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

[C. G. Estabrook]

Exactly right - and quite well put.

Maybe if the piece leads to a discussion of those two errors - massive as they 
are - it'll have done some good.


On 6/10/10 11:38 AM, David Green wrote:
> 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.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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