TO: George Galloway FROM: Me RE: My Role in Bringing about Your Defeat Dear Mr. Galloway: Having lost your recent election by a rather large margin–and it must have been really embarrassing to have been so comprehensively routed–you decided that it would be a good idea to blame “racists and Zionists” for your defeat. Despite the fact that I am not a racist, I am a Zionist, and a Zionist Jew to boot. I write this piece to claim responsibility for having helped engender your political demise.
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Scribbling, scribbling, scribbling on the Internet.
Tagged Zionism
Yes Virginia, You Can Be Both a Liberal and a Zionist
David Bernstein explains. And the following is worth highlighting: . . . the only feasible alternatives to Zionism are themselves illiberal–have a majority Arab state in which Jews are, at best, a suppressed minority, or force all six million Jews living in Israel to flee to whatever countries (if any) will accept them, or some combination of the two. The idea that giving up on “Zionism” makes you a “liberal” is false, unless creating yet another Arab dictatorship in what is now Israel at the cost of six million Jews’ lives and liberty, and of by far the most liberal state…
John Mearsheimer Is Sober, Level-Headed, Clear-Thinking, and Analytical . . . Except When He Isn’t
I recommend to everyone this piece on the present and expected future interplay between China, Taiwan and the United States written by my former college and graduate school professor, John Mearsheimer. It is exceedingly well-written, very hard-headed, and reveals that Mearsheimer has done his homework when it comes to the history of China and Taiwan. It doesn’t make for comfortable reading if one is Taiwanese, American, or a member of any Asian country that seeks to offset or balance against Chinese hegemony in Asia, but that certainly doesn’t make the need to read the piece any less urgent; if anything, the…
Nuclear Hypocrisy
Via Tyler Cowen, we have this piece from my onetime college and graduate school professor, John Mearsheimer, which was written in 1993 and which argued that Ukraine should have kept its nuclear deterrent. Current events make Mearsheimer’s piece look very prescient indeed, as Professor Cowen says. Of course, being the nettlesome fellow that I am, I have to bring up this blog post of mine, which was written over three and a half years ago, and which noted that while Mearsheimer was willing to argue against both the de-nuclearization of Europe and India, he was–and continues to be–entirely willing to argue…
Scarlett Johannson Schools OxFam
Well played: As if her otherworldly beauty and screen presence were not enough, here is another reason to love Scarlett Johansson: Oxfam, of which she was an ambassador, hinted that she should cut her ties with SodaStream on the basis that it maintains factories in Israeli settlements and she responded by cutting her ties with Oxfam! What’s not to love about this story? A worthy charity shakes its big head in disapproval at a celeb who has dared to do things for a company that works in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, no doubt expecting the celeb to freak out,…
“C’est un Peu Trop, Non?”
Oui. C’est un peu trop: The truth comes out when we think no one else is listening. On Thursday a United Nations interpreter, unaware that her microphone was on, uttered words of truth in reaction to the General Assembly’s adoption of nine politically-motivated resolutions condemning Israel, and zero resolutions on the rest of the world. Under the mistaken impression that she was speaking only to colleagues, the interpreter uttered the following words into the headphones of every UN delegate, and before a live webcast audience worldwide: “I think when you have… like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, there’s gotta be…
