Month: October 2006

Controversies, Lobbies, Freedom

Earlier this month, historian Tony Judt was due to speak on “The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy” to a group called Network 20/20, which is comprised of young business leaders and academics from various countries. These meetings are usually held at the Polish consulate, which serves merely as host and not as organizer. The talk was cancelled at the last minute, and a controversy has erupted over the reasons why. Judt maintains that the consulate was threatened by Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman, while Foxman and the ADL claim they simply “inquired” into who was organizing the event.

Judt’s lecture was supposed to also include a discussion of Mearsheimer and Walt’s paper “The Israel Lobby,” which inflamed passions when it appeared in the London Review of Books last March. (The authors were accused of anti-semitism, among other things.) Recently, a panel of experts that included Martin Indyk, John Mearsheimer, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, and Dennis Ross discussed the paper at length in New York, without incident. You can view a video of the event here.

Now the New York Review of Books has published a letter, signed by more than a hundred writers, editors, critics, and academics protesting the ADL’s involvement into Tony Judt’s scheduled lecture at the Polish Consulate. The signatories state: “Though we, the undersigned, have many disagreements about political matters, foreign and domestic, we are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy. The Polish Consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle public debate. We who have signed this letter are dismayed that the ADL did not choose to play a more constructive role in promoting liberty.”

For a radically different take you can read Christopher Hitchens’ takedown at Slate.



Clear Your Calendar

It’s too bad I’m travelling so much in the next three weeks or I would have gone to some of the events organized by Literary Arts this season: Frank Rich is due to speak on November 5th, for instance. Check out all the events here.



New Alarcón

I was very pleased to see that the latest issue of the New Yorker includes a short story by Daniel Alarcón, “República and Grau.”



Dawkins in Review

There is an excellent, excellent review by Jim Holt of Richard Dawkins’s much-hyped The God Delusion. Here’s a small excerpt:

Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds. Dawkins asserts that “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.” But what possible evidence could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can come into collision with it. Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary.

You should read the whole article.