The Freeman story is huge. Andrew Sullivan is obviously enraged; here he links Fareed Zakaria's pretty good interview of Freeman under the headline, "Crackpot… See for yourself: the man too dangerous to be allowed into the US government."
And here is my piece in the American Conservative. Wow, they gave it a great headline: "Are you now or have you ever been an Arabist?"
Last night at the 92d Street Y, Eric Alterman said that Freeman was in a State Department tradition that included Arabists. I think Freeman's an Arabist, but I also wonder whether this isn't in the end a form of projection. Jews are engaged as Zionists on Middle East policy. Freeman's legacy is the traditional (yes patrician) State Department types who opposed Partition and the recognition of the state of Israel out of a concern for American interests; there'd be war for generations in that part of the world, they said. They were accused of antisemitism. And they were described widely as Arabists. I suppose some of them are Arabists, some have been driven to study Arabic. I want to study it myself. Adherence to Israel has deeply hurt the United States. The difficulty now is trying to reclaim an American interest that is not nativist or nationalist, which is why the American Conservative, which Pat Buchanan founded, has been the leader in the U.S. on this issue. No one did Gaza better here. I remember when my hero Mike Kinsley said that he believed Buchanan was an anti-semite. I was on Mike's side on that one. Now it is a matter of indifference to me. (As a friend states the issue: "since the danger of the spread of anti-Semitism in America seems infinitely smaller than the danger of the spread of lies that lead to wars; and Buchanan has been good at exposing the worst of the recent lies.") Chas Freeman grew up in a milieu that surely included antisemitism. Blueblood, childhood in the Bahamas, Yale, Harvard Law. Puritan roots and ethos. One beauty of his case is that so many Jews came to his side. We all get a chance to change in life.
