Shots in the Dark

…the Yankees win! The Yankees win!

(Don’t expect similar treatment tomorrow, Boston fans, if the Sox win tonight….)

In the New York Sun, Ira Stoll reviews “The Israel Lobby.”

The professors write that “anti-Semitism indulges in various forms of stereotyping and implies that Jews should be viewed with suspicion or contempt, while seeking to deny them the ability to participate fully and freely in all realms of society.” They are at pains to emphasize that “the lobby is defined not by ethnicity or religion but by a political agenda.” Then they proceed to jump in and do exactly what they say anti-Semites do.

Meanwhile, in The New Yorker, David Remnick has a take that reflects his greatest, perhaps his only weakness as a writer: His desire to be universally liked.

Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists. They are serious scholars, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity.

This is a bit of a bizarre couplet, perhaps the only place in Remnick’s piece where he argues by assertion rather than accretion—and by misdirection: No one has accused W&M of insincerity. To W&M’s critics, it is their sincerity that is the problem.

Remnick then continues in a less forgiving manner.

But their announced objectives have been badly undermined by the contours of their argument—a prosecutor’s brief that depicts Israel as a singularly pernicious force in world affairs. Mearsheimer and Walt have not entirely forgotten their professional duties, and they periodically signal their awareness of certain complexities. But their conclusions are unmistakable: Israel and its lobbyists bear a great deal of blame for the loss of American direction, treasure, and even blood.

I do not mean to accuse W&M of anti-Semitism, a subject on which my expertise is more than limited. And yet, I wonder why Remnick is so quick to absolve them of the charge, when the seed of it lies within his own words: though W&M “periodically signal their awareness of certain complexities,” they still paint a picture of Israel as the Great Satan in American foreign policy. In other words, they sometimes try to be scholarly, but more often resort to stereotyping. Why could that be?

Remnick’s answer lies in his concluding words:

“The Israel Lobby” is a phenomenon of its moment. The duplicitous and manipulative arguments for invading Iraq put forward by the Bush Administration, the general inability of the press to upend those duplicities, the triumphalist illusions, the miserable performance of the military strategists, the arrogance of the Pentagon, the stifling of dissent within the military and the government, the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the rise of an intractable civil war, and now an incapacity to deal with the singular winner of the war, Iran—all of this has left Americans furious and demanding explanations. Mearsheimer and Walt provide one: the Israel lobby. In this respect, their account is not so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it.

Put more bluntly, Remnick’s argument is that, in a time of fear and anxiety, W&M are irrationally blaming the Jews and their Torah-carriers. I don’t know if that’s anti-Semitism, but nothing within Remnick’s argument rules it out.

Walking into the Union Square Barnes & Noble tonight, I saw a bunch of copies of “The Israel Lobby” sitting on a table, which would suggest that either Farrar, Strauss & Giroux has abandoned its embargo idea, or that Farrar, Strauss and Giroux isn’t very good at embargoing things.

Professors concerned about the widening money gap between Harvard and everywhere else are proposing some novel ways to spend Harvard’s money—including giving some to less-fortunate schools.

Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University whose blog, “University Diaries,” can be found at www.insidehighered.com, suggested Harvard start giving grants with all that money. She specifically mentioned Florida Southern College, the Lakeland school that has the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings, some of which have fallen into disrepair.

Sounds like a good investment to me….

“I was able to see Craig’s blue eyes as he looked into my stall.”

Larry Craig’s police report.

It’s over, Boston Magazine and the Boston Herald proclaim—the American League East race, that is. And they’re probably right. The Yankees have been stinking up the joint lately, and they’re getting crushed tonight, thanks to a third consecutive abysmal starting performance from the suddenly excruciatingly bad Mike Mussina. (It happens fast sometimes.)

Now the Yankees have to start thinking wild-card….

Larry Summers’ new column in the Financial Times analyzes the current disruption in the credit markets and the role of quasi-public institutions such as Fannie Mae in alleviating the crisis.

Only time will tell where we are in this cycle. There have been some signs of returning normalcy over the past week, but we cannot judge whether they represent a false spring or the end of a crisis phase. There may be further shoes to drop in the financial sector….

This crisis could have a silver lining if it leads to the careful reflection on these vital questions.

Indeed.

Idaho senator Larry Craig, a Republican (of course), has been arrested and fined for trying to pick up a cop in a men’s bathroom in Minneapolis.

Here’s one of my favorite lines of all time, from the Roll Call story on the arrest:

A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding.”

Is that what they’re calling it these days?

Among other odd behaviors Craig manifested while sitting in a bathroom stall, he rubbed his foot against the foot of the policeman in the stall next to him.

As the arresting office put it in his report, Craig stated “that he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine.”

That is just too much information.

I almost feel sorry for Craig, who is married (of course), but clearly has some personal issues. But then you read his positions on civil rights issues: voted to ban gay marriage, voted against adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes, voted against prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual discrimination, and so on, and so on.

Classic.

The Times reports today on China’s out-of-control pollution.

Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union….

Some 1,000,000 Chinese a year are estimated to die from pollution-related illness. And what’s bad for the Chinese is also bad for us.

China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.

China’s air pollution sends out a stream of toxic dust across the Pacific that is wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon—and winds up on the West Coast of the United States.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the rise of China as an economic superpower is the greatest single threat (let’s call global warming a collective issue) to the viability of the planet since the development of the nuclear weapon.

China’s coal-fired pollution has made the Kyoto Protocol pointless; its fishing is depleting the oceans (while the fish that they farm and send overseas is poisoned); they are destroying their own rivers and forcing species such as the beautiful river dolphin into extinction; they are making enormously destructive environmental inroads into Africa and South America; and meantime, the Communist Party seems unwilling and/or incapable of enforcing any kind of environmental regulation, and is in fact cracking down on environmental protest, for fear of social unrest before the Olympics—even though, ironically, the pollution is going to be so bad in Beijing that the viability of the Olympics itself is being threatened.

This is a very scary situation. What do you do if one nation is destroying the world and refuses to do anything about it?

The liberal Jewish magazine, The Forward, has read “The Israel Lobby,” and doesn’t think much of it, nor of Walt and Mearsheimer’s protestations that they are being silenced.

As part of the advance marketing campaign, the scholars asked to appear before a variety of Jewish audiences, including synagogues and a Jewish community center. They were, predictably, turned down.

Then the Forward was approached. We were asked to sponsor a program at which the professors would present their views, unopposed. Noting that we hadn’t thought much of the paper when it came out, we were assured that the authors had now incorporated last year’s criticisms. We asked to see a copy of the book, but we found it as sloppy as the original paper and decided not to endorse it. All of which played right into their hands, enabling them to argue that the Lobby is still working to suppress their views — with the Forward as Exhibit A.

…Most of the paper’s flaws survive in the book, but the longer format allowed the introduction of whole new stretches of substandard work…

I think W&M are facing some rocky waters ahead.