I’ve heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank’s smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday’s Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That…
Consider the following condemnations of the Israeli settlement policy in the occupied West Bank: It would create “some kind of South African Bantustan” by frustrating Palestinian rights to self-determination. It would cause international condemnation because at a time of “decolonization…
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today attacks Walt and Mearsheimer’s appearance in D.C. yesterday on racialist grounds, saying that they are blue-eyed and have Germanic names, and he wonders about their motivation for saying what they do about the…
Dana Milbank thinks that it important that John Mearsheimer mispronounced a congressman’s name, or two of them. Mearsheimer says we need a “freewheeling” debate about the role of the Israel lobby in our policy. Freewheeling means mispronouncing a politician’s name,…
One big price exacted by the Israel lobby is that it tries to shut down free debate when Israel’s motives are questioned. This is the lesson of the furore over comments on CNN by Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s Pentagon…
In the Houston Chronicle, Professor Michael Desch makes the argument that Israeli withdrawals from occupied territories save Israeli lives. Israeli Foreign Ministry figures reveal that while Qassam rocket attacks increased marginally from 2004 to 2005 (309 to 377), the total…
I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It’s the 1980s and the height of the violent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American…
While visiting my mom, I took in a fine talk on U.S. dilemmas in the Mideast by Retired Ambassador William A. Rugh. The talk was sponsored by a local peace group and was remarkable to me for the use Rugh…
I’m just back from visiting my mother on the Cape and it’s with sadness that I report that all the families seem to be leaving now and heading home. That regretful process used to happen in September. Kids would prolong…