On 26 April, the long awaited history of the House of Representatives by Historian of the House Robert V. Remini was unveiled at an event at the Library of Congress. In attendance were author Remini, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, Secretary of the Smithsonian Lawrence Small, and President and CEO of HarperCollinsPublishers Jane Friedman. Also in attendance was former history teacher and now member of Congress John B.
Larson (D-CT) whose legislation (P.L. 106-99) served as the catalyst for the first comprehensive history of the House targeted to the general reader.

The book, titled “The House: The History of the House of Representatives” is published by Smithsonian Books (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers) and is available for $34.95 in bookstores (and via the Internet) nationwide. Remini had the challenge of condensing over 200 years of history into a 625-page book. The author, who is principally a historian/biographer found conceptualizing his first institutional history a challenge. Remini’s thoughtful narrative solution was to chronicle the first through the 108th Congress by highlighting the struggle between principle and pragmatism. To that end he showcases not just events but the many colorful personalities who have contributed to making the institution what it is today. Remini drew heavily on manuscript materials as well as the congressional records, newspaper accounts, letters, diaries, memoirs, and his own interviews with many current and former members. The result is a rich history of “the people’s House.”

Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23, the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows. Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges to debate.

Titled "The Israel Lobby," the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in America's siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans thought the Iraq War was about oil, but "the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."

While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and outgoing academic dean. "It was inevitably going to take someone from Harvard [to get this discussed]," says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies.

What's more, the article appeared when public pessimism over the Iraq War was reaching new highs. "The paper was important as a political intervention because the authors are squarely in the mainstream of academic life," says Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University dedicated to bringing the issue of Palestinian suffering under the occupation to Americans' attention. "The reason they're getting a hearing now is because of the Iraq debacle." Bennis and Finkelstein, both left-wing critics of Israel, have criticisms of the paper's findings. Partly this reflects the paper's origins: Though it was printed in a left-leaning English journal, it was written by theorists of a school associated with the center/right: realism, which holds that the world is a dangerous neighborhood, that good intentions don't mean very much and that the key to order is a balance of power among armed states. For realists, issues like human rights and how states treat minorities are so much idealistic fluff.

Given the paper's parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?

Let's begin with the personalities. The more forceful member of the duo (and the one who would talk to me), Mearsheimer, 58, is by nature an outsider. Though he spent ten years of his youth in the military, graduating from West Point, he wasn't much for tents and guns even as he latched on to David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest because it explained a horrible war. Out of pure intellectual curiosity Mearsheimer, who had become an officer in the Air Force, enrolled in graduate school classes at the University of Southern California. Today he is a realist powerhouse at the University of Chicago, publishing such titles as Conventional Deterrence. Like Mearsheimer, Walt, 50, grew up in privilege, but he is a courtly and soft-spoken achiever. Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton figured in his progress to Harvard. "I think Steve enjoyed moving into institutional roles," says one academic. "Steve likes a good argument, but unlike John he can be polite. John enjoys the image of the bomb thrower."

Mearsheimer was hawkish about Israel until the 1990s, when he began to read Israel's "New Historians," a group of Israeli scholars and journalists (among them Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev) who showed that Israel's founders had been at times ruthless toward Palestinians. Mearsheimer's former student Michael Desch, a professor at Texas A&M, recalls the epiphany: "For a lot of us, who didn't know a lot about the Israel/Palestine conflict beyond the conventional wisdom and Leon Uris's Exodus, we saw a cold war ally; and the moral issue and the common democracy reinforced a strong pro-Israel bent." Then Desch rode to a conference with two left-wing Jewish academics familiar with the New Historians. "My initial reaction was the same as John's: This is crazy. [They argued that] the Israelis weren't the victims of the '48 war to destroy the country. Ben-Gurion had real doubts about partition. Jordan and Israel talked about dividing up the West Bank together. All those things were heretical. They seemed to be coming from way, way out in left field. Then we started reading [them], and it completely changed the way we looked at these things." Mearsheimer says he had been blinded by Uris's novel. "The New Historians' work was a great revelation to me. Not only do they provide an abundance of evidence to back up their stories about how Israel was really created, but their stories make perfect sense. There is no way that waves of European Jews moving into a land filled with Palestinians are going to create a Jewish state without breaking a lot of Palestinian heads.... It's just not possible."

