It's a non sequitur all right but also perhaps an indirect plea for help?

I believe they now sell ointment for major cases of tuchesverklemptheit. Without a Rx, too!

5.You never say whether you know enough about Israel to evaluate a work of advocacy journalism. This puts you in a bind. If you know enough about Israel to recognize how one-sided Goliath is, then you shouldn’t fear delving into the sea of information it provides and coming out more knowledgeable. In other words, you won’t drown if you know how to swim. But if you’re a novice, how would you know that MB is any more one-sided than most Israeli journalists? Hmm?

6.Your latest post sounds like you’re desperately seeking a face-saving exit. I can see why. It takes a certain amount of left brain activity to figure out the difference between what an author concludes WITHIN THE PAGES OF HIS BOOK and what he has to say outside of it. The very video you gave me disproved your argument and proved mine. Lustick prodded MB to go further and to be more explicit. You know why? Because what Lustick wanted to know wasn’t spelled out in the book!

It may be hard for you to give in to the superior arguments of a woman, but I assure you you'll get over it. Especially after you read the book and realize that it was actually worth your time.

In that spirit, I thank you once again for (re) introducing me to Ian Lustick. I knew he was a luminary in poli sci, but other than that I couldn't recall much about him. Thanks to you, I will be following him avidly from now on.

Not the comments I asked for, Gil. You fail yet again and your hypocrisy is duly noted. On the one hand, you chide MB for being one-sided, yet on the other you plead ignorance about the notoriously one-sided nature of mainstream Israeli historiography and propaganda in the classroom. Then, when I asked you specifically to comment on this
:
Many of the facts that you mention in your introduction are not known to most Israelis. In addition to Netanyahu's huge state propaganda machine, there is the problem of Sheldon Adelson's paper, Israel HaYom, distributed for free, which has effectively destroyed a more competitive, dissenting free press. So what the Israeli said was that his own people need to read Goliath to find out what is going on in their own country.

you changed the subject.

Isn’t it a fact that because of your own agenda, you can only recognize one-sided propaganda when it’s coming from the other side?

For the record, I never claimed to know what MB’s thoughts on Israel were outside the framework of what he wrote in Goliath. I proved what his thesis was in the book and I proved that the thesis you imputed to him came not from the book, but from a talk. Again and again, I have acknowledged that Goliath is selective, which is why I invited you to read it alongside other books and articles. But you won’t do that because you are intellectually dishonest, hypocritical and afraid.

Reviewing some of your many failures once again:

1.It is plain for anyone to see that whatever passing interest you may take in the fate of Israeli democracy pales beside your bumbling but monomaniacal efforts to “get” Blumenthal.

2.So crazed are you in pursuit of your game that you’ve actually forgotten what our argument was about. You argued that MB could be judged and labeled a “Borat” on the basis of the video (an inane charge on its face) and then argued that you didn’t have to read his book because he’s anti-Israel. I argued that his book contained invaluable information and that you couldn’t know what the BOOK’S thesis was until you read it.

3.You then claimed you didn’t have to read it because MB is a liar. I proved you wrong again and again.

4.You repeatedly misstated the book’s thesis. When I corrected you, you went on to cite a JJ Goldberg piece that did nothing to resolve the disagreement, and which in fact doesn’t so much review the book as describe the outcry over the book. I doubt JJ had actually finished the book before he wrote his “review”. From the looks of things, he may not have even gotten very far into it.

