The journalist Christopher Hitchens has abandoned his role as a leading activist-scribe-provocateur of the radical Left, but here and there he shows that he has held fast to his radical aversion to Zionism. In a column last year on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state, he confided that it is only the “degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad” that “forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West.” (The Israelis, as he sees it, have not “returned a completely convincing answer.”)
Now, in a preemptive review in the December Atlantic of Michael Scammell’s forthcoming biography of the novelist, essayist, and polemicist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Hitchens butchers the record by projecting his own Israel-related hostilities onto his subject.
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If he sat through Ishtar, that’s something he could put up against McCain’s POW experience.
If anyone else had said what Obama said about foreign policy experience he or she would have been instantly laughed out of the election. The willful blindness to BHO’s flaws is breathtaking.
I thought Ishtar was a better movie than it was given credit for. Not an especially good movie, but better than what the critics said about it.
It’s risible that Obama claims superiority in foreign affairs. As a matter of fact, he would probably rank at or near the bottom of all 100 senators in foreign affairs experience.
I cant tell whether this is that patented BHO arrogance or whether it is of the big lie/jujitsu nature. I lean towards the big lie theory … he can’t really be that arrogant can he?
Well, if Obama knows what Sunni and Shia ‘was’ even before he joined the Foreign Relations Committee, he’s ahead of many Democrats who haven’t figured out yet what or where Sunni and Shia are. And wasn’t he in grade school when he ‘lived abroad”?
To confuse that experience with an understanding of foreign policy is pretty amazing.
Actually, knowing the difference between Sunni and Shia may not be such an advantage. It seems that numerous pundits and policymakers sober enough to recognize these proper nouns think the two groups are incapable of cooperating with each other, which has been the source of many disasterous policy decisions.
Didn’t Ishtar’s plot unfold in North Africa? Maybe I have that wrong.
Well, “knowing what Sunni and Shi’a are” is more often than not a matter of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, among politicians and pundits. A lot of Americans have absorbed a very weird idea of what the difference means, in practical and historical terms, from the ignorance and tendentiousness of the press. One politician saying he “knows what they are” is no more credible or informative than that comment from anyone else. (Especially if he learned about Sunni and Shi’a on a college trip to Pakistan. One thinks of little old ladies who learn their lore, often imperfectly, from tour guides.)
Plus, of course, making that assertion in that particular way comes off sounding like it was probably preceded by a “Nyaah, nyaah,” and squealed on a playground.
J.E.Dyer
Well expect Obama to go to the experts if he gets elected – wait until he has advisers like Esposito, Cole, Beinin, Pappe etc giving him the “low-down” on ME matters…
I wonder how many opposition researchers in the Clinton camp are working on defining the itinerary of Obama’s Pakistan trip? Who did he see? What did he say? Who was in the group with which he travelled? Why didn’t he mention the trip in his books?
Hillary isn’t going to go down easy and there are only ten days until the PA primary. Is there a science to defining the precise number of days before an election for releasing the most scurrilous attack? Soon enough to reach enough voters, too close to permit rebuttal.