Martin Peretz, etc

Martin Peretz

Those selected for inclusion in this book were picked out by reference to two criteria, with the first of these entailing that the chapter subject be well known and respected among those who generally ascribe to the pundit's politics. Martin Peretz is only slightly well known among liberals and moderates of the general population, and being no more widely respected than he is widely prominent, he certainly wouldn't seem to make the cut. But as the other bit of criteria entails being unqualified to serve in whatever role one plays in the national dialogue, Peretz more than makes up for his lack of mainstream notability, sort of like when someone does very poorly on the math section of the SAT but still pulls a 790 on the verbal, except in a bad way.

This is not to say that Peretz would have done poorly on either section of his SATs, as even his enemies are quick to acknowledge. His academic background is considerably impressive, he having served as an assistant professor of social studies at Harvard and that institution having honored him in 1993 with the establishment of the Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature. Most notably, he has served for over three decades variously as editor-in-chief and owner of The New Republic, which in turn has served for over a century as one of the nation's most justifiably respected sources of social and political commentary.

Peretz, then, is a smart fellow and knows quite a bit about quite a bit. The problem is that he doesn't seem to know how the things he knows should fit together. If knowledge were a jigsaw puzzle, Peretz would not begin by sorting the pieces into groups based on similar color schemes in order that he might better undertake the gradual process of fitting them all together, as is the common practice among those who make it their business to complete jigsaw puzzles. Rather, he would begin by composing a poorly-written editorial to the effect that the Arabs are a warlike and untrustworthy people. Incidentally, Peretz's more bizarre outbursts are almost inevitably prompted by scorn for Arabs and Muslims, as we'll see. Perhaps more incidentally, the jigsaw puzzle was of some ducks swimming in a river, and then there's a bunch of trees off to the background and a couple of deer.

Peretz's penchant for general ridiculousness when confronted with certain subjects is so glaring that it is accepted as simply an obvious fact of life by an unusually large percentage of those who actually agree with most of the chap's political views and who might otherwise respect him for his more positive qualities. His poor reputation in this regard even extends to his own magazine, an open secret that I have unnecessarily confirmed by way of conversations with two former TNR staffers. Here's a pertinent excerpt:

Me: Does anyone at The New Republic respect Peretz as a writer or a thinker or-

Former Staffer: No.

The person in question was quick to add that Peretz is indeed smart and well informed, and that his virtues as a publisher and editor are just as universally acknowledged among those associated with the publication as are his vices as an essayist. He/she wasn't just trying to be nice, either; under Peretz's run, TNR has published consistently superior content by some of the nation's most relevant and capable commentators on the subjects of politics and culture.

Were Peretz content to serve in that capacity, he would be rightfully known as among the finest of publishers. Our universe being a flawed one, though, he chooses to write as wellfrequently on his TNR-associated blog, occasionally for the print magazine itself, and sporadically in the pages of conservative publications such as Commentary and Wall Street Journal, where he may occasionally be found expressing agreement with Republicans on foreign policy and matters of topical adjacency. This willingness to criticize his own party on a range of issues is admirable, and would be more admirable still if his criticisms were not so often directed at the wrong things, or if these criticisms did not so often apply also to those for whom he has only praise, or if so many of these criticisms were not demonstrably insane.

Worse than Peretz's various offenses against logic is the great violence that he insists on doing to the English language by way of astonishing stylistic deficits and endless grammatical errors. To his credit, those stylistic failures are so original that Noam Chomsky should probably be analyzing them for clues with regards to the origins of human linguistics, and even the manner in which the editor tramples upon fundamental aspects of grammar is consistently innovative. Let us examine a few examples culled from his blog:

I count as authoritative someone who hasn't misled me too much. Well, I sat with one of these authoritatives last night and she was giving me news, future news about the news.

The New York Post [D1] and Reuters both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that. Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.

Even the U.N. characterizes Congo as the rape capital of the world. Alas, there are 18,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the country...and they only make the circumstances worse. Yes, quite literally.

This last instance merits special attention. When the term "literally" is deployed in error, it is almost always in the his-ears-were-literally-steaming sense, yet Peretz has here managed to invent an entirely new misuse of the adverb. He is worth reading if one approaches him as a sort of anti-William Safire, perhaps useful for those who have gotten too stuffy and self-congratulating in their command of the English language and who are thus inclined to perhaps cripple themselves via exposure, much like a long-distance runner who trains in the oxygen-depleted mountains except not at all because the metaphor doesn't work, really, and now I'm too confused to figure out how to fix it. See, Peretz has already cured me of my literary self-regard, and not a moment too soon; I was planning to write the next chapter about the various classical sources from which I draw my prose style and the means by which others may come to emulate the resulting esthetic. But now I'm not going to do that.

The second of the three instances listed above also merits special attention insomuch as that anyone who writes such a thing as this does not deserve the protection of our state and federal laws. Here, let me show it to you again:

The New York Post and Reuters both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that. Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.

I don't even know how to make fun of this other than to simply repeat it over and over again without additional comment.

One could reasonably dismiss Peretz's poor style as irrelevant to the question of his usefulness to the republic. Alternatively, each of these terrible, terrible sentences could be used to focus on particular topics that Peretz has gotten terribly, terribly wrong. And that is what we shall do.

***

Peretz on Iran

There is much that even an economically challenged West can do to put Iran back into the well, let's say the twentieth century. (Nothing can yet bring it to the twenty-first.)

Martin Peretz, February 2009

   Soon after Iran's state news agency released what it claimed to be the results of the nation's 2009 presidential election, Western analysts came to general agreement that President Ahmadinejad's alleged 63 percent victory could only have been the result of fraud. Middle East experts such as Juan Cole noted that the official results flew in the face of well-established regional and ethnic electoral trends, and as the days went by, international observers confirmed dozens of blatant irregularities.. The obviousness of the electoral theft was such that American pundits of every ideology found themselves in rare unity on the subject, with most everyone concerned expressing support for the millions of Iranians who took to the streets in an attempt to restore the fundamental right that had been stripped from them.

    As is always the case with such affairs as this, there were those whose agendas demanded that the electoral results be considered legitimate. Ahmadinejad, for instance, was firmly in Ahmadinejad's corner on this one, while the Chinese and Russian governments were both quick to congratulate the incumbent on maintaining the status quo in a nation strategic to both regimes. Kim Jong Il expressed particular delight over his Persian counterpart's overt intention to deflect Western pressure and thereby score a victory for the self-determination of despots.

