A friend just brought this to my attention, from two weeks ago. Jeffrey Goldberg on “Chuck Hagel and the Jews”:
[A reader asks] “Don’t you think it’s dangerous for groups like the American Jewish Committee and the ADL, etc., to get so identified with stopping Hagel, to associate Jews with this cause? Couldn’t this backfire?”
Jews are unpopular when they’re powerless. They’re unpopular when they’re powerful. They might as well be powerful, no? Do you think Stephen Walt is going to suddenly like Jews when Jewish groups lose whatever political influence they have?
It’s amazing that the Atlantic would give Goldberg a platform for such a malicious statement. But he’s gone even further in the past.
[Walt] makes his living scapegoating Jews… grubby Jew-baiters like Stephen Walt.
It is devastating to be accused of anti-Semitism. Peter Beinart:
The core truth is this: In American punditry today, you can casually accuse a decorated war hero of bigotry against Jews or Israel secure in the knowledge that while the accusation may destroy his career, it will never imperil your own. Until that changes, nothing will.
Most remarkably, Goldberg provides no evidence whatsoever to support his charge. None. Walt, a Harvard professor and former dean at the Kennedy School, has been sharply critical of Israel in the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy and in his blog on Foreign Policy, but where’s the anti-Semitism? In that book, Walt and his co-author John Mearsheimer repeatedly cite the dark history of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, and point out that Jewish persecution was fed by overblown theories of Jewish influence– then take care throughout their analysis to distinguish between “an interest group whose ranks are mostly Jewish” and Jews generally. They echo JJ Goldberg’s view in the book Jewish Power that “an entity called the Jewish community” has played politics in “rough-and-tumble” style and say it is “fair and indeed necessary” to examine the effects of interest-group politics. The idea that Steve Walt is anti-Semitic is preposterous and outrageous. He has made his career in a largely Jewish community, his chair at Harvard is endowed by a Jew, he was introduced by a Jewish friend at a speaking engagement I went to last summer. After the Washington Post implied he was anti-Semitic a few years ago, I asked Walt if it was true as I’d heard that he was married to a Jew; Walt wrote to the New York Observer to explain that his wife is from “a culturally Jewish extended family” in New York and added:
As you might imagine, I find this whole type of discussion disheartening. Our country shouldn’t be debating important issues by focusing on people’s individual characteristics and backgrounds. That is what racists and anti-semites do: they look at someone’s heritage and claim to know what they think, what they believe, and how they will act. Instead of focusing on our arguments and evidence, people want to look for some hidden motivation.
Normally, when a supposedly serious journalist tells repeated falsehoods (i.e., he lies), he can expect to suffer some professional consequences. But not in this case.
Update: Goldberg also writes for Bloomberg.
You forgot to add that some of his best friends are Jewish…
I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Phil.
While it’s true that in the past the lobby could finish people’s careers off for good, the situation is much changed now.
Thanks to our opponents crying ANTISEMITE! far too many times and in far too many situations, the charge itself has zero weight in Europe and is diminishing by the day in the USA. Consider just how many genuinely great and good figures have been accused of antisemitism in the recent past, and the accusation becomes nonsensical, simply a bad joke.
Steve Walt’s post and reputation is secure, no matter how much Jeffery Goldberg might wish otherwise.
Beinart—In American punditry today, you can casually accuse a decorated war hero of bigotry against Jews or Israel secure in the knowledge that while the accusation may destroy his career, it will never imperil your own. Until that changes, nothing will.
Well then, when they have destroyed Israel, they will have destroyed their own Careers.
Israel must be the most unlucky nation on the planet, having these bimbos,(Goldberg/Koch/Kristol et al) defending or should that be destroying it.
What bothers me stems from the facts that Goldberg obviously believes this (he knows full well that saying this promiscuously just devalues the charge, and doing so invalidly against a guy like Walt could only incite distrust of jews in the most elite of spheres), and that there seems to be lots of support for Goldberg’s views.
So … what are gentiles supposed to think of jews if we are all just a moderate comment or observation or so away from being regarded by jews as “grubby” anti-semites?
If indeed they feel themselves utterly surrounded by 300+ million either gross anti-semites or subtle ones or merely nascent ones, do they really feel themselves part of this nation? Part of this community?
I wouldn’t. Nor do I think any normal person would.
And so again how are gentiles supposed to feel about this?
