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.<\/p>\n
Over at the ‘American Educational Trust’ website, they ran a criticism of a Washington Post review<\/a> of Mark Perry’s book, ‘A Fire in Zion<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n The substance of the book is interesting, but more interesting to me is this side comment by the author:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \nLaqueur 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.<\/b> 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. <\/p>\n \n[emphasis added]<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The author of this piece?<\/p>\n 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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Obviously an experienced professional diplomat. Who believes that Israel is ‘…an unadmirable country…’ Nice locution, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal finds an experienced U.S. diplomat who explains, as a side note, that Israel is ‘an unadmirable country’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}