So I’ve been reading some materials suggested to me by Mark Perry, which I’ll try and set out for discussion in a bit, but I tripped over one thing which ought to explain why it is that I don’t automatically genuflect when someone explains that they are a professional diplomat or otherwise have expertise in diplomatic affairs and go on to make an argument from authority.
Over at the ‘American Educational Trust’ website, they ran a criticism of a Washington Post review of Mark Perry’s book, ‘A Fire in Zion‘.
The substance of the book is interesting, but more interesting to me is this side comment by the author:
A shameless example of the other kind of book review, blasting it so that it won’t be read, was the Post’s hatchet job two years ago on The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball and his son, Douglas Ball. A professional and deeply compassionate study by the now deceased diplomatic and business titan and his historian son, The Passionate Attachment was nevertheless belittled by the Post’s reviewer, Walter Laqueur, a career apologist for Israel.
Laqueur could not refute the Balls’ facts and their conclusions that Israel was an unadmirable country enabled to exist only by annual multibillion dollar gifts from a neo-Rothschild, the American taxpayer. So, ignoring the book’s actual contents, Laqueur snidely intimated in what essentially was a non-review that since the Balls’ complaints were so numerous, both they and their book were somehow discredited.
[emphasis added]
The author of this piece?
Andrew I. Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was U.S. ambassador to the state of Qatar at the time of his retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service. He also served in London, Augsburg and Frankfurt, Beirut, Jerusalem, Amman, Baghdad, Dhaka, Tehran, Manama, and Wellington.
Obviously an experienced professional diplomat. Who believes that Israel is ‘…an unadmirable country…’ Nice locution, isn’t it?
Love the “neo-Rothschild” ZOG conspiracy element. The Qataris obviously trained him well.
That’s the attitude of much of State. Anti-Semitism is alive and well (really the dominant attitude) in:
*State Dept.
*Academia.
*The Press
*Intellectuals
*Europe.
*The Democratic Party.
Part of it is the rejection of modernism for romanticism (ala the Nazis “Blud and Boden” and the Islamicists pretensions to the Caliphate). Part of it was always there and just hidden after the Holocaust.
It nevertheless exists.
Of all the nations in the ME, only one embraces modern principles (it has to in order to survive). Only one and it is not Qatar.
Actually American history is loaded with ignorant, bigoted, and incompetent diplomats; if we had that many bad generals we’d be Northern Mexico.
We had Marion Davies, ambassador to Russia who thought Stalin’s show trials were for real. And Joseph Kennedy the anglophobe Ambassador to Great Britain. And only in America could William Jennings Bryan be Secretary of State. Then there’s Ambassador Joe Wilson (the worst ambassadors are also the ones who insist on being called “Ambassador” for the rest of their lives, as did Joseph Kennedy) who could probably eat yellow cake for breakfast and not notice.
On the plus side, we had Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, and Robert McNamara. Just kidding.
There is a serious case to be made for “profiling” so-called diplomats as likely enemies of the Republic, who tend to spy for Communists and steal things out of the National Archives.
One of the little pluses I see in the current military strategy in Iraq and elsewhere is that it is educating what I think might be a great crop of diplomats. I just hope many of them decide to go into that field when they retire from the military.
I wish more people knew about the American Educational Trust and its pseudo-academic front, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. They are a pretty blatantly anti-Semitic outfit dedicated to spreading blood libels about Israel.
AET/WRMEA were conceived by ex-Foreign Service officers, including Richard H. Curtiss and Andrew I. Killgore, an ex-Ambassador to Qatar. Curtiss is listed openly on its web site as a contributor to the journal of the Institute of Historical Review. Yes, that’s right: the leading American Holocaust-denial foundation.
Interestingly Laila al-Arian, the daughter of convicted Islamic Jihad financier Sami al-Arian, interned at WRMEA in 2001. (She’s now a Columbia journalism student.)