    And then there was Martin Peretz.  "I wish I could harbor even a smidgen of the confidence the vice president has that Dr. Ahmadinejad's sweep was really a fraud," he wrote at the time in reference to a statement Biden had made to the effect that the election had probably been stolen. "My impression is that the incumbent's margin of victory was too big to have been fraudulent and the loser's numbers also too big. Tyrannies don't play around with the numbers like this. A dictator usually wants 99 percent of the voters to have been for him...Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity." So, there you go. Tyrannies dont play around with numbers like this and the margin of victory was too great to have been fraudulentbut perhaps the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers, as opposed to having play[ed] around with the numbers, which is presumably something entirely different from "fiddling" with thembut at any rate, there is some sense of authenticity to such results.

    Peretz is smart enough that he would not have come to this self-contradictory and obviously incorrect conclusion unless he had some overriding purpose for doing so. In this case, that purpose is to prevent his readers from coming to another self-evident and obviously correct conclusion: that the majority of Iranian voters had rejected the worst of Iranian presidents. Peretz prefers to avoid such a conclusion because insomuch as that it humanizes the bulk of the Iranian people, it works against one of his most commonly expressed desires, which is to see Iran dealt with militarily, and soon.

    The desire for either the U.S. or Israel to strike at Iran in order to prevent its fundamentalist regime from acquiring nuclear weaponry is a common position. It is also a position worthy of serious consideration if one holds, as I do, that any relatively free nation is well within its rights to attack the military assets of any dictatorial regime at any time. In fact, I happen to agree with Peretz and many Iran hawks that opposition to military action is groundless to the extent that it derives from the belief that a theocratic government has some sort of right to operate without outside interference. But there also exists a very reasonable cause for opposition to the bombing approach: that air strikes against Iran would not necessarily assist in either Western security or Iranian freedom, and would likely run counter to both.

   It does not take an extensive reading of history to be aware that foreign threats generally prompt domestic unity, itself almost invariably taking the form of "pragmatic" statism coupled with scattershot nationalism. Nor does it require a deep understanding of modern Iran to determine that Ahmadinejad would use any military action against his nation as a means by which to discredit domestic opposition for supposedly siding with the Iran's enemies. We see this phenomenon everywhere, even in the public discourse of our own republic; the Reader will no doubt recall a time not long ago when a certain Texan megalomaniac took to painting his opponents as taking the side of America's most despicable adversaries. I am referring, of course, to two paragraphs back, when I associated Martin Peretz with North Korea, Russia, and China for having joined the leaders of those amoral countries in supporting Ahmadinejad's claim to electoral legitimacy.

    Being a mediocre thinker who has attached himself to a cause in a way that defies introspection, Peretz is no more interested in reasonable objections to his preferred option of air strikes than he is in the evidence that the Iranian people might very well be on course to doing away with the mullahs themselves. The Iranian people as a whole, he would have us believe by way of his most-Persians-love-Ahmadinejad meme, are collectively inclined to act against us without due cause, and thus the only solution is for us to act against them without undue hesitation. He is either unaware or unimpressed that our nation's previous interferences with Iran have clearly resulted in damage to that nation's democratic institutions while likewise contributing to the advancement of both its religious zealots and secular thugs. Presumably, he does not find any lessons in the shameful conduct on the part of the CIA during the early '50s, during which time that viper's nest spearheaded the overthrow of Iran's democratically-elected prime minister through disinformation campaigns, financial aid to fascist politicians, and strategic support for known gangster Shaban Jafari, among other things; all of this is now publicly acknowledged by our own government and detailed with charming neutrality in our national archives. That these prior interferencesso much akin in spirit to the proposals now being made by our modern-day hawkssubsequently resulted in a quarter-century of dictatorship by a degenerate shah; that this state of affairs was followed by a predictable backlash whereby most any degenerate who promised to stand up to the U.S. was given a place in the new regime; and that this final revolution produced the very government that is now causing us so much trouble, does not seem to strike Peretz as relevant or even worthy of mention.

    Likewise, Peretz has no interest in the real significance of the 2009 election and its aftermaththat the majority of the Iranian people are today desirous of securing their own liberty and improving their material circumstances, that they will tomorrow be capable of seizing these things, and that the sooner this is accomplished, the sooner will they be inclined to give up such distractions as anti-Israeli sentiment in favor of their own pursuit of happiness. Reducing the possibility of an Iranian attack against Israel is Peretz's reasonable objective, and here we have a viable and ethical method by which this may soon be accomplishedone that will bear the added legitimacy of having been carried out by the Iranians themselves. But Peretz is not interested in solving the problem so much as he is in solving the problem in a particular wayone that is risky,

will almost certainly result in civilian casualties, and which will provide a criminal and theocratic regime with the opportunity to redirect public anger from itself to the U.S. and thereby increase its own legitimacy in the eyes of many Persians while also discrediting the opposition as foreign puppets. Simply stated, Peretz seeks to solve a problem in a manner that will almost certainly end up exacerbating it. Also:

Peretz on His Various Enemies

Yes, let me assure you, this hater of Israel [Princeton professor Richard Falk] is a Jew. And, also yes, this hater of America is an American. They are one and the same individual. So Wikipedia begins its narrative with the simple characterization, 'Jewish American.' No one will claim him, perhaps not even his mother. But that I don't know.

Martin Peretz, April 2008

      If you or I decided to accuse someone of possessing some sort of negative trait, we would probably begin by finding one or more occasions on which the person in question had exhibited that trait. Aside from helping us to back up our assertion, such instances would also present the added bonus of helping us to ensure that our attack is warranted. If we're especially honest, we might also pause a moment to consider whether other people we're in the habit of defending do not also bear this particular trait, in which case our especial honesty might prompt us to either acknowledge that this is the case or scrap our objection altogether lest we give the impression that our enemies are in some unusual habit not found among our allies. Peretz rarely gets past the first of these tasks, whereas you and I would of course go through each of them out of our obligation to the truth. You and I are quite alike, it seems. And the smell of you intoxicates me.

    Whereas you and Iunited together by way of sexual tension and civic virtuewould never attack a fellow citizen without having first done our due diligence, Peretz does this to such a great and perpetual extent that one might reasonably suppose that such things get him high, just like you get me high when I take in the sight of you, when I gaze into your eyes as they gaze back into mine.

    At the time when Peretz was among the few to have gotten the Iranian election story wrong, Juan Cole was among the many who got it right; though fraud was apparent to many from the beginning, the author and Middle East expert did a particularly outstanding job of identifying specific instances of electoral regularities on a province-to-province basis. That Cole has in this and other instances displayed a specified working knowledge of the region far beyond anything Peretz has ever demonstrated does not seem to have deterred our antihero from menacing the scholar with the following interconnected array of specified symbols which may very well be intended to convey some sort of semantic meaning:

For Cole, though a popular blogger, is certainly not sensible, and he has, on many issues, kept himself acidulously ill-informed. Smart he is, however, though mostly in his efforts to get to the top of the heap of popular experts about the Arabs.

