Unqualified Offerings

Since You Asked

26 Responses to “Since You Asked”

1. Comment by Gary Farber —
   June 30, 2005 @ 2:36 am

   No, Jim, I’d have to click on the proto-fascist Raimondo’s site, and you’ve yet to explain why I should. , insofar as that works (indicates friendly thoughts, at this point).
   http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004/02/wisdom-of-justin-raimondo.html

2. Comment by Gary Farber —
   June 30, 2005 @ 2:43 am

   Wow, and that’s some fine stuff itself, about “Comrade Aaronovitch.”
   Jim, how the hell can you plug this stuff? It’s as nauseating as Raimondo always is. WTF?

3. Comment by Ray —
   June 30, 2005 @ 3:24 am

   Aaronovitch is a figure who should be mocked whenever possible. Luckily, there’s a blog http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/
   for that very purpose.

4. Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
   June 30, 2005 @ 6:15 am

   Raimondo is, as usual, incoherent. He writes: “The headline of Aaronovitch’s piece – “How Did the Far Left Manage to Slip Into Bed With the Jew-Hating Right?” – is an outrageous libel.” Yet in the same article, he insists on referring to a neo-con as “Comrade”, refers to “left-neocons like Aaronovitch”, “loyalty to an outmoded ‘left-right’ paradigm”, and in general tries to imply that the neocons are somehow Stalinist. If you substitute “Israel-controlled” for “Jew-hating”, Raimondo is making the same sort of claim that he says is libel when Aaronovitch makes it.
   .
   And, needless to say, Raimondo’s conspiracy theories about how Israel must have known about 9/11 beforehand may be consistent with non-Jew-hating, but still make him a crank. The libertarian bench has to be very small indeed for Jim to have to quote Raimondo.

5. Comment by Jim Henley —
   June 30, 2005 @ 6:15 am

   Gary, the link you keep posting gets no more persuasive with repetition.

6. Comment by Jim Henley —
   June 30, 2005 @ 9:10 am

   And, needless to say, Raimondo’s conspiracy theories about how Israel must have known about 9/11 beforehand may be consistent with non-Jew-hating, but still make him a crank. The libertarian bench has to be very small indeed for Jim to have to quote Raimondo.
   .
   Rich, I agree with your first sentence. As for the second, I don’t quote Justin much here any more, because of the first. I’ve made my opinion on the matter known both publically and privately.
   .
   However, two things: 1) I am a big believer in the concept of “the lethal center” that Virginia Postrel developed a few years before she went and joined it. That is, mainstream political culture rather insistently defines out of the discourse anyone outside a narrow range of rather baleful precepts. Your remarks about “the libertarian bench” are of a piece with Republican talking points on MoveOn, Howard Dean (rather a centrist himself) and Michael Moore. I think Moore’s gun control film is mendacious twaddle, but it’s absurd to make him an unperson. I believe in the healing power of eccentricity, basically.
   2) As an opponent of contemporary American neo-imperialism, I have a vested interest in combatting false allegations of antisemitism, since our present-day imperialists, whether gentile or Jewish, use them as an all-purpose shield against substantive criticism. I maintain that both the material and the rhetoric of Justin’s cited piece here are incompatible with the “code word theory” by which the minds of so many intervention opponents have been read.
   .
   If I wanted to go to the effort of cherry-picking choice Raimondo quotes out of ten years of willful contrarianism, I could include his account of his horror upon accidentally meeting Willis Carto, his admonishing Jared Israel for whitewashing the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic, his public upbraiding of short-lived AW.com columnist Anthony Gancarski, who really did engage in code-word rhetoric in one column, and who shortly thereafter turned up as a Front Page Mag contributor. Etc.

7. Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
   June 30, 2005 @ 9:46 am

   I wasn’t asking for a denunciation of the tiresome “denounce person X or be somehow contaminated” sort, and I don’t think that Raimondo should be treated as an unperson. I don’t even think he’s anti-Semitic, or rather I am willing to accept his own and others’ assurances to that effect. I just wonder why you have to quote Raimondo to get the same basic things that Raimondo says — presumably, despite a fondness for eccentricity, you would quote someone else if you could get the same polemic without the people bringing up conspiracy theories that you don’t agree with. For Michael Moore, individual liberals who like him but dislike particular aspects of his movies are stuck with him, because the barriers to entry in the movie business mean that there can’t be many popular liberal polemicists. There aren’t really as high barriers to entry in blogging.
   .
   To me, it brings up the question of whether Raimondo’s particular style of libertarian-Buchananite isolationism is inextricably bound up with conspiracy theories, whether he’s just more popular than other presumably existing polemicists saying much the same thing without the conspiracy theories because of the way that bloggers who started early have retained popularity, or whether there really isn’t anyone else who’s a reasonable writer in the same ideological niche. I am interested in this because the size of the libertarian bench of various flavors may be important to the anti-war movement in general.

8. Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
   June 30, 2005 @ 9:54 am

   Eh, and I didn’t mean to ignore your statement that you don’t actually quote Raimondo much any more, it just wasn’t important to what I wanted to explain in my response. You presumably still *read* Raimondo, or you wouldn’t have noticed this article, and the question of why you’d still have to read him is about the same as why you’d still have to quote him.

