Last night James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, interviewed author Lawrence Wright on C-Span about his Al-Qaeda book, The Looming Tower, and alas made a hash of it. The best thing about After Words, the book interview show,…
Earlier this summer, I read Bill Clinton’s startling insight on the assasination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 2005, passed along by the great columnist MJ Rosenberg: In 1997, President Bill Clinton told me that he believed that Yigal…
Yesterday on Cspan, you could watch Naval Postgraduate School professor Vali Nasr talking about Sunnis and Shi’ites, at a book store, and Noam Chomsky speaking at West Point last spring. Both messages were leftwing, Nasr’s about the importance of understanding…
Even as the Washington Post continues its effort to blackball Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites, how interesting that their ideas gain wider and wider circulation. Later this month the giant issue they raised, the Israel lobby, will be the subject…
C-Span today broadcast a panel of the neoconservative Hudson Institute (Norman Podhoretz’s sock) at which a Russian immigrant neocon in the audience rose to say that he had observed a trend. Those who opposed neoconservatism now spoke of the importance…
I’ve heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank’s smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday’s Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That…
Consider the following condemnations of the Israeli settlement policy in the occupied West Bank: It would create “some kind of South African Bantustan” by frustrating Palestinian rights to self-determination. It would cause international condemnation because at a time of “decolonization…
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today attacks Walt and Mearsheimer’s appearance in D.C. yesterday on racialist grounds, saying that they are blue-eyed and have Germanic names, and he wonders about their motivation for saying what they do about the…
Dana Milbank thinks that it important that John Mearsheimer mispronounced a congressman’s name, or two of them. Mearsheimer says we need a “freewheeling” debate about the role of the Israel lobby in our policy. Freewheeling means mispronouncing a politician’s name,…