More on Khalidi and Antisemitism
My friend Jeff Goldberg, author of Prisoners, which is one of the very best books I've read about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, takes me to task, rightly, for some wordplay I engaged in yesterday while excoriating the vile McCain spokesman, Michael Goldfarb for calling Khalid Rashidi an antisemite. And while the term, antisemitism, will always retain its traditional meaning--anti-Jewishness--it does conflate certain categories: there are those who just hate Jews, and then there are those who merely disapprove of zionism...and a third category, those who accept the idea of a Jewish state, but disapprove of Israeli expansion into the West Bank and Gaza. People like Goldfarb--and far too many other Jewish neoconservatives--go around calling people like Rashidi antisemites when, in fact, they're merely opposed to the more egregious expansionist schemes favored by the some of the more extreme members of the Likud Party. Indeed, Goldberg defends Khalidi:
But about Khalidi -- he's a fierce partisan of the Palestinian cause, of course, and in my conversations with him, and in his writing, I see that his sympathies frequently cause him to distort Middle East history. But an anti-Semite? I don't think so. In fact, Rashid Khalidi is one of the rare Palestinian advocates who argues, as he has with me, that Arabs must study Jewish history, including and especially the history of Jew-hatred, in order to better understand Israel, and to reach a compromise with it.
Jeff, however, goes on to make a truly foolish argument about my efforts to call out a small group of Jewish neoconservatives for their disgraceful, bullying behavior and their dangerous influence on John McCain's and the Bush Administration's foreign policy:
I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble.
No, Jeff, I don't derive great pleasure from it. I'm pretty anguished about it. As a Jew, I'm embarrassed by these extremists and outraged by their assumption that they represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this country. Furthermore, I don't use the Christianity of Bush et al against them because their Christianity had nothing to do with their support for the war. For people like Doug Feith et al, their Jewish identity--their ethnic nationalism, not the religious part of it--had an awful lot to do with their plumping for war with Iraq and, more recently, Iran. Feith et al advised Binyamin Netanyahu, in a paper called "A Clean Break," to go to war with Iraq when he was Prime Minister in order to protect Israel. I find the conflation, by some Jewish neoconservatives, of Israel's interests and America's--and their truly dangerous misreading of both--to be appalling. But much worse is their rush to pin the tag of antisemitism on anyone who disagrees with them, including me.
And even worse than that is the McCain campaign's tendency, driven by thugs like Goldfarb, to imply that Barack Obama is soft on Islamic terrorism--and perhaps even a closet Muslim himself--by linking his name with people who have Arab names like Rashid Khalidi. This is the vilest form of anti-Americanism. And, happily, it appears not to be working this year.
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piper,
seriously though you can read the posts easier. Yes im going with the glass is half full lol
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wow, trippy man!
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Looks the same to me on the Chrome beta. But it looks way different on IE.
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Off topic--
If the gay mafia funding campaigns for key state legislative seats is worthy of coverage
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1854884,00.html
(and it is. Gill in particular has been genius at these stealth campaigns.)
Isn't the gay Belrway Republicans also worth a story.
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When I refresh, I see a light and my grandma is there and she's telling me to come to the light, and I want to because it looks so warm and sweet, and I love you grandma, here I come ...
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Woo.Took me a while to get her through the TIME home page using IE (wanted to make sure I got the most current page). Trippy indeed. I think they'll get their columns back soon.
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Still little squinky TimesRoman letter with Chrome, and the columns are working. Let's try Firefox.....
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Hmmm. Columns work in Firefox as well.
Little more readable with Firefox, actually. The blue font has less weight and the text, while still serif isn't all slanty and nearly italic as at Chrome.
IE is still a mess, but it's a sans serif mess. So there's something good in all the different instances.
Does it haz auto paragraphing?
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Hung in firefox....
reminding me that I stopped using firefox because it was hanging so often on ad loads.
Ah, it loaded.
.
Nope, no autoparagraphs. -
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Aaron must have put the HTML tags in.Like this.
If it worke.
We'll see.
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Seems to me the last time trouble started was on a Friday.
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Looks unchanged in Firefox. But I fired up IE to check it out and, well, um. Sure. You could design a site like that, if you wanted to.
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It's unchanged on Safari. I have no idea what you're all talking about!
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The absurdity of this is apparent if we only think about how this became an issue. Khalidi's name was ONLY brought up because he is Palestinian.
Look at the evidence--this came from a story in the LA Times that is 6 months old. What kind of research and thinking went into making this a focus of the campaign? Somebody--probably lots of somebodies--have been sitting and poring through reams and reams of internet material for months.
They have not been looking for evidence of problems with Obama's campaign platform, they are looking for what will do maximum damage to his credibility. Of all the things they came up with, they are pushing Khalidi.
What attracted them to this old story? His name and ethnic background. Period, full stop. The links to the PLO are so insubstantial that they would never on their own be an issue. This is no Bill Ayers, but they are being treated as equivalent. Why? Because of the name. You don't need to go further than that to know that this is a venomous racist attack.
I can't wait for November 4.
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Marty Peretz is defending Khalidi, end of story. Hope this TNR url doesn't put this comment into moderation purgatory (not embedding it, you'll have to copy/paste):
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2008/10/30/excuse-me.aspx
Hopefully the LA Times can persuade their anonymouse to give permission to show the tape, so this 'bombshell' will fizzle just like all the other ones did. And if this kerfluffle increases Khalidi's public profile, it's all good.
