Alex with his dog Jasper. (Photo: Tao Ruspoli/CounterPunch)
On Friday Alexander Cockburn, fearless journalist with a caustic tongue known for lashing corporate corruptors, jingoistic foreign policy, and compromising leftists—even colleagues—passed in Salzhausen, Germany at the age of 71. Although battling cancer, Alex kept his illness quiet. He chose to work right up until the end of his life with most unaware that his time was coming to a final stop.
From Jeffrey St. Clair, co-editor with Alex at CounterPunch:
Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.
…
Alex lived a huge life and he lived it his way. He hated compromise in politics and he didn’t tolerate it in his own life.
Born in Scotland, raised in Ireland, Alex came from a family that are the Redgraves of independent media. He is the son of newspaperman Claud Cockburn, whose novel Beat the Devil, which became a film starring Humphrey Bogart, was the namesake for Alex’s acerbic column at the Nation magazine. He was also the brother to journalists Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, and the late novelist Sarah Caudwell. As well as uncle to Grit TV’s truth-telling mogul Laura Flanders, BBC editor Stephanie Flanders, and actress Olive Wilde, who peeks into food politics on her blog Wilde Things.
In the 1970s Alex got his start in U.S. media with the Village Voice, leading to a gig at the Wall Street Journal. Then Alex moved to the Nation and later co-founded CounterPunch.com.
In the obituaries that have poured out since Alex’s passing, those that knew him highlight his sharp opinions. He was “a punishing writer,” said Wayne Barrett, who worked with Alex’s during his Village Voice days.
And former Assistant Secretary to the U.S. Treasury under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts (yes, Alex made friends across party lines), wrote:
Alex lived in the U.S. for a long time and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. He wrote for the Village Voice and in the Reagan years had a column on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, something that would be impossible today.
I will miss him and so will people who do not know who he was. The force has been weakened.
(Photo: Tao Ruspoli/CounterPunch)
I was fortunate enough to also know Alex as his one of his research assistants during most of 2010. It was my first post-college, post-internship gig. Echoing what others have said, I learned from him what fearless writing looked like. Alex never dropped issues because they were out of fashion. He was persistent about ending nuclear energy from the time of the Three Mile Island disaster to today. And he did so with a charisma that made him forthright, not acrimonious. From one of his last columns published on March 26, 2012 in the Nation:
Nuclear power really is safe, because we didn’t lose Pennsylvania or Tokyo. Stratospheric levels of cesium, strontium-90 and tritium? No problem. ‘Even if you eat contaminated vegetables several times, it will not harm your health at all,’ the BBC reported Edano as advising. From the point of view of the nuclear industry, the great thing about nuclear fallout, provided it doesn’t fry you on the spot or within a day or two, is that cancer takes time to show up, during which more nuclear plants can be built and more money coaxed out of dangerous existing ones.
And he was one of the first writers to catch onto the Obama administration shoveling subsidies into nuclear energy, while it was deceptively re-named “clean energy,” or “green energy.”
His biting sensibility was also exercised in critiques of Zionism, making Alex an early fall guy for the pro-Israel lobby. The Evening News called it “journalistic hygiene,” when in 1984 he was fired from the Village Voice after the news broke that he received a grant from the Institute of Arab Studies to write a book on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. But the sanction did not censor Alex. Instead he carried on reporting per usual, firing away at injustices and sloppy analysis. In a 2010 the Nation column, “Israel: Into Deeper Darkness,” Alex called out Haaretz and ABC over reporting his friend Noam Chomsky was “denied entry into Israel:”
Entirely untrue. Chomsky was denied entry to Ramallah, not Israel. This distinction highlights, among other things, that Israel controls the borders into occupied Palestinian areas.
Most writers I’ve worked with are too timid to ruffle the feathers of friendly publications. But not Alex. However his more damning pieces were reserved for more questionable figures, for instance Marty Peretz of the New Republic. Even the New York Time‘s obituary noted Alex’s ropework used on Peretz in particular:
After Martin Peretz, the longtime owner and editor in chief of The New Republic, had a fainting spell in Paris in the late 1980s, Mr. Cockburn gleefully wrote that Mr. Peretz had been dining at an expensive restaurant where patrons were ‘so bloated that they have to be rubbed down with Vaseline to squeeze through the door.’
