On “60 Minutes” last night, George Tenet fingered Richard Perle as the agonist behind the Iraq War. Tenet said he ran into the prince of darkness on Sept. 12, 2001, at the White House and Perle was already pushing for…
Today’s Washington Post has two articles, showing that hawkish pro-Israel views about the Middle East are held in high places across party lines. The first piece is Robert Novak’s column on Chuck Hagel, in which Hagel attacks the neoconservatives and…
Yesterday, C-SPAN broadcast a panel from the L. A. Book fair called “Profiles in Terror,” featuring several authors with expertise on the Arab world. Someone in the audience asked forthrightly, “why do they hate us?” Why, she went on, were…
The rightwing Israel lobby feeds on American youth. Young idealists must be recruited into the enterprise before they think to question Israeli policies. Columbia/Barnard Hillel is housed at the handsome, new Kraft Center on W. 115th Street in New York,…
The other night on Charlie Rose, the host asked the regrettable Richard Perle about Israel. Perle went on to liken Yasir Arafat to Hitler and asked, rhetorically, “would you have diplomacy with Hitler?” Perle’s comment should be filed with a…
I keep saying that leftwing Jewish criticism of Zionism is a movement. Exhibit A is Australian author Antony Loewenstein, who has lately published a book, My Israel Question that is forthright and searing. His travels through Israel and the West…
1. Iraqis’ protests over the 12-foot separation wall in Baghdad–that it will promote sectarian divisions and make normal life impossible–cause the American government to abandon the wall, which it had lately begun, to stop suicide bombers. (And the 30-foot separation…
Saif Ammous has his comprehensive exam (a big deal, apparently) next Tuesday at Columbia. He’s told me he won’t respond to my comment on the big thread below, nor anyone else’s, till he gets that done. Good luck, Saif. I…
I wrote about U.N. Ambassador-to-be Zalmay Khalilzad’s ideological peregrinations before. From radical to neocon. Well, turns out there was a stop in Realism. Ten years ago, Khalilzad deplored the Israel lobby’s role in our foreign policy. In a 1997 paper…