Blogging time was limited last week, as it was half-term in my neck of the woods, so I'm posting a few late additions. Apologies if you've already seen them elsewhere.
Tom Gross's Middle East dispatch includes items on the fatuous "Israeli Apartheid week"... I also never got round to posting a link to John Judis's New Republic article on America's pro-Israel lobby and the ongoing Walt-Mearsheimer controversy. Is the latter a symbol of a new form of anti-Semitism? Judis thinks not. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to read what he has to say. Here's an extract:
There is a paradox that haunts these charges of anti-Semitism. On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism--the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith...
One of the best pieces I read on the parenting crisis and the shootings in London was by the youth Worker, Shaun Bailey... As for the day-to-day stresses and strains of child-rearing, Michael Lewis's Slate column was quite chilling in its quiet way. There he is: highly successful, affluent and eloquent, yet he has to admit his unusually intense seven year-old daughter is mounting a psy-ops campaign against him. Should he even be writing about her in this way? I'm not sure, to be honest.
UPDATE: I got it slightly wrong on Judis - you only need to register to read him. Incidentally, TNR has also run an impassioned response from Bret Stephens:
What rankles about the charge of dual loyalty is not that it doesn't contain its share of truth--of course American Jews generally have strong, if subsidiary, loyalties to Israel. What rankles is that it is leveled as a charge. When given voice by the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer, it suggests that the loyalties of millions of American Jews are evenly split and that, in extremis, the Israeli loyalty could win out over the American one, posing a permanent risk of betrayal or treason.
[Thanks: TM]
Shaun Bailey's pamphlet "No man's land - How Britain's inner city young are being failed" can be downloaded here - go to the "Historic Catalogue" and select his name from the list of authors. The "View" button for the 2002 edition gets you the full text, although the button for the 2005 edition only gives the first chapter.
Posted by: Andrew Zalotocky | Monday, February 19, 2007 at 02:03 PM