    "Smart he is, gurgle comma blargle comma blarg comma however comma comma comma the Arabs." Fucking abominable.

   Peretz is also in the habit of targeting New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for special criticism, apparently because Kristof has failed to target the Arabs for same[D2] thing[D3] . Having once begun a blog post by conceding that Kristof himself was among those who first brought attention to the Darfur genocide, Peretz immediately points out that he "can't recall whether Kristof has ever noted the overwhelming Arab backing for these heinous deeds." This would be a reasonable thing for Peretz to have written had he written it from some 19th century Montana homestead and had no legs. Insomuch as that Peretz actually exists among us in the dawn of the information age, he could have Googled "Kristof," "Sudan," and "Arabs," like I did, and found that Kristof had indeed called out the Arabs on their collective complacency regarding Darfur less than a month before Peretz had called out Kristof for not calling out the Arabs on their collective complacency regarding Darfur. One doesn't even need legs to do this sort of research; otherwise I wouldn't have done it.

   So, a month before the point at which Peretz couldn't recall if Kristof had written anything like the following, Kristof had written the following:

Unfortunately, the Arab Leagues secretary general, Amr Moussa, who quite properly denounces abuses when suffered by Palestinians, has chosen to side with Mr. Bashir rather than the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed in Darfur. If Israel bombed some desert in Darfur, Arab leaders might muster some indignation about violence there.

Kristof 1, Arabs 0! Aside from wondering aloud whether or not Kristof had ever noted Arab complaisance regarding Darfur when he could have looked that up in something under 30 seconds by way of 21st century super-science, Peretz goes on to imply further degrees of fascist coddling on the part of the monstrous Kristof by way of an assertion that two TNR contributors who also helped to bring attention to the Darfur story are in possession of some insight into the overall situation that Kristof allegedly lacks:

[Richard] Just and [Erick] Reeves do not believe the the [D4] [sic] United Nations is able or, for that matter, willing to do what needs to do be done to stop the killing. After all, China and Russia are structurally empowered to block any constructive moves on the matter by virtue of their veto rights on the Security Council [hey, that was actually a pretty well-composed sentence].

It is fantastic that Just and Reeves understand this very obvious thing, but Peretz's implication that Kristof does not is typically ridiculous. In the very same column in which he'd taken issue with the Arabs on Darfurthe column he'd written just a month before, I here note again for emphasisKristof asserted that the Chinese must be compelled to cease supplying weaponry to the Sudanese antagonists and summarized the matter as follows:

If China continuesit is the main supplier of arms used in the genocidethen it may itself be in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention...Incredibly, China and Russia are acting as Mr. Bashirs lawyers, quietly urging the United Nations Security Council to intervene to delay criminal proceedings against him. Such a delay is a bad idea, unless Mr. Bashir agrees to go into exile.

    Kristof, then, knows every bit as well as Just and Reeves and Peretz do that the UN is worthless in such cases as these and that the Russian and Chinese regimes are not particularly concerned about the well-being of Africa's rural animists, although this does not deter Peretz from implying otherwise, as Peretz is an unstoppable force and cannot be deterred by anything. This will remain true no matter what revolutionary new models our physicists and cosmologists might someday develop to explain our universe.

   The occasion for the bizarre criticisms we've just examined was a more recent Kristof column to the effect that, although Kristof eats meat, he suspects that history will judge meat eaters very poorly from some vantage point in the future. Based on such an irritatingly introspective and self-critical little essay as this, full of hemming and hawing about all the poor little animals, Peretz concludes that Kristof "has the vanity of the absolutely righteous." One might wish that Kristof had any such thing, but clearly he does not.

    Peretz has elsewhere gotten after journalist Roger Cohen, not to be confused with superbly mediocre Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Journalist Roger Cohen, as we'll go ahead and call him, is attacked in a Peretz post that begins thusly:

Roger Cohen has the Times beat in Iran. Well, not exactly. No one has the Times beat in Iran. I don't know how many Western newspapers have their own journalists in the country. I do know that the FT does but it is an Iranian who holds it. Anyway, the datelines from Iran are commonly from Arab capitals, mostly Beirut.

This is how Martin Peretz chooses to begin an essay. Do you see now that we must all arm ourselves and prepare to rip our own nation asunder and destroy all of our institutions and spill the blood of our very cousins if that is what it takes to prevent such paragraphs as this from ever again being written? Do you? He goes on to "explain":

Cohen's standards for an evil regime are quite specific and tough. He will not judge Tehran harshly until it murders many many Jews.

Many many many. Peretz then asks us the following question, presumably more out of sadness than anger or honest curiosity:

So how has Cohen dealt with the torments to which hundreds of thousands of Iranians have been treated since the election?

This seems to be a hypothetical question in that Peretz does not answer it or even suggest that such a thing can have an answer. He does subsequently admit that an analogy he had just made himself two paragraphs back in which he'd compared Iran to Nazi Germany might be "a bit overwrought, although I'm not at all sure it is." Which is to say that he doesn't actually admit it. What? We do not get any answer as to how this mullah-loving journalist deals with the crackdown on protesters in that country. If we had asked someone who bothers to read the work of those whose work he claims ought not to be read, we would have learned that Cohen has dealt with it by reporting on it, decrying it, and otherwise doing everything it is that a journalist can do short of shooting thousands of Basij paramilitaries or rescuing a brilliant scientist from the clutches of an underground prison complex and then having him invent a nanovirus that seeks out the brains of conservative ayatollahs and covertly rearranges their neurons in order to turn them into moderates without this process being detected by Iran's counter-nanotech forces, as Peretz has presumably done. Cohen, being less heroic, is content to simply write such things as this:

The Islamic Republic has lost legitimacy. It is fissured. It will not be the same again. It has always played on the ambiguity of its nature, a theocracy where people vote. For a whole new generation, theres no longer room for ambiguity.

    Cohen goes on to rail against the regime in flamboyant and irritating terminology of the sort that he probably would not have submitted to his editor were he a marijuana user, in which case he would have almost certainly realized for himself that the entire column was kind of ostentatious. "A nation has stirred," he announces, shamelessly. "Provoked, it has risen." It is Jesus, Emperor of Persia. But then I am being unnecessarily mean to a reporter who of course does fine work in explaining a country that requires so much explanation. The point is that Peretz has once again wrongly criticized yet another columnist for having not done something that he did in fact do. He's going to keep doing that throughout this whole section. That's what this section is about.

