Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Juan Cole and Yaacov Lozowick

So far most of our exchange has happened on Cole's blog. I've now moved it here - or rather, since it's too long for a blogpost: here.

2 comments:

Lydia McGrew said...

I commend your moderation and gentlemanliness. But to the Juan Coles of the world, Likud is the incarnation of evil, and Israel's existence as a Jewish state is an Original Sin that can only be expiated by its ceasing to exist as a Jewish state. Similarly, Livni (who has never struck me as particularly hawkish from the little I know) must do penance for ever having belonged to Likud. Perhaps Prof. Cole would like her to flagellate herself publically?

It's odd how religious all this sounds, sometimes.

Yaacov said...

Actually, most of the language of the ideological Left is religious (without God). I read the Guardian daily (so as to know the enemy...), and the only way you can understand them is in religious terms. They have their articles of faith, heresies, a whole series of heretics they'd gladly burn at the stake, and so on and on. A major problem with their religion, however, is that it's all so young and untested. The Great Religions have all been around for millenia (or at least 1 1/2, in the case of Islam), and that's given them time to develop layers of coherence, not to mention intellectual wealth, that have withstood the centuries, hence must be robust. The gobbledygook of these guys, on the other hand, or at least much of it, is here today, gone tommorrow - and justly so (gone).