And I found the picture at NASA to bring to you. The news articles weren’t polite enough to link back, but I am.

From the press release:

Harper Lee has made an outstanding contribution to America’s literary tradition. At a critical moment in our history, her beautiful book, To Kill a Mockingbird, helped focus the Nation on the turbulent struggle for equality.

To Kill A Mockingbird is on my top ten favorite books list. I have read it dozens of times, and will doubtless read it dozens more. IMHO, it should be in the list of the top three American novels, with Huckleberry Finn in the number one slot and The Great Gatsby third. (Hemingway doesn’t come on the list at all. I think he’s an overhyped hack.)

So good for you, Ms. Lee. You deserve it.

George W Bush has announced that Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour that can be bestowed upon a civilian.

The medal, established in 1963, is awarded for an “especially meritorious contribution” to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, or for their accomplishments in the areas of culture or “other significant public or private endeavours.”

Lee won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for the novel, which is credited with helping to focus the country at the height of the civil-rights movement by raising awareness of the injustices of discrimination.

It tells the story of a small-town Alabama lawyer, Atticus Finch, who defends a black man accused of raping a local white woman. The narrator of the story is six-year-old Scout, the daughter of Atticus.

Although downplaying the idea that To Kill A Mockingbird is semi-autobiographical, it bears a striking resemblance to her early life. She was born in Monroeville, a small town in Alabama, and her father was also a lawyer.

In 1931, when Lee was six, nine young black men in Scottsboro, Alabama, were accused of raping two white women, and, despite the lack of any evidence, the men were convicted by an all-white jury.

Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.

[...] She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love.”

“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. “Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said of Dumbledore’s feelings, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down.”

Dumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy.”

Um. O-kay.

Is the next character to be outed going to be McGonagall?

Were Mearsheimer and Walt simply saying that Israel’s hard- line policies have often done the country more harm than good (as have the Americans who confuse any criticism of Israel with a threat to its existence), they’d be on solid ground. They claim not to be espousing a theory of a Jewish cabal or a conspiracy — and they’re not. In “The Israel Lobby”‘ there’s nothing secret about Jewish influence. Every bit of U.S. foreign policy that benefits Israel or harms the U.S. has a Jew behind it.

Contradictions, evasions and lapses of logic pepper the text. When the authors want to argue that Israel was not an effective U.S. ally in the Cold War, it’s a small country. When they want to argue that Israel can easily repel any aggression from hostile neighbors, it’s a land of military might.

And yet another devastating conclusion:

In general, critics of Mearsheimer and Walt have dismissed the charges of anti-Semitism against them. But what else can account for a scenario in which Jews are the center of every perfidy, exerting so much influence and dispensing so much money that the goyim spring into line? And how can research so shoddy, so quick to ignore anything that contradicts it, so ready to subjugate facts to ideology qualify as serious?

The eager reception the pair have found in some parts of the left may yet cause embarrassment when those who embraced them come face to face with their realpolitik. Their argument against U.S. support of Israel is that our alliances must be decided solely by self-interest.

That’s the very ideology that has led the U.S. to align itself with dictators in the past and to spurn countries that desperately needed American help. The disaster of Iraq may have led many on the left to think there’s no case left for liberal interventionism (which need not be military). But are leftists really willing to desert their long-held view that oppression should be named and confronted?

In the hands of Mearsheimer and Walt, the socialism of fools has become the foreign policy of idiots.

The L.A. Times’ Tim Rutten is equally as sharp:

It’s interesting that the authors chose to first float their arguments in the London Review rather than, say, in Foreign Affairs or some other American journal. While I subscribe to the review — and, in fact, have been invited several times to contribute to it — it’s a melancholy fact that, in recent years, like so much of the European intellectual press, it has become objectively anti-Semitic in its treatment of Israel. And while it’s true that the authors have had several invitations to speak about their book in the United States withdrawn, it’s also true that this volume arrives under the imprint of what is arguably America’s most prestigious publishing house.

Odd that the all-powerful Israel lobby let that happen.

To get a flavor of the professors’ argument, here’s how they described the lobby’s operations inside the U.S. Congress: “Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ — on Capitol Hill — ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing. . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness. . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators. . . . ”

The quotation from an AIPAC staff member is an ingenious twist on the old dual-loyalty argument, but at the end of the day, you’ve still got sour old wine in new skins.