September 11 was a catalytic event for the realists. Mearsheimer and Walt came to see the close US alliance with Israel as damaging American relations with other states. American policy toward the Palestinians was serving to foster terrorism, Walt wrote in a book called Taming American Power. And you weren't allowed to discuss it. Walt spoke of the chilling effect of the Israel lobby (on a University of California, Berkeley, TV show called Conversations With History last fall): "Right now, this has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from."

For his part, Mearsheimer saw the lobby's power in an episode in the spring of 2002, when Bush called on Ariel Sharon to withdraw troops from Palestinian towns on the West Bank. Sharon shrugged him off, and Bush caved. Mearsheimer says by e-mail: "At the American Political Science Association convention in the late summer of 2002, I was talking to a friend about the US-Israel relationship. We shared similar views, and agreed that lots of others thought the same way. I said to him over the course of a dinner that I found it quite amazing that despite widespread recognition of the lobby's influence, no one could write about it and get it published in the United States. He told me that he thought that was not the case, because he had a friend at The Atlantic who was looking for just such an article."

The Atlantic had long hoped to assign a piece that would look systematically at where Israel and America shared interests and where those interests conflicted, so as to examine the lobby's impact. The magazine duly commissioned an article in late 2002 by Mearsheimer and Walt, whom Mearsheimer had brought in. "No way I would have done it alone," Mearsheimer says. "You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece."

Mearsheimer and Walt had plenty of ideological company. After 9/11, many other realists were questioning American policy in the Mideast. Stephen Van Evera, an international relations professor at MIT, began writing papers showing that the American failure to deal fairly with the Israel/Palestine conflict was fostering support for Al Qaeda across the Muslim world. Robert Pape, a professor down the hall from Mearsheimer at Chicago, published a book, Dying to Win, showing that suicide bombers were not religiously motivated but were acting pragmatically against occupiers.

The writer Anatol Lieven says he reluctantly took on the issue after 9/11 as a matter of "duty"--when the Carnegie Endowment, where he was a senior associate, asked him to. "I knew bloody well it would bring horrible unpopularity.... All my personal loyalties are the other way. I've literally dozens of Jewish friends; I have no Palestinian friends." Lieven says he was a regular at the Aspen Institute till he brought up the issue. "I got kicked out of Aspen.... In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back." In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel. Attacked as an anti-Semite, Lieven says he became a pariah among many colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment, which he left for the fledgling New America Foundation.

Yet another on this path was the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, a neoconservative-turned-realist. In 2004 he attended Charles Krauthammer's speech at the American Enterprise Institute about spreading democracy and was shocked by the many positive effects Krauthammer saw in the Iraq War. Fukuyama attacked this militaristic thinking in an article in The National Interest. He wrote with sympathy of the Palestinians and said the neoconservatives confused American and Israeli interests. "Are we like Israel, locked in a remorseless struggle with a large part of the Arab and Muslim world, with few avenues open to us for dealing with them other than an iron fist?... I believe that there are real problems in transposing one situation to the other." Krauthammer responded in personal terms, all but accusing Fukuyama of anti-Semitism. "The remarkable thing about the debate was how oblique Frank's reference to the issue was and how batshit Krauthammer and the other neoconservatives went," says Mike Desch. "It is important to them to keep this a third rail in American politics. They understood that even an elliptical reference would open the door, and they immediately all jumped on Frank to make the point, 'Don't go there.'" It seems to have worked. The soft-spoken Fukuyama left out the critique of the neocon identification with Israel in his recent book, America at the Crossroads.

"We understood there would be a significant price to pay," Mearsheimer says. "We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged." They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. "[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote," managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic's policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.

"I believe they got cold feet," Mearsheimer says. "They said they thought the piece was a terrible--they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened." The writing as such can't have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.

