by Derek Davison
This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, demonstrate solidarity, and carry out a public discussion about the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for the future of Europe, Russia, and the world.” However, Wieseltier’s remarks at the conference, delivered on May 17, focused very little on “Ukrainian pluralism” and instead painted a picture of a crisis that bears little resemblance to what we actually know about the situation in Ukraine.
Wieseltier should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the neoconservative policy world. Despite being considered a liberal thinker, he has worked on behalf of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and its offshoot, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), as well as continues to be affiliated with PNAC’s successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). FPI has written many letters, all including Wieseltier’s signature, to prominent DC politicians, endorsing a litany of neocon policy goals: military intervention in Syria, increased hostility toward Iran, and belligerence toward Russia. Wieseltier himself insists that he is not a neocon, and former LobeLog contributor Ali Gharib once declared him a “liberal neocon enabler and booster” rather than a neocon in his own right. This may be a distinction without much of a difference.
During his remarks in Kiev, Wieseltier began by placing his feelings on the situation in Ukraine in the context of his “somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals, some of whom became my teachers and my heroes, against the Stalinist assault on democracy in Europe.” That desire seems to have motivated Wieseltier to concoct a new narrative of recent events that papers over the very real internal struggle going on among the Ukrainians themselves, in order to make the crisis entirely about Russian aggression. He concedes that “Putin is not Stalin,” at least, and no one could challenge his assertion that “Putin is bad enough,” but Wieseltier was still trading in half-truths through much of his speech.
For starters, Wieseltier opines that “[t]he Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West, its unintimidated preference for Europe over Russia, is not merely a strategic and economic choice; it is also a moral choice, a philosophical choice, a societal decision about ideals, a defiance of power in the name of justice, a stirring aspiration to build a society and a state that is representative of some values and not others.” This assumes facts not in evidence — specifically, of a “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” According to polling data, prior to Crimea’s secession in March, when Ukrainians were asked which economic union their country should join if it could only join one, support for joining the European Union never polled higher than a slim plurality of Ukrainian citizens. A Gallup poll taken in June-July 2013 found that more Ukrainians saw NATO as a “threat” than as “protection” (a plurality chose “neither”). Predictably, Ukrainians in the country’s east have been more likely to have a negative view of NATO and the EU than Ukrainians in the west.
Even now, after Crimea’s secession and the implied threats of a Russian invasion, only 43% of Ukrainians want stronger relations with the EU to the exclusion of stronger relations with Russia, and only 45% of Ukrainians have a positive view of the EU’s influence on Ukraine. These are both pluralities, yes, but they hardly speak to some universal “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” In fact, there is evidence to suggest that recent polling that indicates growing support for joining the EU reflects the Ukrainians’ response to what they see as Russian aggression and does not necessarily involve any abiding Ukrainian desire to join the West.
Wieseltier talks about four principles that guide the Ukrainian “revolution”: liberty, truth, pluralism, and moral accountability, but in each case his remarks obscure what is really happening in Ukraine. He talks about liberty, “the right of individuals and nations to determine their own destinies and their own way of life,” but ignores the fact that, for many Crimeans and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, the Euromaidan protests that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych took away their rights, as individuals, “to determine their own destinies.” This was not a democratic or electoral transfer of power; it was a coup against what was by all accounts a legitimately elected government. Weiseltier seems unconcerned that Ukraine’s revolution effectively disenfranchised vast numbers of Ukrainian citizens by short circuiting their electoral process. He also criticizes Russian propaganda that calls the Kiev government “fascist” without acknowledging that there are fascist or soft fascist elements involved with Euromaidan who have been given a significant role in the government.
But it is on the principle of “pluralism” where Wieseltier is most confounding. He says that “[t]he crisis in the Ukraine is testing the proposition that people who speak different languages can live together in a single polity. That proposition is one of the great accomplishments of modern liberalism. Putin repudiates it.” But Putin’s geopolitics aside, it was, in fact, the new Ukrainian parliament installed by Euromaidan that initially repudiated that proposition; its very first act was a repeal (passed but not signed into law) of a 2012 law that allowed regional languages to attain semi-official status in parts of Ukraine with sizable non-Ukrainian populations. The impact of this action in terms of stoking the fears of Ukraine’s Russian population about the intentions of the new government probably can’t be overstated.