9. Comment by Gary Farber —
   June 30, 2005 @ 12:42 pm

   “Gary, the link you keep posting gets no more persuasive with repetition.”
   Jim, probably you replied to the specific points, and I’ve forgotten. In which case, my apologies. Can you provide a link to that post again, please? Thanks.

10. Comment by matthew hogan —
    June 30, 2005 @ 2:23 pm

    Jim — Are you now, or have you ever been, a Raimondo-quoter? Don’t take the Fifth.
    Elsewhere:
    RP: “I don’t even think he’s [Raimondo] anti-Semitic, or rather I am willing to accept his own and others’ assurances to that effect.”
    In other shorter words, “or rather” means you do think he {Raimondo] is now, or has once been, an anti-Semite.
    Frankly, I agree with Jim H on Raimondo and his 9/11 and Israel noise.
    But who has ever cited Raimondo as a source on anything other than personal matters of the Raimondo-universe? One might enjoy his polemical style and agree with some things, and point his writing out as interesting or thoughtful when it happens.
    Leave the rest of the worrying to the folks who actually care if Justin’s real first name is Dennis.

11. Comment by Jim Henley —
    June 30, 2005 @ 2:31 pm

    Gary I’ve never done a point by point response and am not really moved to. I ceased citing Justin as an authority when he insisted on bringing out his idee fixee book against the better instincts of his original publishers. It’s Milroieism, except that Milroie at least troubles to do the occasional interview to provide color for her baseless conjectures. Justin continues to cite the same two-year-old secondary sources. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that people with an ax to grind find you. I’ve heard from Marine Captains, comics scripters and Pakistani historians, solely because I mentioned them on this thoroughly obscure weblog. Were there really anyone in the FBI who remained convinced that Israel had played America false in the Summer of 2001, they’d have found a way to get word out, and likely to someone like Justin Raimondo. For me, the lack of new developments on that front (I don’t think the Franklin-AIPAC case ties in) are the definitive disproof.
    .
    Now, if Laurie Milroie or Congressman Hayes, to name two people who buy into evidence-free conspiracies, was poobah at a top-notch news aggregator that maintained a good blog and published solid work by other writers, I would certainly link to their websites. As it happens, they don’t.
    .
    In the meantime, your anti-linking campaign disturbs for the reasons I give in my response to Rich, above.

12. Comment by Jim Henley —
    June 30, 2005 @ 2:33 pm

    Jim — Are you now, or have you ever been, a Raimondo-quoter? Don’t take the Fifth.
    .
    Indeed I have been. Quite a bit in the early days of the blog, less so over time.

13. Comment by matthew hogan —
    June 30, 2005 @ 2:58 pm

    ” Indeed I have been. Quite a bit in the early days of the blog, less so over time.”
    No more Hollywood scripts for you.

14. Comment by dsquared —
    June 30, 2005 @ 3:41 pm

    Given that the 9/11 commission found that the USA had enough information to deduce that it was going to happen, I don’t think it’s intrinsically ridiculous to belive that Israel had managed to put two and two together, is it? Raimondo’s not really my cup of tea either because he’s a libertarian, but I’m not sure that this particular claim is beyond the pale.

15. Comment by Jim Henley —
    June 30, 2005 @ 3:53 pm

    Daniel, various news reports also cited (general) Israeli warnings to the US during Summer 2001, so even if they knew something there’s evidence they didn’t keep their own counsel. Justin’s claim is that a) Israeli agents were living so close to the hijackers they must have been tracking them, and b) that they must have therefore known what the hijackers were planning in detail. I think the evidence for a is middling to good. But b does not follow. Just this month we saw major stories from Spain indicating that Spanish counterintelligence had their eye on the guys who ended up carrying out the 3/11 train bombing. But they nevertheless had no idea that the 3/11 train bombing was coming.
    .
    I have often suspected that, given America’s long, tangled history with Al Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan thru Kosovo, the Israelis may first have wondered if the 9/11 hijackers were somehow working for us, assuming that Israeli intelligence was even watching the hijackers. My other maybe is that the famous “art students et al” operation was actually drug-related rather than terror-related - hence their apparent interest in DEA facilities.
    .
    But again, there’s a time element here. Two years ago, it was indeed “not intrinsically ridiculous.” But the plausibility of the scenario decays over time. Were the worst suspicions of the early reporting true (Carl Cameron et al), SOMEONE in the bureaucracy would be hopping mad, and would see to it that the word got out.

16. Comment by Frank —
    June 30, 2005 @ 3:53 pm

    I used to read Raimondo. The thing about that claim that is beyond the pale is that he seems to take it for granted that the israelis didn’t warn us. I think there is enough evidence to believe that they did try to warn us about 9-11, but like the others, mostly FBI personell they were at best ignored.

17. Comment by matthew hogan —
    June 30, 2005 @ 4:40 pm

    Raimondo’s Israel claims are piffle, and this comes from an at-times two-fisted Israel-basher. Bin-laden and Co. were/are sufficiently dedicated eccentrics that they were/are hard to penetrate by anybody. 9/11 succeeded by the sheer boldness and plodding ingenuity of maverick fanatics.