That might have been the end of it. The authors "nosed around," Mearsheimer says, looking for another US publisher, then gave up, concluding that the piece could not be published as an article or book in "a mainstream outlet" in the United States. Half a year passed. Then a scholar Mearsheimer will not identify called to say that a staffer at The Atlantic had passed along the piece, which he found "magisterial." The scholar put the authors in touch with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the London Review of Books editor, and last fall she contracted to publish the piece.

"John, who I think is a little bit more hardheaded politically and intellectually, expected what came," Desch says. "Steve was more confident that facts and logic would carry the day, and from some conversations I've had he was clearly shellshocked. He was in an exposed position at Harvard." Desch adds that when the New York Sun linked the authors to white supremacist David Duke, who praised the article, "it came as a real kick in the stomach." Some measure of Walt's exposure is financial. Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard's Hillel center, brought this issue up unprompted to me: "I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, 'It's been seismic.'"

Something in Mearsheimer's spirit would seem to be fulfilled in upsetting people by expressing ideas that he deeply believes. "When you write about this subject and you're critical of Israeli policy or critical of the US-Israel relationship, you are invariably going to be called an anti-Semite," he says. When I said he had autonomy as a professor to enjoy "free discourse" in this country, he said, "What free discourse in the United States? What free discourse are you talking about?" Mearsheimer's friend Van Evera criticizes him for allowing his legitimate anger over being shut out of the discourse to affect the tone of the article. But Mearsheimer was expressing his sharp personality; and doesn't passion give life to an argument?

The authors have gotten support from hundreds of e-mails, three-quarters of which congratulate them, Mearsheimer says. Foreign-service officers in Washington who are frightened by the neoconservative program are said to be excitedly passing the article around. The European left has also welcomed the paper, saying that these issues must be discussed. And even in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha'aretz saying it was a "wake-up call" to Americans about the relationship.

Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is "so incendiary and so complicated that I don't know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that's a problem. But there's not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn't cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched." In Salon Michelle Goldberg wrote that the authors had "blundered forth" into the argument in "clumsy and crude" ways, for instance failing to distinguish between Jewish Likudniks and Jewish support of Democrats in Congress. Noam Chomsky wrote that the authors had ignored the structural forces in the American economy pushing for war, what he calls "the tight state-corporate linkage." Norman Finkelstein makes a similar distinction. "I'm glad they did it," he says of the publication, but he argues that while the pro-Israel lobby controls public debate on the issue, and even Congress, the lobby can't be shown to decide the "elite opinion" that creates policy in the Mideast.

One problem with this argument is that in insisting on the primacy of corporate decision-making, it diminishes the realm of political culture and shows a real dullness about how ideas percolate in Washington. Think tanks, the idea factories that help produce policy, used to have a firmly WASPish character. But as Walt and Mearsheimer show, hawkishly pro-Israel forces have established a "commanding presence" at such organizations over much of the spectrum, from the Brookings Institution in the center to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation on the right. After Bush's 2000 victory, Dick Cheney made sure that his neoconservative friends were posted throughout the Administration, and after 9/11 their militaristic ideas swept the government like a fever. In a fearful time, their utter distrust of Arab and Muslim culture seemed to the Bushies to explain the world. "You have an alliance between neocons and aggressive nationalists that goes back thirty years. Their ideas have bled into one another," says Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service. "And neoconservatives put Israel at the absolute center of their worldview." One of the tenets of neocon belief was that the road to peace in Israel/Palestine led through Baghdad: Give Israel a greater sense of security and you can solve the Palestinian issue later. That has been the government policy.

Lieven says, "It's self-evidently true that other interests and ambitions are involved in the war with Iraq.... Oil is very much--imperial ambitions are very much there." But, he adds, "it is crazy to suggest on the one hand that the neoconservatives had a great influence on the Bush Administration and to say that it didn't play out in terms of a hard interest for Israel. If you think the neocons were not running the whole show but had a definite impact, then you can't possibly suggest that Israeli interests were not involved."

The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons' Israel-centered view of foreign relations. "It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby," Wilmers, LRB's (Jewish) editor, says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel's security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after--horrors--calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker's courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby's powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans' ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.

Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. "If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue--my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government--has so much difficulty publishing, it's a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country."

Realist ideas are resonating now because the utopian ideas that drove the war are so frightening and demoralizing. Indeed, Fukuyama has moved toward what he calls Wilsonian realism. Lieven is about to come out with a book (co-edited with a right-winger from the Heritage Foundation) on ethical realism. These ideas are appealing because they offer a better way of explaining a dangerous world than the idea that our bombs are good bombs and that Muslims only respect force. Left-wingers and liberals who find themselves alienated from the country's warmongering leadership have to acknowledge the potential in these ideas to forge a coalition of outs. But the price of effecting such a realignment is high: It means separating from the Israel lobby (or reforming it!) and trusting that a fairer American policy in the Middle East will not mean abandoning Israel.

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Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

... [In 1996] the liberal writer Michael Tomasky published "Left for Dead," which argued that the progressive movement was being ruined by multicultural identity politics. Democrats have lost the ability to talk to Americans collectively, Tomasky wrote, and seem to be a collection of aggrieved out-groups: feminists, blacks, gays and so on.

At the time, Bernstein and Tomasky were lonely voices on the left, and the multiculturalists struck back. For example, Martin Duberman slammed Tomasky's book in The Nation, and defended multiculturalism:

"The radical redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially transformative challenge to all 'regimes of the normal.' The work of theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler represents a deliberate systemic affront to fixed modes of being and patterns of power. They offer brilliant (if not incontrovertible) postulates about such universal matters as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the performative nature of gender, and the multiplicity of impulses, narratives and loyalties that lie within us all."

Duberman insisted that postmodern multicultural theorizing would transform politics, but today his gaseous review reads as if it came from a different era, like an embarrassing glimpse of leisure suits in an old home movie.

That's because over the past few years, multiculturalism has faded away. A different sort of liberalism is taking over the Democratic Party....

I've started a petition drive for college and university teachers to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from baseless charges of anti-Semitism. I apologize for limiting the petition base this way, but others are welcome to create other petitions that anyone can sign. I feel it is time for teachers in higher education to stand up and be counted on this issue of the chilling of academic inquiry through character assassination. At a time when the use of congressional funding to universities to limit and shape curricula and research is openly advocated, all of us academics are on the line. And if scholars so eminent as Mearsheimer and Walt can be cavalierly smeared, then what would happen to others?

In the next few days the university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies.
Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole's postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories.

In justifying all the time he spends on his blog, Mr. Cole told the Yale Herald that "when you become a public intellectual, it has the effect of dragging you into a lot of mud." Mr. Cole has done his share of splattering. He calls Israel "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East." That ties in with his recurring theme that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee effectively controls Congress and much of U.S. foreign policy. In an article titled "Dual Loyalties," he wrote, "I simply think that we deserve to have American public servants who are centrally commited [sic] to the interests of the United States, rather than to the interests of a foreign political party," namely Israel's right-wing Likud, which was the ruling party until Ariel Sharon formed the centrist Kadima Party. Mr. Cole claims that "pro-Likud intellectuals" routinely "use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv."

Last January, Mr. Cole participated in a "teach-in" at Yale that could have been an audition for his possible hiring. According to the Yale Daily News, he told students that U.S. efforts "in helping create a constitution for the 'new Iraq' have increased factionalism." He concluded that "this is a recipe for continued social turmoil and continued global war."

Mr. Cole says that he is often unfairly attacked for being anti-Semitic, when in reality he claims he is only critical of Israeli policy. But Michael Oren, a visiting fellow at Yale, notes that in February 2003 Mr. Cole wrote on his blog that "Apparently [President Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon's ass." Mr. Oren says "clearly that's anti-Semitism; that's not a criticism of Israeli policy." (Exit polls showed that 74% of the Jewish vote went to John Kerry.)

Mr. Cole appears to be the only prominent academic in America to have embraced "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a highly controversial paper by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. Mr. Cole told the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday that the paper argues the "virtually axiomatic" point held by the rest of the world that a "powerful pro-Israel lobby exists." The result is that "U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been dangerously skewed."

