Jeffrey Goldberg

Lee Smith sent Goldblog the following response to Dalia Mogahed's response to his original post. Enough with the responses, already, I know, but everyone (well, almost everyone) gets a turn on Goldblog. This feud concerns, in essence, whether Dalia Mogahed, the leading pollster of Muslim attitudes (and someone who both advises President Obama and endorses his outreach to the Muslim world) downplays Muslim radicalism:

Thanks to Jeffrey Goldberg for his invitation to respond, and turning Goldblog into a model of what engagement really ought to be: not just one side listening to other, but both engaged with each other's ideas and making a case for them (ed. note: Aw, shucks). Accordingly, thanks most of all to Dalia Mogahed who, as she notes, gave me an hour of her time last week for the interview, and here again gives generously of her time in order to engage the article and my arguments.

Regarding the Gallup poll that led to her book Who Speaks For Islam?, Ms. Mogahed writes that the term "moderate" is more a placeholder than a value judgment, but in this context, "moderate" is not value neutral, but is rather part of the highly charged political vocabulary that we've used over the last several years to describe relations between the US and the Muslim world. Perhaps she and her co-author John Esposito did not, as I wrote, intend to "prove that the vast majority of the world's Muslims are moderate by nature"; however, both their choice of questions and the decisions they made in clustering respondents can serve no other purpose than to define what they think moderate means in reference to how Americans perceive the concept. The book is an entry in that debate, and accordingly some of her audience is going to disagree with how some of her findings are packaged, as I do.

As for the radical side of the spectrum, I do not believe that there are 91 million would-be terrorists in the Muslim world, but a cheering section of that size makes it difficult for American policymakers to be heard in the region, regardless of how much respect they convey for Muslims and their beliefs. I argued in article is that it was unwise to pretend we admire things about the Muslim world that we do not find admirable.  Ms Mogahed writes that Muslims wish to be engaged as equal human beings, and for a recognition of their common humanity, both of which are perfectly unobjectionable, even as it suggests that this would mark a change in past practice - in particular, a departure from the attitudes of President Obama's predecessor. That Bush was somehow anti-Muslim is a popular theme, in the Muslim world as well as the US, but since President Bush never showed that he did not respect Muslims and because it is impossible to look into a man's heart to know whether or not he is sincere about the feelings he conveys publicly, we are left with the physical evidence; in the case of policymakers, this comes down to the policies they advocate and implement. For example, democracy promotion and human rights were central to the last administration's regional policy, whereas these do not seem to play any role in the policy of this administration.  So, who shows more respect for the common humanity of Muslims? The last president, who spoke out against human rights violations in Egypt, or the current president, who went to Egypt to complain about French laws regarding the headscarf? We can debate the merits of George Bush's decision to promote democracy in the region and in Iraq above all, and elsewhere I have questioned the wisdom of that choice, but the fact remains that under Bush's command thousands of American servicemen and women shed their blood so that, among other things, the lives of millions of Iraqi Muslims were no longer subject to the whims of a dictator. Ms Mogahed's findings suggest that the US is unpopular in the Muslim world because, among other reasons, of the Iraq War; however, I am quite certain that were she to limit respondents to Iraqi Shia and Iraqi Kurds she would obtain a very different sampling. In effect, the difference seems to be that President Obama is interested in the common humanity of the Muslim world, whereas the last commander-in-chief staked his presidency, the national security of the United States, and the lives of American military and diplomatic personnel on his faith in the humanity of Muslim human beings.

