drunk with intellectual passion

Everyone has a Golden Calf inside of them, the need of worshipping and staying attached to forms, to feed the form as it were. And the difference between building something more durable and divine as opposed to allowing these forms to generate some form of seductive essence is sometimes very subtle, especially with regard to ideas, ideology mixed into the post-modern aesthetic of mass communication. And such is much of the workings of a Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer who feed off the platform of academia and resuurect the old anti-Semitic shibboliths of Wandering Jew and their lack of worthiness in enjoying the national status of a homeland. Too often, academia, cut off in the ivory tower of isolation, serves as a spawning ground for mutant genes and free radicals of the Martin Heidegger variety where scapegoating and demonizing Jews is expressed in the most polished language worthy of induction into the Academie Francaise. It’s an effort really to undermine Israel itself, for they know that if Israel is strong, the United States will value it and if it is weak, it’s not really redeemable despite the Biblical pretensions to the divine.

---This is somewhat difficult to believe, but John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of The Israel Lobby, are actually standing by one of the world's most reprehensible anti-Semites, Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is the charming fellow who argues, among other things, that the Jews persecuted Hitler.---click image for souce. painting: Marc Chagall.

—This is somewhat difficult to believe, but John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of The Israel Lobby, are actually standing by one of the world’s most reprehensible anti-Semites, Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is the charming fellow who argues, among other things, that the Jews persecuted Hitler.—click image for souce. painting: Marc Chagall.

Once it is established that jews have a valid right to the land of Israel, then the violence, hatred, and disregard for life that has characterized the Arab position can be judged for what it is. Unless that right is established, the Arabs will always claim that they have a valid goal: reclaiming a land that is rightfully theirs. Once validity is granted to their goal, the debate whether all means are acceptable to attain it or not descends into the realm of moral relativity and philosophy. The Walts and Mearsheimer’s, though experts of sorts, are totally unable to fathom anything beyond the cold, mechanical, logical, inductions which coalesce around their basic hatreds mixed with a portion of pragmatism. Its not far fetched that academics like Mearsheimer simply don’t want Israel to exist, a kind of visceral reaction to something they cannot fathom: love for the people of Israel of which the expression is its own reward.

There is much blather about a holocaust industry, but this entire concept of popular dissent is in itself an industry, self-regulated by the gatekeepeers of the Left claiming high moral ground. In this Society of the Spectacle there is always new demand for new twists and outrages on old themes as long as they don’t step out of line and keep doing what is expected of them. A bit of self-flagellation: place the blame on America and the nation in the heart of the Arab world.

---arguments are being voiced that call into question the viability of a two-state solution given the political realities on the ground, and for various political and ideological reasons others have begun to talk more of a one-state solution. This panel discussion will seek to examine the cases for one and two-state solutions and place them in the context of Israeli and Palestinian politics and public opinion. Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund in D.C., Mitchell Plitnick, a respected policy analyst formerly of Jewish Voice for Peace and the B'Tselem U.S. office, and Ali-Abunimah, Palestinian-American journalist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada as well as a graduate of the University of Chicago, will be featured on the panel. The event will be moderated by Professor John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science.---click image for source...

—arguments are being voiced that call into question the viability of a two-state solution given the political realities on the ground, and for various political and ideological reasons others have begun to talk more of a one-state solution.
This panel discussion will seek to examine the cases for one and two-state solutions and place them in the context of Israeli and Palestinian politics and public opinion.
Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund in D.C., Mitchell Plitnick, a respected policy analyst formerly of Jewish Voice for Peace and the B’Tselem U.S. office, and Ali-Abunimah, Palestinian-American journalist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada as well as a graduate of the University of Chicago, will be featured on the panel. The event will be moderated by Professor John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science.—click image for source…

In the end with the Golden Calf, we furnish the gold, but the Calf ends up taking on a life not initially perceived in our limited sense of design. Golden calves have no interior space so it relies on ego to glorify itself. Full of itself as the expression goes, it is a dangerous obstacle to anything outside materialist thinking. It is the championing of cold intellect over the heart and emotions. Its an addiction and dependence on form, perverting the whole point of form as a vehicle to send us somewhere and not backwards to some post-modern version of idolatry which seems to tend towards the construction of very isolating forms of personality and ego that have to be protected and have moats built around them…

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Last fall, Mearsheimer reenergized his critics by favorably blurbing a book on Jewish identity that many commentators denounced as grotesquely anti-Semitic. The blurb became a blot on Mearsheimer’s judgment, given the book’s author’s revolting commentary elsewhere, and was considered evidence of an unhealthy obsession with Israel and Jewishness on Mearsheimer’s part.