    Peretz is so intemperate as to have even attacked staffers of his own magazine on such occasions as they've written articles he deems incompatible with his personal hodgepodge foreign policy. In August of 2008, Peretz denounced TNR senior editor John Judis for having written that the U.S.'s late-20th century dealings with Cuba are comparable to Germany's early-20th century dealings with Belgium; Judis was referring in this case to Imperial Germany, although Peretz does not manage to figure this out. "(I can't believe that even he would compare us to the Nazis)," Peretz mused, both parenthetically and in italics, a combination that he must have thought to be particularly devastating around about the moment in which he instead ought to have been thinking about whether or not it was likely that anyone would single out Belgium as having been the most memorable national victim of Nazi Germany.

    Still, Judis did compare the U.S.'s approach towards Cuba to that of the German Empire towards Belgium as well as to that of Iraq towards Kuwait, and such an argument certainly merits a counterargument based in historical fact and context. He begins his screed against the journalist with " John Judis has often had a soft spot for America's enemies" and ends it with the following prepositional experiment: "There is nothing less than Henry Wallace, doughface tripe." There is how Peretz writes when he's particularly angry about nothing less than tripe. There is how it seems to me, at least.

   A few hours after having written his nonsense, Peretz apologized for the outburst. "There is great embarrassment for me," he wrote. Just kidding. Here's the real apology, inserted as an update to the blog post in question:

Judis' item obviously upset me. And I have had my differences with John over the years. (As you know, I revel in intellectual give-and-take) But re-reading this item a few hours later, I realize that my rhetoric was a bit too rough. Since our disagreements are fierce, I wish my language had been less angry.

    I wish his language had been Mandarin so that I wouldn't have had to learn from Peretz that Peretz "revel[s] in intellectual give-and-take" and that everyone knows this. Also note how he's managed to once again misplace his parentheses. Of course, he does not bother to correct his erroneous contention that one of his writers compared U.S. foreign policy to that of the Nazis, presumably because this would have taken up precious blog ink.

     Contributor Gabriel Sherman once made what was apparently the terrible mistake of writing a piece on William Kristol's inexplicable new role as a mainstream newspaper columnist in which he or she or whatever Gabriel is reported that certain people are unhappy with the prospect of such a fellow as Kristol being given such an outlet as this. "Why?" Peretz asks himself or possibly us. "Because Kristol has slammed the Times on several occasions, even waged war on it?" Probably not. Kristol has been so wrong about so many things that it is now passe to even point this out, which is why I was reluctant to write this sentence and in fact have decided not to leave it in (but my delete key is broken). Peretz does not see it this way. "You do know this about the new columnist: he won't be a patsy. And he won't be boring." In fact, he did turn out to be kind of boring.

    Sherman had to be reprimanded for having done whatever it is that the dual-gendered special correspondent did wrong. Peretz characterized the piece as "very informative but slightly nasty" and then immediately notes it as including " the usual stuff about Arthur Sulzberger, some of it either wrong or irrelevant." He forgets to provide examples of what it is exactly that the writer has gotten wrong, content in having unfairly maligned the work of someone who has already suffered so much from society's misunderstanding regarding the two sets of genitalia with which it was born. See, I can make up shit, too. Someone should give me control of The New Republic.

   Among Peretz's various ham-fisted attacks on his superiors, one finds a pattern of hypersensitivity to criticism of U.S. foreign policy both past and present. To his credit, this almost certainly stems from the publisher's long and reasonable opposition to those among the Old Left whose philosophical degeneracy led them to sympathize with the Soviet Union and its hangers-on over the United States and the other relatively free nations of the world. But most of these people are either dead or living in San Miguel de Allende, and their modern counterparts have descended into even greater irrelevancy than even the dead ones, if not the ones who are residing in San Miguel.

    I shall make a self-indulgent aside because there is no one here to stop me. My grandma used to live in San Miguel, and when I was 15 or so I made the acquaintance of several of these elderly and two-dimensional creatures. One of them explained to me over breakfast that the Aztecs knew perfectly well that Hernan Cortez was not actually some deity, but rather just a European operating on various proto-imperialist and early-stage capitalist paradigms, and that Montezuma was simply being nice when he allowed the Spaniard to seize control of the country and go up to big chunks of gold and lick them or whatever it was that you do with gold; the Aztecs as a whole, she asserted, simply felt sorry for these confused and evil Spaniards. Another trapped me in her apartment and told me about how she used to know Lenny Bruce, forced me to listen to recordings of Lenny Bruce, related to me anecdotes about Lenny Bruce, and gave me a sandwich which was in fact very good and which I did enjoy eating very much, so thanks, Benita. On another occasion, two of these obsolete old crones argued over whether or not one can find orange cats in Rome; one them claimed that Rome has no orange cats at all, and the other claimed to have owned one herself while living in that very city. One group of them eventually had another other group arrested over a dispute involving control of the local library. If only there were a metaphor in there somewhere. At any rate, I managed to steal a lot of pain pills in those days. I'll continue this anecdote in some other outlet ala Truman Capote because it sounds like some nonsense Truman Capote would have written if he had ever written more than six things. Ooooh, take that, Truman Capote, who is dead!

    Peretz, then, is right to keep an eye on whatever manifestations of Old Left sentiment might arise in the pages of the The New York Times Review of Books or Unitarian church services or the next Gore Vidal autobiography (there have been three so far). The difficulty here is that he cannot differentiate between Bolshevik propaganda and reasonable historical analysis. In 2006, writer James Carroll, being a writer, wrote an article for The Boston Globe in which he argued that the North Korean dystopia came about in part as a reaction to the U.S.'s involvement in the peninsula. He did not argue, incidentally, that North Korea is the glowing sun of harmony to which all faces turn from every corner of the Earth, its children looking to Kim Jong Il for hope and guidance as they struggle against the white-skinned dog men who burn them for fuel in the factories of the West.

    You wouldn't know this from reading Peretz's take on the piece, though. Carrol, it seems,  "didn't tell his readers that the present communist tyrant Kim Jong Il is the son of the last communist tyrant Kim Il Jong, who ran the tyranny in 1948." There is a good reason for Carrol not to have done so even aside from the fact that Kim Jong Il's father was not the non-existent Kim Il-Jong but rather Kim Il-Sung: the vast majority of Americans who would be inclined to read an article on some subset of 20th century Korean history would also be aware that the current ruler is the son of the previous one and that this might very well reflect poorly on the regime's commitment to popular governance and the rule of law, so there is no more reason for Carrol to explain this to them than there would be for him to note that North Korea is north of South Korea.

