Beinart’s Anti-Israel Ambitions
Peter Beinart
It’s no surprise The New York Times published Peter Beinart’s column calling for a boycott of Israeli settlements. The Op-Ed pages are a forum for extreme voices and radical anti-Israel positions.
Beinart’s joining the extremists may win him speaking engagements and plaudits in some venues but he’s also clarifying who he is for a lot of other (mainstream) news consumers. As Richard Baehr spells out in Israel Hayom it’s clear what he’s up to. Nothing advances a lagging career like Israel-bashing.
[I]n early 2010, Beinart chose to follow the Walt-Mearsheimer model. In an article in the New York Review of Books, he bemoaned the loss of support (and even hostility) for Israel among young educated Jews, and decided that his sympathies were with this camp of Jews who had become alienated from Israel.
Claims that young Jews are largely disaffected from Israel are specious, but the argument serves as the favored excuse for the far left to join Israel’s attackers. (Various polls show continuing strong sympathy of Jewish youth for Israel. The Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis study found the Beinart/J Street theme of younger Jewish “distancing” from Israel to be false. A CAMERA/Luntz poll in May 2011 found young Jews to be sympathetic to Israel in nearly the same degree as the older population.)
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