[lbo-talk] The Banality of anti-Israel Lobby Doctrine

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Mon Aug 9 07:23:54 PDT 2010


On Mon, 9 Aug 2010 06:48:24 -0700 (PDT) David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Michael Smith asked:
>
> Could we maybe have a few examples of this? (referring to
> anti-Semitism).
>
> You can find plenty in the comments sections of these discussions
> including Mondoweiss, some of which may have been eliminated. And I'm
> not sure what you call it when Blankfort's mode of argument is to
> accuse his opponents of growing up in Zionist households.

Are you referring to this passage from Blankfort:


> [Chomsky ]admits to having been a Zionist from childhood, by one of
> the earlier definitions of the term—in favor of a Jewish homeland in
> Palestine and a bi-national, not a Jewish state—and, as he wrote 30
> years ago, "perhaps this personal history distorts my
> perspective." [_Peace in the Middle East (1974)]

(http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html)

If so, your gloss on it seems a bit unfair -- even dishonest, I'm tempted to say. But perhaps you have some other locus-nefarius in mind. If so, one would appreciate a citation to it, rather than mere characterizations of what people say.


> But like Carl Estabrook has said on this list, there is a "higher
> anti-Semitism" involved here when people like Mearsheimer and Walt
> attribute U.S. foreign policy failures to the Israel Lobby. I'd
> actually be more comfortable with an overt anti-Semite than someone
> who "blames the Jews" with an academic cover.

This passage illustrates the circularity of much anti-anti-Semitic rhetoric, combined with the usual habit, mentioned above, of tendentious mischaracterization of others' views. Nobody who has read Mearsheimer and Walt with anything like an open mind would recognize this travesty of what they have to say. "Blames the Jews"? Please.

And it's simply assumed, or supposed to be self-evident, that anti-Semitism is their motivation -- from which the next step is to cite their work as evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism!

--

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com http://cars-suck.org



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