If you are interested in the Mearsheimer/Walt article and/or book (I didn’t know there was a book), here is a very interesting documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N294FMDok98

For the reflexive defenders of all things Israeli: Please note that 90% of those interviewed are Jewish. One is Israeli and started a competing PAC to AIPAC in the hopes of counteracting AIPAC and all the damage they are doing to America. He’s rightly concerned with blowback as Americans are awakening. At least be open, be curious. This has nothing to do with “race,” religion, so cut it out. No more red herrings please. Those who have awakened do not fall for those tactics and we are awakening others.

“I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be the truth” Morpheus

Go ahead, take the red pill….:-)

Now THAT’s a literate Literary Review worthy of the name!

M. R. Khan

Words of the “review” and, especailly, the previous words of the reviewer, are hints to the reader whether the “information” presented is reliable. (NOT)

How does help determine the veracity of the W&M book? Maybe at the CLR you expected a rock-solid factual analysis and instead stepped in a flaming bag?

James Abu, you are clear, although won’t admit here, your sympathies lie with the wrong Freedom Fighters. Does Sihan Sirhan qualify as one of your heros too, or will pretend not to recognize RFK’s killer? Right, we should have trusted Arafat more…

This “review” is better known as a “screed” and belongs in amazon.com, not the California Literary Review! Any adults around?

What we really need from CLR is specifics on where W&M are factually correct or flat out wrong, drawing on multiple, reliable sources, and a reasoned analysis of their conclusions. That would be a review.

The implication that Mr. Abourezk is making, of course, is that anyone who is pro-Israel on any level is assumed to be a liar.

While I gave specific reasons why the books written by Ilan Pappe and Clayton Swisher can be considered unreliable, from their own words and/or omissions as well as my own original research, the best that Mr. Abourezk can do to cast aspersions of Ross’ book is to mention that he now works for that evil “Lobby.” Using that logic, of course, would allow us to assume that Abourezk is equally suspect for being an uncompromising supporter of Arab causes. I prefer to stick with facts, not guilt by association, and any problems I have with Mr. Abourezk come from his own words, most specifically his praise for Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists that was mentioned earlier in this thread and that he has studiously ignored so far.

In the end, the biggest flaw with Abourezk’s positions is that he consistently ascribes the best of intentions to Arab and Muslim countries and the worst of intentions to Israel and, often, the US. In one particularly hilarious paragraph in his review above he says that “both Iran and Syria have proposed a nuclear weapons free Middle East.” The reported events of recent weeks by British journalists who can hardly be considered pro-Israel indicate that not only did Syria have a clandestine nuclear weapons program, but also that there was a major chemical weapons accident this past summer killing dozens of Syrians and Iranian engineers with WMD that were meant to be placed on missiles. But Abourezk, quite willing to publicly assume that anybody who supports Israel is not trustworthy, has no such skepticism about the public pronouncements of dictators and the world’s worst human rights abusers.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with Mr. Abourezk’s positions on the Middle East and of the “Israel Lobby.”

It also strikes me that if someone working for “a component” of The Lobby is automatically disqualified from talking on this issue, then the same must apply to you on the other side for you have made your biases very plain.

And yes, I think Bill Clinton lied a lot about a lot of issues when he was president.

Mr. Abourezk’s mention of Camp David piqued my interest as this was the issue that led me to takes sides on the Israeli/Arab confab. Given that we had the Israelis and the Palestinians in failed negotiations, why would one simply believe either side? It seems reasonable to at least turn to the mediators for some understanding. In this case, the two chief functionaries were Clinton and Ross, both of whom categorically blamed Arafat.

Given the enormous cachet that would have attached to solving this issue, it seems highly likely that the mediators did in fact seek a real solution and the balance of probability strongly suggests their accounts should be reliable.

Even if not, even if the stories about how it was a bad deal are true, it was the best offer ever. (I know this because the media in general was quite adamant and even at that time when I paid less attention to world affairs, I knew the general media was hardly pro-Israel.) Given that Israel was bending so far, what on earth was the point of not only not negotiating further, but starting an Intifada? It speaks volumes.

It is difficult to respond to the accusations that Israel-bashers are fond of hammering away at that the Zionists who built Israel were racist bigots hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine of Arabs. How can someone prove that the mindset of the vast majority of Zionists were the exact opposite, that they truly wanted to live in peace with the Arabs despite the daily terror that the Jews of Palestine were subjected to?

I posted something last week that does in fact go a long way towards proving exactly that – http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2007/09/zionism-and-intense-desire-for-peace.html . I took a single issue of the Zionist Palestine Post from March 10, 1946 and analyzed exactly how the Zionists quoted there, as well as the editors of the paper, wrote about Arabs. The desire to live in peace with the Palestinian Arabs was not just empty words – it was pervasive. I invite anyone to look at the archives of the old Palestine Post and try to find articles that disprove what I am saying. You have two decades of issues available online. The tendency of historians to take individual quotes out of context is reprehensible when it is done for partisan purposes – but here is real source material that cannot be faked that shows, pretty clearly, that Abourezk and Pappe are not being honest in their slander against Zionism.

I also noticed that the Dershowitz column was also published in the Huffington Post, and Abourezk didn’t have a reply printed there either. Is the HuffPo part of the Israel Lobby as well? (I emailed the Jerusalem Post to ask them whether they censored Abourezk’s reply to Dershowitz.)