With Alex my assignments always varied, leaning to the esoteric if not outright bizarre. I liked his style and it suited me to scour archives looking up nudist colonies in California, or a cult leader who died in a mysterious 1960s fire, or the cost of medical compared to street marijuana . I saw many odd facts end up as logical empiricism in policy pieces. The marijuana figures fed a story on California’s proposition 19, which was reported as decriminalization, but Alex showed the measure was a tool for corporations to privatize family farms. He had a way of catching the insidious lurking behind the liberal.
When I read Alex’s columns, I eagerly looked forward to what he would say next. And although he has passed, still there is more to come. Jeffrey St. Clair mentions in his dedication two more books will be published posthumously.
Alex, it was an honor to have worked for you. Best,
Allison
Politics of Antisemitism, such a prescient work. RIP Mr. Cockburn.
Alison, I think Alex started writing for the Village Voice in the 1970s. He wrote a column with James Ridgeway and the Pressclips column, dispenser of advice to benighted scribes. “Dear Dr Pressclips…” This was before you were born, so you are forgiven.
His departure from the Voice has been glossed over in all the commentary. It came in 1983, after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the Sabra-Shatilah massacre and seizure of a security strip south Lebanon, under the control of the “South Lebanon Army”, and related horrors. Tempers were very high at the Voice basically because many Jewish writers simply couldn’t take the truth, and there had been the usual hyperbolic slander of “anti-Semitism on left”.
This was the backdrop to the contrived controversy over the grant from the AAUG, I think, to write about Palestinian affairs. Obviously receiving a grant on any other topic would not have been controversial. His left Zionist enemies pounced, aided perhaps by the fears of the incumbent editor, a corporate nonentity, over Alex’s popularity as a threat to his position. The Voice ran a “Blazing Typewriters” issue of commentary (cf. “Blazing Saddles”), including from Noam Chomsky. But in the end Alex was given the boot.
Readers were very supportive. The best letter I recall came from one Sarah Miles in Brooklyn, which said
NO BISH, NO REVO
NO COCKBURN, NO VOICE
This was at the time of the Grenada invasion, an early exercise of Reagan muscle-flexing, against the popular revolutionary leader, Maurice Bishop, who was eulogized in Grenada in the first line. I had several pieces on CounterPunch, though my last submission, “Liberal Citizenship, not Jewish Identity” was declined, without comment, to appear on DissidentVoice. I can now forgive him, thinking that his illness affected his judgment.
He was a unique voice and will be missed. His weekly “CounterPunch Diary” was for many the equivalent of the NYT’s Week in Review, and will presumably be published as a collection. As with Maurice Bishop, for many of us, NO COCKBURN, NO VOICE.
I remember Alexander Cockburn’s departure* from the Village Voice. The pretext was that Alex received an advance from a pro-Arab think tank in London. At the time, many people pointed out that nobody has ever been fired for taking B’nai B’rith money.
Decades ago, Cockburn was one of the very very few journalists willing to be strongly critical of Israeli policy.
*He wasn’t actually fired. He was suspended. But then he got a job with The Nation, which was a coup for The Nation and a black eye for the Village Voice.
Thank you, Allison.
My last submission to CP, whose rejection I mentioned above, was in January, and its entirely possible that he wasn’t attending to editorial duties closely, and it slipped past him. Either way, NO COCKBURN, NO VOICE.
Allison, thank you so much for your remembrance, and congratulations to you for having had the opportunity to work with Alex. I eagerly consumed his columns for about 35 years, ever since a law school buddy recommended him. I met him once, briefly, and he was very friendly to this fawning stranger (I actually asked him to sign one of his books), and still stung from the passing of his good friend Edward Said a month or two earlier.
To me, Alex’s most memorable columns involved sniffing out the lies in widely-accepted stories. He was the lone voice to immediately question the story that Iraqi troops had taken babies out of Kuwaiti incubators and left them to die on cold hospital floors. Years later, journalists finally got to the bottom of that hoax that helped to fuel Gulf War I. He also ridiculed the official explanations for the US invasion of Grenada to save American med students; the bombing of the Sudanese pharma factory; and the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner in June 88. Again, it took a long time for others to catch on (I recall seeing a Nightline years later where Ted Koppel repeated the “revelations” I had read from AC immediately after that last disaster). His instincts on these and many other stories were astonishing. Even if he wasn’t right 100% of the time, his track record was phenomenal, considering how often he was a lone voice in the wilderness. He loved to quote his dad: “believe nothing until it has been officially denied.” Good rule of thumb.
