By Dylan Matthews
I see Jeff Goldberg has gotten into the habit of comparing well-respected professors to terrorist leaders. To recap: John Mearsheimer holds an endowed chair at the University of Chicago, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by his colleagues in the field as the fifth most influential, and third most interesting, international relations scholar alive. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is a international terrorist leader, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Regardless, Goldberg thinks it perfectly acceptable to refer to the former as "Sheikh Hassan Mearsheimer" and label him an "al-Manar commentator" when the Hezbollah station merely reprinted an earlier article of his. Charming.
Now, none of this is surprising. After all, this is the same guy who wrote a 7,100 word screed in The New Republic calling Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt anti-Semites (sorry, "negative Judeo-centrists") and comparing them to Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh,, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and bin Laden. And this isn't even the only subject where he's resorted to ridiculously aggressive character assassination; remember when he compared Robert Wright to Holocaust deniers for not thinking a 15-year-old massacre was sufficient cause for the Iraq War?
What is surprising is that people still take this guy seriously. Marty Peretz pulls these kinds of hijinks with similar frequency, and got forced off The Plank and is ignored except as a target for occasional ridicule as a consequence. While Goldberg is an actual reporter (albeit not a particularly honest one) and not a flaming anti-Arab racist, both of which give him a leg-up from Marty, his output is about as reliant on juvenile pot-shots and casual accusations of anti-Semitism. So why does David Bradley let him undermine the reputation of The Atlantic on a daily basis? And why do otherwise smart reporters - like his colleague Marc Ambinder, Jon Chait, and Noam Scheiber - insist on validating his "insights"?
