C-Span filmed Walt and Mearsheimer’s event at Politics and Prose on September 5 and has not yet aired it. The event was so jammed, reports the WSJ (fairly), with 500 people, that people were turned away on the sidewalk. Why hasn’t C-Span aired this important talk so that we the people can see it?
Right now the media are in some consternation about The Israel Lobby. They are not sure where the matter is going. The advance word on the book, the piece that set the tone, was David Remnick’s in the New Yorker, and it was a split decision: respectful, but saying W&M are playing into hysteria. Now the book is bumping up the bestseller list even as it is proving deeply upsetting to some people. The Washington Post has run columns by Michael Gerson (a Christian conservative!) and Richard Cohen that savaged it. Gerson says it contains the seeds of anti-semitism. Cohen says the case was so overwhelming it seemed to deny Israel’s right to exist and made him want to break out into Hatikvah. (For all pre- or post-Zionists, here are the words from the card the Zionist Organization of America distributes: "As long as deep in the heart/A Jewish soul yearns/And to the furthest edges of the east/An eye looks, towards Zion…")
Others, including progressive Zionists Dan Fleshler and MJ Rosenberg, differ with the book’s conclusions but are actively engaged in the discussion. They are not trying to marginalize the book. Nick Goldberg of the LA Times gave the authors a fair hearing. As did the Dallas Morning News. And then there are the lovers of the book. Like myself…
When Christopher Hitchens published his diatribe against religion, God Is Not Great, Chris Matthews put him on air. Now W&M are right next to Hitchens on the bestseller list. There is only one answer to this muddle. Goethe’s last words. More Light! Put the authors on C-Span please…
A lot of those Book TV events, I think especially at Politics and Prose, pretty typically air months, on occasion even years, after the fact.
A lot of those Book TV events, I think especially at Politics and Prose, pretty typically air months, on occasion even years, after the fact.
A lot of those Book TV events, I think especially at Politics and Prose, pretty typically air months, on occasion even years, after the fact.
I am going to email C Span and ask what is the delay..
To Phil: have you emailed M & W to ask them what is the delay.
I cannot agree with Jack that a delay is normal for a HOT topic.
BTW there are some good posts of M w on Youtube.
I am going to email C Span and ask what is the delay..
To Phil: have you emailed M & W to ask them what is the delay.
I cannot agree with Jack that a delay is normal for a HOT topic.
BTW there are some good posts of M w on Youtube.
They put Marcy Wheeler on with her book _Anatomy of Deceit_ fairly quickly – less than two weeks after filming her. A very good book, but not on the level as _The Israel Lobby_, which I bought Thursday. I was going to wait until I finish _Team of Rivals_, but picked TIL up last night, and I'm hooked. I'm learning a lot every page so far.
Anyone see the interview with Jimmy Carter on Democracy Now?
Amy Goodman expected Jimmy Carter to be more critical of the Israel Lobby, and of George W Bush, but was disappointed that he was so reticent.
I thought he did a good job. He's a principled man.
It makes his provocative title more believable.
Glenn Greenwald has declared war on the neo-cons. This is the second entry on his blog on Michael Ledeen in a couple of weeks.
(Remember that Michael Ledeen was a principal player in the Iran-Contra scandal but too many officials in the Reagan administration had suspicions that he was working for Israel, that he was passing classified info to the Israelis, while also making some money for himself from the arms deals. Oliver North recommended several times to have Ledeen take polygraph tests!)
Greenwald's e-mail exchange with Ledeen is hilarious:
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"[...] Along those lines, I had the following e-mail exchange with Michael Ledeen today, whose views on these matters — in light of his new book, the various and increasingly absurd Iran "controversies", and his status as favorite right-wing Iran "expert" — I really was hoping to probe in order to write about. This is the exchange with the emails printed verbatim and in their entirety:
GG to ML
Mr. Ledeen – I'm writing a piece for Salon on your new book. I am curious about one issue in particular — if, as you frequently say (including this morning), "Iran declared war on us in 1979 and has been waging it ever since," do you consider it to be an act of treason for those in the Reagan administration who helped facilitate the sale of highly sophisticated weapons to Iran during the 1980s, during the time when they were waging war against the U.S.?