I can well understand—and indeed agree with—the idea that because of the Holocaust especially, but also just because of simple human courtesy, politeness, consideration and etc. that one should avoid giving unnecessary offense. Be sensitive to natural and normal and even extra-sensitive feelings.
But aren’t we in essence being asked to say *nothing* unless it’s laudatory? To avoid any and all comments or even questions—such as Walt and Mearsheimer made and asked—that might upset the hyper-sensitive too?
Quite clearly that’s not just the desired rule but indeed very close to the situation in the U.S. at least.
It’s funny, but all we can seem to hear in any discussion of jewish/gentile issues is the question of … how jews feel. Not unlike reading about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where so often we’re told that no, the Palestinians really don’t care about the settlements, but that of course there’s no question but that any peace deal has to accept the biggest of those settlements. (Because, apparently, what the Palestinians really want is up for grabs, and because what the Israelis want just has to happen as if God had decreed it.)
Oddly though, I never seem to see any discussion of how jews feel that *gentiles* should feel about being regarded apparently as just one tiny step away from being genocidaires.
Or, to put this another way simply reversing the Goldbergian sensibility: If I believed that jews—in the main and on the whole, and to some realistic degree—were really just a step away from wishing to kill or subjugate me as a gentile or a Christian, I don’t think anyone would deny that this would be anti-semitism of the worst sort.
So how come, when we merely flip that proposition, nobody’s calling Goldberg or all the similar believers—which would seem to include whole rafts of mainstream jewish spokespeople at least—”anti-gentile,” “anti-Christian,” or “Christian-haters”?
Seems intemperate, but why given the logic involved? Someone please tell me: Why are these labels invalid?
Phil? Adam? Anyone?
As always, it intrigues me why the Atlantic keeps Goldberg on.
If you discount Goldberg, there’s precious few left on that site who are Zionists. Many probably do not like Zionism; after all, why should they? Zionism isn’t liberalism. Zionism is aggressive ethnic nationalism. It’s the very anti-thesis to a liberal.
But before I speculate, let me just note one more thing about Goldberg.
Goldberg, in his ‘memoirs'(the best way I can put it), admitted that in his youth he was a follower of Kahane, not organizationally, but an admirer from distance.
If you don’t know who Kahane is, I’d recommend googling the guy. It’s revealing look into the connected sewers that make up the mind of Jeff Goldberg.
What really struck me was when he wrote about Kahane’s funeral.
As I read the passages, I was shocked to see just how amazingly ambivalent he was about that fascist, even neo-Nazi(if there could be sucha thing), Jew, despite the fact that Kahane’s notorious and deranged racism was well, well known by then.
As I read one, he reluctantly conceded that Kahane’s violent, ultra-aggressive fantasies of outright ethnic cleansing was “unhelpful”, he nonetheless stated ambivalent admiration, even after the old man’s death.
This truly stunned me. Can you even imagine a self-proposed white Gentile ‘liberal’ who openly sympathized with David Duke and/or other neo-Nazis and wrote of their reluctant admiration of the men if/when they die, even if they put in a tactical “they were wrong” as a pure tactical concession? I tell you, they wouldn’t even get a second look on their CV.
Yet it keeps amazing me how the Jewish variant, of essentially the same thing, of the violent white racist version, keeps somehow getting forgiven. Zionists like Goldberg keeps talking about double standards. He probably knows deep down that a racist like himself operates under one.
Second, just a quick note, about just another nail in the supposed liberal coffin of Goldberg. Namely: whenever he ‘attacks’ Israel he always empores the racist ultra-right in his next post. Notice the premise, a premise Goldberg doesn’t challenge(!), about how all those who are for Hagel, or at the very least “those driving the conversation”, are supposed anti-Semites. Goldberg buys this line completely. His thuggish racist side rears its ugly head. He emphasizes completely with this sentiment, and gives it ample room.
But, finally, returning to why Goldberg is somehow kept on. Well, he did diversify to Bloomberg. I don’t think that is a coincidence.
He probably feels less wanted. James Fallon, a typical careless liberal WASP, is the most important person editorially at the Atlantic. He subtly nudges Goldberg about his Zionism, but never really bites thoroughly. My guess is access. Goldberg has tremendous access to the most bigoted, and most powerful, corners of the Israel lobby. He is also the mouthpiece of Israeli propaganda(like his support for the Iraq war, or his support for the Iran war).
Yet Fallon has to, at some level, actually think that Goldberg is an independent journalist. He isn’t. He’s a lobbyist. But that’s another story.