Leon Wieseltier reports on a “series of hot-headed e-mails” on which he was copied or forwarded, from Tony Judt, occasioned by Judt’s inability to give a speech on his favorite topic at the Polish Embassy:
Here is Judt on October 4: "Maybe you really do have to have grown up under Communism to recognise the house style of a demagogic rag like the New York Sun . . . and yes, it helps to have read Kafka to know what it feels like to go to bed a liberal, secular historian of Jewish background and wake up the next morning an anti-semitic Israel-denier." Only somebody who did not grow up under communism and did not read Kafka could have written that sentence, or someone romantically involved with himself.
Similarly, on October 3: "the public space for non-conforming opinion in this country is closing down." And "whatever your views of the
Middle East I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America." Amerika! So let us be clear. The censorship of Tony Judt is not working. He is one of the least suppressed, repressed, and oppressed intellectuals who ever lived. . . . Anyway, Judt exaggerates his dissidence, the unpopularity of his anti-Bush, anti-war, and anti-Israel views, which are by now banalities.
And his suggestion that he is not an "Israeldenier" is, quite simply, a lie. "When and where did I ever negate
Israel’s right to exist?" he indignantly asks . . . October 23, 2003, is when, The New York Review of Books is where. I have never met anybody of any persuasion who believes that Judt’s call for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in " Israel: The Alternative" was not a call for the abolition of the Jewish state. I wonder whether the shahid of Washington Square and his champions have spoken or signed anything against the boycotts of Israeli academics; but I will leave the double-standards research to others. The more significant point is that what Judt was prevented from delivering at the Polish consulate was a conspiracy theory about the pernicious role of the Jews in the world. That is what the idea of "the Lobby" is. It is Mel Gibson’s analysis of the
Iraq war. It is not just an analysis of the impact of aipac on particular resolutions and policies: such an analysis requires a detailed knowledge of American government, specifically of Congress, that I suspect Judt does not possess and that his fellow heroes Mearsheimer and Walt have been shown to lack.
Do you want to see how little Mearsheimer knows about his subject? Watch ScribeMedia’s video (scroll down to Section 06) of the London Review of Books debate at Cooper Union last month, entitled “The Israel Lobby: Does It Have Too Much Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy?” with panelists Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, Rashid Khalidi, and Dennis Ross.
Mearsheimer starts talking about how Bush 41 “caved in” on loan guarantees to
Later in the segment, you can see Rashid Khalidi expound on his theory that the “Israel Lobby” controls not only American foreign policy but domestic politics as well. In his weird listing, there is almost nothing not controlled by it. What passes for scholarship at
UPDATE: For more on Judt’s overheated emails, which included his accusation of Abe Foxman of the ADL and David Harris of the American Jewish Committee "and some others in the leadership of ‘official’ American Jewry" as "illiberal lying bigots — Fascists, as we used to say" and his description of Foxman as "pollution" that "swirls in the gutters of every democracy" — a sentence that could only be written by someone who has no idea what contemporary fascism looks like — see Suzy Hansen’s cover story in the October 16 New York Observer. At the end of the article, Judt tells Hansen that he can tell "real anti-Semitism" — it’s a "sort of insensitivity to the implications of your own words."