Cross-posted at Newsrealblog.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Eric Alterman of The Nation magazine (and unless you’re a shut-in with a crush on Michael Moore and a strange love of unicorns and lotion, why should you have?), he is a far-left columnist who makes it his mission to say silly things.  That is not unexpected, since he is also a professor of English at City University of New York.  A liberal professor who speaks out about issues outside his area of expertise and makes a fool of himself in the process?  Who woulda thunk?

For example, he penned an entire ridiculous book entitled What Liberal Media?, which argued that the media was actually conservative.  In order to reach this counterintuitive conclusion, Alterman essentially labeled everyone to his right “right-wing”, which would make Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and everyone not openly associated with the Marxist left a right-winger in his book.  For a solid review of that tome of stupidity, read here.

Today, Alterman’s job is to say silly things about Israel.  Well, technically, that’s been his job most of the last week.  Falling into the trap that states that because he has a Jewish last name, he is especially qualified to speak about the Jewish state (to find an equally dubious proposition, one would have to posit that because Madonna was born a Catholic woman, she is especially qualified to speak about abstinence in the priesthood), Alterman penned a bizarre piece this week for The Nation in which he contended that certain academics “manage to oppose Israel’s religiously defined state apparatus and yet remain supportive of the rights and aspirations of Jewish Israelis.”  Which is akin to saying that you can oppose the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and remain pro-America.

That piece was dumb enough.  But Alterman (who, like most professors of English, seems to read foreign policy like poetry rather than with the hard-headed realism it requires) has taken it upon himself this week to attack your humble author personally.

To read more, click here.