[Peace-discuss] Tragedy & farce in today's media

[David Green]

I too was disappointed in Judt's comments, and you're right that this piece, although more critical than Beinart's in the New York Review of Books, is indeed policing the limits of allowable debate. Factually, for example, Judt doesn't seem to know that the Palestinians have been suing for peace since the mid-1970s, and the U.S. and Israel have been unalterably rejectionist. 

In the last section, Judt writes: "Along with the oil sheikdoms, Israel is now America’s greatest strategic liability in the Middle East and Central Asia." This is bizarre, and the opposite of truth. The whole point of our resource-driven policy is to keep oil under the control of friendly dictators, and to have Israel help us do it.

DG




________________________________
From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: peace discuss <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Thu, June 10, 2010 11:20:54 AM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Tragedy & farce in today's media

The historian Tony Judt is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, a terrible fate, and that may help to explain the inadequacy of his op-ed in today's NYT "Israel Without Clichés").  It's unfortunate but unsurprising that it seems to represent the limits of liberal opinion as countenanced by the major media.

First as tragedy, then as farce: a man who pretends to be a historian, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the US, was featured on Stephen Colbert's show last night. Colbert employed the same knowing burlesque he's used against the White House press and the US army in Iraq - an extremely difficult procedure - and the results as usual seemed to me equivocal.

I'd like to know what people are making of both Judt and Oren.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/opinion/10judt.html?scp=1&sq=tony%20judt&st=cse

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/wed-june-9-2010-sam-nunn

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