His occasional dust-ups with Dershowitz, on I/P and other issues (the first I recall was over Tiananmen Sq. in 1989) were hugely entertaining. Not only did he skewer the Dersh, his brilliance and wit were LOLable.
Allison, you’ve been a great addition to MW staff, and now that I know of your association with this giant of journalism, I appreciate you even more.
“Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”
Thanks for that David.
David Samel, Allison: Cockburn was wonderful, and so are you. Keep on truckin’.
Re the Kuwaiti incubator babies left to die on the cold floor by Iraqi soldiers here is Cockburn’s exchange with an Amnesty International official:
I remember this incubator story well as it was the item that most angered me about the Iraqi invasion, though I continued to take a firm stand against the US response. Gradually the story fell apart. Oddly the first crack in the story for me was a tiny piece in buried in USA today quoting a Finnish hospital worker saying it didn’t happen.
The significance of this story beyond one normal atrocity fabrication is that six Senators who had up to that point been against the pending war changed their positions as a result of it. Their six votes were enough to change the balance of votes in the Senate in favor of the US military intervention. By the time the story was totally exposed as a hoax generated by a Washington DC PR firm, the war had been fought.
Moral of the story is to not support anyone’s war based on initial reports of horror stories.
Thanks David, Annie and Citizen.
best homage i’ve read to alex thus far allison. thank you. i’ll second david … you’re a great addition to mondoweiss.
Thank you Allison for this eulogy. I just read a wonderful Facebook comment on the post-mortem potshots that David Frum, Harold Myerson and even Geraldo Rivera have been brave enough to take at the great AC: ” I like people still being mad at Cockburn better than the pretense that he was a lovable gadfly in the mix.” Thank you Allison and MW for your courage and intelligence.
Very interesting! It’s good to learn of these personal and political connections.
I surely hope CP continues to beat the devil for many years to come.
And keep it up MW as well.
We need you both.
Thank you Alex Cockburn. RIP.
A fine homage to a fine scribe. I contacted Alexander three months ago. The subject of my email was the historian William Blum whose articles had abruptly ceased to appear on CounterPunch to my surprise and I sought an explanation from its editor. It ran in part:
“Dear Alex,
I hope this finds you well. I’m a long time admirer of your steady artillery fire against the cranks of Freedom’s Land, and a first time correspondent. God knows that I’ve reached for my keyboard a million times with your email in the address bar to send you words out of which many flowers bloom, but sloth won the day and my hand was stayed. As much as I relish your weekly subversion of the national quackery, I was shocked to find that I had never read your books and I am lost for where to start. Or perhaps I have and just misplaced the work.
I nurse the deep suspicion that you are the resurrected spirit of Mencken freed from the hotter climes of Hell to afflict and alarm the sons of God. Don’t bother denying; I am a soul of immovable convictions. I would be grateful then if you might give me some pointers on which book of yours the novice might profit starting with.”
No answer came back from Alex. And now I understand why. A profound loss. I look keenly forward to his upcoming memoirs. It’s a mark of his devotion to his craft that to the very end he was still slouching over his typewriter. Thank you for this tribute.
Theodore, when you finally did get around to sending that email, it was a gem.
David, you are a fortunate man to have shaken hands with the legend. Perhaps if I can shake yours some of the gold dust may rub off on me.
“to send you words out of which many flowers bloom, but sloth won the day and my hand was stayed”
I have always admired the things that people of Indian and Pakistani heritage can do with the English language.
“His critics quoted the final passage, reproduced below, to accuse Cockburn of spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories:[33][34]
Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussions of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing Mohamed Atta and his associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it, or were simply spying on US facilities.”
link to en.wikipedia.org
This was not someone to be admired. This was an anti-Semite.
If some Ziobot wouldn’t soon reinstate it I would edit out the passage on anti-Semitism in AC’s Wiki page. It’s like accusing someone of communism in the 1950s, or of being a witch in Salem in the 1660s. It should be retired until Zionism is retired.
Come now, Fredo, why not print the response, and not just the charge? Especially as it touches on your bullshit claim of antisemitism:
I guess when there’s no Jewish guy to defend, you just switch to level unwarranted attacks on anyone who doesn’t like your apartheid state, huh, Fredo??
