Jay Adler directs me to this correspondence of his with Andrew Sullivan. Inter alia, Adler writes: “The problem in this is that Max Blumenthal and those particular ‘young left-wing Jewish political writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies’ are not, simply, ‘writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies.’ Blumenthal and Mondoweiss are both anti-Zionist. They are opposed to the existence of the Jewish state and are expressly working to bring about its demise.”
Continue reading ‘Andrew Sullivan Forecasts Israel’s Demise’
The increasingly nauseating Max Blumenthal is ably taken apart by Dvar Dea here. Serendipitously, Dvar’s piece came into my in-box while I was reading Blumenthal’s whine on the Huffington Post (look it up, I ain’t linking) comparing Israel’s security forces with those of Iran.
Should it ever dawn upon Blumenthal that intrepid journalism involves more than filming a bunch of drunken kids in the safety of west Jerusalem, perhaps he might venture to Tehran. Or at least London, where Press TV may well be willing to take him on, given that so many other pundits are bailing out on the voice of the Iranian regime.
Also recommended: Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez in The Boston Review write about antisemitism in Chavez’s Venezuela.
“But for the ‘facts-don’t-matter’ camp, there simply can’t be any threat to Israeli security: Ahmadinejad is just talking and anyway gets translated wrongly; anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world doesn’t really exist and whenever it gets too obvious to deny it, it is only an entirely understandable reaction to Israel; Hamas doesn’t really mean what they say in their charter and if they do, their nostalgia for the good old days without Israel is only human; thousands of rockets and mortars targeting Israeli civilians are just homemade fire-crackers meant to signal understandable frustration, and there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism because whatever the Palestinians do is legitimate resistance against a cruel and inhuman occupation. ”
Read Petra Marquardt-Bigman’s critique of those who regard facts in much the same way as my kids regard broccoli. Although on the latter front, I am more confident.
I was struck recently by that fact that myself, Eamonn and the other contributors to this blog rarely comment upon or examine the medium that we use. Perhaps this has something to do with why (from the truly brilliant xkcd):
“Omidreza Mirsayafi was Iran’s first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back with the tools they know best — imprisonment and intimidation.”
More on the trials facing Iranian bloggers here.
You have to read this. Utterly brilliant.
(Via Terry Glavin.)
AJC, which publishes Z Word, has started a new blog featuring news, views and commentary as the Durban Review Conference in Geneva approaches. It’s called Durban II Countdown and is a must-read in the coming weeks.
Welcome to The Mideast Peace Pulse - a new blog from the Israel Policy Forum. Their roster includes Tom Dine, Ghassan Khatib, MJ Rosenberg, Alon Ben Meir, Nimrod Novik and others. Sometimes you’ll agree, sometimes you won’t. But enough clichés from me - go and read it for yourselves.
I wrote earlier about three of the many ghastly articles and videos which I’ve encountered since the Gaza conflict began. If I communicated the sense that there’s nothing decent out there, I didn’t mean to. In that spirit, here are two pieces well worth reading.
Continue reading ‘Gaza: Reasoned Analysis is Possible’
El Criador de Gorilas is one of Argentina’s leading political blogs. Its pseudonymous author mainly concerns himself with questions relating to voter behaviour here and the United States but occasionaly ventures further afield. I take the liberty of translating part of his his latest - titled “El Criador Makes Himself Even More Unpopular” - post below, with some minor editing.
Continue reading ‘Gaza and El Criador’
The strange case of Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, which we examined here and here, remains unresolved. The man widely referred to in Iran as the blogfather, widely believed to have had some sort of murky relationship with that country’s security services, and widely known for his see-sawing political views, has seemingly vanished.
Continue reading ‘Hossein Derakhshan: The Blogfather Vanishes’
Now here’s a story that looks decidedly murky. The Jerusalem Post reports that Hossein Derakhshan, a leading Iranian blogger, has been arrested in Tehran on charges of spying for Israel.
Continue reading ‘The Strange Case of Hossein Derakhshan’
Israel’s Demise (And Other Opportunites to Bend the Mind)
In the nearly three weeks since the Gaza conflict erupted, I’ve had the misfortune of reading a huge amount of commentary on outlets ranging from the mainstream to the obscure. Some of it was just asinine, much of it was plain disturbing. And while there was a great deal of it, the three pieces I discuss below - and particularly the one I begin with, which involves some unpleasant mind bending - nonetheless stand out for me.
Continue reading ‘Israel’s Demise (And Other Opportunites to Bend the Mind)’