Wow. You have to hand it to Omri. The boy can
write. Besides his latest response in this ongoing (and
hopefully soon-to-be-ended) Peres debate, he posted another 9 on Friday
alone.
So when he posts that having me “devote half
of [my] Wednesday posts to mocking Peres matters,” his readers could be
forgiven for thinking that I was unfairly targeting Peres with a lethal
barrage of posts. Thing is, my grand total of posts that day was 2,
with 1 containing the Peres quote.
But now
to my response.
Claim (1) – that Peres
places his own ego above the security of the State of Israel – is a
slander. It’s a slander that we can’t prove or disprove – we think
there’s a line somewhere in Judaism about who’s the only person who
gets to know what’s in people’s hearts, and we’re reluctant to tread on
that guy’s toes – but it’s a slander
nonetheless.
Leaving aside the fact that
slander is not the correct legal term for making a defamatory statement
in print (that would be libel), I have been very clear that my
statements about Peres’ egotism represent my opinion and the opinion of others, rather
than a statement of fact. He can question why this is my opinion, but
he cannot accuse me of slander.
Claim (2)
[Peres was being ego-maniacalwhen he was speaking to the press about being an Israeli who has the
credibility because of his Noble Prize to go overseas and address the
world’s leaders – ed.
] is equally undecidable – althoughwe think that purely from a logical standpoint, it’s much easier to
make the claim that the Israeli press was wrong when they were
bemoaning to Peres how no Israeli leader is welcome in Europe than when
Peres snapped back that his Nobel Prize opens any door in any European
capital. But since motivations can’t really be proven or denied – and
more so, since they don’t really matter to this debate – we’ll bracket
them and ask about what’s really at stake here: it’s not “why would
someone [Dave] pick on Peres”. It’s “what’s going on when center-right
bloggers and readers take cheap shots at
Peres”.
I think I made it abundantly clear
in my previous post why I interpreted his comments in the way I did.
And just because people like Omri think that Shimon Peres is the great
Israeli patriot who can do no wrong, does not lend more credence to his
interpretation than mine.
Yes, in theory, claim (4) –
Dave’s equal opportunity claim – is true. Dave could have slammed
anyone else for being egotistical. But he didn’t. And that matters.
Let’s put it another way. When tens of thousands of people march in the
streets protesting Israeli checkpoints, we don’t object to their
actions because Israeli checkpoints don’t exist. Israeli checkpoints do
exist. We object because we find it suspicious that, given that there
are checkpoints all over the world, tens of thousands of human rights
activists would choose to focus on Israeli checkpoints. When someone
takes yet another predictable cheap shot at Peres’s
“self-aggrandisement”, we don’t object to the low blow because Peres is
modest. We object because we find is suspicious that, given that we’re
talking about Israeli politicians here, a center-right pro-Israel
blogger would choose to focus on Peres’s “self-aggrandisement”. Did
Bibi, Barak, Ya’alon, Livini, and Peretz all fail to pay their cell
phone bills this month? Have they disappeared from the face of the
Earth? You’d think we would have heard something.
I don’t really understand Omri’s argument
here. The Peres post was inspired by the Peres comment. I did not see
any other comments from egotistical politicians that day, which seemed
to manifest their egotism. It is not like I scoured the internet for
material to slam Peres with. I just happened to read the Jerusalem Post
article, formed my conclusions about it based on the article itself, as
well as previous information about Peres, and was inspired to post
about it. Nothing suspicious there.
But now to the
crux of Omri’s argument.
When people with
lots of readers make choices about whether write about certain things,
they’re not just throwing words into the air. Some people’s blogs are
vanity projects. Israellycool is a recognized voice and agenda-setter
in the small community of people that we call bloggers and blog
readers. Which is why having them devote half of their Wednesday posts
to mocking Peres matters. For most people on the rich (not Dave),
mocking Peres for his ego provides the same cheap thrill that DKos
denizens get whenever someone makes a crack about how Bushitler is
stupid [insert obligatory reference to people who live in their
parents’ basement mocking Yale MBAs here]. The problem is that building
a political community on that foundation guarantees that it will
collapse later. Snarky cheap shots at Peres set us off because they’re
in a very real way pathological – they fulfill a certain
community-building function, where everyone uses jokes to confirm that
everyone is on the same page. It’s glib ideological back-patting as a
substitute for reasoned argument and news gathering, and the
consequence is that communities become insular and unthinking. They end
up oscillating between being very sarcastic about something everyone
agrees on and expressing what everyone agrees about with more
vehemence. It’s like a giant, extrapolated version of the New York
Times letters section, where instead of making arguments people just
repeat their ideologically derived conclusions as if they were
arguments.
So really, this is more just a request
that people stop making bad arguments about Peres. In the first place,
those arguments are untrue – he doesn’t care more about power than
about Israel, otherwise he wouldn’t stick to his (perhaps wrongheaded)
beliefs about how to achieve peace. And while we’re at it, we’ve been
having this debate on the blogosphere for a couple of years and we
still haven’t heard a compelling answer to the assertion that Sharon
would not have been able to win Intifada II during 2001-2003 without
Peres’s tireless work going from European capital to European capital
and assuring leaders that he was looking out for the humanitarian
situation (we know, we know – who cares what if the goyim will ban
Israelis from Europe? Answer: the 90percent of Israeli Jews with
passports). Taking pot shots at Peres in center-right pro-Israel forums
is not done in a vacuum: it’s historically unjustified and politically
corrosive, and people ought not do it.
In
other words, I should not post snarky things about Peres, because it just leads to me building up a community of glib, ideological back patters, insular in their thinking, and not capable of anything more than repeating ideologically derived conclusions as if they were
arguments. And for the record, Peres doesn’t care more about power than
about Israel.
I understand Omri’s concern, but I just happen to think more of my readers. I almost always offer links with my posts (including the one in question), allowing my readers to form their own conclusions. Heck, Omri himself is a reader, and he is certainly not acting like an ideological back-patter. And let’s be honest here. The risk that some people will remain insular in their thinking is hardly an argument for censorship, which is really what Omri is calling for, whether he realizes it or not (“Taking pot shots at Peres in center-right pro-Israel forums
is not done in a vacuum: it’s historically unjustified and politically
corrosive, and people ought not do it“).
But I can’t help but think that Omri’s real problem with my post is that it does not conform to Omri’s view of Peres. To Omri, Peres is a patriot who cares more about Israel than power. He says it very clearly:
So really, this is more just a request that people stop making bad arguments about Peres. In the first place, those arguments are untrue – he doesn’t care more about power than about Israel, otherwise he wouldn’t stick to his (perhaps wrongheaded) beliefs about how to achieve peace.
But to me, Omri is doing something similar to that which he warns will result from posts like mine. Instead of making any substantive argument, he seems to be repeating his ideologically derived conclusion as if it were an
argument. How does pointing to Peres sticking to his beliefs as how to achieve peace prove that “he doesn’t care more about power than about Israel”? It might show that he wants to achieve peace for Israel (something that I do not rule out), but it certainly does not preclude my conclusion – that he is an egotist who thinks he knows what is best for Israel.
Besides, the Peres post is not the first time I criticized an Israeli political figure, yet it is the first time that Omri took exception (publicly) to something that I posted. Which makes me think that this is less a discussion about the dangers of taking pot shots at Peres in center-right pro-Israel forums, and more a discussion about Shimon Peres.
In any event, I truly hope that Omri and I can agree to disagree on this one, and continue to fight the good fight for Israel. While I have enjoyed this discussion, I can’t help but feel that my energies would be better devoted to snarky posts about Ahmadinejad and Kofi Annan.