I anticipated that someone would come out with that “defense”. It’s like saying in a prominent forum that “rumor has it Mr.XYZ is a pedophile” then “defending” yourself against claims that you are anti-Mr.XYZ by saying “I never said the rumor was true, I was just reporting what was already in circulation”.
But it does not mean that you are anti-Mr.XYZ simply because you report stories in circulation.
The Republican stories in circulation against Obama include (1) that he was born in Kenya; (2) that he is a socialist; (3) that he is secretly Muslim; etc. Am I now “anti-Obama” simply because I recognized and reported or what other people are saying?? No. Only a moron would think so.
Sheesh, give the ideological nonsense a break and use your brain, for once. Cockburn’s point was that it was very odd that Billy Graham was known to have had discussions with Nixon in which: (1) Graham and Nixon made anti-semitic comments about the supposed power of Jews in the media and in society and that (2) Graham recommended that if the peace talks with the North Vietnamese failed, that Nixon should bomb the dikes in North Vietnam, which would kill a million people.
Cockburn pointed out that the media ignored the latter and expressed “shock” at the anti-Jewish statements.
And he made a good point. Why would anyone in the media be “shocked” that two old bigots, thirty-some years ago, were expressing bigotry about Jewish control of the media and their political power on the left?? Even today, he suggested, the same types of discussions are “sloshed” about the news. Yet, he noted that these stories “raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level.”
You really have to intentially misread this to view it as being anything other than anti-Nixon and anti-Graham.
Do you think that anyone who was actually supportive of these ideas would describe them as “acrid”?? (I guess a paranoiac might say he described it that way so as to give himself plausable deniability or some such nonsense.)
And of course, that’s just one example of the anti-Semitism of Mr. Cockburn and his magazine. They printed an article claiming that the medieval blood libel was true.
link to hurryupharry.org
Original article here:
link to webcache.googleusercontent.com
Which I note has exactly the same kind of “implausible deniability”. Rather than taking responsibility for her own anti-Semitic spreading of the blood libel, she instead quotes a source who later recanted his accusations and acted as though she was just “reporting” something that someone else said rather than giving fresh life to old anti-Semitic slurs.
“They printed an article claiming that the medieval blood libel was true.”
That’s a lie. The article did not “claim[] that the midieval blood libel was true.” In fact, the article specifically noted that the blood libels are “widely refuted stories that Jews killed people to use their blood in religious rituals.” The exact opposite of your libel.
The article details information concerning the israeli organ-trafficking scandal, involving the organ-snatching ghoul, Dr. Hiss, who you repeatedly defended.
“Rather than taking responsibility for her own anti-Semitic spreading of the blood libel, she instead quotes a source who later recanted his accusations and acted as though she was just ‘reporting’ something that someone else said rather than giving fresh life to old anti-Semitic slurs.”
You really need to learn how to read, because she reported the facts concerning Rabbi Toaff, including the fact that after being pressured by, inter alia, the ADL and Abe Foxman — as the article specifically notes — Toaff recanted, denied his research and paid Foxman with the profits on the book he’d made to that time.
She didn’t need to “act” like she was just reporting something, because she actually was just reporting something. Fredo, what you don’t seem to get is that just because someone reports a thing, doesn’t meant that the reporter actually did the thing or agrees with the thing.
So when Walter Cronkite reported about the moon landing, he didn’t actually land on the moon. And when Woodward and Berstein reported on the Watergate coverup, they weren’t involved in the Watergate coverup. And when the Washington Press Corps reports about the allegations hurled at Obama by the nutball right-wingers that he wasn’t born in Hawai’i, that does not mean that those reporters believe that Obama wasn’t born in Hawai’i. And when Allison Weir reported on the facts about Toaff’s book, that does not mean that she agreed with the thesis of the book.
Actually she goes out of her way to make the blood libel spreader Toaff seems like he knew what he was talking about, saying he was basing his claim on 35 years of research, when the man was actually basing it on one incident in which a priest vanished (maybe not even dead) and a confession was extracted from Jews by torture, and not “sleep deprivation and solitary confinement” type torture, but “medieval rack and thumbscrews” type torture. She was doing her best to give false credibility to a story with no credibility. Toaff wasn’t a Rabbi, his father was a prominent Rabbi who expressed shocked disappointment that such lies came from his son. Then, rather than admitting that he recanted because he realized that making a claim like that based on a tortured confession was stupid, she made it out to be a Jewish conspiracy to silence him.
