Conventional wisdoms are often based on misrepresentations, no surprise there.
Some of these are matters, to a degree, of interpretation, and it can take a lot of wordage to dismantle them (or, I should say guiltily, it can take me a lot of wordage to dismantle them.)
Some are so baldfaced, you really don’t have to dig deep to explain why an argument collapses before it begins.
Christopher Hitchens says the following makes self-evident the powers of the pro-Israel lobby: This year, the Foreign Affairs committee of the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing the Ottoman era massacres as a genocide. The resolution didn’t pass in other years, he says, because the pro-Israel lobby protected Turkey, then a friend of Israel. Now that it is no longer the case, it passed.
There are a lot of problems with this thesis, but the main one is that it is not based on fact. The same committee passed the same resolution in 2007.
I have explained this over and over again, most recently immediately upon publication of Hitchens’ piece in Slate.
And now Andrew Sullivan picks it up.
On counter argument that may emerge, based on my experience, is: "Well, this example is wrong, but the broader truth is," etc.
I don’t agree, but please, let’s at least get this counterfactual bit of nonsense out of the way?
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