Isn't it the ultimate act of treason to help a country at war with the U.S. obtain weapons? Any thoughts you have to be included in the article would be appreciated.
Glenn Greenwald
GG to ML
While I have you – one other question: yesterday, you indicated that Gen. Abizaid had "suppressed" evidence of Iranian acts of war inside Iraq. Do you have any ideas as to what motivated him to do so?
Glenn Greenwald
ML to GG (re: arming Iran)
As I wrote at the time, quoting Talleyrand, "it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder."
ML to GG (re: Abizaid)
it's all in the book, which i'm sure you are memorizing.
GG to ML
But was it treason to work to provide arms to a country at war with the U.S.?
ML to GG
listen, i've answered you twice. you've slandered me from pillar to post, please stop being rude.
GG to ML
It's true that you responded to my emails, but you didn't actually answer the question. I'll include the email exchange and let the reader decide if you did.
Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/20/ledeen/index.html?source=rss&aim=greenwald
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Right now, nobody is nearly as good as Greenwald in exposing the neo-cons and their agenda. He is leading the way and ripping them apart, all of them, the Kagans, the Podhoretzes, the Kristols, National Review, Weekly Standard, everybody. And he is a star blogger with a couple of NYT bestsellers.
Sounds like Alan has a crush on Glenn. Too bad Glenn doesn't go for Alan's type.
"Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws. But that is clearly not the source of the hysteria surrounding their arguments. “The Israel Lobby” is a phenomenon of its moment. The duplicitous and manipulative arguments for invading Iraq put forward by the Bush Administration, the general inability of the press to upend those duplicities, the triumphalist illusions, the miserable performance of the military strategists, the arrogance of the Pentagon, the stifling of dissent within the military and the government, the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the rise of an intractable civil war, and now an incapacity to deal with the singular winner of the war, Iran—all of this has left Americans furious and demanding explanations. Mearsheimer and Walt provide one: the Israel lobby. In this respect, their account is not so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it."
The concluding paragraph of the Remnick review.
A couple of quotes that express his positions well:
From the Wikipedia article on Amos Oz
* "Two Palestinian-Israeli wars have erupted in this region. One is the Palestinian nation's war for its freedom from occupation and for its right to independent statehood. Any decent person ought to support this cause. The second war is waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause." (April 7, 2002)
…
In July 2006, Oz supported the Israeli army in its war with Lebanon, writing in the Los Angeles Times "Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. This time, the battle is not over Israeli expansion and colonization. There is no Lebanese territory occupied by Israel. There are no territorial claims from either side… The Israeli peace movement should support Israel's attempt at self-defense, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians (not an easy task, as Hezbollah missile launchers are too often using Lebanese civilians as human sandbags)"
Please try to lighten up on the cursing of one's brothers on the planet (me).
Richard, that Oz comment about the Lebanon war and Lebanese civilians is simply inaccurate–Human Rights Watch showed that Israel was largely responsible for the deaths of the Lebanese civilians that it bombed. In most cases there were no legitimate Hezbollah military targets nearby. I hope Oz came to realize his mistake–he was frankly naive to think the IDF would behave the way he wished, and if anything "naive" is too nice a word. Given the history of Israel's behavior in war, there's not any real excuse for an intelligent man to think they'd have not been brutal.
Hezbollah committed its own war crimes, as HRW also proved. I'd like to see discussions of this war (and the Israeli/Arab conflict in general) take the crimes of both sides into account, rather than making up excuses for one side or the other. (I've seen one or two writers on the left attempting to show that Hezbollah didn't mean to target civilians, but this is as false as what Oz claims.)
Oz's statement was written a couple days after the Hezbollah shelling of civilian towns followed by their abduction of soldiers (still unaccounted for).
The IDF response at that point was primarily strategic.
It indicates the sentiment and causes for the sentiment of Israeli advocates for peace.
My suspicion is that Oz shared the view of the majority of Israelis that the source of the problem re:Hezbollah was the absence of clear goal, and therefore absence of strategy and codes of engagement towards the goal, but that the goal of defending Israel from Hezbollah was legitimate.