Rutten’s conclusion:

In fact, if you accept the analysis put forward in this book, it’s impossible not to conclude that the United States was, in fact, tricked into a disastrous war in Iraq by a domestic Fifth Column and that the ranks of that subversive formation are filled with Jews, their friends and willing dupes.

Mearsheimer and Walt go to great pains to proclaim their disinterested benevolence toward all and to attach the word “realist” to their argument. The only adjective that comes to this reader’s mind is “sinister.”

Both articles should be read in their entirety. And may I say: You see? It wasn’t my imagination. People who do not generally use the word “anti-Semitism” are all but accusing the authors of it. On the one hand, I’m glad to keep finding these reviews. On the other hand, the effing book is a best-seller. Then again, best-sellers reach the top of the list by selling only a few hundred thousand copies. I’d love to see the publisher’s statement on “The Israel Lobby.” I want to know how many they sell. Discounting, of course, the sales they’re going to make overseas. Wait for the pictures of the book next to “Mein Kampf” in Arab nations, just like Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel screed.

The first is in the WSJ:

A crop of Israel’s critics — most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by pre-emptively predicting that “the Jewish lobby” will accuse them of it.

Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, in particular, have been heralded by Israel’s critics for their “courage” in attacking American Jews, who have allegedly “strangled” criticism of Israel. Their case seems one part laughable, and one part eyebrow-raising.

My favorite part, once again, is the conclusion:

But if anti-Semitism is too harsh a term, and if the word “bigoted” is also taken off the table, perhaps one can be forgiven for concluding that “anti-Jewish bias” fits the bill here. After all, where there is nothing wrong with foreign money from Arab countries advancing a pro-Arab agenda in Messrs. Walt’s and Mearsheimer’s world — but there is something very wrong with American citizens who are Jewish exercising their civic right to speak out on behalf of Israel and taking issue with the pro-Arab agenda — even the most vehement disclaimers of any bias against Jews lack a certain credibility.

The potency of the Middle East-funded anti-Israel lobby around the world and in the U.S. is difficult to ignore. Yet, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer and others who adhere to an anti-Israel line ignore it. In and of itself, this is not surprising. When at the same time they portray American Jews’ efforts to make the case for Israel as morally suspect, however, they open themselves up to reasonable charges of something far more troublesome than mere hypocrisy, and that is anti-Jewish bias, by whatever name.

But read it all. Well worth it.

Also of note, from the Chicago Sun-Times, which was mentioned in the W-M paper as part of the lobby (go figure):

Mearsheimer and Walt concede Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War but argue that our continued support is detrimental to U.S. standing in the Middle East and helps “inspire a generation of anti-American extremists.” That’s their world view. Forget the dynamics of radical Islamism, Arab resentment of the West and other complexities of international affairs. Just change U.S. policy toward Israel and the world will be a happier place for America. Two intellectuals at two of our best universities have reduced international relations to that.

[...] The two go to lengths to try to rebut any suggestion of anti-Semitism in their criticism of the American Israeli Political Action Committee and other pro-Israel groups. But you can’t read The Israel Lobby without realizing that whenever two interpretations exist for some action by Israel or its supporters, Mearsheimer and Walt automatically default to the darker view.

For instance, a section of their book titled “Camp David Myths” cites numerous secondhand sources to disparage the Israeli peace initiative in 2000 while dismissing the account of Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton’s chief Middle East peace negotiator, who was at the center of the Camp David effort and wrote the highly praised The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.

Another read-in-full recommendation.

I’m glad to see W-M’s book getting lousy reviews. Because these creeps have hit the best-seller list. Gee. Amazing how the Israel lobby is so powerful, it manages to squelch all criticism. They’re being silenced. They’re only number 23 on Amazon, and 17 with a bullet on the NY Times bestseller list. Yes, they’ve been utterly silenced by the Israel Lobby—all the way to the bank.

Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is not even in bookstores, but already anxieties have surfaced about the backlash it is stirring, with several institutions backing away from holding events with the authors.

