"Unlike many other publlications on the right, left and center, we believe in John Stuart Mill's view of the deep value of conflicting views in the marketplace of ideas--because we think truth is most likely to emerge from that perspective. In Tikkun magazine as well we print views which we find offensive, but nevertheless stimulating and forcing us to think about ideas that we might otherwise ignore. In fact, we believe that without this kind of exchange, people fall into an intellectual deadness that ensures that their ideas become stale and irrelevant."
So Tikkun publishes "Moment of Truth" by Horowitz (among several pieces by a range of authors) which opens...
"Americans need to take a hard look at what is going on in the Middle East, because it provides the clearest picture possible of the war we are in. On one side are al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbollah, Syria and Iran and their allies: Russia, France, Greece, and the UN majority. On the other is the only democracy in the land of Muslim and Arab terror."
and concludes with
"The goal of the United States and Israel and all freedom-loving and civilized people in this war must be the destruction of the Hamas and Hizabollah leadership, their military infrastructure and capabilities... The world will not be a safe place or a decent one until the present regime in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Iran are gone. This is a war all Americans must support."
Joel, can you explain your editorial decision to publish this? Why would you distribute the work of a man who seems to believe the Left shouldn't exist? Does the invocation of John Stuart Mill and the value of printing views which some find offensive mean that Tikkun will publish work on Israeli apartheid (Reinhardt's use of the a-word, for instance) and critical holocausts (there's a school of lit on U.S. policy in Central America in the 1980s using that comparative term, for instance)?
Or is "this kind of exchange" solely open to people, however right-wing they are, whose views shore up the liberal-Left Zionism of Lerner which opposes divestment and criticism of the Jewish identity of the state?
(From Lerner's latest... http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/news_item.2006-07-17.9426591429 "Who are [Palestine's] enemies? Those who preach ideas like “one state solution” or global economic boycott without offering the Jewish people a secure state in Palestine--paths that will never produce anything positive but continued resistance by Israel and world Jewry.)
aaron
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