Einstein was always thoughtful. Now, what part of “anti-Zionist or at least critical of the State of Israel” do you have trouble understanding, Gil? I never claimed that Einstein was unambivalent toward Israel throughout his life. On the contrary, his hatred of German anti-Semitism and the mortal threat posed to Jews by Nazism stoked Einstein’s feelings of kinship with Jews around the world and led him to recognize the crucial role played by Israel as a both a refuge from physical annihilation and as haven for the project of revitalizing Jewish cultures. On the other hand, and this is a bigger hand, Einstein’s actions in his later days speak volumes. If he wasn’t critical of Israel, why didn’t he accept a professorship at Hebrew University, even though it was repeatedly offered to him? Why did he turn down the presidency of Israel upon the death of Weizmann in 1952, even though he declared that that his relationship with the Jewish people had become his strongest human bond? Einstein’s own words are our best guide. “If I were to be president, sometime I would have to say to the Israeli people things they would not like to hear." What might these things be? Einstein was no dogmatist, but he had an ideology and that ideology was democracy with all it entails. A civil rights activist since 1946, Einstein wrote an article on “The Negro question” in which he singled out equality and human dignity as two of the most essential ingredients of a democracy. What might his article on the Palestinian question have looked like had he lived a decade or two or three longer? In the Negro Question, he reminded white Americans that “your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force" and he railed against racial prejudice.

Were his views on Palestinian rights consistent with his views on Negro rights? Yes they were. “The most important aspect of our policy must be our ever present manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people." (Einstein was also an advocate of world government as means of controlling the brutality of nation states, a position which belies your seeming eagerness to paint him as a man without a clear and forceful Weltanschauung. )

In conclusion, we have in Einstein an example of a Jew who loved Jews and Jewish culture far more than he did the idea of a Jewish state for reasons that are already clear in the sharp critical remarks I quoted elsewhere on this thread.

Whenever a thread needs comic relief, as this one did, we can always count on Gil to provide it. Did it ever occur to you that Einstein hugely preferred Labor Zionism to Begin’s Herut Party, the precursor to Likud, and that Begin’s victory in 1977 ushered in exactly the sort of seismic rightward shift in Israeli politics that would have horrified Einstein and left him in despair? If Einstein weren’t already dead, a Begin victory would have killed him.

Quote it, then.

I don't see it. Remember, I am talking about GOLIATH alone, not anything MB may have said elsewhere.

THE BOOK ALONE.

JJ Goldberg does not quote where MB, IN GOLIATH, advocates indigenization. In fact, Goldberg's is a strange little review that avoids much scrutiny of the book's actual content. Know what I think? I don't think JJ read it all the way through.
Even Lustick admitted he hadn't read all of it. It's 400 pages set in small font.

My "boyfriend?"

Oh, is that, like, a gender smear coming from a guy who went ape when Ron called him a "she"?

MB is more likely to be your spurned lover than mine, because all I've done here is talk about his books, whereas all you've wanted to talk about is the man. Sounds like a jilted lover to me.

Fact is, at the start of this conversation, you knew way more about MB than I did. I only discussed his books because that's all I knew about him and because I felt (and still feel) that his books stand on their own merits.

But now it sounds as if you're desperate to run away.

People who speak with wide-eyed reverence about "facts", oblivious to the truth that facts cannot be understood independent of interpretation, are in no position to tell others what "specious" means. lol.

"How has Bibi made his living as a saleman?"

You mean you don't already know and you really do want to know?

There's one great way to find out.

Read Goliath.

"Max is not a journalist he's a propagandist".

Flat-out lie. MB is a journalist who makes no secret of practicing advocacy journalism, unlike some journalists who masquerade as objective reporters when they're just as much advocates for a cause or point of view as he is. At least MB backs it all up. The same cannot be said for all self-styled "objective journalists."

In this instance, I'm merely prodding you into responding substantively to the post you didn't comment upon, viz:

Gil claims to have watched a video available on youtube called "Max Blumenthal and Ian Lustick speak at Penn" yet he is completely unimpressed by it and uninterested in it save for the discussion about Nazi references.

During that talk, an Israeli gets up and tells MB: Many of the facts that you mention in your introduction are not known to most Israelis. In addition to Netanyahu's huge state propaganda machine, there is the problem of Sheldon Adelson's paper, Israel HaYom, distributed for free, which has effectively destroyed a more competitive, dissenting free press. So what the Israeli said was that his own people need to read Goliath to find out what is going on in their own country.

Comments, Gil?

Please provide exact quotes proving that Churchill is an anti-Semite.