I am very glad this discussion is getting attention elsewhere, even as some of the attention is ill-informed. For instance, MJ Rosenberg says of my Tablet article that it is a "racist attack" and that I am "famous for this type" of  "Islamophobic neocon claptrap." I guess I didn't know that, but you can't control what you're known for. For instance, in pro-Syrian regime and pro-Hezbollah circles in the Levant I am best known as a Hariri stooge, that is to say, an advocate on behalf of Lebanon's March 14 movement, a broad cross-sectarian pro-democracy coalition - Sunnis, Druze, Christians as well as independent Shia not aligned with Hezbollah - under the leadership of now Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim. There's no reason for Mr. Rosenberg to know of my political activism in the region, and since he is yet another tiresome commentator on the Middle East who seems to understand the region only in terms of Jews vs. Muslims, it's likely he's never heard of March 14. Nonetheless, noble souls like Mr Rosenberg will have to reckon with the fact that it is precisely because President Obama regards the region as an indiscriminate mass of Muslims whose friendship we must eagerly court that informed his decision to reach out to regional actors that the Bush administration had isolated, like Syria. As soon as our Lebanese allies registered the direction in which Washington policy was moving, they were compelled to submit to Damascus, leaving the US without a Lebanese ally, and Beirut without a pro-democracy movement. It is surpassingly strange that a feel-good policy like President Obama's anodyne outreach to the Muslim world has left so many Muslims worse off than they were two years ago.

Roger L. Simon usefully posts a translation of a recent article from Ma'ariv, which reports that the U.S. is no longer regularly granting visas to Israeli scientists associated with the Dimona nuclear facility. The  best way to judge the strength and health of the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is not by watching what the Obama Administration says about the number of apartments Israel is building in East Jerusalem, but by watching how the Administration treats the unwritten forty-year-old agreement between the two countries that allowed Israel to avoid signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In exchange for reduced American pressure, Golda Meir promised Richard Nixon that she would keep her country's nuclear program invisible, or at least "opaque."

It is true that Bibi Netanyahu is skipping Obama's nuclear summit because he fears an ambush by Egypt and Turkey, which both want Israel's nukes on the table (what they really want, of course, is nukes of their own, and who wouldn't?), but Netanyahu wouldn't skip this meeting, I think, if he thought Obama had his back on opacity. If Ma'ariv has it right, though, this aspect of the "special relationship" might be coming to an end.

UPDATE:  Ben Smith is reporting that the White House is denying the Ma'ariv visa story. 

From Rabbi David Wolpe:

Each morning a father enters our morning minyan with his two daughters.  Before he drops them off at our school, he and his daughters put some money in the Tzedakah box.  One morning another worshiper, Norm Pell, approached me and reminded me of a beautiful midrash.  When the women and men of Israel gave Tzedakah, what did their children do?  They watched, and learned what it is to help those in need.

In turn I was reminded of something that happened when I was a child.  My father, for the first time in his life, was audited.  When he asked why, he was told that his taxes were flagged for excessive charitable contributions -- The I.R.S. wanted to verify that he really gave the money away!  I never forgot the example he and my mother were setting for their children.

Our money is on loan.  Sooner or later it will have to be given up -- the shrouds in which we are buried have no pockets. To be charitable is not only to invigorate a community, to help others, to burnish one's own souls; it is to teach children an invaluable lesson.  Rowan teaches his daughters the importance of giving each morning. May our Tzedakah boxes always ring with the coins of children.

Over at a blog called Foole's No Man's Land, Louisa Lombard has some interesting commentary on my piece on Mark and Delia Owens, the controversial American conservationists. She doesn't know too much about the practice of journalism, but she knows a lot about militarized anti-poaching operations like the one Mark Owens supervised in Zambia. She reports that in the Central African Republic,

militarized anti-poaching is done by a parastatal "project" funded by the European Union. (The project will end in July, at which point it will be replaced; its successor aims to critically examine the management of space in CAR, which hopefully will diminish the death toll of poachers, anti-poaching guards, cattle, elephants, and other animals.) In the past twenty years, this work has been done by French soldiers ("securing the borders"); an American conservationist (his efforts never really got off the ground, though, because the South African mercenary in his employ got into diamonds and attempted murder and other scandals); Russian former French Foreign Legionnaires funded by safari hunters...I could continue.

And she writes:

It is important not to oversell the successes of militarized anti-poaching. National Geographic published a graphic photo-studded story three years ago about Zakouma National Park in Chad (just across the border from CAR), which has been hard-hit by poachers. The author, Mike Fay, struck a cautiously congratulatory tone in his description of the anti-poaching guards' (also EU-funded) work. Nevertheless, in the past four years Zakouma's elephant population has dwindled from 4,000 to 400. Unless something is done about demand, no conservation efforts will succeed.

