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Go Home Fact-checking Eric Alterman

THE PLANK FEBRUARY 19, 2008

Fact-checking Eric Alterman

BY MARTIN PERETZ

Eric Alterman is often wrong about many things. Today, he asserts:

Then, last week we read of Malcolm Hoenlein of the extremist Zionist Organization of America -- with whom I once took a teen tour to Israel -- making a series of unsupportable allegations against Obama here.

Except Malcolm Hoenlein is Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, and has nothing to do with the Zionist Organization of America other than that the ZOA is one of the 51 constituent organizations of the Presidents Conference. As such, Hoenlein is perhaps the most high-ranking and high-profile Jewish communal leader in the United States, if not the world. For a man who claims to speak on behalf of American Jewry, it's strange that Alterman doesn't know this.

For some time now, Alterman has been on a crusade to prove that American Jewish organizations do not actually represent the political interests of American Jews (as if the political opinions of American Jews were entirely uniform). Sounding like any garden variety conspiracy theorist, he asserts that the most prominent American Jewish organizations are led by "belligerent right-wingers and neocons who frequently demonize, distort and denounce [American Jews'] values to speak for them in the U.S. political arena" while the "majority of Jews in the United States" -- presumably like Eric Alterman -- "oppose virtually every aspect of the Bush administration/neocon agenda." Nevermind the irony of Eric Alterman calling anyone else "belligerent," but given his outrage against all those nasty, neo-con Jews who presume to speak for him and the rest of American Jewry, one would presume that he would know something as elementary as Malcolm Hoenlein's institutional affiliation. But seeing that Alterman is a "frequent lecturer and contributor to virtually every significant national publication in the United States and many in Europe,” one can understand how his very busy work schedule might get in the way of simple fact-checking.

--James Kirchick

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12 comments

OK--When this post came in over my RSS feed, it had Jamie Kirchick's signature at the botton--but the header proclaimed the author as "M. Peretz"!!  Which is it?  Or does it matter?

- colablease

February 19, 2008 at 4:38pm

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Can someone please start editing Kirchick? Someone? Please?

"Nevermind", one word, is an album title. "Never mind", two words, is the idiom. And it's one of the worst cliches in the book for a writer to mention something in the course of pretending not to mention it. For example, I need not mention that only crap writers would even think to use this sort of back-door construction. Never mind how lazy that kind of construction is, the real problem is that it is implicitly dishonest. If we ought not bring a thing to mind, the the writer ought not mention it at all.

A minimally competent editor could have explained to Kirchick why his entire last paragraph is a useless melange of redundancy and authorial self-importance that manages to say nothing in a way that completely undercuts the impact of the first half of the entry. Cut that paragraph entirely, as any undergrad j-student would have the good sense to do, and this becomes a perfectly acceptable little entry.

So, please, someone get this man an editor.

- rhubarbs

February 19, 2008 at 4:50pm

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While I'm not endorsing Eric Alterman's position, as a former employee in the policy shop of a major national Jewish organization, it was my impression that frequently the national Jewish organizations did not seem to represent the political views of many American Jews related to Israel.  They tended to be dominated by the more hard line views in the community, and didn't - in my opinion - reflect the sometime ambivalent and complicated views many American Jews have toward Isreal's continued occupation of the West Bank and the settlements movement.  

- kabloom123

February 19, 2008 at 4:52pm

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An obligatory piece of a Jamie Kirchick post is the sentence where he denounces someone else for having a negative quality that he himself has in spades. For example, accusing Yglesias of being sarcastic and substanceless (or something to that effect), which is probably as good a two-word summary of Kirchick's blog posts as you could find.

Here we've got Kirchick calling Alterman belligerent. Oy vey. I'm not saying that Yglesias isn't snarky or that Alterman isn't belligerent, but if there's anyone who has no right to lob these kind of accusations around, it's this guy ...

