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Jeffrey Goldberg Says ‘Who Me?’

Jeffrey Goldberg has a post calling me “thuggish”– twice in one short post actually. He doesn’t like that I wondered whether he might soon call Sen. Patrick Leahy an anti-Semite for comparing the plight of the Palestinians to that of his Irish ancestors –“hunted because they had fought to practice their own religion… hunted because […]

Jeffrey Goldberg has a post calling me “thuggish”– twice in one short post actually. He doesn’t like that I wondered whether he might soon call Sen. Patrick Leahy an anti-Semite for comparing the plight of the Palestinians to that of his Irish ancestors –“hunted because they had fought to practice their own religion… hunted because they wanted to keep their land..”” Jeffrey’s answer is No, definitely not, he has the highest regard for Leahy, etc. How on earth could I have suspected such a thing?

It was probably this , Goldberg’s long review of Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby”. Instead of engaging the arguments made by two very serious and highly regarded scholars about Israel and its status as America’s most treasured ally, Goldberg took his readers on a three thousand word tour through Osama Bin Laden (and his distaste for “usury”) Father Coughlin, David Duke, Mel Gibson while very drunk, Louis Farrakhan, before asking why Walt and Mearsheimer would want to join this “odious tradition.” (He actually called the tradition “negative Judeocentrism” but that was simply being clever.)

Anyway, his resort to smearing those whose foreign policy views about Israel he dislikes by claiming they have joined the “tradition” of Coughlin, Duke, etc. made Jeffrey a pretty big mover in the labeling of (gentile) critics of Israel as anti-Semites game. Maybe, given his umbrage over how I thought he might treat Leahy, he has regrets about that review. If so, I’d like to hear them, and I’d revise my opinion of him.

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