But the paper has been roundly attacked for sloppy generalizations. The two authors claim that "neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel." Even Noam Chomsky, a far-left critic of Israel, wrote that we "have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion." But Mr. Cole praises the two professors for seeking "to end the taboo [on discussions of the "Israel lobby"], enforced by knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism."

Mr. Cole wants to enforce his own taboos on free expression .In February, he told the Detroit Metro Times that the federal government should close the leading cable news channel. "I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it," he said in summarizing his view that Fox "is polluting the information environment." He went on to claim that "in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It's an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on."

Appointing someone as hotheaded and intolerant as Mr. Cole to a prestigious appointment at Yale wouldn't seem to make any sense. The drive to hire him can be explained in part by the same impulses that prompted Yale to admit Mr. Hashemi. "Perhaps the folks who still want to let Taliban Man into the degree program are also thinking Cole would make a great faculty advisor for him," jokes Mr. Tayor, the alumnus leading the NailYale protest.

But that might not be a joke. Many Yale faculty members are deadly serious about wanting Mr. Cole to become their newest colleague, and their views hold great sway. Unlike at Harvard, the university president at Yale has no power to veto the faculty's hiring choice. So even if the admissions department rejects Mr. Hashemi's application for the fall semester, Yale may jump out of the Taliban frying pan and into the Cole fire.

After learning of the existence of yet another secret agreement just this last week -- this one between NARA and the CIA -- Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein has released a redacted version of that agreement and has pledged that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) would no longer enter into secret agreements with government agencies that would allow them to withdraw documents from the archives for national-security reasons. The NARA/CIA agreement that was discovered as a result of the ongoing audit of the reclassification program. According to NARA insiders, the October 2001 CIA agreement that was entered into shortly after the 9/11 tragedy appears "to be the model" from which other agreements such as the March 2002 agreement between NARA and the Air Force that was released last week (see "NARA Releases Redacted Version of "Classified or Sensitive" Records Memo" in NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE Vol 12, # 18; 14 April 2006).

Weinstein stated, "There can never be a classified aspect to our mission. Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being. If records must be removed for reasons of national security, the American people will always, at the very least, know when it occurs and how many records are affected." Furthermore, stated the Archivist, "Our focus is on the preservation of records and ensuring their availability to the American public while at the same time fulfilling the peoples expectation that we will properly safeguard the classified records entrusted to out custody. Agencies have the prerogative to classify their requests to the National Archives if disclosure of the reasons why they are asking us to take action would cause identifiable damage to national security. However, what we do in response to such requests, and how we do it, will always be as transparent as possible."

Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archives who last week criticized the agreement entered into by Weinstein' predecessor, John Carlin, praised Weinstein. "He's doing the right thing, no more secret agreements to classify open files" said Blanton. Steven Aftergood, director of the anti-secrecy project at the Federation of American Scientists, recently characterized the episode as "a genuine scandal for the archives" also praised Weinstein: "He did not attempt to deny the existence of the problem, and he did not attempt to evade responsibility for it...instead he moved to fix it, and that is something we don't see very often these days." In a letter to Weinstein, the Society for American Archivists (SAA) also thanked the Archivist for "taking the several actions you have taken to balance the public's need to know against national security interests."

John W. Carlin, Weinstein's predecessor who ran the archives from 1995 to 2005 also has issued a statement fully supporting Weinstein's "quick response." In that statement Carlin denies knowledge of the reclassification program and asserts that he was "shocked" to learn of them when he read about the program in a February New York Times article. NARA insiders report that Carlin was briefed but has apparently forgotten about it. According to these sources, Carlin authorized the agreements but he did not personally read them.

Weinstein stated that the existing secret MOU's will soon be replaced with thoroughly transparent versions that will be promulgated as a change to "Classified national Security Information Directive No #1 (32 CFR Part 2001) following formal interagency coordination and an opportunity for public comment. But for the time being, a moratorium on the withdrawal of documents remains in place and an audit of the program is being conducted by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). The audit is expected to be completed and a report released 26 April 2006.

