Re: Harvard's intellectual culture discourages identificat ion with Christian...

In a message dated 4/18/2006 4:02:54 PM Eastern Standard Time,
rich.blinne@gmail.com writes:
As this has gone waaaay off topic this will be my last post on this subject.
In the past, I've complained about right-wing conspiracy theories. This is the
left-wing version. It is so "out there" liberals such as Dershowitz have
disavowed this. So, who are the friends of this? The PLO and the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt are passing out copies. David Duke cites this as "vindication".
Harvard removed their logo from it. Maybe left-wing critiques are not good
enough. I'll give a right-wing one. Paul Johnson of Powerline blog's assessment of
this work:

Mearsheimer and Walt are chaired professors, respectively, of political
science and international relations at two of America's most elite academic
institutions, yet their essay is shoddy almost beyond belief. Among the authorities
it relies on are Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. If it were a student term
paper, it might be spared a failing grade in recognition of the effort that
went into it. Among other things, its tendentious, highly selective use of
evidence marks it as the work of zealots rather than scholars.

I could be wrong but isn't Paul Johnson the author of the Gifts of the Jews?
Hardly a critic...

"Johnson is most famous for Modern Times (1983), the breath-taking epic of
twentieth-century tyranny. Before that book, intellectuals commonly
distinguished between bad "right-wing" totalitarianism (fascism and Nazism) and
justifiable "leftwing" totalitarianism (socialism and Communism), whose crimes were
overlooked. Johnson dared to denounce them all as evil."
http://www.libertyhaven.com/thinkers/pauljohnson/historipaul.html

Note Johnson takes no sides, neither right nor left wing. Of course, and he's
regularly published!

You bring up Chomsky and Finkelstein and vilify them with no justification as
to why you're vilifying them, (dershowitz trashes chomsky in chutzpah and has
had a number of acrimonious debates with him) and dershowitz is a known
plagiarist. What is it you're objecting to? And why so vehemently?
Because the Harvard paper was lauded by David Duke, you doubt its contents?
Have you read it?

rich faussette
Received on Tue Apr 18 18:38:02 2006