Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg reached a fresh low, blaming Stephen Walt for the anti-Semitic emails that Goldberg gets. He titled his post, "Stephen Walt’s Mailbag," then quoted a bunch of scabrous and anti-semitic emails that were actually in Goldberg’s inbox.
Crazy. Andrew Sullivan points out that this is vicious guilt beyond even association. Daniel Luban says, shrewdly, "The fact that so many of Walt and Mearsheimer’s enemies have descended into this sort of hysteria…[Goldberg lately went after Mearsheimer, too] has arguably been more helpful to their case than any number of endorsements of their position would have been."
Three years ago at Yivo Institute, Jeffrey Goldberg said that he would refuse to debate Walt and Mearsheimer. Now he is smearing them day after day.
I think the cause of this shift is obvious: Goldberg and his ilk are slowly being edged off the stage by Mearsheimer, Walt, and other critics of Israel. Early this week, Tablet labeled its piece on critics of Israel (notably Walt, Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and Jim Lobe) that inaugurated the smear season, "agents of influence." Right: we have influence in the discourse. Young people don’t trust Jeffrey Goldberg as a guide. They’re looking around, they’re questioning the peace process and the idea of two states. It’s just a matter of time before mainstream editors start trusting us, too. The New York Times’ publication of Glenn Loury talking about Zionism and the Nakba and Robert Mackey talking sense about the flotilla is huge.
Goldberg has had a long run. Consider the fact that early on he seemed content to pursue a parochial career– at the Jerusalem Post and the Forward– then found a golden road opening before him because the mainstream (and yes, pro-Zionist media bosses) trusted Jewish race-men– religious Zionists, like Goldberg. When he got to The New Yorker, it was said that he was editor David Remnick’s id, willing to say stuff that Remnick wasn’t going to say himself but wanted to hear. (Like bad information about Saddam’s alleged ties to Al-Qaeda). Now Goldberg is just Goldberg’s id, and the tantrums show he’s losing power.