For the link to the NARA press release and statement of Archivist Weinstein, go to: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2006/nr06-92.html . For additional background on the MOU's, go to: http://www.archives.gov/declassification/background.html .

... Among the leading voices opposing any Israeli action at all aimed at stopping the massive firing by Palestinian terrorists of Qassam and other rockets at Israeli civilians is Aviad Kleinberg, the chairman of the Department of History at Tel Aviv University. How convenient for him that his campus is not (yet) within range of the Palestinian rockets and missiles.



Kleinberg claims to have some expertise in medieval history, as well as philosophy and religion. (His interest in Jewish "religion" seems to end with his pronouncements that the sage Maimonides necessarily implies that one must vote for the Israeli Labor Party's candidate, or Kleinberg's fatwa that all retaliation against terrorists is "not kosher".) Some of his research has been on pop pseudo-medieval novels, like "The Name of the Rose" and the "Da Vinci Code." He also heads the Tel Aviv University Press, a small in-house publishing house at TAU, and writes a regular leftwing column for Yediot Ahronot, Israel's largest-circulation tabloid.



In a recent Op-Ed, Kleinberg denounced all counterattacks by Israel aimed at stopping the firing of Qassam rockets, insisting that the "War on Qassams (is) not kosher... Even during Pesach (Passover), there are methods that are simply not kosher."



Now Qassam rockets are routinely fired by Palestinian terrorists from the Hamas, the PLO and the Islamic Jihad, shot into civilian areas INSIDE Israel, that is, inside Israel's 1967 border lines. Thousands have already been fired at the Jews by the terrorists. Recently the PLO-Hamas terror army added Katyusha rockets to its Gaza arsenal, the same weapon used by the Soviet Red Army with such effectiveness in terrorizing its enemies in World War II, and at least one has been fired at Jewish civilians.



Kleinberg's central thesis is that Israel is behaving like a barbarian terrorist state when it defends its civilians from these rockets:

"IDF (Israel Defense Forces) attacks almost always strike the innocent. The reason they are being fired is psychological. They are intended to give Israelis a nice feeling for the beginning of Pesach (Passover) – "See, the IDF isn't sitting on its hands." Quite the opposite, the army is using what the media admiringly calls (sic) its "iron fist", and is striking painful blows to the innocent."

In other words, Israel shoots at the terrorists for the heck of it because it is a bloodthirsty irrational country trying to terrorize the poor innocent Palestinians for no reason. Kleinberg insists that Israel should not respond at all to having thousands of Qassam rockets shot into its civilian areas, since such rockets are not an "existential threat" to Israel.



Among his other comments in the same piece, Kleinberg denounces the Israeli media for not opposing Israeli retaliations against the rocket shooters:

"If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of spring: Birds chirping, the buzz of mosquitoes, and the incessant sound of IDF artillery, turning the lives of innocent Gazans into a living hell. Springtime's here, alright. The IDF's firing a lot, alright, thousands of shells into "open fields" from where the Qassam Rockets are being fired. Of course, the term "open fields" is given to interpretation….Qassams are primitive rockets… You can find an article, maybe even a picture, in (Israeli daily) Yedioth Ahronoth, of a dog at Kibbutz Zikim that was literally scared to death by the exchange of fire. "The artillery fire killed our dog," screamed the headlines. Who said Jews had no compassion?...And IDF attacks almost always strike the innocent..."

Kleinberg has long denounced Israel for retaliatory and pre-emptive anti-terror strikes. Kleinberg believes Israel should be prevented from conducting any such strikes as long as there is any risk at all that some Palestinian civilian might get hurt. But since the terrorists firing the rockets at the Jews always are based and hiding among Palestinian citizens, Kleinberg's position is equivalent to demanding that Israel refrain altogether from defending its own citizens from Palestinian rocket and mortar terrorism.



Instead, Kleinberg demands that Israel restrict its responses to terrorism to displays of pacifism and turning the other cheek, at least until a danger arises that is "considered an existential necessity." Otherwise, Israel itself is the real terrorist. Kleinberg then concludes: "Arab lives are very cheap in the State of Israel."



