Shots in the Dark

The Israel Lobby is reviewed by Leslie Gelb in the New York Times BR tomorrow.

Their book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” is an extended version of their highly controversial article of a year ago, which appeared in The London Review of Books. Now, as then, they contend that the lobby has made United States policy so lopsidedly pro-Israel that it fuels Muslim terrorism against the United States, fosters the spread of nuclear weapons in Arab states and puts at added risk America’s critical energy supplies from the Persian Gulf.

This commentary could not be more serious, and I believe that the authors are mostly wrong, as well as dangerously misleading. But Mearsheimer and Walt are raising the very same fundamental, gut-check issues about American security and who controls policy that many Middle East experts talk about mostly in private…

…Why have two such serious students of United States foreign policy written so weak a book and added fuel, inadvertently, to the fires of anti-Semitism?

It’s a funny thing: Someone who once reviewed one of my books e-mailed me out of the blue yesterday, and in the course of his e-mail suggested that I might not have been pleased with the review. I wrote back that I don’t think much about reviews, yea or nay, because in my opinion they usually say more about the reviewer than the book—especially when the reviewer is male. These men, thrusting and parrying with their reviewers’ swords, think that they’re writing in some objective way…when really, they’re generally just writing about themselves. Not always, of course, but often. Meanwhile, reviews by women can be more interesting—less competitive, more contemplative. It’s a different style of discourse.

Gelb’s review manifests this phenomenon.

Some sample lines:

Mearsheimer and Walt live in the same foreign policy world I inhabit….

But as my mother often said, “They asked for trouble”…

And my favorite:

Fidel Castro thundered at me in a private meeting a decade ago: “You don’t have a democracy….”

Note to NYTBR editors: Next time, try this: “‘You don’t have a democracy,’ Fidel Castro told an American journalist in 1997…'”

Anyway, I don’t think W&M will be very happy with the review.

Marcia Brady slept with Jan?

Marcia?

One wishes that the women who pushed for the invitation of Larry Summers to speak to the regents to be rescinded had thought of television commentary like this, on Fox, in re Columbia’s invitation to Iranian president Ahmadinejab to speak….

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Let me give you an example of the double standard. This week there was a petition, in the last few weeks, at UC Davis by feminist professors protesting the appearance of Larry Summers at a dinner of the regents, which was supposed to happen last night.

The invitation was rescinded.

BRIT HUME: Former Harvard University President Summers, former Treasury Secretary Summers.

KRAUTHAMMER: In a Democratic administration, a great professor and a great American. His invitation is rescinded. These are elite institutions that speak about a welcoming a diversity opinion. Well, not if you are Larry Summers, and yet yes if you are the president of Iran, a sponsor of terrorism and a denier of the holocaust.

This is an example of the degradation of American academia. And the reason it has become so irrelevant in American public life — 40 years ago in the Kennedy days academia was a source of ideas. It no longer is. All of that now is in think tanks as a result of the incredibly hostile atmosphere in the university against real diversity of opinion.

Boy, you know things are rough when people are saying that think tanks are generating more diversity of opinion than academia.

The Yale Daily News reports that the campus is under siege from conservative blogs.

When students were caught having sex in the shower last spring, the retaliation was swift….

What will it be like when the conservatives latch on to the story of Casper DesFeux, who filmed himself and his girlfriend having sex without her knowledge (the filming, that is, not the sex) and showed the video to his roommates?

(Interesting technology aside: He used his MacBook’s iSight!)

(Interesting globalization aside: He’s Danish!)

Meanwhile, on the left coast, at Stanford they’re protesting the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as a “distinguished visiting fellow” at the Hoover Institute.

And here in Crazytown, Columbia prez Lee Bollinger is getting all sorts of grief for inviting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus. Yesterday the New York Post basically called for someone to assassinate Ahmadinejad…. Ah, what a strong and secure nation we are!

And finally, over at Princeton, Shirley Tilghman has launched a $1.75 billion fundraising campaign.

Here’s an interesting Crimson story: The Coop tries to have Harvard students arrested for copying down book ISBN numbers so that they could find the books online cheaper than the Coop sells them.

