Neocon Ira Stoll, writing in the Daily News, claims Lincoln for Israel. He says that Hamas has perpetrated the equivalent of slavery and the only way to fight slavery is to destroy it. He, and Cynthia Ozick too, is upset about a new Jimmy Carter book saying that the Civil War could have been averted, and that Lincoln became deluded by messianic ideas when there were better ways to end slavery than war.
My friend Jack Ross seizes on this and writes, "Put this in your Lincoln kick and smoke it."
1) Has it really completely slipped my mind to point out in this whole discussion what Lincoln is for the neocons and especially the Straussians, that is, an example to be invoked for any and all atrocities to be committed in a war fought for progress?
2) What, ultimately, is the difference between Lincoln's mythical "Union" and Herzl's mythical "Jewish people"?
Weiss response. I limit my Lincoln hermeneutics to pre-1859. I don't see a mythical Union in his writings at that point, I read hatred of slavery and a political mission to oppose it. I share Jimmy Carter's hope that the Civil War might be avoided--this time--in Israel/Palestine, where slavery is being practiced, with great statecraft. I haven't studied Lincoln as president. I wonder whether he didn't himself feel that he had erred. As Carter observes, slavery was dying around the world when we had a war that not only killed hundreds of thousands but wounded the south to this day. Today democracy is flourishing in the west and Israel is practicing apartheid. How do we lead it forward without bloodshed?
Look to Obama, the Lincolnite. He intends to do nothing about I-P until his second term. To do otherwise would be political suicide. The advantage is that by 2012 Israel will have put another few thousand squatters on the West Bank, and will have completed its bifurcation. That absolutely precludes the two-states solution; there will be no decent alternative left but the bi-national state solution. And anyone who doesn't think it will work otta look at Canada: true, we are a centrifugal nation — always on the verge of flying apart — but that is our strength, not our weakness. It precludes the cultivation of an unhealthy nationalism — the kind that occasionally gets the US in trouble, the kind that is driving Israel to ruin.
it's that "second term" meme again. don't fall for that old gag again, people.