As for the organ transplant nonsense, you can’t take an organ from a dead person for transplantation. That’s one reason why its so hard to get organs for transplant, you basically have to take them from someone braindead on life support or from someone living. Dr. Hiss’s organ theft from dead people was for research purposes, not for transplantation.
Fredo, there is nothing which she reported which was untrue. (btw: He was a rabbi, as was his father, at least according to haaretz.) If you don’t think that she wrote about it in the way that you would have liked, that does not make her an antisemite.
Unless, of course you think that anyone writes about this subject must write in the matter which you approve or else they’re an antisemite… (which appears to be the way your mind works…) (And, tell me, is it only the inferences that you make or don’t make that are key to this fantasy-land antisemitism claim, or do you judge it on word choice and punctuation, too??)
“As for the organ transplant nonsense, you can’t take an organ from a dead person for transplantation”
All the more reason why there should have been a transparent, neutral investigation, as Weir recommended.
“Dr. Hiss’s organ theft from dead people was for research purposes, not for transplantation.”
Well, at least now you’re admitting that he stole organs. Now, if we can only get you to admit that stealing organs without the consent of the next of kin is a grievous wrong…
Fred, you’re wrong about organs only being donated by the brain-dead and not the recently deceased, but far worse than that, did you really read what you wrote? Even if you were completely right about the medical aspects, which you are not, it’s not a scandal because the organs were stolen for research and not transplant purposes???? Seriously?
Just guessing here, but are you the same guy who came up with the line that the Jews of Europe did not immigrate to Palestine to take homes, lands and communities for their home countries, but only to take them for a future Jewish State – So what’s everybody complaining about? Same brilliant logic.
Because that is the M.O. of the modern “don’t call me an anti-Semite” anti-Semite. Instead of saying “Jews this” or “Jews that”. They say “other people say that Jews this or Jews that”. Then they give false or deceptive reasons to try to bolster the non-existent credibility of the “other people”. In the case of the Cockburn quote I posted earlier, the attempt to bolster the credibility was saying it was “sloshing around in the news” when the only place it was sloshing around was anti-Semitic publications. In the case of Alison Weir’s article, it was trying to build up the credentials of some idiot who said something ridiculous then realized how ridiculous it was, and to claim that he recanted because of a conspiracy. That’s how they work.
Well, Fredo, I suppose that if someone wanted to express antisemitism they could say, “other people say that Jews this or Jews that.” Of course, a person — say a reporter — may simply want to say what other people are saying about the subject. And that’s kind of the problem. Because a non-antisemitic reporter might do the exact same thing you believe an antisemite might do but the reporter might not, in fact, be an antisemite. That’s where your allegations are so off base. Unless you have something else to go on but this, you don’t have anything. It’s equivalent of saying “KKK members revere the Chrsitian Cross, so anyone that reveres the Christian Cross is a KKK member.”
“when the only place it was sloshing around was anti-Semitic publications.”
Nonsense. To take just one example, the “dancing Israelis” story appeared all over the media. 20/20 did a story on the story. Does that make Barbara Walters and John Stossel antisemites?
“In the case of Alison Weir’s article, it was trying to build up the credentials…”
How was she building up anything? She reported what he claimed, that he was looking at the issue for 35 years.
“… of some idiot who said something ridiculous…”
No, the story angle isn’t that some idiot said something ridiculous, but that a professor at an Israeli univeristy did. Regardless of what happened later, that fact alone is very newsworthy.
“…and to claim that he recanted because of a conspiracy.”
Where are you reading conspiracy? She said that there “he was attacked from all sides” (which he was… indeed, half a decade later, you’re still attacking him) and that ” under relentless public and private pressure” he recanted, which is also true. (Actully, the public part is undoubtedly true. I can’t attest to what private pressure he was under, but it is a reasonable conclusion to say that he experienced private pressure, especially given, for example, his employer’s call for meeting where he was to explain himself.)
Again, this looks like nothing but you saying that there are certain subjects that can only be discussed in one way and anyone who fails to do so hates Jews. That’s simply bullshit.