   Still, Peretz determines that Carroll's non-existent defense of the North Korean regime is so dangerously existent that it must be publicly refuted. With this in mind, the erudite publisher reveals the following piece of inside baseball:

And, if you want a retrospective judgment on the cold war, just compare North Korea with South Korea, the most backward and brutal heavily armed industrial country in the world and its neighbor, an exemplar of market capitalism, democratic politics, and strategic independence of its allies, like the United States.

Though initially skeptical, I've since verified this with several National Security Agency veterans as well as a number of top-tier analysts associated with Stratford and other privately-run global information consultancy outfits, and although I am still analyzing the data and would thus be uncomfortable in publishing any definite conclusions as this time, I am prepared to note that my preliminary determination is in apparent agreement with Peretz's own findings to the effect that South Korea may very well have done better than North Korea. Extrapolating from what I've managed to determine thus far, I can also predict at this early point that as the data continues to be analyzed, my own research will continue to largely support the foundations of Peretz's contentions as a whole, although I have run into a sticking point insomuch as that I have no idea what "strategic independence of its allies" is supposed to mean.

In all seriousness, Peretz's contention that Carroll has sought to downplay the vast culpability of the Kim dynasty can only be the result of dishonesty or incompetence or some Peretzian hybrid thereof. In his apparently controversial article, Carroll makes reference to "the Stalinist character of the North Korean regime" and elsewhere employs such terminology as "the tyrant Kim Jong-Il," this being the exact phrase that Peretz himself uses in the course of accusing Carroll of trying to hide the fact that Kim Jong-Il is a tyrant.

One can probably imagine the treatment given by Peretz to those who actually ranked among the Old Left and who actually did sympathize with communism and its various national manifestation. Our chapter subject once took issue with a recent book on the author and leftist public intellectual I.F. Stone with the following assertion: "A review of "All Governments Lie," The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone in [the wacky old leftist journal] In These Times fails to tell you that Stone somehow believed that the Stalin regime was an exception to this rule." Had the review told you that, it would have been wrong, as Stone obviously knew perfectly well that lies were the favored means of communication by the Soviet regime in general and the Stalinist one in particular:

Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men.

Contrary to Peretz's typically unsourced accusation, then, Stone did not consider Stalin and his comrades to have been the only honest rulers in all of human history. What bizarre assertions one has the occasion to shoot down when dealing with Peretz, whom I suspect would actually recognize the foolishness of his own implications were someone to explain to him what those implications were. Perhaps he needs an intern.

Desmond Tutu once delivered an address to an American congregation in which the Christian activist offered the Israelis some unsolicited advice regarding what they ought to be doing with all the Palestinians they've collected over the years. According to Peretz's highly original account of the speech, the bishop's advice was that they all get ready to be killed by some impromptu horde operating under his own personal command. As our publisher-scholar relates:

With his characteristic sneer [Tutu] actually threatened Israeland not just the State but the whole People. 'Remembering what happened to you in Egypt and much more recently in Germanyremember and act accordingly.'

Such a quote as this could certainly be construed as having been intended to convey to the Israelis that they deserve to receive another round of persecution and that this could very well come about, particularly if one rips the quote out of the context that quite obviously indicates it to be something else entirely, which is of course exactly what Peretz did because he is some sort of trickster deity.

Hey, here's that context right over here! C'mon, ganglet's attach it to the piece that Peretz discovered and see if any secret messages are revealed! Those mummies have just got to have some sort of weakness:

My address is really a cri de coeur, a cry of anguish from the depth of my heart, an impassioned plea to my spiritual relatives, the offspring of Abraham like me: please, please hear the call, the noble call of your scriptures, of our scriptures... Be on the side of the God who revealed a soft spot in his heart for the widow, the orphan and the alien... This is your calling. If you disobey that calling, if you do not heed it, then as sure as anything one day you will come a cropper. You will probably not succumb to an outside assault militarily. With the unquestioning support of the United States of America, you are probably impregnable. But you who are called are they who are called, asked to deal with the oppressed, the weak, the despised, compassionately, caringly, remembering what happened to you in Egypt and, much more recently, in Germany. Remember and act appropriately. If you reject your calling, you may survive for a long time, but you will find it is all corrosive inside, and one day, one day, you will implode...Somebody has said if something has happened once, then clearly it is something possible. It happened in South Africa; why not in the Middle East?

    Which is to say that the former Archbishop of Cape Town did not actually threaten Israel with anything, not even destruction, much less annihilation or a big hammerand contrary to threatening Israel "and not just the State but the whole People," as Peretz characterized him as doing, Tutu actually states his belief that the country is safe from anything that might constitute a significant threat. The allegedly threatening portion of the quote, meanwhile, is directly preceded by the word "caringly," which itself is preceded by the word "compassionately." Note that Peretz is so helpful as to have capitalized the "r" in "remembering" as presented in his chosen quote lest his readers realize that it's actually pulled from the middle of a sentence and then be forced to go look up the speech for themselves and thereby get distracted by all of the boring context. It's quicker and easier to just let Marty lie to you.

   Peretz is not so not nice as to not ever be nice[D5] . His niceness comes in irritating little bursts, often directed at the wrong people for the wrong things. This leads to incidents so terrible that the resulting terribleness cannot even be measured by existing instruments and would instead have to be estimated by cosmologists.

    In April of 2009, Peretz attended a lecture given by Thomas Friedman and then wrote about it on his blogfdgsdh4deg.bk.zdj[D6] [D7]

    I'm sorry, I fell out of my chair and had to be taken to the hospital, although this was done intentionally in order that I could obtain a prescription for morphine before having to further consider a meeting of the minds between Martin Peretz and Thomas Friedman. Now I'm ready to continue.

    Duly impressed by Friedman's erudition, Peretz writes a rather lengthy blog post in which he singles out one of his recent New York Times columns in particular:

Tom makes a surprisingly fresh argument about Iraq. "If we, with Iraqis, defeat them by building any kind of decent, pluralistic society in the heart of their world, it will be a devastating blow."

The assertion that this is some sort of "fresh argument about Iraq," surprisingly so or not, is absolutely ludicrous, even relative to all of the other absolutely ludicrous things we have encountered so far. This sentiment had at that point been utteredand in much the same terminology as thisperhaps millions of times, by President Bush and other members of the administration, by countless pundits, by a hundred thousand drunken uncles, and probably by Peretz himself. In the absence of WMDs, it had even evolved into the central justification for the war; even before the WMDs were found to be[D8] not found, it had been a peripheral justification for the invasion of Iraq. In fact, it served as a major argument for the invasion of Iraq well before 9/11 pushed the issue back into the public dialogue. The assertion that this idea is somehow new, much less "fresh," is so amazingly wrong-headed that I do not think it would be amiss for me at this point to call for Peretz to be stripped of his citizenship and perhaps even his legal status as a human being. He should be abandoned to a pack of seals or something so that he can learn to catch fish or otherwise be trained in some useful task. Then he should be arrested and shot out of a cannon and then arrested again for speeding and then released back to the pack of seals so that they may shun him for what even a pack of seals must know to be the incredible degree of nonsense inherent to claiming that there is anything original at all in noting that it would good for us and bad for al-Qaeda if we succeed in building a pluralistic society in Iraq. Then we should shoot all of Peretz's seal friends and make him join us in eating their flesh.