The most practical lesson I could impart to a rising young journalist is this: If you think there's a chance you're going to be attacked by ferocious dogs while doorstepping the target of your inquiries, bring a bag of McDonald's hamburgers with you; most dogs I know prefer hamburgers over human legs. It's a lesson I put to good use while writing this story. And it's a lesson these cops should have learned:

 

Lee Smith has a piece up at Tablet about a woman he calls the most influential person influencing the White House on Muslim matters, Dalia Mogahed. She is the director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, and sits on the White House's faith-based advisory council, and she was the only person at the Aspen Ideas Festival in hejab. Lee argues that Mogahed is well-meaning but naive about the importance of showing "respect" to the Muslim world:

"Respect" may be the Obama Administration's keyword for dealing with the Muslim world, but one might argue that there is nothing respectful about lying through our teeth to a substantial part of humanity and pretending to admire culturally ingrained behavior and practices that we in fact deplore. Nor is there anything kind and decent about imagining that Muslims are so childish as to be duped by our mendacity. Muslims in the Middle East are well aware of the tragedy of their situation as members of a society in which innovation, education, and personal liberties are on the decline and violent radicalism is on the rise. That is the reason for their anger and despair.

Lee suggests rather strongly that in her polling work, Mogahed systematically underplays the levels of extremism among Muslims. But you should read the whole thing. Because both Lee and Dalia are friends of mine (Goldblog is a uniter, not a divider), I asked Dalia to respond to some of Lee's points, and she did, in this e-mail below (complete with charts).

Though I am flattered at being called more influential than Denis Ross and Secretary Clinton, Mr. Smith uses a lot of embellishment in this article, including his description of my position.  My access to the White House is no greater than any other member of the White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a group whose one year term ended 3 weeks ago. I disagree with some of the opinions in Mr. Lee Smiths's piece, but I see two main factual issues requiring a response.  First, the definition of politically radicalized used in Who Speaks for Islam, and second, the idea that "respect" as an approach is disengenuous and ineffective.

 

On the first issue: Had Mr. Smith asked me about this issue in our hour long phone call 2 days ago, or done the most rudimentary research http://www.gallup.com/press/108457/Frequently-Asked-Questions.aspx, he would have found the empirical evidence for our decision on how to define the extremist fringe. The decision as to where to break out the "politically radicalized" from the rest was data-driven. It was based on several analyses of where the data clustered for a natural breaking point. The analyses showed that the people who responded with a "5" (completely justifiable) to the question on the justifiability of 9/11 as a group were distinctly different from the groups who responded with a "1", "2", "3" or "4." The graphic below provides an illustrative example: It shows the percentage of people in each of the 5 groups who said "sacrificing one's life for a cause one believes in" is completely justifiable. The group that responded to the 9/11 question with a "5" look distinctly different from the groups that responded with a "1" to "4."

 

 

Events of Sept 11th in USA, that is, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
	%
1	55.4
2	11.8
3	11.3
4	6.5

The term "moderate" is more of a placeholder label than a value judgment. It is similar to calling one clustering in the data "group A" and another "group B." We simply used labels that a broad audience can easily understand and remember. Some have also asked how we can call someone a "radical" simply because they thought 9/11 was justified and actually had not *done* anything. The idea here is not that we are judging who or what a "moderate" or "radical" is, but rather assigning labels to statistical groups that we clearly define.

The 7% with extremist views in Muslim societies are similar in proportion (no statistical difference) to the 6% of the American public who report they believe that targeting and killing civilians is "completely justified."  In both cases, these groups are the extremists "cheering section", not an organized network of would-be terrorists.  

Who Speaks for Islam is a Gallup Press publication, which means that it had to meet Gallup's standards of objectivity and scientific rigor.  Gallup is a for-profit company which relies on its brand image of non-partisanship and integrity to stay in business.  It would be hard to find a reason for Gallup to deliberately put its business model at risk by reporting inaccurate or "whitewashed" analysis.  The book did not "set out to prove that the vast majority of the world's Muslims are moderate by nature."  The book set out to showcase data in a readable way, regardless of what that data proved or disproved.