Cheers!

Of course, Mr. Abourezk is silent on whether Bill Clinton is also a liar for saying that Barak accepted Clinton’s plan and Arafat rejected it. But if he accepts the words of graduate student Clayton Swisher over what Clinton and Ross have said, that is indeed what he is saying.

(Swisher seems to base much of account on interviews with Saeb Erekat, who is an accomplished liar in his own right – see http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2007/08/laughing-it-up-with-liar.html for some examples. But Swisher’s agenda is clear when he completely fails to mention the official PLO response to Clinton’s offer, where they reject virtually all of it – and it is still on their web site: http://www.nad-plo.org/inner.php?view=nego_nego_clinton_nclinton2p )

So I just documented proof of what Dennis Ross said from the PLO’s own words that Abourezk’s recommended source inexplicably ignores.

Another innovation brought to us courtesy of Mr. Abourezk is saying that Wolf Blitzer’s “hostility” towards him is evidence that Blitzer is himself a member of that amazingly powerful Lobby. It appears that the definition of this “lobby” has been watered down to pretty much anyone who is not lockstep with the Abourezks of the world in supporting Syrian and Palestinian terror.

Apparently, there is another liar in the room: Mr. Abourezk himself. Dershowitz did not call Abourezk anti-semitic in his article in the Jerusalem Post, although he does broadly imply it – in much the same way Abourezk broadly implies that Jews (i.e., “Zionists”) were behind 9/11. I don’t know whether Abourezk’s comments to JPost were indeed censored, but I for one would love to see him actually address what he said on Al-Manar rather than change the subject repeatedly as he has done on this thread (notice that he chooses to attack the weaker Zionist posters on minor topics and ignores my substantive responses and challenges.)

Also, my regards to the person who claims to be Wolf Blitzer’s mother. Not realizing that my description of him could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, I had said he was short and asked hostile questions. I probably should have said he was just “not tall,” and that his questions were as “sweet as honey.”

But you can see how easy it is to be thrown off the subject. We are now discussing Wolf Blitzer’s height rather than his work for the Israeli Lobby back then.

As well, Alan Dershowitz attacked my in his column which he wrote for the Jerusalem Post. I tried to respond with a comment, but apparently Arabs are not allowed onto that website.

Mr. Dershowitz came up with something original–he said my remarks on a television interview I did with Almanar television, which is actually Hisbollah’s station, were anti-Semitic.

I had always thought that Mr. Dershowitz and I could have been friends, except for his support of torture, his efforts to have Norman Finkelstein thrown off the faculty of De Paul University, his plagiarism, which Norman caught him doing, and his defense of O.J. Simpson during the famous murder trial. Mr. Dershowitz will most likely be busy now with O.J.’s latest venture into the world of crime.

He did a magnificent job, however, of trying to change the subject of what Israel is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, which is to brutally occupy an unwilling population.

I hope that all presidential candidates and politicians will read every word…

You can criticize Nigeria without being a racist, but criticize Israel and all heck breaks loose.

I came here because I wanted to read a review from a different perspective. I can get the Israeli perspective anywhere.

This man does not speak for me or for my people. He is a total disgrace to the community of Arab Americans to which he pretends to represent. We in Lebanon do NOT see Hizbollah as heros Mr Abourezk! Get your facts straight.

And instead of demonizing Israel how about talking about the real issures facing Lebanon? Infant mortality, the lack of security brought about by fanatics from Iran who you clearly adore and the ravaged economy you who live in the US have no interest in. Shame on you. You are a disgrace to the people of Lebanon and a puppet of facists.

Answer the question asked you by those who post here including the tape of you on Hizbollah TV then show your evil face in Lebanon again.

My apologies for not answering a flawed question. It is flawed because it makes an amazing number of erroneous assumptions for such a short question:

* That the West Bank is legally “Palestinian” Arab territory;
* That Israel’s defensive fence is somehow connected to “apartheid”;
* That Jews are simply not allowed to live in historically Jewish areas, a very racist argument.

Space and time here do not permit me to prove each of these wrong, and I prefer to have an audience that is receptive to learning facts rather than those parroting hateful talking points (like “apartheid wall.”) My blog does address many of these issues much more comprehensively and if you are interested I can point to articles that do an even better job.

Cheers!

Sure, the best defense is always a good offense. And when you’re at fault, trying to shift blame to others is a tried and true tactic. The terrorists and their supporters, like you, Elder and Callie, always try to distract others from their own evildoing, like a pickpocket who yells “thief, thief!” and points at someone else when caught redhanded. We’re wise to your tricks, and we despise what you’re doing to the Palestinians and, if you’re Americans, to your own country.

No one posting here has said a blessed thing about the facts brought up about the authors clear and present bias against Israel and by extention Jews.

It would appear the ones who support this review have little to say of any substance and that makes the point of those who refer to this as simple bigoty sound quite credible.

Have you anything to say of substance? As for the poster from Berkeley I believe you have the most inane comment. Can you refute a single thing that Elder has said if you are a mid east ‘scholar’ one would hope you had more to say that was a true debate. Simply calling oneself a ‘scholar’ is quite silly.