All this is the familiar message from Israel's extremist anti-Israel leftist academics: Palestinian atrocities are acts of "self-defense" and "protests against occupation," even when they involve shooting rockets into Jewish civilian homes. Israel's actions to stop the rockets are human rights abuses that must be denounced and obstructed at all costs, all so that the Qassams may be fired with continued impunity. As Kleinberg says:

"But more importantly, the (Israeli counter-) attacks are also intended - pay attention to the sophisticated psychology here – to put pressure on the civilian population, that (sic) will put pressure on PA authorities, that (sic) will put pressure on the Qassam gunmen to stop shooting. It's like that song about the little goat at the end of the Pesach haggadah (holiday prayer reader)."

Kleinberg has been turning out extremist anti-Israel propaganda from his Tel Aviv University office for many years. Israel is not a democracy at all, Kleinberg pontificates, because of the "reversal of Israel('s) integration into the block of democratic nations and the adoption in its place (of) the same pattern of violent and ethnocentric policies we officially condemn." In other words, in order to be a democracy, Israel first needs to adopt those extremist policies which he himself favors and most Israeli voters oppose.



Kleinberg insists Israel is "autocratic" and undemocratic because it "relies on its leaders," like Ariel Sharon. "This (system of democracy) is not the case in Israel today. The great weakness of the system is that too much power is concentrated in the hands of the prime minister, sending signs of autocracy (for instance, making his son a secret advisor.)"



Kleinberg considers Ariel Sharon a warmonger devoted to preventing peace, but also regards Ehud Barak from the Labor Party Left in the same way. All they offered the Palestinians, according to Kleinberg, was a "Bantustan," that familiar nonsense term beloved by the Bash-Israel Left. (Google and Yahoo list over 40,000 web pages in which Israel haters have linked the term "Israel" and "Palestinian" with "Bantustan".) Here is Kleinberg's bottom-line assessment of his own country's defense strategy: "So Israel has to make sure the Palestinians give up their dreams, that they reach total despair."



Kleinberg's conception of democracy is best illustrated by the fact that he is a longtime endorser of politically-motivated insurrection and mutiny by Israeli soldiers. Law-breaking is his notion of the highest values of democracy. As a writer featured on many Palestinian propaganda web sites, he has signed calls upon Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the military. This is his own anti-democratic tactic to coerce the country into implementing the policies endorsed by Israel's anti-Zionist far Left. Then, without pausing even to take a breath, he denounces the Jewish "settlers" for "law breaking": "The settlers pose a danger not only because the 'legal' settlements stand in the way of any lasting agreement between us and the Palestinians, but because a whole generation has grown up with no respect for authority and a view of its representatives as a hindrance." Meanwhile, the Gaza Jewish settlements were all removed, but in response the Palestinians escalated the rocket shootings. So much for the learned history professor's analysis of why there is no peace.



In general, Kleinberg dismisses Israel as a racist society and has denounced Israel as "marching to apartheid." A few years back Israeli universities temporarily abolished college board exams, but then reintroduced them, realizing that without them standards were simply being "dumbed down." Kleinberg attacked the universities for their "anti-Arab racism" in restoring the exams. In any test of academic proficiency, Arabs in Israel do worse than Jews on average, which indicates to Kleinberg that such proficiency must not be tested at all. [Interestingly, he did not denounce Arab universities in Arab countries for their own "anti-Arab racism," even though they also use entrance exams.] Never mind that those very same Israeli universities have implemented affirmative action preferences across the board in favor of Arabs.



Naturally, Kleinberg is also anti-American. Right after the start of the liberation of Iraq from Saddam, Kleinberg wrote: "The war in Iraq was more than the first expression of the United States' readiness to go to war as an empire (sic)….The world has a new sheriff who does not hesitate to use his pistol, with or without partners, with or without sanction, with or without justification."