John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, were not totally surprised by the reaction to their work. An article last spring in the London Review of Books outlining their argument — that a powerful pro-Israel lobby has a pernicious influence on American policy — set off a firestorm as charges of anti-Semitism, shoddy scholarship and censorship ricocheted among prominent academics, writers, policymakers and advocates. In the book, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and embargoed until Sept. 4, they elaborate on and update their case.

“Now that the cold war is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States,” they write. “Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public or even raise the possibility” because the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful. They credit the lobby with shutting down talks with Syria and with moderates in Iran, preventing the United States from condemning Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon and with not pushing the Israelis hard enough to come to an agreement with the Palestinians. They also discuss Christian Zionists and the issue of dual loyalty.

You see how silenced they are? There’s an article in the New York Times telling us that they’ve been silenced. They’ve had six events cancelled or turned down! Six! That damned Israeli Lobby is so powerful, it controls whether or not people want Walt & Mearsheimer to speak at their venues.

Opponents are prepared. Also being released on Sept. 4 is “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control” (Palgrave Macmillan) by Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. The notion that pro-Israel groups “have anything like a uniform agenda, and that U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East is the result of their influence, is simply wrong,” George P. Shultz, a former secretary of state, says in the foreword. “This is a conspiracy theory pure and simple, and scholars at great universities should be ashamed to promulgate it.”

The subject will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down or canceled events with the authors, mentioning unease with the controversy or the format.

So, let’s recap: W&M have been cancelled out of three events. And they were turned down by three organizations. Let’s see exactly how that played out. Their speaking appearance was canceled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Why?

Mr. Bouton was out of town, but Rachel Bronson, vice president for programs and studies at the council, said, “Whenever we have topics that are particularly controversial or sensitive, we try to make sure someone from another point of view is there.” In this case, she said, there was not sufficient time to set up that sort of panel before the council calendar went out. There are no plans to have the authors speak at a later date, however.

Ah. The Council wanted someone there for an opposing viewpoint. Yes, we know that one. It’s used for every pro-Israel speaker invited to college campuses. It’s a goose/gander thing. But what about those three turn-downs the Times is touting?

After the cancellation Roberta Rubin, owner of the Book Stall, a store in Winnetka, Ill., offered to help find a site for the authors. She said she tried a Jewish community center and two large downtown clubs but they all told her “they can’t afford to bring in somebody ‘too controversial.’ ” She added that even she was concerned about inviting authors who might offend customers.

So the three cancellations are all tied to the same Chicago event? Isn’t that interesting. An event that was cancelled at one venue—which raises red flags when trying to schedule it at other venues—was turned down by three other venues. So it’s one event that was turned down by three alternative venues. Not three separate events turned down by people who didn’t want W&M to speak. And let’s think…. why is it that a Jewish Community Center would be reluctant to have Walt & Mearsheimer come to tell an audience of Jews about how the Israel Lobby is controlling American foreign policy? Let me think about this one for a while, and see if I can find a reason why they were turned down. Hm. Jewish Community Center. Lots of Israel supporters. The W&M claim that the Israel Lobby is controlling U.S. policy…. That’s a tough one. Nope, I can’t figure out why they were turned down by the Chicago JCC.

Please.

Some of the planned sites, like the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, a cultural center in Washington, would have been host of an event if Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt appeared with opponents, said Esther Foer, the executive director.

Mr. Walt said, “Part of the game is to portray us as so extreme that we have to be balanced by someone from the ‘other side.’ ” Besides, he added, when you’re promoting a book, you want to present your ideas without appearing with someone who is trying to discredit you.

If you are presenting a book written about a charge that has been widely discredited in its thesis form, people are going to want to let your audiences know that you are, well, not being truthful with the facts, shall we say? Jimmy Carter pulled the same drek. The common theme here? Both books charge Israel (and American Jews) with controlling American foreign policy. Both books charge Jews with being less than full citizens of America (the old dual loyalty canard). And both books are riddled with inaccuracies and lies. Of course he doesn’t want his “ideas” discredited. People won’t buy a book based on information that has been shown to be false. The more coverage W&M’s opponents get, the fewer dollars fall into their pockets. But don’t worry. It’s going to be a guaranteed best-seller in the Arab world. It will be on the bookshelves right next to Mein Kampf, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

W&M are also now defending themselves against charges of anti-Semitism. And they do it by showing that the Israel Lobby isn’t really as powerful as they claim it to be. They do it in a wholly unironic way. You really have to wonder if these men ever listen to themselves speak.

