The New York Times reviewed Walt & Mearsheimer’s extended-play version of the anti-Israel paper they released last year. I like the subtle Times-style digs throughout, and there’s a laugh-out-loud line at the end that in eight words utterly refutes the W-M theory. I can’t nominate William Grimes for a Master of Juvenile Scorn position because damn, there’s nothing juvenile about his scorn.
Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel’s foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself. They describe a virtual rogue state, empowered by American wealth and might, that blocks peace at every turn, threatens its cowering neighbors with impunity, crushes the national aspirations of the Palestinians and, whenever the opportunity arises, bites the hand that feeds it.
Working tirelessly in the background is the Israel lobby, playing Iago to America’s Othello, leading president after president down ever more dangerous paths. Without intense pressure from the Israel lobby, the authors argue, America would not have undertaken the war in Iraq.
[…] The authors state, on several occasions, their belief that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist, but the effect of their book is to leave it dangling by a moral and strategic thread. In essence they call for the United States to cut Israel loose, to return more or less to American policy before the 1967 war, when the United States tried to occupy a middle ground between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Strangely, the authors do not itemize the fabulous benefits delivered by this approach in the 1950s and ’60s.
And here’s my favorite: The devastating conclusion.
“It is time,†Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt write, “for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country.†But it’s not. And America won’t. That’s realism.
Well played, sir.
Read it all.
On another New York Times note, did anybody see the bizarre article in today’s paper about 1960’s Israeli “comic” books about Nazis and POW’s that were essentially pornographic, and were swiftly banned? The subject is strange and the implication of the story is that these odd comics somehow inform in a significant way Israeli views of the Holocaust today. This is news to me.
Let’s see this utopian “middle ground” between terrorist states who have vowed to wipe Israel off the map and those who are being threatened with extinction would be … (hmmm, let’s see … ooo, I’ve got it) … slaughter only half the Jews.
incredible that this appeared in the NYT — it must’ve killed Pinchy to print something so pro-Israel
This cannot be from the NY Times…It can’t be! I don’t believe it!
I actually went to high school with Pinch (publisher of the NYT). Trust me, if this guilt-ridden leftist nitwit hadn’t inherited his job he wouldn’t have gotten as far in journalism as Jimmy Olsen.
Jimmy Olsen was actually quite competent. It wasn’t his fault that he was just starting out and was also constantly being attacked by super villains. He actually got quite far for his age. Please do not compare him to an incompetent who feels guilty for living.
National Communist radio had some kind of review or interview about that book on today, unfortunately I got to work before it aired.
Wish I had got to hear it.
More of the same I reckon.
Give the muslims a chance. Just give them everything they want, and they promise to only kill those Jews in Israel. Er, I mean Palestine…..
It’s odd….
When muslims FIRST came to “power” they were a war mongering, and conquering people. You converted to islam or died.
Then when they got their butts handed to them islam became a religion of peace….
Suddenly after oil is discovered, and the middle east becomes “important” islam returns to it’s roots as a war mongering conquering, convert or die cult.
How can a book that reads “Infidels are to be converted or KILLED.” be ANY kind of religion of peace?
Gary Rosen…does Pinch actually feel guilty at a personal level? Or does he just think all the *rest of us* should feel guilty?
I think the latter is actually more common among “progressives.”
Long Rifle,
It’s a bit more complicated than that. I hope I don’t sound too pedantic, but here goes.
Early Arab conquerers were not in the business of “convert or die” outside of Arabia. That choice would be offered to pagans, but others could live under Muslim rule provided they cringed properly and paid the high poll tax, the jizya “with humiliation”. They signed agreements with communities of non-Muslims for this, who then becoma dhimmis because the contract was called a dhimma in Arabic. In fact early caliphs were a bit discouraging of conversion since at first Muslims did not pay taxes while dhimmis did, so every conversion lowered their revenues. Eventually though many converted to avoid the social and political disadvantages of being dhimmis, as well as the jizya. Richard Fletcher, in his book “Moorish Spain”, discusses research that shows the maximum conversio rate was around a century and a half after the Moorish conquest there.
Medieval Islam was more advanced and economically developed than Medieval Christendom. Greek philosophers were translated from by Eastern Christians Greek into Aramaic, then into Arabic, then Latin Christians translated them into Latin. The result was what has been called the 12th Century Renaissance. Great thinkers like Aquinas worked to integrate Greek thinking, especially Aristotle to Christianity, based on the transmitted works from the Muslim world. Muslim and Jewish scholars had already done such work (Avicenna and Maimonides were two of them)
This Muslim advantage started to change in the early modern period, although it did not become apparent until the late 17th Century. Over the next three centuries Europe hammered the Muslim world back in a steady advance that culminated in the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the elimination of the last caliph by Ataturk in 1924. It was a reversal of the previous Arab and Turkish advances that hammered Christendom for so many centuries, and the Muslims did not like being on the receiving end, any more than Christians had liked it previously. Muslims have been trying to recover their superior place (which they think is natural) ever since then. With the rise of radical Islam over the last few decades the persecution of non-Muslims in Muslim lands has gotten worse, probably worse than it has ever been before. And of course the Jews have been driven out of the Muslim world almost completely.
Parenthetically there was a little enclave of non-Muslims in Afghanistan up until the 1890s. The Afghans called it Kaffiristan. It was in the northeast. Probably under the influence of Wahhabism (which has influenced Afghanistan and Indian Islam since the early 1800s) the Afghans made a jihad against the non-Muslims, in about 1895 I think. then there were no more non-Muslims, so it was remaned Nuristan (Land of Light or of Enlightenment). So this jihad revival has been going on for some time.
It is our misfortune that we are living through one of Islam’s periodic reformations, where a bunch of fanatics from out of the desert somewhere decide to purify Islam of culture more advanced than memorizing the Qur’an, and wage jihad while they are about it. With oil wealth and modern communications and weaponry the fanatics are able to make a bigger mess than they did in the past, and be a pain in the rear to more of us than ever before. This coincides with a dramatic loss of civilizational self-confidence in the West. These movements tend to burn out in a century or so, and the descendents of the fanatics are corrupted into civilized life again, but that is no consolation to those of us who have to endure it.
If you want to find out more, and if you have not read them already, I recommend books by Bernard Lewis, especially “What Went Wrong”, “The Crisis In Islam”, and “The Middle East: A History of the Last 2,000 Years”. His little book on “The Assassins” is also very interesting. For Arab/Muslim political culture a good book is David Pryce-Jones’ “The Closed Circle”.
Excuse me for the length of this comment post.
Michael, anytime you want to guest post, feel free. That was a perfect length for what you had to say.
Great comment Mr. Lonie. With this kind of intelligent, informative contribution to the discussion you establish yourself as that rare creature the anti-troll.
On Bernard Lewis, I would urge anyone who has not done so already to read his essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” IIRC, it was first published in The Atlantic in the mid-90s. Read post 9/11 it seems eeriely prophetic.
Thanks Meryl and John.