The year-old, student-run crimsonreading.org site allows Harvard students to find cheap textbooks at Internet booksellers by clicking on the courses they are taking. The Coop has argued that it owns intellectual property rights to the identification numbers for the books it stocks, which are organized by course on the third floor. Crimson Reading Director John T. Staff V ’10 insists the information is in the public domain.

…Jonathan L. Zittrain, the director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, also said yesterday that Crimson Reading’s actions appeared to be legal.

“It’s hard to see [the ISBNs] as intellectual property,” Zittrain said in an interview. He said of the Coop’s policy: “It sort of takes the ‘co’ out of ‘Coop’ to do that. I’m sure the Coop isn’t interested in suing its patrons and it probably should just say that it welcomes the competition and welcomes students.”

I love the Coop, but they’re just wrong on this one. Arresting students? What are you folks thinking?

Now, here is one point that Harvard might consider: ISBN’s might not be intellectual property, but I’ll bet there’s an argument that course syllabi are…and CrimsonReading.org lists the books for a lot of courses, which isn’t quite the same as publishing syllabi, but it’s pretty close. Should the university worry that its students are publishing this stuff online?

I know some of you folks out there don’t like him, but he did incredible reporting that season.

Today he raises the specter of 1978, a prospect that strikes terror in the hearts of Red Sox fans.

“The mood is suicidal,” a fan from Maine said in an e-mail message yesterday. “The Yanks are going to win the division.”

…A Boston lawyer said he listened to Red Sox games and asked: “Why am I doing this? This is a waste of time. I know the Sox will blow it at the end and the Yanks will win. And every night lately that premonition comes true.”

He added, “There truly is a foreboding sense that this is the arrival of the inevitable collapse and that they are gagging like they did in ’78.”

Me, I still find it hard to believe that the Red Sox could lose the division—not with their pitching. (Although what’s happened to the bullpen?) And, of course, even if the Yankees and Sox tied, there would be no one-game playoff. And even if the Red Sox were the wild card, wild cards can win World Series too.

No, what gives a Yankee fan the greatest pleasure is hearing the tone of desperation and futility in the voices of Sox fans—almost as if (please God, please God) 2004 never happened.

A small aside: These are fun days for Yankee fans, as not only are the Red Sox suddenly losing, but the Mets (ugh) are folding in a dramatic and exciting and wonderful way. I feel bad for Willie Randolph, but still…it’s lots of fun to watch the Mets choke.

Here’s a curious story: the toy company Mattel has apologized to China for recalling toys made in that country.

The gesture by Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel’s executive vice president for worldwide operations, came in a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, at which Li upbraided the company for maintaining weak safety controls.

…Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys,” Debrowski said.“

…Li reminded Debrowski that ”a large part of your annual profit … comes from your factories in China.’

‘This shows that our cooperation is in the interests of Mattel, and both parties should value our cooperation….’ Li said.

The whole apology has a kind of Orwellian quality, doesn’t it?

A poster below defended Harvard Business School’s new 2+2 program, in which college juniors are encouraged to apply to HBS, by saying that the program was only going to admit 12 applicants and that there was no penalty for dropping out.

Turns out that’s not quite right.

In an interview with Business Week, HBS Assoc. Dir. for MBA Admissions Andrea Mitchell Kimmell explains that over time the school hopes to enlarge the program to 90 students and that students who are accepted, then change their minds, will likely lose a $1,000 deposit…..

Sadly, the Business Week interviewer does not ask if the program is a response to students who are simply abandoning b-school and going straight to hedge funds….

(By the way, HBS’ Dee Leopold, Managing Dir. for Admissions and Financial Aid…has a blog! Any time, FAS…..)

Here’s their take on the subway-cell phone situation:

Good news for crazed narcissists who think the world should be able to reach them AT ALL TIMES because they’re just that important: The MTA is set to announce a deal to wire all 277 subway stations over the next six years. Sadly, your cellphone will only work in the stations, but hey, at least that time you spend sweating on the platform waiting for a 6 train that never comes will now be scored to a soundtrack of, “So then I was all, ‘Why won’t you tell your friends we’re dating?’ and he was like, ‘Let’s not cheapen it with labels,’ which kind of makes sense?” Even better, the terrorists will only be able to remote-detonate their bombs in the station, so you can kick back and relax while you’re cruising through the tunnels at 3 miles per hour.