On the second issue:  Muslims around the world are not waiting for Obama or anyone else to pretend to respect aspects of their societies that they themselves abhor.  But like all people, Muslim men and women want to be engaged as equal human beings.  The Cairo speech clearly outlines the issues in Muslim societies that Muslims themselves say need to be fixed, from a deficit in education and innovation to a lack of gendar justice.  The issue is that Islam should not be scapegoated for these issues.  When Martin Luther King demanded that Africa Americans be respected as equals, he was referring to a recognition of a common humanity, not a dismissal of any problems the community is facing.  President Obama frequently addresses the problem of fatherless families that plagues the black community disproportionately.  Yet, clearly, he still regards the African American community as equally deserving of respect. It is possible, indeed crucial, to show respect for a community while honestly raising the challenges that community faces.  It was in fact this candor that many said they admired about the Cairo address.

Maureen Dowd occasionally turns over her column to her much-more conservative brother, Kevin, usually to interesting effect. Today's column, on the future of the Catholic Church, is especially good. Of course, watching the Vatican priest catastrophe unfold is purely a spectator sport for me (and hard for me to relate to, given that my own personal religion never experiences any sort of crisis whatsoever), but it still provokes in me unhappy feelings, not only for the obvious reason (I'm a parent), but because a) I think non-fundamentalist religion is a good thing generally, and b) I grew up in a mostly Catholic town, and I have many fond memories of the Popish atmosphere, excluding the five or six miscreants who accused me of killing Jesus, which I did not do.

I did commit one sin against Jesus, however, and I was reminded of this sin by Kevin's call for the Catholic Church to return to its fierce and righteous roots:

It is time to go back to the disciplines that the church was founded on and remind our seminaries and universities what they are. (Georgetown University agreeing to cover religious symbols on stage to get President Obama to speak was not exactly fierce.)

Our first child was born thirteen years ago at Georgetown University Hospital. A small and tasteful crucifix hung on the wall of the delivery room, and Mrs. Goldblog, upon being wheeled into its presence, demanded that yours truly remove it from the wall. I saw in the crucifix an opportunity to make to my soon-to-be-born child the classic Jewish joke, "This is what happens to Jewish kids who don't do their homework" (I realize that newborn babies don't get humor, but you have to start training them early). Mrs. Goldblog, however,was in no mood for jokes, nor was she in a terribly analytical frame of mind, so when I said, "Hey, sweetie, this is their hospital, and this is their savior, so if they want him on the wall, it's their right." She repeated her demand, stridently, that I remove Jesus from her sight. So I did, and placed him between two towels in a drawer. Everything went swimmingly from there (including the Bat Mitzvah in February of the aforementioned newborn).

But a few weeks after the successful delivery, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a Catholic chaplain at Georgetown, and I told him, with some trepidation, about what I had done, and where, if he was so inclined, he could find the crucifix. He laughed and told me that I should not have been worried about my Jesus-removal activities; if I had called him, he would have gladly removed the crucifix for me, in order to make Mrs. Goldblog more comfortable. I complimented him for his kindness and understanding and general sense of non-judgmental universalism, but I also thought then, as I do now, that he would have been within his rights to say, "You chose the hospital, we didn't choose you. With all due respect, we're not going to change or mask our beliefs for fear of offending you." Cynthia Ozick famously said that "universalism is the parochialism of the Jews," and, if I'm reading Kevin Dowd correctly, this might be a bit of a problem for Catholics as well. In this case, tolerance for the wrong things has led to a crisis of faith that has served to undermine the belief among many Catholics that they possess the transcendent truth.