It seems clear that, as Jim Sleeper writes, Wieseltier has “learned nothing from his moral posturing on Iraq.” As he and his colleagues in PNAC and the CLI did a decade ago, Wieseltier is still using the language of principle and moral absolutes to mask reality and support the desire for a more muscular American foreign policy.
]]>Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two [...]]]>
Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two paragraphs about an Iranian air defense war game:
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said Tuesday that there were indicators that international sanctions on Iran had caused a rift between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme LeaderAyatollah Ali Khamenei.
“I personally believe they’re still intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, but also the information that we have is that they have been surprised by the impact of the sanctions,” he said. “Those measures have really bitten much harder than they anticipated, and we even have some evidence that Khamenei now is beginning to wonder if Ahmadinejad is lying to him about the impact of the sanctions on the economy and whether he’s getting the straight scoop in terms of how much trouble the economy really is in.”
Mr. Gates said “the only long-term solution in avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest” and “everything else is a short-term solution.”
On Nov. 8, Mr. Gates cited the success of the sanctions to push back against comments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “a credible threat of a military operation” is the only way to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.
Speculation continues to run wild over whether Israel will launch air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities if Western diplomatic and economic measures are seen as failing.
Not a word on Gates’ warning about an attack, a warning that echoes the concerns of a wide array of former top Pentagon brass and diplomats and prominent Iranian dissidents — namely, that an attack would unify Iran against the United States and destroy the nascent opposition.
Birnbaum simply doesn’t report this aspect of the talk.
Compare his story with Reuters’s lede:
Sanctions against Iran are biting hard and triggering divisions among its leadership, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday, as he argued against a military strike over Tehran’s nuclear program.
And the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, reiterating his long-standing opposition to a military attack on Iran, said Tuesday that new sanctions led by the Obama administration are causing divisions within the Iranian leadership.
Kessler, a mere two paragraphs later, adds:
Gates, who has repeatedly warned against military strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, said, “I personally believe they are intent on acquiring nuclear weapons…”
Lest Reuters and the Washington Post be accused of some sort of liberal bias, here’s the right-wing Israeli Jerusalem Post‘s third paragraph:
Additionally, Gates told the [audience] that a military strike would not succeed at halting Iran’s nuclear program. He said it would only result in it becoming more secretive than it already is, and strengthen the country’s unity.
While most of those pieces were longer than Birnbaum’s, it’s clear these other publications reported what was a central thrust of Gates’s answer to the question he was asked about Iranian nukes — that attacking Iran is a bad idea. Birnbaum leaves this out entirely, instead juxtaposing Gates’s recent PR work for sanctions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for a “credible military threat” against Iran. Given that Birnbaum had enough “white space” to tack on two paragraphs about Iranian wargames, it seems that brevity was not the issue, either.
The Washington Times, which until recently faced some financial problems, has a decidedly hawkish bent. Their opinion section regularly publishes some of the most belligerent voices in U.S. foreign policy. That does not necessarily reflect poorly on the newsroom; the Times has featured Eli Lake’s informative national security reporting.
I’m not as familiar with much of Birnbaum’s work, but it seems good enough. Eli Clifton, on this blog, reported an instance when the Bahraini government took issue with a diplomat’s comments to Birnbaum, but it seems to have been a standard walk-back. Our colleague Daniel Luban also took a little issue with Birnbaum’s New Republic hit piece on Human Rights Watch, but said from the get-go that Birnbaum’s piece “actually isn’t terrible, at least by the (admittedly low) standards of TNR hit pieces.” That’s pretty much how I feel about what little I’ve read.
Nonetheless, in this instance, Birnbaum’s omission raises serious questions his reporting.
]]>Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics [...]]]>
Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics but not much in the way of a religious education. Instead, Goldberg forged his Jewish identity in response to some schoolyard anti-Semitism whose traumas left him longing for the so-called muscle Judaism represented by Zionism.
Jim has written an excellent blog post on the role of humiliation in forming the neocon psyche which, when read in the context of the description of Goldberg’s “Jewish identity,” offers some insights into how Goldberg may have gained his hawkish instincts.
But the points from Berrin’s article which deserve special attention regard Goldberg’s role in the hyping of an Iraq-al-Qaeda link in a 2002 New Yorker article and accusations that he is “peddling Israeli propaganda.”
Berrin writes of the response to Goldberg’s September Atlantic cover story (I blogged about it here) on the likelihood of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear program (my emphasis):
The story has been both widely praised and reviled. Critics accused Goldberg of warmongering, framing the piece as a question of who would invade Iran — Israel or the U.S.? — rather than challenging the sense of another Middle East incursion. Charges that he was, yet again, prepping America for war stem back to a 2002 piece he wrote for The New Yorker, in which he claimed to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The piece was widely interpreted as an endorsement for the Iraq war, which, on some level, Goldberg regrets. He now admits having been wrong about Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction “like everybody else” but maintains the dignity of the story. “I will never regret taking a stand against a genocidal fascist,” he said. “Do I regret the atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war, and its aftermath? Of course.” Citing a report conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, he defends his claim connecting Hussein to al-Qaeda.
While I haven’t seen many critics attack Goldberg for “taking a stand against a genocidal fascist,” I have seen a fair number of criticisms of Goldberg’s reporting. His critics assign him considerable responsibility for having given mainstream acceptance to the false narrative that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was forming ties with al-Qaeda.
Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein wrote in 2006:
In urging war on Iraq, Goldberg took highly dubious assertions — for example, that Saddam was an irrational madman in control of vast quantities of WMDs and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were deeply in bed together — and essentially asserted them as fact. From these unproven allegations, he demonstrated that an invasion of Iraq was the only rational policy.
While Goldberg had plenty of company in being mistaken about the WMD’s and al-Qaeda ties, “everybody else” was not wrong — just the power players in DC As Michael Massing chronicles in his excellent 2004 New York Review of Books article “Now They Tell Us,” dissent was all around. Knight Ridder reporters questioned the premise for the war, but their newspapers were not read in DC. Rereading Massing’s take, Goldberg’s response is a lot like that of disgraced journalist Judith Miller.
Goldberg’s half apology, in which he defers blame to the “atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war,” closely mirrors the avoidance of responsibility displayed by neoconservatives like Richard Perle, David Frum, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Michael Rubin, James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen and Danielle Pletka when they publicly decried the Bush administration’s execution of the war to Vanity Fair‘s David Rose in late 2006. The fact that the war was, in large part, engineered by these very neoconservatives (or colleagues who, quite-literally, worked down the hall) was conveniently overlooked.
Goldberg still stands by his 2002 New Yorker article in which he depended on Mohammed Mansour Shahab, a prisoner in a Kurdish town in northern Iraq, as his source to confirm the Saddam Hussein-al-Qada link. But, as reported by The Guardian‘s Jason Burke, Shahab is a liar and very little of his story which established the al-Qaeda link for Goldberg holds up to closer scrutiny.
In contrast, liberal interventionists (and Goldberg likes to portray himself as one) have offered more thoughtful apologies for their involvement in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The editors of the The New Republic issued an apology in which they said “The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war” and in may 2004, The editors of The New York Times issued an apology in which the editors took responsibility for, among several failures, depending on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq,” as trusted sources. The information provided by these sources was often misleading and, at times, completely wrong, and the Times admirably took responsibility for not fulfilling basic reportorial duties of double checking their stories.
Goldberg played an important role in convincing the U.S. public that invading Iraq was necessary and well-grounded in factual data about what turned out to be Saddam’s nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda and pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. That Goldberg “maintains the dignity of the story” — a story which served to disseminate falsehoods and brought the U.S. into a preemptive war which resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and, according to the Iraq Body Count project, 98,585 to 107,594 confirmed civilian casualties — raises questions about Goldberg’s own (to borrow the term) integrity as a journalist. It certainly should make readers of his recent cover story on Iran ask themselves if Goldberg is reporting based on facts or finding facts to conform to his ideologically driven narrative. (Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli blogger, has written about how Goldberg, instead of cherry-picking intelligence, seems to have cherry-picked interview subjects.)
