The first editors of the first issue of The New Republic in 1914 began their books and arts section with what was, and still is, a bristling admonition to critics. The words belonged to Rebecca West, called “indisputably the world’s number one woman writer” by Time in 1947 (though she probably resented the gender modifier). She titled her essay “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” and she was as harsh on herself as she was harsh on the two males she put to scrutiny, George Bernard Shaw and H.G.
OK, the Bertrand Russell psychodrama is also malicious but maybe not dangerously so. About six months ago, I came across a web posting announcing the formation of a Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Yes, it was one of those false kangaroo courts in which, from the Stalin era on, convenes not to evaluate evidence but to condemn. In loads of cases the verdicts brought quick impositions of the death sentence. One such process is now unfolding in Tehran, and its backers are Muslim millenarians and western leftists who are prone to support every revolution even if it is decidedly and objectively reactionary, nay, fascistic. This hangmen's jurisprudence will soon end its proceedings and it will end in blood. The Russell production will be a show trial.
The convener of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, Ken Coates, is the chairman of the Betrand Russell Peace Foundation who has been in this unproductive line of work at least as early as 1975 when he and Noam Chomsky wrote their sympathizers (through the New York Review of Books, of course) to ask for help in raising 20,000 pounds, not a big sum for an organization with so many flashy supporters. Now, fast forward to 2009, and the occupiers of the Russell name are still out on the street pandering for support. Dorothy Day's sweet old Catholic Worker does better.
The verse is from Psalms 119, that is, King David, poet and hero.
Robert Malley and Hussein Agha are (let me just to be polite say "adversaries" instead of) enemies of Israel. That is why they are so welcome in the New York Review of Books and, of course, on the op-ed page of the New York Times where their latest missive, "The Two-State Solution Doesn't Solve Anything," appeared on Tuesday. (The same piece was published simultaneously in the Guardian, the closest thing to a pro-jihadist publication in ordinary journalism.) While fronting as an academic at St. Antony's College, Oxford, Agha makes no bones about his role as a strategist for the Palestinian leadership or as one of his admirers and the brains behind "J-Street," Daniel Levy, (the son of Lord Levy but that's another ugly story) characterizes him, "a track-II activist." In any case, Agha is not a flack for the official Palestinians; he is really and for all intents and purposes just one of them, even more under their intellectual discipline than Rashid Khalidi. Unlike Khalidi, he is also coarse.
Whether Agha is track-II or track-I, however, Robert Malley was once a real comer. He was a special assistant on Israeli-Arab affairs to President Clinton and then reappeared with basically false narratives of the Barak-Arafat negotiations as the Democratic administration limped to an end. When Barack Obama was running for the nomination, the Clinton campaign put out rumors that Malley was one of Obama's middle east advisers, and then the McCain campaign picked up the same tale, with even less scare-success than Hillary had.
I was one of those who put the kibosh on the story, and I was correct. Malley was not attached to the Obama campaign and he is not attached in any way to the present administration. You can understand why. Primarily, it is because he is against a "two-state solution." There were hints of that in his previous appearances in print. But there are no deceptions in the present Times article. The Times and the NYRB, for that matter, have previously published encomia for a "one-state solution." You will recall Tony Judt's outcroppings for that. But, then, you should also recall Leon Wieseltier's devastation in TNR.
It's hard not to laugh, or at least smile, when you see, say, Larry McMurtry give glowing praise to Gore Vidal's new memoir in the New York Review of Books. After all, this is the publication commonly known as the New York Review of Each Other's Books. But on the incestuous reviewing front, I was glad to see that National Review is giving NYRB a run for its money.
A few months ago, Garry Wills wrote an erudite piece in the New York Review of Books called "Jefferson the Aesthete." Far from the radical populist of historical myth, Wills argues, Jefferson was an aestheticized elitist of excessive refinement, who went on reckless buying sprees in Paris and cluttered his mountaintop chateau with Houdon busts, Sèvre table sculptures and a fauteuil from Marie Antoinette's own ébéniste.
Americans, from William James to Jimmy Carter, have been searching for a “moral equivalent to war”: some commitment to high purpose which benefits mankind yet evokes the same degree of discipline and self-sacrifice that war does. Because the vision of such a state is so attractive it has figured rhetorically in the expressions of many presidents, most notably Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Mr. Carter.
