The New York Times says it "condensed" this interview with Norman Podhoretz, presumably because he was longwinded. I am going to condense it further and leave out most of Podhoretz’s answers, which are slippery and old school, and keep the questions. Note the point of view of the interviewer, Deborah Solomon: liberal Jews are passionately pro-Israel, the settlements may have "oppressed" the Palestinians, and that neocons allegedly provided the intellectual justification for the Iraq war. These questions show how head-stuck-in-the-sand are mainstream media Jews, who are mostly all PEP, progressive except for Palestine. As if there is any doubt that neocons provided the thinking for the war. As if there is any question that the occupation has oppressed Palestinians–with two systems of roads, and 600 checkpoints! Solomon/Podhoretz:
What you’re overlooking is that many American Jews on the left are passionately pro-Israel.
…The ideology of the left, in the last 50 years roughly, has represented the Palestinians as a kind of dark-skinned oppressed people like the blacks in this country. Obama believes that. [did we ever take slavery out of the textbooks?]
You mean that the Palestinians are oppressed by Jewish settlements?
It’s a crazy idea… [planet check!]
Do you think the neoconservative movement discredited itself by pushing the Iraq war?
the idea that Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz somehow manipulated Don Rumsfeld into doing something he didn’t want to do is lunatic. [man up, Norman, take some g-d responsibility]
The charge is not that they manipulated Rumsfeld but that they provided the intellectual justification for the war.
Neoconservatives were never quite as powerful as people thought we were. [slippery]
