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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 5:26 pm Post subject: The Left DOES Still Have Credibility |
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Exhibit A for the defense...
The Wrong Guys
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Major Jewish organizations, including centrist as well as hard-line groups, regularly use their clout to narrow the scope of acceptable public debate on Israel. They cast their net wide, indiscriminately targeting independent-minded allies of Israel along with its sworn enemies. Many pro-Israel dissenters have walked away feeling deeply bruised and disillusioned.
Lately, however, some of Israel�s critics have started learning a few tricks themselves � and rather than enriching the conversation, they are choosing to further muddy it. There are substantial numbers of true moderates in this country who believe deeply in the need for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. They struggle to make their voices heard in a hostile political and communal environment, and they naturally look for spokesmen who can capture the public�s attention and help unite and mobilize the peace camp � including, most recently, scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. We are sympathetic to this quest for leadership, but after firsthand experience of these scholars� definition of �opening the debate,� we feel compelled to speak up: They�re the wrong guys.
The trick follows a typical pattern. Step one: Publish your views in as provocative a manner as possible. Use words like �apartheid,� as Jimmy Carter did in his book, or paint Jewish lobbying efforts in darkly conspiratorial terms, as Walt and Mearsheimer did in a paper published last year. Step two: Dare the Jewish community to lash out at you, then whine about being victimized by bullies. Step three: Implore fair-minded liberals to line up behind you, forcing them to choose between endorsing your vision � however skewed � or becoming part of the censorship juggernaut.
It�s been a pattern with these two since the beginning. When their original paper, �The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,� first appeared, they claimed that it couldn�t be published in the United States, and so they were forced to release it in a British journal, the London Review of Books (and simultaneously on the Harvard Web site, by the way). �Couldn�t be published here,� as it turned out, meant that they had been commissioned by one magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, but when the 16,000-word manuscript was turned in, it was rejected. And so they gave up on America. |
Let's hear it for even-handedness. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:20 pm Post subject: |
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| ...they had been commissioned by one magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, but when the 16,000-word manuscript was turned in, it was rejected. And so they gave up on America. |
Ha. |
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