As I said, and as you continue to ignore, someone merely reporting on what other people are saying, when they know it is false, do not attempt to give false or deceptive credibility to the claims that the “other people” are saying. The professor in the university was an idiot for saying that the blood libel _may_ have happened based on a tortured confession with no actual evidence. He realized that he was an idiot for saying it and recanted because he realized how stupid it was to base such an outrageous claim on so tainted a source. Objectively, there is no reason to report on this other than to try to further spread the blood libel or to refute it. Rather than pointing out why it was wrong, she did everything in her power, including falsely claiming he was basing it on 35 years of research rather than basing it on one incident with tortured confessions. She was trying to make it seem true, not just reporting on something obviously false. That is what demonstrates she is an anti-Semite rather than an objective reporter.
I never said he didn’t, just that there is no evidence any were taken from Rachel Corrie.
@David Samel
Of course it is a scandal, just not even remotely close to the level of scandal you and your ilk make it out to be. Taking organs from people who are already dead, which happened. Is nothing close to killing people for the purpose of taking their organs, which your side falsely imply and/or outright say happened.
Stop trying to characterize Israel’s actions as merely ‘taking’ and not what it actually was – STEALING.
And it doesn’t matter how Israel ended up stealing the organs of Palestinians. Your fascist apartheid State kills more Palestinian children than Palestinian militants kill Israeli civilians in general anyways so who cares how the organs were obtained? The point is that they were stolen and lied about to the families of the deceased.
It was only after the story broke that the truth came out.
You have now defended, along with hoppy and the settler side-show gulag-g, pedophilia in the orthodox community and a crime in which a Jewish assailant slashed a Palestinian citizen of Israel to death and was given a lenient sentence.
You continually whitewash the disgusting state of Israeli ‘democracy’ even though you’re not Israeli.
When Islamophobic clowns like you, who know nothing about history aside from what you copy/paste from nationalist hate-sites like JihadWatch or any Zionist blog (see: all your idiotic comments on the ‘occupation’ of the Iberian Pennisula LOL) – it is not even a slander against the accused.
It’s a badge or honor. So thanks, it means we’re doing something right if all you can do is cry antisemitism.
You and hoppy ran out of your bag-o-tricks a long time ago.
Fredo, I understand exactly what you are arguing; I simply think you are wrong. The author of the piece was under no obligation to frame and report that part of the piece in a manner acceptable to your at the risk of being called an antisemite.
“Objectively, there is no reason to report on this other than to try to further spread the blood libel or to refute it. ”
Sure there is. She was comparing the reaction Toaff received in response to his book to the reaction the investigators in the organ-theft story received (apt, given the charge in the latter case that it was a modern-day blood libel). Now, this is not the comparison I would have made, but you seem to think that the sole and only non-antisemitic stories which can be written about the Toaff affair are: (1)Toaff is an idiot; (2)Toaff’s thesis is wrong. That’s nonsense.
“…including falsely claiming he was basing it on 35 years of research rather than basing it on one incident with tortured confessions.”
I read it as Toaff saying that he based his book on 35 years of research. If he did not, and she got that wrong, then she should not have made that statement.
“She was trying to make it seem true”
No, that was your inference, not her implication. When you’re primed to find antisemitism everywhere, you’re bound to have false positives.
You would do better to take your righteous indignation over whether or not Weir is an antisemite because she did not express “properly outraged” about a book covering racist libels in the midieval period, and address modern day people who are carrying on the same types of libels against people, like the guy who wrote the “King’s Torah” and the rabbis who teach that non-Jews are inferior to Jews and that it’s okay to kill non-Jews if you think they might pose a danger in the future, and who praise people like Baruch Goldstein.
No, that was her implication, not my inference. She didn’t get it wrong, she lied. Just like she lied about “Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many, real incidents.” Toaff originally said that there might possibly have been one incident, and he based that one on nothing but false confessions extracted under torture. Then said that he was wrong, long, long before her article was written. The sole and only reason she reported on it at all was to make it seem true and deliberately spread the blood libel.
Read the refutation articles instead of getting all your info from Alison Weir.
link to hurryupharry.org
link to adamholland.blogspot.com
“1) Ariel Toaff is not “Israel’s preeminent expert on medieval Jewish history”. Weir has no reason to believe that he is and provides no citation for this invented claim. Toaff is not a rabbi. Toaff did not conduct 35 years of research into the question of whether Jews conducted ritual murders of gentiles, or used blood to cast spells. All of these claims by Weir are untrue and were invented by Weir to burnish Toaff’s reputation as an expert on the subject of ritual murder and bolster his opinions about it.”
