How true! How brave it is to stand athwart the Jews and yell "Stop!" We are a dangerous group of people. Just look at what has happened to other critics who have gone where angels fear to tread and criticized Israel. Take, for example, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of "The Israel Lobby." Walt, as many of you know, is in hiding in Holland, under round-the-clock protection of the Dutch police, after the chief rabbi of Wellesley, Mass., issued a fatwa calling for his assassination. Mearsheimer, of course, lost his job at the University of Chicago and was physically assaulted by a group of Hadassah ladies in what became known as the "Grapefruit Spoon Attack of 2009." Now he teaches political science at a community college in Hayden Lake, Idaho, under police guard. And Michael Scheuer, the former CIA man who argues that American Jews are traitors to their country, was recently burned in effigy during a riot led by a cell of Reconstructionist rabbis. All across this country, assaults by Jews on their critics are on the rise. It's gotten so bad you can't even publish a mildly anti-Semitic cartoon without having your office sacked by gangs of extremists from the North American Federation of Temple Youth. It's tough out there for brave truth-tellers these days.
Presumably, Walt and Mearsheimer still teach at the sufferance of the Jewish overlords, who wish to give the appearance of freedom the our doomed world. Crafty folk, we are.
In a debate between Goldberg and Sullivan, I don't really see any way for reason to win.
ReplyDeleteIlliteracy probably will have to take the palm, since Alexander Pope's line is "For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread." It's insulting to say someone rushes in where angels fear to tread, since angels are wiser than we. Perhaps Sullivan intended the reference in an entirely complimentary way -- David and Jeffrey Goldberg read him more regularly than I do -- but that's not the obvious meaning.
ReplyDeleteWas there a point to Goldberg's rant there? Maybe I'm missing some crucial context. Obviously he is alluding to Muslims doing the things he tongue-in-cheekedly says Jews are doing, and the upshot of this is... what?
ReplyDeleteBecause usually that's the kind of rhetoric I hear from Mark Steyn right before he suggests we bomb a bunch of Muslims.