Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, who charged the “Israel Lobby” (and by extension Jews, and American Jewish advisers of the president) of exerting undue influence on American foreign policy on behalf of Israel, are not too popular, it seems. Their article is being attacked both for its shoddy “scholarship” and for its broad-brush polemicism. And for its clueless “casual” anti-Semitism (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt).

Even Noam Chomsky considers their arguments weak. Read about it here, at the DailyKos. Scroll down and follow this link, too, for even more detailed rebuttals.

The editor of the London Review of Books, however, is defending the professors and their piece. The Observer reports:**

Wilmers rejects the accusation by Hitchens, Ross and others that the Mearsheimer-Walt article has done little more than attempt to join up a disconnected list of people and organisations lobbying on different aspects of Israeli concern into a central ‘Israel Lobby’ - capitalised by the LRB. She admits now, however, that it would have been better to use a lower case ‘l’ for the word ‘lobby’ - to have avoided the risk of being misunderstood….

‘I know Israel thinks [the article's viewpoint] is a monstrous presumption. But then I don’t think that the way that Israel behaves is terribly helpful. The article doesn’t talk about a “Jewish Lobby” or a “Cabal”. I feel very clear about that. We were very conscious of that risk.’

I guess it’s okay to make any circuitious accusation you want about American Jews having dual loyalties as long as you don’t specifically refer to them as Jews, or as a cabal.

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**

The Observer piece has at least one infuriating typo: is Mary Kay Wilmers a “he” or a “she”?

‘I don’t want David Duke to endorse the article,’ he told The Observer from France on Friday. ‘It makes me feel uncomfortable. [emphasis added]

I wonder: who can live up to author Jane Smiley’s moral standards? Who exactly does she consider to be on the right side?

First journalist George Packer came in for a skewering for not being contrite about his pro-war stance before the invasion of Iraq, as I mentioned here. Now “newly minted dissenters from Bush’s faith-based reality” come under attack:

4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not object. When the Bush administration adopted an “Anything but Clinton” policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush….

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation….

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of children and denied the existence of a “common good”. You have disdained and denied the idea of “altruism”. At one time, our bureaucracy was full of people who had gone into government service or scientific research for altruistic reasons–I knew, because I knew some of them. You have driven them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses….

And on it goes, at length. One poster responds:

Man, I thought *I* was angry! By: drv on March 22, 2006 at 01:48am

Unhinged, more like.

The suspense is over. From the New York Times:

NEWARK, March 27 — Mayor Sharpe James entered his sixth race for mayor 11 days ago with the flourish of a Las Vegas heavyweight, arriving at City Hall astride a police bicycle to deliver his petitions in gym shorts. He dropped out on Monday, with a letter delivered to the city clerk only minutes before the ballots were to be sent to the printer….

Clement Price, a Rutgers historian who teaches a course about this mostly black city, said the mayor deserved credit for using his power to help Newark “recalibrate its image” after the 1967 riots.

Really? How so?

One-third of Newark’s children still grow up in poor families, according to state figures. The unemployment rate of nearly 11 percent is roughly twice the state average, and the median household income of $26,000 makes Newark poorer than every other major American city except Miami, according to 2004 census figures.

The Times again refers to a documentary, Street Fight, which I mentioned here, shot during the mayoral election of 2002, in which James beat Cory Booker by 3,500 votes. The mayor and his pals didn’t come off too well, apparently (I haven’t seen the doc; but James wrote angry letters to PBS, which aired it, so one can assume he was not flattered by the portrait drawn of him).

Upshot: there is such a thing as bad publicity.

Carroll has released a statement through the Christian Science Monitor:

Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not. The people who kidnapped me and murdered Alan Enwiya are criminals, at best. …

I also gave a TV interview to the Iraqi Islamic Party shortly after my release. … [F]earing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn’t threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times.

Also, at least two false statements about me have been widely aired: That I refused to travel and cooperate with the US military and that I refused to discuss my captivity with US officials. Again, neither is true.

While it is obvious that there’s a seasoned PR hand behind both the timing of the statement and the overall message, I see no reason to disbelieve Carroll’s statement, particularly in light of the photographs and video I’ve seen of her in the last day or so–wearing jeans, her head uncovered, looking “herself.” Gone is the hijab and the praise for the mujahideen.

Carroll’s beliefs and stand on the war, her sympathy for the Iraqis—none of this matters. She should be sympathetic to Iraqis—they are suffering. Would that more Americans were as sympathetic as she.
What matters a lot in this affair, however, is the unconscionable, even if unintentional, collusion of the American media in an Islamist propaganda campaign.

The giddy, celebratory, uncritical reporting of Carroll’s release on the two networks I watched–CNN’s American Morning and ABC’s Good Morning America--is the real cause for alarm here. The failure to explain the context–or even to question it–of the interview Carroll gave upon first being released was not only a propaganda victory for the enemy; it was an implicit smear of Carroll, too. The lies she was forced to state were allowed to linger.

For the MSM, keeping silent was the problem. Then there are the people across the blogosphere who were busy defending the statements Carroll made under duress (”It is totally inappropriate to assume that her description of how she was treated is motivated by anything other than a desire to tell the truth.”) Did they stop to think about what they were saying? Or is it simply their reflex to defend the  indefensible?

This comment over at The Belmont Club pretty much sums up my take on how the MSM told the Jill Carroll Story on Thursday morning:

Ari Tai said… It’s surprising how the MSM didn’t make more of the fact that the video was provided by the enemy, and tell their listeners / readers it should be taken with a large grain of salt (or perhaps even delayed its use until after verifying it with a number of parties).

You’d think that after Rummy told them how they were being used, and after the CNN debacle of reporting propaganda as news because they were being blackmailed by Saddam, the industry would be doubly cautious.

The journalistic sin was providing no context for the pictures the networks aired over and over again yesterday morning. They jumped the gun: again–like in the Sago mines disaster. Went with the story before they knew the story. Showed the pictures (again and again) before they knew the story. And, worst of all, showed no critical judment–either about what they were seeing or what they were airing:

Anti-American propaganda dressed in a hijab and spoken in an American accent.

It didn’t go down easy. Several people–none of them “political” and none of them newshounds–mentioned it to me today.

I am positive that the Danes are smart enough to form an opinion about this themselves. What I’m saying is: I mean you no harm. But [other Muslims] do because they think it will give them power in the Moslem community in Denmark. Did my visit harm you? No, the visit the Imams paid the Arab countries, spreading false, dangerous accusations about  your country harmed you. They are the ones who owe an apology to the Danes. Not the Prime Minister and not Jyllands-Posten.”

So says Algerian-French journalist Mohammed Sifaoui to the Danish paper Politiken in the heated aftermath of the Mohammed cartoon jihad. Note that a Muslim is explaining this to deeply skeptical Danes.

To see how deep is the European denial of an Islamist threat from within, even after 7/7 and 3/11, read the whole interview. (Thanks to Agora for the translation and for following this story so doggedly.)

The AP reports that violence has broken out among the Palestinians in the wake of Hamas’s ascension:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - A top militant with ties to Hamas was killed by a car bomb Friday, and his followers blamed security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement for the assassination.

A shootout at the militant’s funeral killed three more people and wounded more than 20, raising the possibility of a wider Hamas-Fatah clash just two days after Hamas assumed power, replacing Fatah at the helm of the Palestinian Authority.

In the last few weeks debate has been raging about whether or not the intra-Muslim conflict in Iraq is a civil war or rather the run-up to a potential civil war. I wonder: in the Middle East what constitutes a civil war, and how is it different than, say, “a wider Hamas-Fatah clash” (see above) among the Palestinians?.