- Androscoggin

February 19, 2008 at 5:31pm

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Eric Alterman has already corrected the error. He is quite rightly just as dismissive as the commenters here of James Kirchick. Here is merely one vintage Alterman put-down:

-- But I see that in the past few days, I've been attacked as an anti-Japanese racist by a right-wing blogger, attacked as an anti-black racist by a left-wing blogger, quoted favorably by right-wing anti-Semites, attacked by Naderites, and attacked in Commentary by "Jamie Kirchick," who I continue to maintain does not really exist but was invented as a sock puppet/imaginary friend, Lee Siegel-style, by the friendless Marty Peretz. The usual criteria I employ in these cases is to try to ignore the attacks if they appear in a place in which I would never have heard of the blogger or would have no reason to believe them if I had. (I learned the latter lesson the hard way with Gawker.) I see no point in responding to a figment of Marty Peretz's imagination or a hard-core Naderite or the anti-Semites, among others. And as for the right-wing blogger, I never heard of him either, but he's gotten some pickup among right-wingers, and I now I see that my friends at History News Network have now both run it and linked to it. I wonder if they know who he is or why he should be taken seriously, as I sure don't.

If James Kirchick really believes that Eric Alterman is "often wrong about many things" he should tell us what they are.  Any frequent reader of his work knows that James Kirchick IS wrong about pretty much everything. 99 Fs and 1 A is still an F grade, James.

- ndmackenzie

February 19, 2008 at 6:15pm

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Well, ONE thing that Alterman is wrong about is that Hoenlein made "a series of unsupportable allegations" about Obama.  Click through on the link and you'll see.

- bigm

February 19, 2008 at 6:45pm

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Here are a couple of the "unsupportable allegations" about Obama made by Hoenlein :

-- All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be, is an opening for all kind of mischief

-- But there is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign

So what type of "mischief" is Hoenlein talking about and just what are these "legitimate concerns?"

- ndmackenzie

February 19, 2008 at 6:56pm

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In fact, Hoenlein publicly defended Obama

www.jpost.com/.../Satellite

Alterman is an idiot.

- achester99

February 19, 2008 at 7:41pm

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all of this reminds me of the "real hip-hop" nonsense that positive rappers started throwing around a few years ago -- all of them spent a lot of time talking about A) how much more serious they were than everybody else, B) how hip-hop was for real people, and C) how it was being dominated by rappers who somehow weren't real people. none of them ever actually used hip-hop to, you know, actually talk about serious things. the comments, jamie kirchick, eric alterman, and martin peretz -- you guys all spend so much time talking about how unserious everybody else is that this is turning out to be just entertainment after all. (although i admit with peretz that boat sailed a long time ago)

- jackson5

February 19, 2008 at 8:12pm

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no, seriously, why does the article say it's by "M Peretz" in the RSS feed?

- perkowitz

February 19, 2008 at 8:32pm

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This perfectly highlights the ridiculousness of the Kirchick Schtick. In his hungry-puppy zeal to nail Alterman on a mistake - an obviously honest mistake that Alterman has since corrected and more than adequately explained - he completely missed the real, honest-to-goodness error Alterman made. The substantive thing that could have been intelligently debated and discussed.

Too bad he stopped at "Ooooh, ooooh! Gotcha! Alterman got his organization wrong - I'm going to hammer him into the middle of next week!"

(Oh, and while Hoenlein's comments don't reach the level of "unsupportable allegations" about Obama, they do sound pretty silly.)

- WoodyBombay

February 19, 2008 at 8:52pm

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kirchick,

Alterman ain't no Ron Paul.  You are way way out of your AAA league here. Alterman may have gotten the affiliation wrong but his assertion that American Jews are more liberal than the Jewish leaders he cited is factually correct.

I do applaud your scrappiness though. Your mentor took the proverbial powder when Alterman threw down the Prospect challenge - nary a peep from marty...funny, a bully will always run from a real fight - and your willingness to engage Alterman is, in this Old Brawler's eyes, kinda cute.  But, you'll get your head handed to you...

- thejauntyboulevardier

February 19, 2008 at 10:17pm

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