Jeffrey Goldberg's Gasping, Dying Smear Tactics

by Glenn Greenwald
by Glenn Greenwald

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg – in a paragraph he entitles "Where the Left and Right Always Seem to Agree" – writes (emphasis added):

Joseph Epstein's excellent essay in The Wall Street Journal about I.J. Singer's The Brothers Ashkenazi . . . contains this penetrating observation: "Politics taught I.J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism." This is an evergreen phenomenon, unfortunately. We see the brown-red coalition aligned against Israel in Europe, of course, and, in less dramatic, but still disturbing fashion, we [sic] The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's paleo-con magazine, featuring the writings of doctrinaire leftists on Buchanan's least-favorite country, the one he recently compared to Nazi Germany. The Buchananites have even recruited Jews to do their Israel-bashing for them. This particular development falls in the category of shocking yet not exactly surprising.

His link to "Israel-bashing" in the penultimate sentence – as in: "The Buchananites have even recruited Jews to do their Israel-bashing for them" – is to an article I wrote for the January 26, 2009, issue of The American Conservative, an article in which I documented and criticized the lack of any disagreement or genuine debate in the U.S. Congress over America's ongoing, one-sided support for Israel generally and for Israel's attack on Gaza specifically.

As an initial matter, the rank guilt by association technique Goldberg employs here is not only painfully transparent but also factually false. Pat Buchanan has had no involvement with the publication or editing of that magazine for many years. But why let facts get in the way of rabid attempts at character assassination?

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