Posted by David Bernstein: Brzezinski and Obama: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_09-2007_09_15.shtml#1189741142
Barack Obama has been criticized by pro-Israel forces (undoubtedly egged on by the Hilary team) for naming Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security advisor, as one of his foreign policy gurus. [1]Ezra Klein links to, and endorses, a post [2]by one Matthew Duss, relying on a story for the Politico website, suggesting that the �Israel lobby,� writ large, and Alan Dershowitz personally, are upset about Brzezinski because he wrote an essay last Summer defending Mearsheimer and Walt�s �Israel Lobby� essay. This is a good an example of the dangers of blogging about things that one doesn�t know much about. Anyone who is reasonably familiar with the history of U.S.-Israel relations knows that the pro-Israel community (and the organized Jewish community writ large, for that matter) has despised Brzezinski for at least thirty years. And it wasn�t just Brzezinski�s policies, deemed by many to be anti-Israel, it was the way he promoted them, and the way he interacted with Jewish community activists who sought to engage him--much worse, for example, than Bush I Secretary of State James "Fuck the Jews" Baker, who has few friends in the pro-Israel world. For example, the New York Times reported on March 10, 1978, that Rabbi Alexander Schindler, President of the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations (and a very liberal fellow, both religiously and politically), thought that Carter's Middle East policy was a "question mark," largely because of Brzezinski. Schindler told the Times that among Jewish leaders "All of the anger and mistrust is toward the National Security Council and toward Brzezinski." Schindler explained that in a meeting with Jewish leaders, Brzezinski was "antagonistic, blustering, threatening." Brzezinski, for his part, acknowledged to the Times "strong resentment toward him personally expressed by some Jewish leaders." Brzezinski denied being anti-Israel, and for all I know, he was sincere. But even though I was not even bar mitzvah age at the time, as a reader of Jewish newspapers that came to our home I remember the deep hostility and mistrust many Jews felt toward Brzezinski at the time. So for Klein, to attribute anti-Brzezinski sentiment to, for example, the fact that he �calmly defend[ed] and contextualiz[ed] a book by two leading international relations scholars, or because Brzezinski denies that "this Israel Lobby which is currently planting stories to attack and embarrass Obama doesn't exist," [as [3]I�ve noted before, and despite [4]Matthew Yglesias's continued insistence to the contrary, NO ONE denies that an Israel lobby exists, they just quarrel with absurdly expansive definitions of that lobby, and exaggerated notion's of that lobby's power], without any hint that Klein is aware of the longstanding feud between Brzezinski and the organized Jewish community, is just kind of embarrassing. References 1. http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/09/obama-and-naive.html?cid=82645797#comment-82645797 2. http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=09&year=2007&base_name=post_4905 3. http://www.volokh.com/posts/1144717979.shtml 4. http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/09/oh_the_irony_3.php#comments
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