Earlier today I mentioned the late Tony Judt’s great moment quoting Arthur Koestler at the Cooper Union debate of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis in 2006. Well here it is, thanks to Henry Norr. Ended the debate, really…
Moderator Ann-Marie Slaughter: You [Martin Indyk and Shlomo Ben-Ami] are saying this article feeds anti-Semitism. This article feeds those who believe that the Jews are operating through a cabal, through a conspiracy that it shouldn’t have been written because it feeds the anti-Semitism which is a little different and saying the articles itself accuses at the Jews of being that way.
TONY JUDT : Anne-Marie, if I could just say something about that …could you hear me?
AMS: Yes.
TJ: Sixty years ago, very near to this room Arthur Koestler stood up and gave a lecture about, then a fairly new phenomenon, that is the rise of the cold war, the emergence of the Soviet Bloc, and so on and talked very angrily and very energetically about everything that was wrong with it, wrong with communism and why ratify it, this goes from an ex-communist.
And he was accused in the room while he was speaking of bringing aid and comfort to what was not yet called McCarthyism or what was soon going to be McCarthyism. You are saying the kind of things that verge on McCarthyism, Nixonism as it was then called, you shouldn’t say this kind of stuff, it helps them and his answer to that was very simple.
You cannot help it if idiots and bigots share your views for their reasons. That doesn’t mean that you can be taught with their views. You have your views and they should be judged on their merits and it worries me that the very first thing we do when someone writes a controversial essay, whatever its academic standing, about the Israel lobby, about relations between this country and Israel, the first question is not, what is the truth or falsity of the substance of it, but how much does it come close to anti-semitism, does it help the anti-semites, should we not have said it, because of the anti-semitism issue? This seems to me to close down conversation with this country
AMS: Then I said…
(Audience Applausing)