Overall Mr. Mearsheimer said he thinks the response to their views will be “less ferocious than last time, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make the argument in a convincing way that anyone who criticizes the lobby or Israel is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.” Both Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt pointed to the growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, criticism of Israel’s war in Lebanon and the publication of former President Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” as making it somewhat easier to criticize Israel openly.

“This isn’t a cabal; this isn’t anything secretive,” Mr. Walt said.

American Jews who lobby on Israel’s behalf are not all that different from the National Rifle Association, the anti-tax movement, AARP or the American Petroleum Institute, he said, “They just happen to be really good at it.”

Translation: It’s much easier to criticize Israel now because people are criticizing Israel, but we’re being silenced because we’re criticizing Israel. And everybody lobbies, but the Jews are really good at it, and saying so doesn’t make us anti-Semitic.

“It’s the way American politics work,” he continued. “Sometimes powerful interest groups get what they want, and it’s not good for the country as a whole. I would say that about the farm lobby and about the Cuba lobby.”

And yet, they have not written a book about the farm lobby or the Cuba lobby. They have written a book about the Israel lobby. Funny, that.

To the authors, dual loyalty is as American as Presidents’ Day sales and “Law & Order” reruns. As Mr. Mearsheimer explained: “People are allowed to have multiple loyalties. They have religious loyalties, loyalty to family, to an organization and you can have loyalty to other countries. Someone who is Irish can have a loyalty to Ireland.”

“The problem,” he said “is when you raise the subject of dual loyalty, many people tend to think of it in the context of the old anti-Semitic canard and making the argument that Jews are disloyal to the U.S.”

That’s because it is always raised in the context of the old anti-Semitic canard. It is simply disingenuous to pretend otherwise. You cannot accuse a Jew of dual loyalty without meaning that the person you are accusing is disloyal to his or her home country. The concept of dual loyalty is never raised in terms that Mearsheimer “explains” above. That is patently false. Ted Kennedy managed to support the IRA and never be accused of being disloyal to America. Just go do a Google search on Joe Lieberman and see how many times his loyalty to America is questioned, and not just over his support to Israel. Lieberman’s loyalty is questioned simply because he is Jewish. W&M are utterly full of it when they pretend that the dual loyalty charge is not meant in the same fashion.

Walt & Mearsheimer are handing the anti-Semites of the world a great recruiting tool, and a book that will have to be discredited for many years to come, and will ultimately settle in with the Stormfront crowd as “proof” the Jews control America. Their paper has already found wide acceptance in neo-Nazi circles. David Duke is particularly fond of it, touting it as vindication of his anti-Semitic filth.

And there is, of course, the W&M disclaimer:

In print and in interviews both authors have stressed that they hold no animus towards Israel or Jews. “We think Israeli policy is fundamentally flawed,” Mr. Mearsheimer said, “just as we think American policy is fundamentally flawed.”

Right. No animus. Just lies, inaccuracies, and a modern retelling of the old Jews-control-the-world myth.

In the meantime, if you have already read the book (spoilers at most of the links), you’ll enjoy this WSJ review. It discusses religion in Harry’s world, and contains absolutely big-time spoilers. If you haven’t read the book, don’t click the link.

There’s also this MSNBC article from Rowling’s appearance on the Today show last Friday. Yes, it contains some major spoilers, so don’t whine to me if you haven’t finished the book and click on that link.

MSNBC was on a roll with the Rowling stories. This one has spoilers, but it also reveals which character got a reprieve from death after having been scheduled to die in the series. I was surprised, but pleased to find that one out.

And last, but not least, Rowling talks about her plans to write the Harry Potter encyclopedia, and spills the beans about what happens after the book ends, as well as why she changed the last word of the final book (which was originally supposed to read “scar.”) Here there also be spoilers.

Between that and the second season of Battlestar Galactica, Saturday was a no-posting day.

Sleep would be nice now.

I have no desire to read the ending before the novel is published, but be warned. If you don’t want to know, stay away from spoilers between now and the time you have the book in your hands.