She also cited the fact that his father was a big shot Italian Rabbi to further enhance her claims. Without mentioning his father’s reaction:
“(T)he criticism that everyone has expressed about his book was justified. His arguments in the book were an insult to the intelligence, to the tradition, to history in general and to the meaning of the Jewish religion. It saddens me that such nonsense was put forward by my son of all people.”
“Read the refutation articles instead of getting all your info from Alison Weir.”
I did read them. I’m not at all impressed. Besides the false statements, they appear to make exactly the same mistake you do: the author doesn’t understand that simply because the article doesn’t present the ideas in the way the author would have, he simply makes stuff up and assumes that Weir is lying.
Fred, your dishonesty here is appalling, but I suspect Cockburn would find it amusing.
“Fred, your dishonesty here is appalling, but I suspect Cockburn would find it amusing.”
Thank you, David.
“This was not someone to be admired. This was an anti-Semite.”
Interesting how this alleged anti-semitism (which ultimately just consists of words, however objectionable they may be to you or any of us) seem to bother you a lot more than the real abuses that happen every day in the OT.
No perspective. No reality.
” This was an anti-Semite.”
Haha.
Sorry, but this makes me laugh.
Allah irhamu/ar dheis Dé go raibh se le gach Pailistineach a dúnmharaigh Iosrael
I walked down a cemetery one day, holding my six-year-old daughter’s hand. After a while she suddenly stopped and I saw her gazing at the surrounding headstones. She then looked up at me and asked, “Where do they bury all the bad people?”
Great line, Daniel. I saved a computer file of my youngest’s best sayings at the same age, and she just used one on a job bio at age 21.
@ David Samel,
Sometimes it takes open eyes to see that we’re blinded.
Where are they burying Alex Cockburn?
In the military cemetery on Mount Herzl, by special request of the Knesset. The estate preferred the British war cemetery on Mount Scopus, but agreed to the Knesset’s request.
This seems like a well deserved eulogy for a man that is respected by the anti establishment left and the right, pretty neat trick in and of itself…whatever those terms( left and right) used to mean they do not seem to matter much anymore.
Thanks Allison, I didn’t know much about the man but have read a few of his articles and he seemed to have developed a great bull*s.t detector.
there seems to be much truth to the saying that nowadays an “anti semite is someone israel lovers love to hate”, and with a passion i might add.
I am a big fan of the CounterPunch website, my number one source of alternative news. I don’t know how involved Alexander Cockburn was in the daily editing of the site, how much it will be effected by his passing. As for the man, I have somewhat mixed emotions. I have the impression that he was a diehard contrarian who almost always disagreed with the “official” position. As such, he was usually correct, official disinformation being as rampant as it is. And, while his political analyses appeared sound, I’m not so sure of the quality of some of the rest, such as his outrageous position that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax, the fantasy of grant seeking opportunists. His knowledge of the issue was abysmal, consisting primarily of cherry picking the global warming “skeptics” to support an opinion arrived at based upon his self-image as a contrarian muckraker anxious to expose “fraud.” I sent a nasty e-mail to him at CounterPunch in response to this, however, I don’t know if he read it. So, while I enjoyed most of his writing and agree that he was a clever writer, I have reservations that perhaps he was occasionally a little too clever, bias and lack of knowledge camouflaged by clever phraseology, somewhat untrustworthy.
Nice piece, Allison. I’ve been a reader of Cockburn for decades, and a fan of much of his work, and I too will miss his voice.
On the other hand, there’s an unpleasant fact I think we have to face: he was dead wrong on what I consider the defining issue of our time and the greatest challenge humanity (not to mention other species) has ever faced – global warming. It’s not just that he refused to accept the overwhelming evidence and the views of nearly all climatologists, but that in making his case he relied entirely on long-discredited theories and “experts” who were actually kooks, cranks, and corporate shills. He blithely dismissed the whole thing as a hoax and simply refused to address the science.
For all his many virtues, those are not the marks of a great journalist or a true progressive. This may be harsh, but here goes: if someone was a brilliant writer on other issues but supported, say, slavery or fascism, I doubt we’d see all these uncritical tributes, but if we could quantify human suffering, it seems very likely that global warming will cause a whole lot more than either of those terrible historical phenomena.
If anyone wants to review his position on this, try “The Sad Case of Alexander Cockburn” at Climate & Capitalism (motto: “Ecosocialism or barbarism: there is no third way”). And if that’s not enough, Znet has a multipart debate between him and George Monbiot and others.