18. Comment by diana —
    June 30, 2005 @ 8:57 pm

    Jim: I am virtually certain the art students were a drug ring and not only because Israelis dominate (I believe) the Ecstasy trade. (yes?)
    It was the MO. Israelis do use women in espionage operations, but very sparingly, only to entrap sexually.
    Espionage is dirty and potentially dangerous and being demographically-minded, they don’t like to waste women: their most precious resource.
    Oddly enough, in the most celebrated case (Vanunu) the woman in question was American-born. I wonder why. I have no proof but I suspect that as loath as they are to use women for espionage operations, they are esp. loath to use native-born Israeli women.

19. Comment by Jim Henley —
    June 30, 2005 @ 10:06 pm

    Diana, I’ve heard the same thing about the Ecstacy trade, yes. Now the drug trade and spying are pretty inseparable, so who knows what intelligence connections might be involved. Of course, you and I have hashed this out pretty thoroughly in times past

20. Comment by Jim Henley —
    June 30, 2005 @ 10:23 pm

    To me, it brings up the question of whether Raimondo’s particular style of libertarian-Buchananite isolationism is inextricably bound up with conspiracy theories . . .
    .
    Rich, I dunno. It’s something I’m always on the alert for in myself. I know a lot of antiwar libertarians who seem to do fine without them, but crankery is endemic to fringe politics he said, checking his mirror. And let’s face it, the September 11 massacres were the result of a conspiracy. We think we have a pretty good idea of its shape, but it was a conspiracy nevertheless. There are such things. And needless to say the Woolseyite hawks have nothing on libertarian isolationists when it comes to conspiracy theories, having managed to tie Saddam, in their minds, to every American calamity back to Hurricane Agnes.
    .
    On the bright side, thanks to Gary I’ve been doing some additional reading on the America First Committee this afternoon. (I’m familiar with both the standard and revisionist views of the AFC, but it’s always good to find out a little more.) Fascinating and, I think ultimately, tragic stuff.

21. Comment by Gary Farber —
    June 30, 2005 @ 11:24 pm

    For whatever it’s worth, Jim, I’ve found the responses and discussion on this thread far more interesting than any other feedback I’ve ever gotten about Raimondo (partially because I’ve pretty much received only a very little indeed over the years, but not only).
    So, thanks for that, and for allowing me my brief responsive venting. (Also, I note a good forty or so hits on my link, by the way.)
    I’m also somewhat reassured by your comments about Raimondo’s idee fix (and the general dismissal by others here). Do feel free to write about your further look at America First, please. It’s likely I’ll still react far more negatively to it than you, but I always find your analyses most worthwhile, even when, or possibly even more when, I disagree.

22. Comment by Gary Farber —
    June 30, 2005 @ 11:26 pm

    As a point of orientation, unsurprisingly, I tend to find Aaronovitch more agreeable than not, by the way, though, naturally, not always.

23. Comment by Barry Freed —
    July 1, 2005 @ 1:44 am

    Oddly enough, in the most celebrated case (Vanunu) the woman in question was American-born. I wonder why. I have no proof but I suspect that as loath as they are to use women for espionage operations, they are esp. loath to use native-born Israeli women.
    I find this statement fairly odd and a bit disturbing but I’ll refrain from speculating. It’s also pretty damned obvious to me that an American born spy was used to allay any suspicions Vanunu might have had as a native born Israeli spy would have raised a red flag that something was not quite, uh, kosher.

24. Comment by dsquared —
    July 1, 2005 @ 4:16 am

    As a point of orientation, unsurprisingly, I tend to find Aaronovitch more agreeable than not
    I find him reliably awful. A lot of his stuff is based on fighting domestic UK left internecine struggles in a really quite nasty manner, which is the bit you might be missing. He’s also very big on trying to pretend that people who disagree with him about Iraq do so out of an honest desire to see more dissidents fed into shredders.

25. Comment by Leonard —
    July 1, 2005 @ 10:32 am

    Is Raimondo’s particular style of libertarian-Buchananite isolationism “inextricably bound up with conspiracy theories”?
    .
    I don’t think so. But I think you’d need to define exactly what his style is, and what a conspiracy theory is.
    .
    Take, for example, the idea that FDR tricked us into WWII. Gary’s link (post #1) discusses what Justin has said about that. This idea is common enough among libertarians. Is it a conspiracy theory or not? I believe it. I certainly think Japan has some war guilt - they did escalate it in a big way - but the US deserves some too. Intent to start a war is wrong.
    .
    As Jim says, there’s a lot of cranks in the fringes. Once you leave the reservation of accepted wisdom, there’s a huge world of untried, unknown, and/or rejected ideas out there. Some of it is the truth; most of it isn’t. It can be hard to determine which is which, and without giant shoulders to stand on, the horizon can be pretty close. So a lot of people end up believing what they want to believe.

26. Comment by Jeremy Osner —
    July 1, 2005 @ 1:41 pm

    I think you’d need to define exactly … what a conspiracy theory is.
    Ooh, fun! I’ll make the popcorn…