"Am I too sensitive or is this post by Martin Peretz just racist?" asks Muhammad Idrees Ahmad. No Idrees, you're not too sensitive. The post responds to Jesse Jackson's reported statements about Zionist control of U.S. foreign policy in Israel/Palestine. Peretz says Obama has eliminated Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton's "racket."
Blacks have big problems, Peretz says.
I believe that the transformatory demographic absent in the minority world is a solid layer of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer experts. There are only two or three handfuls above none among African Americans who fit this characterization. OK, I'm exaggerating: there are five or six. A paltry number when what is required (for the United States and for blacks) is a vast cohort of such men women trained in the various sciences, abstract and concrete, so that new world not be closed to these citizens and that the upward mobility that flows from these disciplines also be open to them and the coming generations. I've been pushing this idea for more than 40 years with only a bit of success. Maybe I will try to push it on Barack Obama.
Wonder if Peretz will get access. It seems to me that Peretz is being "culturally bound"; he is applying Jewish ideas of exceptionalism to the black community. Everyone's different.
Says Ahmad:
Also note the reference to the "very reliable" Amir Taheri [source of the Jackson Zionist control comments]-- the same fellow who last year floated the bogus story about Iran requiring its Jewish citizens to wear yellow armbands.
A few years back David Mamet wrote a piece in the Guardian where he lamented Hollywood's racial insensitivity and hostility towards Jews, citing a single example where in a film based on Tom Clancy's novel (Sum of All Fears) Israelis were shown to have misplaced a nuclear weapon, a technology they stole from US. This he thought was anti-semitic. Meanwhile the neocons have not felt themselves constrained by such concerns when targeting others. Pipes, Ledeen, Frum have all written about the Muslim "fifth column" in the US.
One other thing. Peretz is very upset that anyone would suggest that Zionists control our policy re Israel. "So now Jackson is a foreign policy realist, like that odd couple, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer." This is an interesting statement; it reflects the reality, which I have again and again told editors about, that Mearsheimer and Walt are very different men, that Walt is a courtly insider in a very Jewish milieu. Harvard, Brookline, the Belfer Chair. Marty's on to that. I've never been able to get an assignment to write about this. Must be all those white-bread Americans who reject the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis out of hand cuz they just love Israel so much. Like Sarah Palin.

Its incoherent.
Peretz says Obama has eliminated Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton's "racket".??
Good…maybe he will also eliminate the AIPAC and holocaust racket.
"And that of the other African American parasites who know how to make a speech."
Well honey, that is the kettle calling the pot black if anything is…there are no bigger or longer running parasites on earth than the jewish victimhood play.
No one knows yet what Obama will do on Israel and the jews…he may do a Kennedy or Eisenhower act on the foreign cabal…or he may not. We will see.
What is incoherent, Richard?
Or do you mean:
Phil,
Martin Peretz,
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad,
Jesse Jackson,
or
Walt/Mearsheimer are incoherent?
******************************************
What happened to you, by the way? You are wonderfully short lately.;)
I went into Moyshe's the other day and ordered a spare Muslim rib on rye and extra baby blood sauce, told 'em not to jew me on the pickles, paid without leaving any tip and even grab-assed the cute chick at the cashier on my way out.
Like my hero Martin Peretz, I'm trying to check all common sense, decency, and understanding of human rights "at the deli door".
Mayhaps, Witty (and SOG) are more like David Duke?
SOG is the old David Duke, Witty the modern one.