On another occasion, Peretz held forth on the virtues of former Clinton advisor and current populist commentator Dick Morris, who possesses not a single virtue, not even the religious sort that would preclude one from cheating on one's wife with a prostitute and having said prostitute suck one's toes or whatever it is that the disgusting little fellow did that one time. Wrote Peretz:

You may not much like Dick Morris. But one thing you know about him is that he is a shrewd political analyst...and prognosticator.

I know nothing of the sort and neither does any other sentient being with even basic knowledge of this creature's history as analyst or prognosticator. In 2006, Morris released a book entitled Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race. The first sentence reads, accurately, "On January 20, 2009, at precisely noon, the world will witness the inauguration of the forty-fourth [D9] president of the United States," after which point the text descends into absolute madness. His most recent book, Catastrophe, is based on the premise that "we must act before President Barack Obama fully implements his radical political agenda. Because after Obama has won his war on prosperity and canceled the war on terror, it will be too late to regain our liberty or our security." He is not so much a prognosticator as he is an opportunist, and not so much an opportunist as he is a disgusting, overgrown boy of the sort that one's mom would force you to invite to spend the night because she and his mom are friends, and then he would try to touch one while one is asleep and then pretend that he himself was sleeping when one wakes up to find a hand on one's buttocks. I am extrapolating a bit here, but at any rate the man is a contemptible fool with absolutely no insight into anything other than self-aggrandizement and sexual perversion.

Also:

Peretz on Iraq

There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective.
                                                                                         -Martin Peretz, August 2006

   Take a look at that quote. That's as close as Martin Peretz has ever gotten to admitting that those who turned out to be right about Iraq are almost as deserving of credit as those who turned out to be wrong, such as Martin Peretz.[D11] [D12]

    The warnings that our republic was about to cripple itself in a dozen ways were made well in advance of the war's launching, of course. Nonetheless, Peretz considers these to have been "all retrospective," presumably because some of them were reiterated after the fact while others were necessarily made at such time as new mistakes were revealed. Peretz's view of the world and its workings does not provide for the possibility, or even the obvious fact, that he might have been wrong to advocate on behalf of the war with such scattershot bravado, and that other people who don't even have their own magazines were right to raise concerns about the project. Every objection to the war, no matter when it was made, is thus by necessity "retrospective."

    This is not to say that Peretz is unwilling to accept responsibility for Iraq. Someone has to assign the blame, for instance, and our publisher friend has done an admirable job of leading the way on this lest potential lessons be lost upon those of us possessing less insight than does Martin Peretz. As he explains:

Whom do we have to hold responsible for the situation in Iraq? The same person who is responsible for the sheer fact of Iraq. That person is Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist, a poet and, most significantly, a British colonial servant.

    Bell, you see, was involved in organizing this particular portion of the British Empire into a semi-cohesive administrative unit. But the resulting unit was somewhat artificial in terms of traditional nation-statehood, being home to several different socio-ethnic groups following several different religious creeds. Later, she was awoken from the warm slumber of death by means of Thelemic nanomagic, after which point she began to roam the earth, forcing people such as Martin Peretz to advocate an invasion of Iraq without regard for the potential consequences. This was unkind of her.

    In fact, the creation of Iraq could have been handled better, but one can say the same regarding quite a few pieces of the dying British Empire. Pakistan, for instance, did not turn out to be a particularly viable entity insomuch as that a large portion of the country broke away in the midst of civil war and chaos and subsequently became the all-terrible Bangladesh. I also seem to recall there having been some spirited disputes now and again regarding the borders of another partial British creation, Israel.

   Incidentally, neither Bangladesh nor Israel is home to hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors, and the U.S. does not seem to have sunk some trillion or so dollars into either of those countries. There is something different, then, about Iraq, and I suspect that this difference may stem from the fact that our republic recently occupied that country at the behest of people like Martin Peretz.

    Peretz does deserve a strange sort of credit insomuch as that he was one of those who helped to advocate the invasion of Iraq well before this "product" was "introduced," as the incorrigible Andy Card put it in 2002, which is to say that he was for the war even before being for the war became the cool new hip happening trend among liberal moderates. Just a few days after 9/11, our chapter subject was among those who formally asked the Bush Administration to invade and occupy Iraq in the interests of U.S. security and power projection capabilities, having signed his name to an open letter to this effect composed by the Project for a New American Century crowd (which had called on Clinton to do the same thing in another, similar letter composed in 1999, as you probably know if you've ever read a liberal blog or even walked into a room while someone else was reading one).

    People deal with their own failures in different ways. Peretz, for instance, wrote "The Politics of Churlishness," an essay that was chosen to appear in a volume entitled The Best American Political Writing of 2005. The churlishness in question is being perpetrated by those who have for some reason failed to grant Peretz and his colleagues their due credit for having done whatever it is that they think they've managed to do. The nattering nabobs of negativitywho do not speak for the great silent majority, mind youare, as the conservative trope goes, rooting for failure despite the clear evidence of success.

"They are not exactly pleased by the positive results of Bush's campaign in the Middle East," nor with the administration's "unprecedented success" in the region, as Peretz explains to us. "I refer, of course, to the political culture of the Middle East, which the president may actually have changed." As difficult as it may be to imagine now, the Peretz crowd was consumed with another round of preemptive triumph in the period from 2004 to 2005. An election in Lebanon seemed to spell the end for Hizbullah, and thus the end of Syrian and Iranian influence over that country's affairs. The streets of Beirut were filled in those days with typically beautiful Lebanese females of Druse, Christian, and secularist backgrounds, all demonstrating against Islamic oppression and in favor of the Enlightenment or something approaching it. Photos of such pretty demonstrations were prominently displayed on the blogs of our own nation's war enthusiasts, many of whom no doubt fantasized that they would someday meet these girls and tell them how hard they had advocated for the Iraq invasion that had peripherally granted them their liberty in turn, and then the girls would also see in them what our local girls have for some reason failed to see, and of course they would be filled with gratitude for their white knights...Incidentally, when Israel bombed Beirut and other civilian areas in 2006, the war bloggers appeared to have forgotten all about these Lebanese girls, as we did not see any more pictures of them. Obviously, I am not accusing these swivel-chair war bloggers, such as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, of opportunism or hypocrisy or of not really caring about the well-being of certain populations for whom they claim to be concerned advocates; it is simply hard to get good pictures of Lebanese girls when they're crying in darkened basements as bombs drop upon their city, is all.