The real tragedy of such controversies, as lamentable as they are, is that they threaten to obscure the urgent and enduring message of Mearsheimer’s life’s work, which topples conventional foreign-policy shibboleths and provides an unblinking guide to the course the United States should follow in the coming decades. Indeed, with the most critical part of the world, East Asia, in the midst of an unprecedented arms race fed by acquisitions of missiles and submarines (especially in the South China Sea region, where states are motivated by old-fashioned nationalism rather than universal values), and with the Middle East undergoing less a democratic revolution than a crisis in central authority, we ignore Mearsheimer’s larger message at our peril.

---No, what has gotten various folks’ collective goat was Mearsheimer’s decision to divide Jewish Americans into three groups: “New Afrikaners,” “who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state”; “the great ambivalent middle,” which is what it sounds like; and “Righteous Jews,” who “believe that self-determination applies to Palestinians as well as Jews.” It’s this part of the speech that Jeffrey Goldberg compared to something out of Father Coughlin. And, I mean, ‘Righteous Jews’? Even if that’s not some sort of analogy to ‘Righteous Gentiles,’ Mearsheimer can kind of go to hell. Sample Righteous Jews, according to Mearsheimer, are Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Goldstone, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, and Philip Weiss. Most of those associated with J Street, says Mearsheimer, are Righteous Jews, too (I promise you J Street resents this categorization, and believes Mearsheimer just made its job more difficult). Sample New Afrikaners are also usual suspects: Abraham Foxman, Marty Peretz, Mort Zuckerman, et al. Mearsheimer’s prediction is that the great ambivalent middle, currently vaguely supportive of Israel, will slowly turn against the Jewish state as its fundamentally apartheid character becomes apparent.. Click image for source. painting: Yuri Pimenov. 1937.

—No, what has gotten various folks’ collective goat was Mearsheimer’s decision to divide Jewish Americans into three groups: “New Afrikaners,” “who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state”; “the great ambivalent middle,” which is what it sounds like; and “Righteous Jews,” who “believe that self-determination applies to Palestinians as well as Jews.” It’s this part of the speech that Jeffrey Goldberg compared to something out of Father Coughlin. And, I mean, ‘Righteous Jews’? Even if that’s not some sort of analogy to ‘Righteous Gentiles,’ Mearsheimer can kind of go to hell.
Sample Righteous Jews, according to Mearsheimer, are Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Goldstone, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, and Philip Weiss. Most of those associated with J Street, says Mearsheimer, are Righteous Jews, too (I promise you J Street resents this categorization, and believes Mearsheimer just made its job more difficult). Sample New Afrikaners are also usual suspects: Abraham Foxman, Marty Peretz, Mort Zuckerman, et al. Mearsheimer’s prediction is that the great ambivalent middle, currently vaguely supportive of Israel, will slowly turn against the Jewish state as its fundamentally apartheid character becomes apparent.. Click image for source. painting: Yuri Pimenov. 1937.

In fact, Mearsheimer is best-known in the academy for his equally controversial views on China, and particularly for his 2001 magnum opus, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2010, the Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts called Tragedy one of the three great works of the post–Cold War era, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). And, Betts suggested, “once China’s power is full grown,” Mearsheimer’s book may pull ahead of the other two in terms of influence. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics truly defines Mearsheimer, as it does realism. Mearsheimer sat me down in his office, overlooking the somber Collegiate Gothic structures of the University of Chicago, and talked for hours, over the course of several days, about Tragedy and his life….Read More:http://www.theatlanti

m/magazine/archive/2012/01/why-john-j-mearsheimer-is-right-about-some-things/308839/

---Kaplan whitewashes the content of the book, and its message; Mearsheimer and Walt advance the Mel Gibson theory of foreign affairs, which is to say, the Jews cause all wars. They blame Jews for bringing anti-Semitism on themselves; they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of lobbying; they hold Israel to an absurd double-standard, and so on.---click image for source...

—Kaplan whitewashes the content of the book, and its message; Mearsheimer and Walt advance the Mel Gibson theory of foreign affairs, which is to say, the Jews cause all wars. They blame Jews for bringing anti-Semitism on themselves; they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of lobbying; they hold Israel to an absurd double-standard, and so on.—click image for source…

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