David Rothkopf Takes Stephen Walt to School

Ouch. That new Foreign Policy website is craaazy. Everyone over here at The Atlantic gets along, Alhamdullilah. Not so over at Foreign Policy. Of course, they've hired the egregious Stephen Walt as a blogger, so it was only a matter of time before one of their commonsense bloggers, in this case the perspicacious David Rothkopf, took him down. An excerpt:

Walt continues his, how shall I put it, crusade?, jihad?...against this nefarious lobby and U.S. support for Israel on this website. He has sketched out a thought experiment in which he posits what might happen were it a few orthodox Jews fighting for their freedom in Gaza rather than the Palestinians. He has quoted George Orwell to make the point that he feels we are overlooking Israeli abuses against the Palestinians. He has suggested that the media is making Israel's case for it. (Please let me know where I can tune in to that. Mostly I get the opposite. Sometimes I think, the BBC ought to rename itself Death-to-Israel TV. I am often glad my college French is not good enough to watch the nightly news from Paris.)

In short, he has become as biased a pleader of special interests as he accuses the Israel Lobby of being. And as such he has become a member of the anti-Israel Lobby, a group that is every bit as vocal and at the moment seems to be even more empowered than the its counterpart. Members include Jimmy Carter and his former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, celebrity activists like Richard Gere, and many members of the media. Like the members of the Israel Lobby, they found their case on some very reasonable assertions. The Palestinians should have a state of their own and their plight is dismal. It is also a terrible tragedy that so many are the innocent victims of the conflict between Israel and, at the moment, Hamas.