Nuremburg rallyI just got home

Nuremburg rally
I just got home after attending Robert Fisk’s lecture at my undistinguished university. It was titled “September 11th: Ask who did it but for heaven’s sake, don’t ask why!” The text of the previous lecture in the series was posted before it began; I’m still waiting for Fisk’s speech to go up. I will link to it if it appears. Were I a deeply cynical person, I might suspect that the university doesn’t want to put up his hate-America-and-the-Jews screed because it might affect their US fundraising. I am of course not a deeply cynical person. But I will say this. His tirade against Israel stunk of anti-Semitism, for all his puffing that he was not. The funny thing is, I’m inclined to believe he isn’t anti-Semitic, just a nutty left-winger. The audience, though, was sickening. I finally have a whiff of what it might have been like at the Nuremburg rallies. One questioner claimed that the Irish Times (the leading Irish paper, sort of like an Irish New York Times in its editorial attitude toward Israel) was part of the Zionist conspiracy because one of their Middle East stringers is Israeli. Fisk actually got jittery about that, but the audience clearly loved it. I won’t say much until tomorrow because the audience still has me shaken.
Fisk, however, was Fisk. Instead of the whole oil bit being about Cheney and Bush, he started off with Condoleeza Rice, who apparently is a tool of Chevron. And, boy, is he still mad about the press treatment of him when he got beaten up and said poor muggers. He quoted Mark Steyn as saying about him “you would have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter” (I haven’t checked the quote, but it sounds right.) He went about this one at length; Steyn really got to him. And he is still mad at Judea Pearl. I have pages of notes, and I’ll blog them all tomorrow. Tonight I am too tired and disgusted by Irish intellectuals.