There are a lot of unexpected gems in Philip Weiss’s American Conservative story on Chas Freeman, especially from the great defender of the Tiananmen Square massacre himself. The following one really takes the cake for what it says about the various manias of State Department Arabists and the journalists who love them:

I am interested in seeing the survival of a humane and not a thuggish Jewish state in the Middle East.

Let us, for analytic purposes, take at face value Freeman’s characteristic of Israel as a “thuggish” state. What, then, does that make Saudi Arabia, the monarchy to which Freeman was posted as Ambassador and where he developed a severe state of clientitis? The state where gays are beheaded, women are banned from driving, and the practice of Christianity is outlawed? Surely, rational people can agree that the things the Saudi monarchy does to keep itself in power are more “thuggish” than the Israeli occupation. Certainly, “thuggish” and stronger epithets can also be used to describe Ba’athist Syria, or Jordan, where torture is routine. Why is it only the perceived transgressions of Israel that rile men like Chas Freeman and the Israel-obsessives at the American Conservative?