Wednesday, October 14, 2009

You Have To Keep Reading

While I'm glad he got the answer he was looking for from a J Street spokesperson, it still remains true that if Jeffrey Goldberg really was curious what that spokesperson meant when it referred to Israel's future as a democracy (namely, whether it ought to remain a Jewish state), he could have read a passage in the same article he quoted from, where the same women who prompted his initial query says the goal of her organization is "securing Israel's future as a Jewish, democratic homeland." Which, presumably, would have taken -- what? An additional two minutes?

1 comment:

chingona said...

You're right, of course, that he could have just kept reading.

But even wrt to the first quote, it's a sad state of affairs when the word "democracy" is considered some sort of red flag.

I've often thought that Jeffrey Goldberg's straight-up journalism got a bad rap because of the opinion journalism he did leading up to the war (which I've heard about more in retrospect, as I wasn't in the country during that period), but I find the way he can go after people who disagree with him to be really obnoxious and unfair.

Aha! They said democracy, not Jewish democracy. They're secret one-staters who make common cause with anti-Semites!

Not cool.