Oh Yes He Did

Marty Peretz on George Soros:

"His authority comes from nothing more than his money."

Hey, but at least it's his own money, right Marty?

Ignatius J. Peretz Has A Posse

Regarding the rather entertaining dustup between Matt Yglesias and a small confederacy of dunces, let me just say, first, that having your views on Palestinian politics recommended by Marty Peretz and Jonah Goldberg is a bit like being hailed as the world's greatest living poet by Jewel and the person who cleans Jewel's pool.

Second, any analysis of the Fatah-Hamas conflict which attempts to ignore or exonerate forty years of Israeli occupation, and the cultivation of Palestinian disunity which has been a central goal of that occupation, is, quite simply, not to be taken seriously. Blaming the factional violence in Gaza on the supposedly inherently violent nature of Palestinian Arab society (which, remember, doesn't really exist, according to Peretz), while turning a blind eye to the myriad ways in which the Israeli occupation has proscribed, manipulated, and handicapped Palestinian political life during the last four decades, is as racist as it is daft.

Peretz Droppings

I know that I cannot be the only one who finds Marty Peretz’s smug satisfaction at the escalating violence in Gaza to be reprehensible, even if it isn’t the least bit surprising. There is literally nothing that transpires among the Palestinians that Peretz will not attempt to use as a prop for his rancid bigotry, as he rehearses yet again the utterly discredited, racist hasbarist myth that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.”

Let's face facts. Only if you are "Eyeless in Gaza" can you believe that these people are a "nation."

And:

There were no Palestinians until there were Israelis. And there will be no Palestine until Israel imposes it. Then it will be a nation-state like most of the other non-nation-states in the Middle East. Yes, a fraudulent nation-state.

More :

Why are men wearing ski masks on the streets of Gaza? So that they will all look alike, and people will think that this proves the unity of the Palestinian people.

It gets worse, if you can believe it :

And, as Steve Erlanger reported, the Palestinian death toll from Palestinian killing rose to 17 on Wednesday. Any bets on high it will go on Thursday?

What kind of twisted pervert thinks, let alone expresses, these sorts of things? And what kind of “liberal" journalistic establishment allows him to get away with, virtually without censure, for so many years?

The Clown Show Must Go On

I'm almost finished with Sari Nusseibeh's memoir, Once Upon a Country, I'll try to post a review of it in the next week or so. I can't resist, though, calling attention to this bit of typical Peretzian assholery:

I watched Nusseibeh, so to speak, write the book while he was in Cambridge at the Radcliffe Institute. Well, he didn't exactly write the book alone...and the title page doesn't pretend that he did. And I didn't literally watch him. His co-author was a man called Anthony David, a ghost-writer who followed him around Harvard taking notes. James Boswell to Dr. Johnson. Can't a real intellectual produce his own books?

Indeed, one could ask of Peretz: Can't a real intellectual produce books? Or are "real intellectuals" too busy spending their wives' money to indulge their obsessive anti-Arab bigotry? Needless to say, it's not uncommon for political figures to employ ghostwriters to help them compile and write their memoirs, so Peretz's catty insult would be ridiculous even if Peretz had ever written a book himself.

Today's Clown Show

Marty Peretz, confusing the words "analogy" and "libel":

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is in the news again. The first time I'd heard of this group was when it picketed our old offices on 19th St, NW, for perhaps a week. I don't recall exactly what provoked them. But, hey, this is a free country: Let them picket to their hearts' content. OK, they made it a bit uncomfortable for staff to get in the building, and the other tenants suffered through dull, rhythmic sloganeering. One thing you know is that any country for which CAIR cares would have locked up the picketers and maybe even tortured them, just for the hell of it.

Since that time, we've run a few articles warning that this is not the ADL of the Muslims. A more apt analogy, though dated, would be the German American Bund to the Nazis or the Labor Youth League to the Comintern. Here, and here.

Now The New York Times has run a story about CAIR and its ties to Hamas and Hezbollah. Not a conclusive article. But still ... .

But still...nothing. Nothing in the Times article which supports Peretz's contention in he slightest. From the article:

A debate rages behind the scenes in Washington about the group, commonly known as CAIR, its financing and its motives. A small band of critics have made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it to Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department, and have gone so far as calling the group an American front for the two.

...

Government officials in Washington said they were not aware of any criminal investigation of the group. More than one described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association.

“Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares,” said Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. official who directed counterterrorism in the Washington field office from 2002 to 2005.

But still...nothing. The only thing that the Times story had to say about CAIR's "ties to Hamas and Hezbollah" is that they are constantly asserted by CAIR's critics, and remain completely unproven by anyone. So the article actually is pretty conclusive that there's nothing to the defamatory accusations which Peretz is trying to keep alive through the clever use of ellipsis.

Compounding his dishonesty, Peretz instalinks to two TNR articles by Joseph Braude as if they made his case, when in fact they undercut it. The first is an article about Abdurahman Alamoudi, the head of an entirely different organization, and mentions CAIR only briefly; the second is about the response of various Muslim groups to the July 2005 London bombings, and notes only that CAIR issued an immediate and unqualified condemnation of the attack. But still...Nazis and Communists, according to Marty Peretz.

Sold

Sadly, even though Marty Peretz has sold his remaining share of The New Republic, he will not be retiring to go and volunteer with traumatized children in Gaza. As part of the deal, Peretz will retain the title of editor in chief (and, of course, retain the shiny satin bowling jacket which identifies him as such) and continue to contribute to the magazine in the print edition and, Michael Calderone writes, in "his pugnacious blog, The Spine." Pugnacious, right. In the same way that Ann Coulter is "flamboyant" or Professor Griff was "outspoken."

I guess I understand Marty's requirements here. There's no way he would be able to wait for his semi-annual Wall Street Journal op-ed (for which he's usually brought in to bash some Democrat or Democratic initiative) for the opportunity to reiterate, once again, his view that Arabs are subhuman, their culture stinks, and Palestinian identity is just another word for Jew hatred. Peretz's kind of obsessive bigotry requires a regular forum to be properly and satisfyingly indulged, which, come to think of it, is probably what led him to buy TNR in the first place. Boy, times have sure changed since then (fade in harmonica, creaking of rocking chair.) Back in the 70's, in order to get published in a prominent political magazine you had to work hard, write well, and have something interesting to say. That, or marry someone with enough money to buy you your own prominent political magazine. Here in the future, we possess all kinds of new and wonderful tools which enable us to participate in political conversation in ways that our forebears couldn't have imagined. Broadcasting one's obsessions and advertising one's prejudices is now no longer the sole purview of trained journalists and wealthy cranks.

Andrew Sullivan marks the end of an era with a single tear rolling down his cheek. I can understand that Sullivan has warm feelings for Peretz because Sullivan began his career at TNR, but I wonder whether he would have written such praise for Peretz if, for the past several decades, Peretz's bile and loathing had been directed at homosexuals and gay culture, rather than Arabs and Arab culture?

Eric Alterman has more.