Noah Pollak had a devastating fact-check on Daniel Levy’s debate with David Frum last week:
Daniel Levy has of late become one of the most sought-after leftist commentators on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and one of the most frequently quoted and interviewed pundits on the subject in the mainstream press. His name regularly appears in news stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, among other papers. . . . The day after
Annapolis, he debated David Frum for 40 minutes on bloggingheads.tv . . . which has now been posted on the New York Times’s website. Levy’s performance was astonishing. His preferred tactic was to repeatedly digress from the debate in order to lecture Frum on what he claimed to be the “historic context” of the conflict; his appearance on Bloggingheads is one of the most misleading performances I’ve ever seen on the conflict from a putatively serious person. This is a long fact-check, but I think it’s a necessary one.
Pollak’s fact-check includes direct quotations from Levy that allows him to state his persuasive-sounding positions and then follows them was a masterful recitation of the omitted facts. Essential reading.
How off the charts is Levy? Here he is last week railing against both The New Republic (Marty Peretz and Yossi Klein HaLevi) and National Review (Michael Ledeen) (“They both suck . . . almost indistinguishable”). He thinks they are part of the “anti-peace crowd” and wishes a “plague on both your houses.”
This is an individual who represented
UPDATE: Carl in Jerusalem has a typically perceptive take on the Levy-Frum debate and a good summary of Pollak’s masterful analysis of it. Note particularly the last paragraph.