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Frankly, McCain's play is just so egregiously race-baiting, I will never in future associate him with anything else. He likes to live on his strength of will during in POW years almost 40 years ago, but look at what he's doing now. He shames himself, and he shames us all. At this point, I would like to see a complete repudiation of him and every shred of reputation he has left.
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You're right about calling out the Jewish neocons on the war. But you are not right in stating Bush's "Christianity had nothing to do with his support for the war". By almost all accounts, after Bush's 'born-again' experience many years ago he felt his decisions were greatly influenced by God. While The Dick and Rummy show had much more sinister reasons for pushing Bush(and therefore Powell)to greatly exaggerate many facts in the speech to America and the U.N., Bush always seemed to be blissfully ignorant about the post-invasion fiasco. He also seemed to believe he was one of Christ's soldiers, and we would be "greeted as liberators". History be damned, we will bring democracy and and Chrisianity to this vile Muslim land! Oh, Christianity had much to do with the quagmire in Iraq. And this is coming from a devout Christian.
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Joe Klein is not much more than just another slime writer for the Tank Media.
The Tank Media is partisan Democrat, and can not be trusted to put out anything more than just propaganda for Liberals.
Whatever Klein is writing is worthless.
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I find it quite sad, Joe, that as a Jew yourself, you use the same scurrilous arguments that renowned anti-semites like Walt and Mersheimer use. Namely, that an Arab can't be an one because he is a semite or that anti-zionism is not the same as anti-semitism. Isn't that the argument tha Ahmadinijad uses - that he doesn't want to kill all the Jews, just wipe Israel off the map?
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As a Jew, and a child of Holocaust survivors, I confess that I'll never cease being surprised by my fellow Jews....Did you not learn anything from the Holocaust? ...My parents, may God rest their souls, loved America and sadly explained that it was foolish intelectual Jews in Europe that died (and the others that listened to them), not being able to understand that playing stupid games of one-upsmanship in Philosophy and Politics and argueing with haughty rhetoric is real fun but doesn't trump, or defend against, being loaded into a cattle car, headed for ovens. Argue all you want, you foolish children, the Israelis (at least those of years gone by, since it seems like today's Israelis are also forgetting the lesson) have "been there, done that" and decided to get tough, kick some ass and shoot, instead of talk. Is there peace in the middle east, no, but at least Israeli Jews are still alive to face the future and whatever it brings, contrary to the Jewish intelectuals of Europe, many who sadly died not understanding that there is a time for words and a time for whoop ass. All you Obama supporting Jews are making that same mistake as the proud intellectual German Jews that are no longer here. Obama and the American intelligentsia, Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, Farrakahn and Pfleger and all the rest of the professors that brainwash today's college kids are NOT YOUR FRIENDS! ....and neither is Obama. These people are friends of Lenin and Marx, Chavez and Castro and we all know how that turned out for the Jews of Russia and Venezuela and Cuba....I don't like McCain but I know that he is "better for the Jews" than Obama and his friends...simple. At least I won't have that look of shock on my when Obama doesn't come to the aid of Israel in it's last hours.
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This is a thoroughly dishonest piece, and you should be deeply ashamed. Better yet, you should be driven from the profession of journalism. I'm not kidding.
In the first place, people who charge racism for the mere flyspeck of including a shot of white female celebrity in an ad denouncing a black man's celebrity status, have to have testicles the size of Montana to take others to task for the failing to note the distinction between "anti-Semite" and "pro-Palestinian." I'll grant you "anti-Israel" is more precise; trying to make the difference between the completely supportable "anti-Israel" and the slightly inaccurate "anti-Semite" into an accusation of bullying and racism, is beyond the pale. You are a demagogue, and should be horsewhipped publicly.
In the second place, I accuse you of deliberate obtuseness regarding the Palestinian cause. These "pro-Palestinian" activists who "...accept the idea of a Jewish state, but disapprove of Israeli expansion into the West Bank and Gaza" have been playing the same game with the West for 30 years now, and anybody who is still falling for it is either too foolish to be trusted with our credence, or to dishonest to be trusted with our credence. They talk this way to the Western press, and then, when they're among their own, they talk of driving the Jews into the sea. They're not even waiting until they can do it an Arabic anymore; they announce their intentions in English, just so long as there's no hostile press nearby. There wasn't even a day's respite between the turnover of Gaza and the first attacks into Israel. How many times does this have to repeat before you get it? Answer: it doesn't matter how many times, Joe Klein isn't interested in the truth on this matter.
I repeat: in a fair world, you would be driven from the profession of journalism in shame an dishonor. It's a measure of the corruption of journalism that you are not; but honest citizens have taken note, and your name, sir, is deservedly a malediction.
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Re: philwynk
One has to remember that the 2 State solution is essentially an American policy designed to shape Palestinian opinion into accepting the idea of a Palestinian country living in peace next to Israel. A viable alternative would be for them to form an economic union with Jordan and/or Egypt. The rational is that a people concerned with trade and civil infrastructure will shy away from war - the real problem is to get the Palestinians to that point.
Its still a good idea but you are right that the Palestinian leadership has indicated both in word and in actions that such as state might serve as a springboard for future aggression and that the long term goal is the destruction of the Jewish State.
Diplomacy is the art of exploiting ambiguity. If enough Palestinians come to realize that their best option is to build an economy, a nation, a future, rather than letting their own nabka define their existence, then there is a chance for peace.
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