First, Peretz [...]]]>
First, Peretz has made no secret of his bigotry towards Muslims. On September 4th, Peretz wrote that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims,” leading Harvard University to cancel his scheduled honorary speech at the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Social Studies Department. So it comes as no surprise that he is willing to participate in the dangerous habit of disregarding Muslim leaders or political groups as simply irrational and insane.
Peretz refers to Hezbollah as a “wild and crazy Shi’a militia” and describes Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as “sane only if you compare him to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself.” While it’s hard to imagine Peretz agreeing on just about anything with Nasrallah or Ahmadinejad, dehumanizing by implying irrationality of one’s enemies is a dangerous form of war propaganda (see Ali Gharib’s article on this topic).
Not satisfied to call enemies of Israel uniformly insane, Peretz moves on to the standard talking point—as pushed recently by fellow Iran-hawks Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard, Joe Lieberman in his speech last month at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jeffrey Goldberg in his Atlantic magazine cover story—that if Obama doesn’t cease to “court Ahmadinejad” and “court Assad away from his pal in Tehran” Israel may have to launch what has widely been accepted to be a potentially disastrous unilateral attack on Iran.
Peretz concludes (with my emphasis):
Dr. A’jad has won all the battles. To be sure, time was one of the battlefields. And the president ceded more than a year and a half to the vicious and virulent opposite number in Tehran.
Iran now has three frontiers with Israel. The line with Gaza, patrolled by Hamas. The line with Syria proper. And the line with Lebanon which is not Lebanon at all. But Hezbollah land. These are all unstable fields of battle. Israel may be forced to deal directly with Iran itself.
How did Israel, and the greater Middle East, find itself in this position? It’s just another “Obama debacle.” In Peretz’s mind, perceived enemies of Israel are all “wild” and of questionable sanity. And a U.S. president who hasn’t followed Peretz’s advice about how to manage the U.S.-Israel relationship is to blame for a geopolitical situation which took decades to form.
Last month, The Atlantic‘s James Fallows wrote of Peretz:
]]>Peretz — and everyone else — must know that if his legacy were to be settled as of today, it would be mixed at best. Beloved by many students and respected by some magazine colleagues, but broadly considered in his 70s to be a bigot.
That said, the article actually isn’t terrible, at least by the (admittedly low) standards of TNR hit pieces. While author Benjamin Birnbaum provides a predictably anti-HRW spin to the piece, he is at least honest enough to include facts that help undercut the HRW-haters’ case. There are some interesting tidbits in this regard: for example, Marc Garlasco, the HRW military analyst who was forced out after the hardliners pounced on his penchant for collecting WWII (including Nazi) memorabilia, was apparently an internal critic of some of the organization’s criticisms of Israel — leading Birnbaum to conclude that in its zeal to discredit HRW, “the pro-Israel community had lynched one of the people at HRW who was most sympathetic to its concerns.”
Still, Birnbaum is clearly out to make the case that HRW has an anti-Israel animus — a case that proves to be rather thin, despite the piece’s length. It basically boils down to two main points. First, some principal figures in HRW’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division have a history of harsh criticism of Israeli policies. Second, some members of the HRW board, as well as founder Robert Bernstein, accuse the organization of devoting excessive attention to Israel’s misdeeds. (Bernstein leveled this accusation in a New York Times op-ed from last year; I previously criticized the piece’s argument here.)
Regarding the first point, I would simply note a quote from the article by MENA head Sarah Leah Whitson, a frequent target of the hardliners.
“For people who apply for jobs to be the researcher in Israel-Palestine, it’s probably going to be someone who’s done work on Israel-Palestine with a human rights background,” [Whitson] explained. “And guess what? People who do work with a human rights background on Israel-Palestine tend to find that there are a lot of Israeli abuses. And they tend to become human rights activists on the issue.”
On some level, whether or not one thinks that the backgrounds of HRW’s MENA staffers are problematic simply boils down to one’s opinions about the broader Israeli-Palestinian and Israel-Arab conflicts. For those who think that Israel is primarily an aggrieved and innocent party in the conflict, it may seem that a history of criticizing Israeli policies is irrefutable evidence of anti-Israel bias. For those, however, who accept that Israel’s human rights record during the occupation and its recent wars has been poor, it only stands to reason that HRW’s staffers have criticized it. Human rights workers should be unbiased, but this does not mean that they must be “impartial” in the sense of allotting equal criticism to all sides — on the contrary, part of their job is to decide which abuses are most conspicuous and most remediable. The notion that HRW staffers must balance every criticism of Israel with a matching criticism of Palestinians is reminiscent of nothing so much as the “he-said, she-said” style of domestic political reporting so common in the mainstream media, in which the typical story simply repeats Democratic and Republican talking points verbatim without delving into which ones are actually true.
As for the internal criticisms by various HRW board members, I don’t have inside knowledge about any of the parties. Still, anyone who spends much time in well-to-do East Coast Jewish circles will note the prevalence of the PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) personality trait. This is the familiar type who is relentlessly liberal on every domestic issue, overflowing with compassion for the people of Sudan and Zimbabwe and Burma and so on, but strangely defensive — not to say militant — when the subject comes to Israel. Given the wealthy New York philanthropic circles from which the HRW donor base (and board) is disproportionately drawn, it is hardly surprising that there would be a few disgruntled PEP types among the organization’s higher-ups who are willing to go public with their criticisms. (Bernstein’s own criticisms in his Times op-ed were, as noted, quite poorly argued, and showed telltale signs of PEP-itis.)
The larger context of this latest attack is, of course, the broader assault on human rights groups critical of Israel. While I suspect that HRW will not suffer measurably from TNR’s would-be expose, it and other rights groups can surely expect more attempts to discredit them so long as they persist in their criticism.
]]>There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you [...]]]>
There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
Peretz is quoted by Glenn Greenwald, who says most of what needs to be said about Peretz’s latest display of bigotry. I’m sure we can expect a 4000-word J’accuse from Leon Wieseltier condemning his boss’s racism any day now.
In any case, if one views Peretz’s post now, one finds that the offending sentence has been changed, without any indication that it used to read differently:
There were moments–long moments–during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture like this in the Arab world turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
The fact that Peretz changed the post (however nasty his revised formulation remains) looks like a tacit admission that he knows he crossed the line. In that case, however, it seems that he should provide an explanation (not to say an apology). Does he believe that Arabs are in fact congenitally shifty and untrustworthy? Does he concede that his slur against Arabs was unacceptable? To simply change his post covertly in the hopes that no one will notice is surely the most cowardly way to deal with the issue.
I realize that it is unwise to waste much time on Peretz. He is an embarrassment, as even his own staffers generally recognize, and the only reason that TNR is forced to publish his rantings is that he owns the magazine. Still, if Peretz wants to be taken seriously in public debate it seems reasonable to demand that he conform to some minimal standards of honesty, decency, and responsibility.
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