightening experience of my lifetime. That the head of the legal branch of the executive, sworn to uphold the Constitution, would turn against it in order to enhance unaccountable executive power is a clear impeachable offense. If anyone anywhere in the world deserved criticism, Gonzales did. But when Chemerinsky unbraided the despicable Gonzales, conservatives rushed to Gonzales’ defense, not to the defense of the American Constitution.

It seems only yesterday that conservatives were complaining about the liberties that liberals took with the Constitution. Liberals were expanding rights, fancifully perhaps. But today conservatives are curtailing long established rights, such as habeas corpus and protection against self-incrimination. Conservatives abandoned “original intent” and all of their constitutional scruples once they had a chance to cram more power into the presidency.

In my conservative days as an academic, I experienced some liberal blackballs. But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se. The new conservatives despise academic freedom and have created organizations to monitor departments of Middle East studies in order to lower the boom on scholars who follow the truth instead of neoconservative ideology or Israeli policy. Today academic freedom has disappeared just like the independent media. No one but powerful organized interest groups has a voice. In the media truth can only emerge on comic shows like The Colbert Report and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

In years past, conservatives were often shouted down on university campuses by left-wing students. But today speakers disapproved by powerful interest groups are simply disinvited in advance. Even Harvard University has fallen to the new censorship. On September 14, 2007, the Harvard Crimson reported that the Israel Lobby was able to force Harvard University to disinvite three speakers, an Oxford University professor, a DePaul professor, and a Rutgers professor, because they had criticized Israeli policy.

In America today, speaking your mind in the media or in academia is a thing of the past. A country that has no voices independent of powerful interests is a country in which freedom is dead.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

There was an inadvertent typo in Richard Witty's post. For 'vibrant democracy' read 'vibrant ethnocracy, with a healthy dose of theocracy'.

"to support the defense of a vibrant democracy, periodically under military assault."

God help us all if to be a liberal humanist today means to be a Richard Witty…

An irony of this debate, considering Walt and Mearsheimer, is the degree of defamation that a even a humanist Zionist will attract from those speaking in defense of free speech.

I think Richard Witty is either badly informed or totally indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians, not only those in the occupied territories (whose life is literally the dog’s life that Moshe Dayan wished on them) but the Palestinian Israelis, in name full citizens of Israel.

A state that systematically discriminates 20 % of its own citizens cannot be called a 'vibrant democracy'. We are not merely talking here of everyday discrimination of ethnic minorities taking place against the law in, let us say, such a country as France but of state instituted and legally based discrimination.It is this that makes of the term 'vibrant democracy' in relation to Israel a mockery.

Susan Nathan, a Jewish woman of English descent, has written a book about the way Israeli citizens of Arab descent (20 % of the Israeli population) are treated. The title is: “The Other Side of Israel. My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide”.

Here is a fragment of an interview with her by Savitri Groag:

"SUSAN NATHAN: My book is about the status of the Palestinian minority living in Israel. Palestinians in Israel are being discriminated in their lives on every level. The worst form of discrimination comes from land allocation. 94 per cent of the land in Israel is in the hands of the JNF (Jewish National Fund). This land can be used by Jews from all over the world. Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20 per cent of the Israeli population, are destined to their ghettos. Thus the Israeli state sends a constant message for Arabs to leave Israel. For me it should not be a solution if the Palestinians should obtain more land. I'd rather have the Jewish and Palestinian community mingle. One state for all inhabitants. That unavoidably means the end of the Jewish state.

QUESTION: What other ways of discrimination of Palestinians in Israel do exist?

SUSAN NATHAN: In all layers of society life Palestinians are being discriminated against, from education and employment to land allocation and community subsidy. Illegal houses (built because Palestinians in Israel could not obtain building permits, where Jews from all over the world could) are being demolished. In the meantime Israel is building settlements in the West Bank illegally.

Also, in education there is discrimination. Arab schools get fewer subsidies. For instance, books and computers are not paid for. Schools are located in bad buildings, without heating or air conditioning. Also, Palestinian teachers are screened before they are allowed to teach. They are not allowed to have too much political interest or to teach about the Palestinian history or the Naqba (the catastrophe for the Palestinians due to the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948). Palestinian history is being denied. In the meantime complete museums about Jewish history have been established.

It is rejected to establish a Palestinian university in Israel. The racist system is being disguised by the fact that Israel lacks a constitution. If a constitution should be recognised internationally the principle of equality should be part of it. Then Israeli Arabs should have a ground to fight their inequality. The system of laws in Israel in itself is a way of discrimination, because many laws are valid only if you have served in the Israeli army, which only Jews are entitled to [do].

There are many other ways of discrimination. Palestinian villages, for instance, are not in computer databases; at the airport Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are questioned and searched thoroughly and eventually cannot pass. Jews do not want to know about discrimination, they don't want to see it. So Palestinians in Israel live separately, invisible for Jews."

This situation has become so flagrant that dissident Israeli intellectuals have been forced to come up with other conceptual tools than Mr.Witty’s ‘vibrant democracy’ to analyse the situation. Here is a fragment of Raymond Deane’s review of Jonathan Cook’s book “Blood and Religion. The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”:

“Israel's defenders have tied themselves up in knots explaining how an "ethnic democracy" can still "operate within the parameters of democratic behaviour," the tragedy being that so many outsiders have played along with such conceptual contortions. Only in the late 1990s did certain dissident Israeli intellectuals query this model.

"Political geographer Oren Yiftachel defined Israel as an "ethnocracy," being "neither authoritarian nor democratic… Ethnocracies, despite exhibiting several democratic features, lack a democratic structure."

"More recently political scientist Yoav Peled, for whom "The logic of the Oslo process was a demographic logic," a logic "to which the PLO was a party," has argued that (as Cook paraphrases him) "Israel could no longer be characterised as a democracy, even in the most formal sense." “

"This assessment was confirmed by a poll organised in 2003 by the Israel Democracy Institute which found that only 77 percent of Israeli Jews believed that democracy "was a desirable form of government, giving Israelis the lowest ranking in a comparative survey of public attitudes in 35 democratic states." It concluded that "Israel is mainly a formal democracy that has not yet acquired the characteristics of a substantive democracy." Clearly the continued use of the trope "the only democracy in the Middle East" needs radical revision.”

.
Arie: I liked your recent contributions, especially the last one. I'm sorry I had false suspicions about you.

Richard Witty won't know whether to laugh or cry–
"Iran Holocaust Show Sympathetic to Jews"
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i1DoYxdYKXISuFW3fYXFNistVjsg

Israel is not black/white, good/bad.

There are bad policies, and there are excellent policies.

The policies and actions are the appropriate focus of dissent. The mischaracterization is only a generalization, and in this case a largely false one.

A society in which generalization is the method of discourse is more fascist than democratic.

Its also a false perspective to ignore context. An environment at war is a different environment than the US or Europe.

One key component of Jewish consciousness is the quickness and viciousness in which a formerly civil society (say like Germany, or Hungary, or Poland) can shift to accepting and implementing its fascistic impulse, and in most cases singling out the Jews for exactly what Phil and Walt/Mearsheimer has alluded to, the "dual loyalty" smear.

Richard Witty, did you by any chance intend that mishmash of woolly statements you came up with in your last letter to be an answer to my post?

"I am rejecting WM papers."

Meaning Steve wants a place in the editorial staff of The Atlantic Monthly.