Give it a pass Henry. He published a few of these climate denial pieces but did drop the whole issue in the face of strong opposition. Those articles convinced me that Alx was scientifically illiterate and I was disappointed that after his errors were pointed out that he didn’t just bite the bullet and admit he was wrong. Those articles are such a tiny piece of his life’s work it is only his enemies that are bringing it up now.
Henry, if I am not mistaken you were once part of the weather underground. I remember those days. That was the time that non-violent street demonstrations became irrelevant because every time we tried to put one into operation a bunch of weather thugs would show up, start breaking windows and totally dominant the message we tried to push. Alex was always a severe critic of those idiots. Dear Henry, do you still feel the sting?
Good grief! It’s break time at the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission hearing on Veolia, I go outside to check my mail, and I find myself accused of having been a member of the Weather Underground! I don’t have time to respond at length, but before this goes any further, let me just say I was never part of anything Weather, underground or over. Wherever did you get that idea, ToivoS?
Sorry about that henry. I did get that impression but must admit now it was in error. I was just going on my memory and realize now it was in error. Not at all clear where that came from. Again, I do apologize.
Henry Norr is a great journalist. We are lucky to hear his work at this site. I’m disappointed that anyone would stoop to such an attack on Mr. Norr here.
Henry, thanks for your ever-inspiring research and perspective.
Here is the 1984 article in the Boston Phoenix that started Cockburn’s dismissal from the Village Voice. The grant was for $10,000 from the Institute for Arab Studies, an affiliate of the Association of Arab American University Graduates, in Belmont. Both groups were academic non-profits, not lobbying groups. The funds came from private sources, not governmental ones. It was a perfectly respectable source from which to receive a grant. The topic was not respectable, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
This is purely an Israel lobby hatchet job, early 1980s edition. The author inflates a controversy, by citing the ADL et al as independent, unbiased sources, repeating their attacks on the AAUG and IAS as sinister propaganda efforts simply because they represented a Palestinian point of view. Absent that, there would have been no issue at all.
Alexander Cockburn’s $10,000 Arab connection
A question of propriety
link to thephoenix.com
The author was Alan Lupo, a Boston journalist who died in 2008. See
Obituary: Alan Lupo, streetwise Globe columnist
link to boston.com
Citizen your link to the boston.com did not show anything.
However, this whole “controversy” exposes the utter hypocrisy of the Zionist discourse of the IP story. It is perfectly OK for American scholars to accept grants from Israeli and Israeli-Lobby sources to spread their tales of that most beautiful country in the world, but lo and behold if a critic accepts funds from a group that represents the non-Jewish peoples from the ME. This is utterly sickening.
In any case Alex Cockburn was one early voice in exposing this hypocrisy. May his works continue to inspire.
Tovio, if you’re curious, google Alan Lupo or look on boston.com. That link was an obit from 2008
Thanks Allison. His legacy and spirit lives on through you and others like you. (Same with Edward Said). Keep up the good work.
RIP Alexander Cockburn.
I’ve read Counter-Punch now and then, but I never knew that Mr. Cockburn had ties to Germany (I’m a German myself). Does anyone know why he lived, or died, in Salzhausen?
I wondered about that too, but I expect it was the cancer treatment that brought him. I recently read of a German doctor who had an international following for his treatment. Even if it wasn’t the same doctor it may have been another, perhaps using a method not yet approved in the US.
As far as I know, he never lived in Germany. He lived in Humboldt County, California for many years but did a lot of traveling. Just guessing, but perhaps there was some particular medical treatment he was receiving in Germany.
Allison I am impressed. You actually worked with Alex for a year. I only met him twice and was quite impressed. Both times he was speaking at a book club — promoting his books of course. His writing stands on its own. But what impressed me about those two talks was this was a man totally comfortable with his own ideas. There was no showmanship about him. His presentation could be called aloof but it was someone who was totally comfortable with his ideas. I mention “his ideas twice”. Alex was completely comfortable discussing ideas. As he should have because so many of them were original.
Alex was not just a caustic journalist but was also a true intellectual. He continued to bring new ideas forth within his critical and always humerus essays.
The thing that I am missing right now: who can replace Alex.
Great job Allison.
I just read this Cockburn piece on Friedman’s ego, which Greenwald posted.
Great stuff…
link to mailman.lbo-talk.org