Alternatív oktatás

Jewish Journal’s Danielle Berrin’s profile of Jeffrey Goldberg is well worth a read for those who want to do a little armchair psychology on Goldberg. It provides no shortage of material for analyzing his views with nuggets like this: Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics but not much in the way of a religious education. Instead, Goldberg forged his Jewish identity in response to some schoolyard anti-Semitism whose traumas left him longing for the so-called muscle Judaism represented by Zionism. Jim has written an excellent blog post on the role of humiliation in forming the neocon psyche which, when read in the context of the description of Goldberg’s “Jewish identity,” offers some insights into how Goldberg may have gained his hawkish instincts. But the points from Berrin’s article which deserve special attention regard Goldberg’s role in the hyping of an Iraq-al-Qaeda link in a 2002 New Yorker article an...

As the insurgency raged in Iraq, U.S. troops struggling to fight a shadowy enemy killed civilians, witnessed their Iraqi partners abuse detainees and labored to reduce Iran’s influence over the fighting. None of these phenomena are unfamiliar to observers of the Iraq war. But this afternoon, the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks released a trove of nearly 392,000 U.S. military reports from Iraq that bring a new depth and detail to the horrors of one of America’s most controversial wars ever. We’re still digging through the just-released documents, but here’s a quick overview of what they contain. (Our sister blog Threat Level looks at how Friday’s document dump could affect Bradley Manning, who’s already charged in other WikiLeaks releases.) It Was Iran’s War, Too No one would accuse WikiLeaks of being pro-war. Not when the transparency group titled its single most famous leak “Collateral Murder.” Not when its founder, Julian Assange, said that its trove of reports from the Af...