“Judt’s second great moment was when he accused Indyk of being ‘faux-naive’ ”a civilized way of
saying, You’re lying”when Indyk kept saying that the lobby was one small factor in an American
president’s exertions of power. Here again, he used his imagination. Because when you’re talking
about something about which there is very little information, and those who know something about it are
trying to deny its existence, you need imagination. Anyway, Judt described the real exercise of power.
He said that when a small state defied an American president, and the president wanted to do something
about it, he had a great number of seen and unseen ways of compelling that state to fall into line, all
sorts of bullying and pressure and fury. None of these had been deployed in Israel’s case, and lo and
behold the settlements had continued to expand, over four decades… Again I’m paraphrasing. Judt also
got the last word of the night when he explained to a hungry audience that knew in its bones it has
been deprived, that this discussion was an astoundingly rare one, and mind you it was organized by the
London Review of Books. Thus he gave the audience a real sense of how the NIKE SHOX discourse/policy
works, which is what the evening was after all fumbling toNIKE SHOXds.
“The most resonant moment of the debate was Judt’s, too. He pointed out that when he had endorsed the
Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in an article for an unnamed major North American newspaper, he was asked by
the editors whether he is Jewish, and told to stick that fact in the article. (Otherwise they couldn’t
publish it, was implicit or explicit, I’ll have to check my tape). The newspaper”obviously”was the
New York Times, in which Judt’s op-ed taking Walt/Mearsheimer’s side, appeared last April, as I
recall, to stunning effect. I say resonant, and damning: Let’s consider the lesson of this story: You
can only speak out on this issue if you’re Jewish? Oh my god, how did we get here…”
No comments:
Post a Comment