Professor Kleinberg is somewhat knowledgeable about medieval Christianity, which he seems to think entitles him to issue policy pronouncements on everything from the Jewish religion to Israel's water policy. While he has trouble rustling up any sense of indignation at the firing of Qassam missiles into Jewish civilian homes, Kleinberg gets positively livid and uncontrollably outraged at one group of people: religious Jews. He is even more of a zealot of hate when it comes to the Jewish "settlers":


"The settlers are in the grip of a godly zealotry – for years they have been operating outside of the law, motivated by a deep feeling that they are not transgressing the ‘real laws.’ In the name of zealotry, they robbed, lied, and cheated, spilt blood, and all this so that their feeling of complete devotion to God remains undamaged."

A few years back, Kleinberg signed a statement that declared:

"In this part of the world there are two borders that are now recognized internationally and regionally: the international border (sic) between us and the Arab states and the border of June 1967 between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians accept this border. Not only that, they have shown a readiness to demilitarize the Palestinian state in relation to heavy weapons, to recognize the annexation of the ring of Israeli suburbs built in Jerusalem, and other changes in the 1967 border, on the basis of a mutual agreement and lands swap."

Now that the Hamas has seized power in the West Bank and Gaza and is rapidly building an Islamofascist terror army, we are waiting for the TAU Professor of History Aviad Kleinberg and his extremist friends from Tel Aviv University to repudiate that statement and issue an academic apology. We will not be holding our breath.

Robert Carson, who has died aged 87, was keeper of the British Museum's department of coins and medals from 1978 until 1983, and the most widely admired and respected member of the international community of coin curators, scholars, collectors and dealers. An expert in Roman coinage, he was a stable force in the department during its postwar reconstruction.
Robert was even portrayed, under a pseudonym, in a numismatic roman à clef, The Coin Collectors (1997), by his friend and colleague the Belgian Pierre Bastien. "The chief curator was tall, with blond hair, and an angular face brightened by piercing eyes. His personality radiated kindness, tempered by a slight coolness, rather characteristic of the well-educated Englishman." It was an accurate description of Robert's appearance and his character, but not of his nationality.

Educated at Kirkcudbright academy, Robert was awarded a first in classics at Glasgow University during the first year of the second world war. Serving in north-west Europe, he rose to a captaincy in the Royal Artillery. Then, in 1947, he joined the British Museum's department of coins and medals. This continued his engagement with classics, and he learned Roman numismatics under the guidance of Harold Mattingly. In 1965 he was appointed deputy keeper.
During his first year at the museum he published his first two reports, on Roman coin hoards, in the Royal Numismatic Society's annual Numismatic Chronicle, and in the ensuing 55 years he wrote about 350 articles. His last, on Roman coin finds from Jordan, apppeared in 2001. Many of these were published in the Numismatic Chronicle, which he edited from 1964 until 1973.

A large part of his work was the processing and publishing of details of coin hoards from Roman Britain. ...

Edmund S. Morgan, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University, will receive a special citation "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian" over the past 50 years.

David M. Oshinsky, a professor of American history at the University of Texas at Austin, will receive the prize in history for Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005). (See an excerpt in The Chronicle Review, July 22, 2005.)

[Mr. Carlin was appointed Archivist of the United States by Bill Clinton. He was replaced by Dr. Weinstein by President George W. Bush in 2005.]

Many individuals have asked me about the recent revelations regarding the reclassification efforts at the National Archives. Like the current Archivist, Dr. Weinstein, I first learned of a “secret” reclassification program in February from the New York Times. Because the Memorandum of Understanding was still classified, I had no idea what was being discussed in the press. I read the MOU with the Air Force for the first time when the declassified version was released on the Archives website on April 10. I was shocked by the content, particularly the language that it was in the best interest of the National Archives to keep the public in the dark. I spent most of my tenure stating that NARA is a public trust ­ this MOU undermines that trust. 
 
I fully support the Archivist’s quick response; including the moratorium on reclassification, his direct involvement in resolving issues with the agencies involved, and the audit by Bill Leonard and the Information Security Oversight Office. I have every confidence that the audit results and Dr. Weinstein’s other efforts will provide the transparency and improved processes needed to repair the damage done to public trust in NARA.