So says Walter (not a Jew) Russell (but understands us anyway) Mead. Read his whole piece, but here's a provocative outtake:

In the United States at least, lobbying for Zion turns out to be good for the Jews. The rise of AIPAC and other Jewish groups who make the case for stronger US support for Israel angers some international affairs specialists and others who think that on the whole the US-Israel relationship is bad for the United States.  There definitely are groups of people who, while doing their level best to fight the temptation (so are they all honorable men), are so angry and so frightened by what they see as the Jewish juggernaut crushing dissent and imposing suicidal Middle Eastern policies on the stupidly passive American gentile population, sometimes cross that all-important line that separates the virtuously anti-Zionist from the vilely anti-Semitic.  But out there where it really counts, in the great sea of American public opinion, Jewish support for Israel doesn't work that way.  In fact, from what I can see the (mistaken) view that Jews are more hawkish than most Americans on the subject of Israel probably works to reduce anti-Semitism in the United States.

AIPAC, in other words, is good for the Jews, regardless of whether the positions it advocates are good for either Israel or the United States from a foreign policy perspective.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Areefi, a prominent Saudi cleric, says he's going to visit Jerusalem next week:

He said he was not afraid of any ''treachery from the Jews,'' as he had put his trust in God....
Al-Areefi is viewed as a comparative moderate among Saudi Arabia's conservative clergy.

That is how James Taranto describes the following story:

Many Jewish Israelis can't stand the stuff, so there's something mind-boggling about their Arab compatriots: Why in the world do they choose to eat matzoh?

Alana Newhouse ably deconstructs the shtetl mythology of the acclaimed photographer Roman Vishniac:

Vishniac released, over the course of a five-decade career, an uncommonly small selection of his work for public consumption -- so small, in fact, that it did not include many of his finest images, artistically speaking. Instead the chosen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impression of the shtetl as populated largely by poor, pious, embattled Jews -- an impression aided by cropping and fabulist captioning done by his own hand. Vishniac's curating job was so comprehensive that it would not only limit the appreciation of his talents but also skew the popular conception of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe.

Larry Gellman writes:

Bibi's greatest challenge is not Obama.  It's deciding if and when he is going to spend more time and energy working on the inevitable two-state solution and less on sucking up to the fundamentalist fanatics who have consistently worked against the peace process.  Most American Jews don't want to acknowledge (much less deal with) those complexities so they just bash Muslims and Obama and define being "pro-Israel--American style" to include positions that most Israelis would find frightening.

The Wall Street Journal thinks so:

As for the potential threat of military strikes to assist diplomacy, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made his doubts about their efficacy very public. The President's two-week public attempt to humiliate Benjamin Netanyahu has also considerably lessened the perceived likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran, thereby further diminishing whatever momentum remains for strong sanctions.

All of these actions suggest to us that Mr. Obama has concluded that a nuclear Iran is inevitable, even if he can't or won't admit it publicly. Last year Mrs. Clinton floated the idea of expanding the U.S. nuclear umbrella to the entire Middle East if Iran does get the bomb. She quickly backtracked, but many viewed that as an Obama-ian slip.

On the other hand, no one, IMHO, has made a convincing argument that a military strike could, in fact, work.

My article on the American conservationists Mark and Delia Owens, and their troubles in Africa, is now on-line at The New Yorker website. I personally believe that it is worth reading in its entirety. Some of the coverage of the article can be found here and here. One note for those who care: I started working on this piece when I was The New Yorker, which is why it appears there. My corporate overlords here at The Atlantic, including and especially James Bennet, were very kind and generous about letting me finish this project for another magazine. And they'll never let it happen again. 

A Goldblog reader writes:

In your recent post on AIPAC, you wrote this: "and most American Jews understand the difference between the legitimate security needs of the State of Israel and the theological, political and economic needs of the small minority of Israelis who have settled the West Bank."
 
Meretz only got 4 seats in the last election. Many supporters of Labor do not want to leave the West Bank. The same goes for many of Livni's backers. The problem is not the Jews in the West Bank; it is the reluctance of the Arabs to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and the obtuseness of the Western "thinkers" such as yourself who do not realize that the problem is not a political one of borders, etc; that ship has sailed a number of times. especially when Olmert offered everything they wanted. The "Palestinians" represent the Arab nation, which for RELIGIOUS reasons, will never recognize a Jewish entity in the midst of what they consider their sphere of influence. Wake up!!