Berrin also touches upon that very question but then lets Goldberg off the hook.
She writes:
But the more insidious critique came when others denounced him for peddling Israeli propaganda, charging him with a deep, subconscious bias. As if somehow his Jewishness makes him unfit to write fairly about Israel.
In fact, Goldberg’s most salient critics don’t attack “his Jewishness” as a bias, but rather his seeming ideological bent in support of aggressive military actions against the enemies of Israel. Connected to this, but not the sole source of the charge, is Goldberg’s service in the Israel Defense Force, where he was a corporal and guarded Palestinian prisoners during the first intifada. A more apt example of criticisms, however, might be Goldberg’s apologia for the Israeli right-wing at every turn, such as his whitewashing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric against Iran, or how he masks Bibi’s intransigence on an issue — settlements — which Goldberg himself claims to take a liberal stand against.
More importantly, Goldberg’s history of pushing for preemptive wars in the Middle East should give readers pause when he makes the case for an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. When viewed in that context, the title of Berrin’s piece could be downright sinister–”Journalist Goldberg changing the world one story at a time.”
]]>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.
The question is, will this make a difference? Some, like Walter Russell Mead, say no, insisting that the special relationship has always been primarily due to Gentile rather than Jewish support. Others, like Matthew Yglesias, recognize the centrality of the American Jewish community to the special relationship in the past, but suggest that the influx of Christian Zionists supporters means that the collapse of Jewish support will ultimately matter very little. And it’s true that in terms of raw numbers, the number of potential evangelical Christian supporters of Israel will always dwarf the number of potential Jewish supporters.
But I think that both supporters of Christian Zionism like Mead and critics like Yglesias underestimate just how crucial support within the educated and affluent liberal mainstream of American Jewry has been in sustaining the special relationship; as a result, they overestimate the extent to which growing Christian Zionist support can unproblematically substitute for dwindling Jewish support. This is a case where merely looking at crude poll numbers, as Mead is fond of doing, can mislead us. For one thing, they show only breadth of support, not depth. It may be that large numbers of Christians are willing to answer “yes” to the poll question “do you support Israel?”, but this tells us very little about levels of actual commitment translating into political action. Some, like John Hagee and his followers, are no doubt exceptionally committed to the Greater Israel project, but they are by all indications a minority even among conservative evangelicals.
But more importantly, poll numbers fail to indicate influence. U.S. support for Israel has never been about the raw number of Israel’s supporters, but rather the fact that these supporters tended to make up an enormous part of the American political, intellectual, and economic elite. It was this influence, not raw numbers, that helped the Jewish community spearhead what Alan Dershowitz called “perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy.” This influence was manifested not only in support among actual Jews, but among the Gentile elites who lived in the same suburbs, went to the same colleges, and worked in the same offices as Jewish supporters of Israel. And it was manifested not only in obvious measures like campaign contributions, but in subtler ways of shaping media discourse and setting the political agenda.
Thus, even if Israel does manage to replace every lost Jewish supporter with a Christian Zionist supporter, there is every reason to believe that this demographic shift would still have enormous ramifications for the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship. In terms of concrete impact on policy, gaining ten less-affluent and less-educated evangelical supporters in Texas or Alabama does not make up for the defection of a single Peter Beinart or Haim Saban. (I don’t intend to sound snobbish here; in fact, I think that the ways in which the American political system limits the influence of its poorer and less-connected citizens is one of its least attractive aspects. I am simply stating brute facts.)
But this means that supporters of the old special relationship should not get too sanguine about the possibility of replacing the old liberal Jewish base with an influx of Christian Zionists. Even if this influx continued — which is far from inevitable, since Christians are watching the same political developments in Israel/Palestine as Jews are, and could very well become similarly disillusioned — it is unlikely that the special relationship can survive without its traditional base of liberal Jewish support.
]]>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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