    Let us return to the crucial subject of churlishness. We are informed that the blame for 9/11 lies mainly with President Clinton, and not Gertrude Bell as one might expect. "The Clinton administration seized on every possible excusefrom the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, right through the atrocities in Kenya and Tanzania, to the attack on the USS Cole not to respond meaningfully to Osama bin Laden." Insomuch as that bin Laden was not at all involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had at that time just spent a decade fighting our Soviet enemies under partial U.S. coordination, had offered to help protect Saudi Arabia from our new Iraqi enemies in a 1990 meeting with the Crown Prince of that alleged U.S. ally, and otherwise refrained from doing anything that could have reasonably prompted President Clinton or anyone else to consider the fellow a significant threat until the embassy bombings of 1998, Clinton can probably be forgiven for not going after bin Laden in 1993 or even giving the fellow much thought until the point when he actually started killing Americans instead of America's enemies. The president did, however, fire a few cruise missiles in the fellow's general direction in 1998; even this small step was widely denounced as a distraction from the impeachment proceedings, as was the Kosovo war the following year. The Bush Administration, in contrast, did eventually pursue bin Ladenafter the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. But less us not rehash the squabbles of the past nine years concerning the last nine years before that; they are hashed enough as it is, and anyway it is easier to divide things into groupings of ten.

    Despite the churlishness that apparently drives the anti-war crowd, Peretz tells us, a few of their number began to achieve sentience around 2005, like so many fictional computers. "Some liberals appear to have understood that history is moving swiftly and in a good direction..." Forward, we may suppose.

    Not content in having written one of the best American political essays of 2005, Peretz in 2006 treated the readers of The Wall Street Journal to one of the best American political essays to have appeared in the August 7th, 2006 morning edition of The Wall Street Journal. This was, not-so-incidentally, the article in which he informs the citizenry that all objections to Iraq to U.S. conduct in Iraq are, "to be sure, retrospective." The subject this time, to be sure, was Ned Lamont's campaign against Joe Lieberman, an effort that Peretz considered to be unseemly. "Mr. Lamont has almost no experience in public life," Peretz notes retrospectively. "He was a cable television entrepreneur, a run-of-the-mill contemporary commercant with unusually easy access to capital."

    Speaking of "unusually easy access to capital," this might be a good time to mention that Martin Peretz was able to buy  The New Republic only because he first married the heir to a sewing machine fortune. In Peretz's defense, he has never done anything so crass and commercial as to actually start a business.

    The real purpose of the piece, though, was to warn the nation about what might happen if people such as Martin Peretz were to lose their influence over the Democratic Party.  "If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength...The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what this is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party." This may be the only occasion on which someone has denounced a political candidate for having spent too much time in the private sector and not enough time solving everyone's problems by way of the governmentbefore going on to warn everyone that the liberals are about to take over.

Peretz on the Arabs, the Arabs Being the Point of All This Anyway

"Alas, apricots don't grow in the dessert [sic]."

                                                                                                                         Martin Peretz

     Deep down, you always knew, throughout the whole of your life, that you were being trained for something special, that every supposedly mundane hardship was in fact a means by which unseen forces were building you up for the task that has always been your destiny. You were wrong, of course.

   But throughout this chapter, at least, I have been preparing you for something that would have been impossible to you before picking up this book. Through repeated exposure, you have been desensitized to the worst series of sentences ever writtenthe one concerning Bernie Madoff's pancreas. You see, we are about to examine the context in which it was originally written. Without adequate preparation, you would have been too distracted by Peretz's awful paragraph to take in the significance of what Peretz is attempting to do in the essay in which the paragraph appears.

    Of course, you had no idea that you were being manipulated[D13] . Don't be embarrassed; I am like unto the owl who sees in all directions but who himself is only seen when he so chooses. I am very much like unto such an owl as that, quite frankly. You, meanwhile, were distracted by red herrings, by misdirection. When I appeared to be hitting on you early in the chapter, for instance, it was simply to direct your perception away from the training I was about to provide to you without you knowingunless, of course, you find me attractive, in which case we should explore that, but only if you want to. I don't want to screw up our friendship. I just feel that maybe we could have more. More sex, lol.

    Anywho, on the occasion of the suddenly-cancerous Lockerbie bomber's release from a Scottish prison in 2009, Peretz began his commentary with the following oft-aforementioned bit of nonsense:

The New York Post and Reuters both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that. Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.[D14] [D15]

To understand what Peretz thinks he's getting at, you must first understand that Peretz's entire reign at The New Republic has been marked by a cartoonish brand of hawkishness directed almost entirely against the Arab and Muslim peoples. His own writings are given over largely to accounts of Arab and Muslim perfidy; among other things, he has asserted that Arabs are incapable of maintaining a "truly civil society." In content, approach, and intent, his output is no different from that of the various websites that catalogue the real or imagined crimes of blacks or Jews or both. Not that I am bothered by his or anyone else's racism, which is directed only towards mere people. But why his perpetual assault on grammar, which he must truly despise? Grammar isn't an Arab, Marty. You're thinking of al-gebra.

Logic, likewise, is no Muslim, and yet Peretz insists on demeaning it as if it were on Hajj. The point he approaches in the blog post we are here concerned with is spelled out more clearly in his headline: "Madoff Has Cancer, Too. Why Not Release Him or At Least Send Him Home on House Arrest?" What he means is that the Lockerbie bomber was to be released to his home by virtue of late-stage cancer while imprisoned in a country that sends terminally ill prisoners home as general policy, and now here's Bernie Madoff, who never even killed anyone, and he's supposedly dying of cancer but has yet to receive the same sweet deal that was given to this murderous terrorist.

Lest anything be left to chance, Peretz amplifies his insight thusly:

So the master Ponzi schemer is now in the hands of the president as top man in the federal penal system. Since Obama seems to think that Libyan terrorist al-Megrahi, who had 16 years of a 27-year 'life' sentence yet to serve, should be put under house arrest until death, why not do the same kindness for Bernie?

Peretz clearly believes, then, that (1) Barack Obama is the "top man in the federal penal system" and is thus in a position to demote Madoff's sentence to mere house arrest; that (2) Barack Obama wants al-Megrahi to spend his last days at home; and that (3) if Scotland follows its own regulations to the effect that a terminally ill prisoner is released to his home, then the U.S. should follow the same non-existent U.S. regulations in respect to a certain prisoner who happens to have been well-known at the time that Peretz decided all of this.