A Goldblog reader writes, in reference to the Politico story suggesting that Dennis Ross is disloyal to America:

I was surprised you didn't define these recent attacks on Dennis Ross by their proper name, McCarthyite. If you read the Politico story, you'll see that it fits the definition of McCarthyism to an absolute T. It is an anonymous smear of a government official designed to call into question his loyalty to the United States. We've all seen this movie before, and, just like during the previous iteration of McCarthyism, many of the victims are Jewish. This time, only the geography has changed. In the 1950s, these Jews were accused being loyal to Moscow, not to Washington. This time, Jews are accused of being loyal to Jerusalem, not to Washington. Why is it that American citizens who believe America should be closely allied with Israel are now being accused of treason? Nothing changes, does it?

We have recently learned, via the Internet, that Jeffrey Goldberg, the fascist Zionist (and yet, strangely, Obama-supporting) Middle East writer, actually served as a military policeman in the notorious Israeli prison camp known as Ketziot during the first Palestinian uprising. Obviously, Goldberg's service at Ketziot as a young man disqualifies him from writing about Israel, which is why Goldberg has attempted to keep this information secret for so long. But after much web-based research, we now have definitive confirmation of Jeffrey Goldberg's sordid history, an entire book devoted to uncovering his dastardly acts. You can buy this book at Amazon.com, but please buy it quickly, because powerful and dark forces of International Zionism will undoubtedly have this book removed from circulation once its existence comes to light. So buy this book now and spread the word about Jeffrey Goldberg's secret past.

We know C-Span has a special place in its corporate heart for anti-Semites, who make up, it seems, a disproportionate number of callers, but it also takes pity on racists. In response to one grossly racist caller, the C-Span hostbot says, "I can understand your frustration." You've got to listen to this for yourselves:

Over at the Atlantic Wire, Alex Eichler usefully rounds-up some rightward opinion on President Obama and his attitudes toward Semites. Bill Kristol argues that:

Obama "aspires to be a leader of humanity, not merely a president of a single country. And there's no better way to be a leader of humanity than to show disapproval of the Jewish state." Whatever his real feelings toward Jews may be, Kristol holds that Obama must find it expedient to show "anger at the stiff-necked Jewish state. It puts him in sync with the rest of the world."

Pamela Gellar, Eichler reports, argues -- if that's the word for it -- that Obama was "wet-nursed on Jew-hatred" in Indonesia. And so on.

Does it need to be said that Obama is a philo-Semite, not an anti-Semite? I suppose it does. (Yes, I know, I've previously defined "philo-Semitism" as anti-Semitism for people who like Jews, but that was a joke, mostly.) It is nuts to think that Obama is out to sink Israel somehow, to make it into a scapegoat for the sins of the world, as anti-Semites and the occasional blogger try to do. When he's at his seder tonight, it would be useful for the President to understand that "Jerusalem" is not simply a metaphor for universal justice, but a real place that is Judaism's holiest city and the object of a great deal of Jewish veneration. But President Obama is a defender of Jews and a defender of Israel. I've seen nothing in the past several weeks to make me change my mind on that essential question.

One of the reasons I haven't blogged much on this new turn in Israeli-American relations is that I don't know quite what to think yet. I know that it is egregious to accuse American Jews of disloyalty to America for supporting Israel, but beyond that, I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, Obama's destabilizing new paradigm could become very dangerous for America, for Israel and for America's Arab allies; on the other hand, Israel must soon give the Palestinians either citizenship or independence -- there's no other way around this, and if President Obama can figure out a way to safely midwife a Palestinian state, then he will cover his Presidency in glory. In the coming months, I hope to be able to report these questions out, rather than pop off on them, but to the question of whether President Obama is somehow hostile to Jews or the Jewish state, I know the answer already. 

A hit from last year: Corby, along with Queen-of-Jewish-Cooking Joan Nathan, and Mrs. Goldblog make gefilte fish. The feel-good movie of Pesach: