Peretz has stood up for Khalidi. Very nice. And good for Jake Tapper, too: he calls Peretz a super-Zionist. Perhaps preparing America to learn the stations of the Religious Left that has controlled our disastrous policy in the Middle East, a journalistic chore so far left undone.
Something else I was just thinking about the New Republic at lunch today. My first cover story for them, maybe my only one, I can't remember, was about the culture of the Gannett news organization, Al Neuharth. It was a very critical piece, focused on USA Today, I think. I can't remember any of this stuff. But what I remember clearly is that my editor, Jefferson Morley, a wonderful guy, kept pushing me to call Gannett's culture authoritarian, and words to that effect. He was right to do so, partly because I was incapable then of any synthetic thought, and the idea arose from the facts I'd assembled. But my point is that journalists have always been urged, good journalists, to make synthetic leaps, sometimes of a highly critical nature, so as to help people understand the world in front of them. The Paranoid Style in American politics. The "Episcopacy," to describe the last ruling order. The White Negro. The Protestant Establishment. That kind of thing. Flashes of inspiration, leaps of understanding. And the point is when it comes to the Israel lobby, or the idea of Jewish influence in American culture, obvious claims about Jewish power that Avraham Burg and Tanya Reinhart have had no trouble making synthetic statements about, American journalists must stand in buckets of cement. No wings, no leaps. No synthesis, no inspiration, nothing. Not even observation. Just denial. Also, exercises in politically-correct literalism, like Jeffrey Goldberg lecturing Joe Klein about the antisemitic and therefore verboten uses of the word "semite" to describe Arab, and Klein apologizing. Language, words, ideas–these are a journalists' wings. In this realm, they're a cage.