If Peretz were someone other than Peretz, he would know that (1) Obama is not the "top man in the federal penal system" and has no power whatsoever to reduce a man's sentence to house arrest, ; that (2) rather than believing that al-Megrahi "should be put under house arrest until death," Obama had already clearly stated that al-Megrahi should have remained in the Scottish prison; and that, contrary to Peretz, (3) it is hardly hypocritical for Obama to refrain from using a power he doesn't have to do something of which he doesn't approve based on a regulation that doesn't apply.

In the early days of 2007, street battles between Shiite and Sunni militias were once again flaring up across Iraq. Never one to avoid controversy, Thomas Friedman wrote a column in which he explained that it would probably be best if everyone concerned were to stop killing each other and instead dedicate themselves to the peace which passes all understanding, not the least of which his own. He also asked:

Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King? Where is the Million Muslim March under the banner: No Shiites, No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad.

There is much to mock in such a sentiment as this, particularly if one recalls for whom Martin Luther King was named and why. Peretz does not do subtlety, though, and instead responded to Friedman's treacle in the following ludicrous manner:

Poor Tom Friedman. He is looking for a Muslim Martin Luther King. There is none, Tom. If one were living on earth, they'd break his windows. Imprison him. Or kill him. Finished.

   It does not cross Peretz's mind that this is exactly what happened to the actual Martin Luther King, and that it is therefore not much of an indictment of the Muslim world that their own incarnation of such a fellow might very well end up just as dead as the original. We would probably not expect him to ruminate over whether or not the centuries of circumstances that made Martin Luther King necessary tells us anything about the Judeo-Christian West's own cultural deficits, because to the extent that any such deficits rise to our attention, the deficits of the Arab Muslim world are thus minimized by comparison and context.

    Peretz has no use for context, particularly such context as may lead us to remember, for instance, which socio-ethnic group it was that illicitly seized control of which region in the course of establish which world-spanning empire upon which the sun never set. Such things are irrelevant to Peretz, as is anything else that could be possibly be used to argue that the Arabs and Muslims are not necessarily the greatest villains of both the past and present, or that much of their actual villainy could be explained as a reaction to the villainy that has been visited upon them by the outside world. Thus it is that his writings on the Arabs and Muslims are entirely devoid of intellectual honesty, and in fact often read very much like the output of some internet-based anti-Semite.

    In July of 2009, two Jakarta hotels were hit with bombs. As Peretz reported at the time, "More than 50 injured were carted away to hospitals. Maybe the casualties will go up. They certainly won't go down." To this brave prediction, Peretz adds the following sentence, set off into its own paragraph in order that its significance not be lost:

Who are the guilty? We all know. But we can't say.

    This particular tropethat there exists some group which perpetrates great crimes but which cannot be publicly identified as doing sois a staple of the anti-Semitic rhetorical aesthetic. It is especially absurd in this particular context. Is Peretz truly incapable of stating outright that a bombing, which is clearly the work of some Islamic militant group or another is clearly the work of some Islamic militant group or another? If so, how has he managed to write such things in the past without suffering retribution at the hands of the International Islamist Conspiracy? If even a liberal publication such as The New Republic publishes articles which refer in passing to "the murderous Arabs"and, under the direction of Peretz, the magazine has done just that on at least one occasioncan it really be said that anyone is being prevented, by way of some non-existent hate speech laws or popular sentiment or any other such forces, from noting that a bombing in Jakarta is probably the work of Islamic terrorists?

    Of course not. What has actually happened here is that Peretz, in the midst of writing his post, decided that it would work in his favor and in the favor of his ideological objectives to portray himself as being unable to write freely on the subject of Islamic perfidy lest he be silenced or boycotted or tisk-tisked or perhaps even have his windows broken out like some Islamic Martin Luther King. It is a common and stupid trick to portray one's self as being in possession of some true-yet-controversial sentiment yet also constrained by the great power and influence of one's enemies. It is especially absurd when one lives in America and one's enemies are Muslims, who are distrusted by about half the population even if they have become the latest pet project of certain pseudo-intellectual liberals who will defend Islam for the same things for which they attack Christianity when they ought to be attacking both. As long as Peretz steers clear of dinner parties attended by members of the Old Left, he is perfectly free to knock the Muslims without significant repercussions, just as he's always done, and just as I myself have done on occasion while somehow escaping retaliation.

    Just as every instance of black violence or Jewish success is seen by the tribalist as endemic to the violent nature of the black man or the conspiracy of the Jew, every occasion of actual misbehavior on the part of an Arab or Muslim is, to Peretz, another indictment of the Arab and of the Muslim. There is no fundamental difference between his modus operandi and that of anyone else whose mentality is driven largely by opposition to some or another socio-ethnic group.

    When a soccer riot occurs, Peretz rightfully ignores it, as such things only carry larger significance only to the extent that anything carries significance to a writer on deadline. When a soccer riot occurs among Arabs, we are treated to such things as this:

But the Arab soccer wars are nothing to laugh about. You can read about them in the attached news reports, along with photos. Still, nothing explains the riots in France where thousands and thousands of mostly young and temper-torn French-born men and women who hail from Algeria took to the streets and ripped them up, broke shop windows, muscled non-participants and wrought general havoc.

When Peretz claims that "nothing can explain" an incident in which young men riot in celebration of a sporting victory pulled off by their country of origin, he is presumably not speaking literally; such things go on all the time and are easily explained by nationalism, youthful exuberance, and other manifestations of douchebaggery. What Peretz really means is that this soccer riot is somehow different from all the others, and that the perpetrators, too, are somehow different from those who came before them. He's right; this incident differs from the many others that have gone down in the years since Peretz began blogging insomuch as that Peretz did not cover any of them, even those that resulted in far greater violence than this one. Those others did not belong to a race for which Peretz has any particular scorn, after all; those of us who are not Arabs are free to riot all we want without Peretz hassling us and otherwise coming down on our good time, which is certainly good to know.

***

There is little to be done about such people as Martin Peretz; it is always possible that some unqualified fellow will somehow get his hands on someone else's money and then use it to take by wealth what he could never have achieved by his own talents, as was the case with Peretz when he married money and promptly bought himself a magazine. Like anyone else whose foolishness damages the public interest to the extent that his foolishness is taken seriously by those who might have otherwise taken in the work of some less foolish media figure and been better-informed as a result, Peretz must be dealt with by mockery. If you happen to run in to him, you might explain that he has more in common with Muhammed than he might think insomuch as that both married wealthy women and neither could write. Better yet, think up something more clever [D16] and tell him that instead.