Category Archives: Middle East

Continuously Updated: Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians

Anti-Semitism, Israel, Middle East, Pseudo-history

The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia—Israel’s own Ward Churchills —are the pretentiously self-styled “New Historians.” This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: “We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas”), who’ve cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they’ve thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon…
…the “New Historians'” most flamboyant and fishy associate [is] Benny Morris. In fact, it was Morris’ bowdlerization of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s words that first prompted Karsh to investigate the fraud perpetrated by these hip historians and expose it in his masterful book, “Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians.'”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians.”

Updated continually: Harvard and the University of Chicago have distanced themselves from “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” study, issuing emphatic disclaimers to that effect. The “study” was fraught with logical and factual infelicities and fell foul of minimal scholarly requirements.

“Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians” dealt with a little-discussed aspect of the “study.”

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting writes that

“[E]ven a cursory examination of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in ‘serious dispute.'”

Read CAMERA’s detailed analysis of the study here.

Also of interests is “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic” by Eliot A. Cohen, who writes the following about the paper:

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information–why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

A doff of the hat to Walter Block for sending this along.

Melanie Phillips offers a characteristically superb analysis of a Kafkaesque strategy, whereby, “The enemies of antisemitism are the new McCarthyites’… —anyone who called attention to the outbreak of Judeophobia was a McCarthyite, because they were trying to sanitise the crimes of Israel…”

And from civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz: “Debunking the Newest—and the Oldest—Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt “Working Paper’”

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has more on the straw produced by libertarians who are “pretty much indistinguishable from the far left and the far right” in the unenlightened heat they generate. Read “The Ugly Side of Libertarianism.”

Overstating Jewish Power By Christopher Hitchens

Religious Freedom in ‘Liberated’ Afghanistan

Democracy, Middle East, Politics, Religion, The State

Lawrence Auster is BAB’s Guest Blogger today. First up, he comments on the case of the Muslim convert to Christianity, now awaiting death in “liberated” Afghanistan.–ILANA

“How Democratization has put us in Bed with the Muslims” By Lawrence Auster at View from the Right:

Here’s something to make your teeth hurt. The U.S. State Department refuses to call on the Afghanis to stop seeking the death penalty for a former Muslim who became a Christian. Instead, the State Department spokesmen are saying things like, “We believe it is important that the Afghan authorities handle the case in a transparent manner,” as though all they care about were proper legal procedure. But wait—that is all our government cares about, isn’t? For example, if a mass-murdering terrorist organization comes to power in the Palestinian Authority by legal popular vote, that’s fine with us, right?
Meanwhile Italy told the Afghanis it would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan if the Christian man is not spared.

Religious Freedom in 'Liberated' Afghanistan

Democracy, Middle East, Politics, Religion, The State

Lawrence Auster is BAB’s Guest Blogger today. First up, he comments on the case of the Muslim convert to Christianity, now awaiting death in “liberated” Afghanistan.–ILANA

“How Democratization has put us in Bed with the Muslims” By Lawrence Auster at View from the Right

“Wafa Wows the West” (But not Muslims and Media)

Islam, Media, Middle East

It’s … of special significance that members of the American news media—not Al-Jazeera—have distorted what [Wafa] Sultan has said, introducing their bias into her unambiguous words. Equally intriguing is the fact that Al-Jazeera—not the American Fourth Estate—introduced Sultan to the world…
For my money, if Al-Jazeera continues to provoke viewers with the likes of Sultan, I’ll be signing on when they start to transmit here. It’s a whole lot better than enduring Chris Matthews’ incestuous love-ins with “The ‘Hardball’ hotshots.” That’s when MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, and Rita Cosby aka “Throaty McHuskington,” who each torture us independently during their respective programs, combine to amplify the unedifying effects.
As for the girls at CNN—Paula Zahn, Kyra Phillips and Anderson Cooper appear indifferent to professional competition. Edgy reporting elsewhere never rubs off on this crew. They prefer to kvetch interminably about colorectal, breast and lung cancer; anorexia nervosa, and Katrina. In this stream of soporific, soft-news stories, Wafa Sultan is indeed a rarity.

Wafa Sultan is the reason I praise Al-Jazeera in my new column, “Wafa Wows the West (But not Muslims and Media).”