RSS Feed MenuI’ve managed to disagree with everything Andrew Sullivan has written about John Yoo without ever thinking Sullivan guilty of anti-Korean animus, and it should be equally possible to disagree with Sullivan about Israel these days without accusing him of anti-semitism.
Sullivan, a career champion of Israel, turned harshly against the Gaza war. That war was right and necessary – and in retrospect, with Hamas quelled and Hezbollah deterred, it looks more justified and successful than ever. As happened in 2002 with the fighting in the West Bank, the Gaza critics repeated disinformation and wrongly disregarded the security concerns of a democratic country under terrorist attack. So if the magazine Sullivan used to edit wanted to challenge him on those grounds, they would have entered a target-rich environment. Why wasn’t that enough? instead, we got this.
Leon Wieseltier’s piece in the New Republic begins by citing a 60-year-old joke by W.H. Auden, reproduced in Andrew’s blog. Wieseltier stipulates that the joke itself is not anti-semitic, but that the decision to reproduce it was. He complains about things that Sullivan has written about Charles Krauthammer and Michael Goldfarb. (Rightly so, too.) You can prove a lot against Andrew Sullivan. But anti-semitism?
Like all Jews, I’m alert to anti-semitism, and well aware that it has spread into new and more respectable purlieus over the past generation. The New Republic has been a valiant voice against this moral vice for as long as I’ve been reading it, and I am glad they are there to challenge it where it exists. But the challenge must begin with the proof. Cite the chapter and verse. Show the context. Get the goods. The New Republic has not done that in its critique of Sullivan’s Israel writing, and as a regular reader of his blog, I know why: Those particular goods aren’t there to be got. Lots of other goods, yes. Not these.
It’s not as if the Jews have so few enemies that we need to pile them up where they don’t exist – or to confuse criticism of Israel that is unfair or wrong with criticism that is malicious and bigoted.
Goggins // Feb 11, 2010 at 8:25 pm
LFC: can you read? The deleted portion of the quotation from Sullivan’s post does not in the slightest way change the meaning of the final two sentences, which say that “Jews” (not Israelis) “once” had integrity; that is, they no longer do. In other words, “Jews lack integrity.” If that’s not anti-Semitic, nothing is.
anniemargret // Feb 11, 2010 at 8:45 pm
The road to evil is oftentimes paved with good intentions.
No matter what the core reason was that the Bush administration invaded Iraq, it was commandeered under an umbrella of lies and deceit. Condi Rice talked about Saddam and ‘mushroom clouds’ over Cleveland in the same sentence. Americans honestly thought that Saddam was going to nuke our cities.
Sending young men and women into battle under false pretenses is wrong. The American people believed our invasion of Iraq was due to 9/11. Despite the facts related to 9/11, the majority of soldiers thought Saddam was somehow responsible for it. This is shameful. This is immoral.
It is not enough to frame this debate into some convoluted logistical beneficent hegemony of foreign policy that the Middle East was best served by regime change and forced conversion to democracy. Yet it was the actual deceit with which it was conducted in our own country by our own leaders that makes the their case moot. There was a reason why they didn’t want to just announce their true intentions, because they knew the American people would not buy it. Instead they used the horrific events of 9/11 and the fear that emanated from it to make their case.
It is sheer Machiavellian tactics.. It is never wise nor moral when they try to convince that the ends justify the means.
glaforte // Feb 12, 2010 at 11:08 am
Googins: Actually, what LFC posted does “change the meaning of the final two sentences”. By providing a little more context, LFC made it reasonably clear that Sullivan was speaking loosely and intended to be talking about only Jews that didn’t appear to have sympathy for more or less innocent people who were harmed as part of the collateral damage. And any reader of the whole post and reader of Sullivan’s blog would have understood it this way.
The insistence on insisting on taking the precise literal meaning of a couple of sentences out of a long discourse to give evidence for a point like this is exactly what is generally meant by the phrase “taking things out of context”.
I do find it hard to believe that anybody who has looked into this matter seriously believes that Sullivan is an anti-Semite in any sense. He may be wrong about the issue of Gaza and many other things, but these kinds of accusations don’t do much to convince anybody of that, and mostly just reflect poorly on the person making them.
Goggins // Feb 12, 2010 at 12:24 pm
I disagree. People should say what they mean, and mean what they say (I guess I’ve felt this way ever since I read “Horton Hatches the Egg”). Sullivan didn’t refer to “some Jews,” or to Jews who feel a certain way or endorse a certain view, who had lost their integrity, he just referred to “Jews,” and the context doesn’t change that.
Besides, is there anybody at all, who does NOT feel sympathy for, as you put it, the “more or less innocent” civilians who are killed or injured in any war? I can even feel sympathy for the “more or less innocent” Germans who were killed when the Allies firebombed Hamburg. Of the 50,000 civilians killed in one week, I’m sure there were plenty who hated the Nazis. There really aren’t a lot of blood-thirsty, war-loving Jews or Israelis out there, who just want to kill as many Palestinian children as possible, so it’s utterly a straw-man type of statement. On the other hand, Samir Kuntar, who killed a 4-year-old Israeli girl by smashing her head against a rock, was celebrated as a hero in Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Territories when he was released from prison about a year ago. He was given Syria’s highest medal, and even met with Mahmoud Abbas. So, Sullivan’s ire is a little misplaced.
glaforte // Feb 12, 2010 at 4:00 pm
The suggestion Sullivan was worked up about was that Israel’s government should decide that the appropriate response to terrorism was to engage in more terrorism itself on a larger scale, and he was talking generally about those who were inclined to think this was a good idea. I didn’t want to go into the tedious details of quoting from Oren and Goldfarb as Sullivan does to establish exactly just what sort of people he was criticizing. Also, I was really just trying to avoid saying something inflammatory about “war-crimes”. That’s why I said “didn’t _appear_ to have sympathy”, since maybe everybody does have some sympathy for the innocent victims.
If you honestly think that Sullivan believes and wants to convince people that _all_ Jews have “exchanged anger and paranoia for the integrity they once had”, then I doubt any evidence is going to change your mind. And if he doesn’t believe this, then it’s somewhat unnatural to describe his words as really meaning that. Ordinarily, understanding a persons meaning means knowing what they actually think. You should probably consider what an example of the context changing the meaning of something could ever possibly mean — that would probably help you understand the point being made here.
And, by the way, Sullivan has complained much more about Muslim atrocities like your story of the 4-year-old girl than he ever has about any Israeli misdeeds, so describing his ire as “misplaced” is also a little weird. He seems to have some ire about some things done by the Israeli government and much more about many things done by Muslims.
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[...] Of course, the insular journalistic community has rallied to Sullivan’s side, and insisted that its old friend and colleague, good-old irascible Andrew, is no anti-Semite. [...]
David Frum would like you to cease and desist with your criticisms of Israel - John Knefel - Making a Mockery - True/Slant // Feb 16, 2010 at 1:07 pm
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