Even A Blind Pig...

As the old saying goes, even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn.

Foreign Policy magazine is not one of my favorite online publications, being altogether too conservative and mainstream for my taste, but every now and then, they do publish something worth reading. Such is very definitely the case in the latest column by Stephen M. Walt.

This column is the latest is an ongoing editorial catfight between the author and Jeff Goldberg, an ardent Zionist who writes for both Atlantic magazine and Bloomberg. This little spat all started when Mr Walt wrote a blurb for the fly cover of a book which dared to criticize Israel. So now Mr Goldberg has accused Mr Walt of being an anti-Semite, (oh noes!), etc, etc, ad nauseam. And the column linked above is a response by Mr Walt and his associate John Mearsheimer.

"Possum," you think, "why are you wasting my time with an editorial bitchfest between two over-educated East Coast Establishment assholes?".

Well, because in the course of his oh-so-genteel defense, John Mearsheimer makes some very interesting points about what was actually said and not said, and about the nature of the whole Zionist debate.

The book in question is "The Wandering Who", by Gilad Atzmon. In spite of the title, it has nothing to do with Pete Townshend or Roger Daltrey. (And, no, I'm not making any money off the link to Amazon).

As I said, there are some interesting points made here, which is why I'm posting about this whole issue. Not least among these interesting points is a sterling example of just how the Zionists use partial truths to slander people. let me quote one paragraph -

Let me make one additional point about Goldberg's mining of Atzmon's blog posts. Goldberg ends his attack on me with the following quotation from a Feb. 19 blog post by Atzmon: "I believe that from [a] certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany." That quotation certainly makes Atzmon look like he has lost his mind and that nothing he has written could be trusted. But Goldberg has misrepresented what Atzmon really said, which is one of his standard tactics. Specifically, he quotes only part of a sentence from Atzmon's blog post; but when you look at the entire sentence, you see that Atzmon is making a different, and far more nuanced point. The entire sentence reads: "Indeed, I believe that from [a] certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany, for unlike Nazi Germany, Israel is a democracy and that implies that Israeli citizens are complicit in Israeli atrocities." This is not an argument I would make, but what Atzmon is saying is quite different from the way Goldberg portrays it.

See what I mean? The author offers up an agonizing observation on the moral dangers of representative democracy, in which the leaders which we elect can then take unilateral actions, of an utterly reprehensible nature, in which we are morally complicit. And Goldberg massages that into a simple statement of extremism.

Take the time to read the column linked above, my friends. It's not easy reading, but it is worth your while.