Your posts hardly see the time of day, Silverstein, because they are full of lies, misinformation, and are quite frankly not very well written.

Talk about lies & misinformation. I’ve been interviewed & mentioned in a NY Times front page article. That ever happen to you? I’ve got a chapter in an essay collection coming out through Verso Books this fall. Anyone ever ask you to write a book or even a chapter of a book? No? What a surprise. It must be because a book editor see’s my writing style a bit differently than you do. And btw, on what basis do you critique my writing style? Do you have any expertise in the subject? Ever take a writing course? Ever edit a book, magazine or newspaper? Ah, just as I thought. Typical self-appointed know it all critic. The kind the right produces so many of.

You got on TV and radio. Whoa, way to go Dave! I’ve done both already in my career as well. Big deal.

So sorry to see your Alexa ranking is down to 544,000, Dave. Don’t look know but we progressive Jewish bloggers are gaining on you. In fact, we’re on the way up & have passed you & you’re on the way down I’m sorry to say. Maybe it’s you who no one wants to read.

And if you’re talking about my alleged lies about your right-wing, anti-Palestinian views, I’m still waiting for that libel lawsuit, Dave. I’ve got pretty good legal representation and we’ve defended ourselves pretty well against Rachel Neuwirth so far.

Your posts hardly see the time of day, Silverstein, because they are full of lies, misinformation, and are quite frankly not very well written.

Don’t give up your day job (assuming you have one of those)

…Your comparison to the Ladies Home Journal is sexist.

OK, how about breathless, superficial journalism that seeks heat rather than light & often attains neither. Is that less sexist?

As for reading yr story in Time Out Tel Aviv, I’ve read & seen enough of yr print & broadcast journalism so as not to need a further dose of it, thank you. And if you think I don’t know Hebrew I wish you’d make such a claim, ridiculous though it might be, instead of the silly snark about my supposed “insistence that my Hebrew is excellent.”

I really think that you should help us to correct the reporting coming out of the Middle East.

I can’t decide if this is more snark or you really believe that reporting coming out of the Middle East needs “correcting.” I’m curious which it is.

I have 3 children under the age of 6 and provide the majority of their child care. I don’t do much globetrotting any more. Not to mention the fact that Lebanon is a tad more expensive to get to for me than for you & I have no Channel 10 picking up the expenses. If I was going to do so, I’d go to Gaza if I felt I could be safe enough & Israeli Arab villages, rather than Iraq or Lebanon. Why don’t YOU go to Gaza? Yes, you’d possilby have to violate a few laws and get yrself into trouble with the IDF. But you’d be the only Israeli journalist to visit the place in eons & have a potentially great scoop. Oh but that’s right, Pajamas Media, Gal Beckerman, the Wall Street Journal and even Channel 10 wouldn’t care very much about the suffering of Gaza. Prob. you wouldn’t either.

But I’ll do you one better…make yr next trip to Iran before Israel bombs the place to smithereens. Now that could be some celebrity journalism. You’re surely grab some headlines in the WSJ & PJM once again. Do a report on all the trendy bars in Teheran and interview taxi drivers about their views of Ahmadinejad.

If you were a serious journalist you’d tell the Iranians you want to visit as an Israeli & see what they said. Even if they refused, at least you could say you tried.

BTW, I don’t buy much of what Daily Star or Al Jazeera said about you. That’s narischkeit as is the Israeli police investigation of you. What bugs me was that you had a golden opportunity to do substantial journalism and the best you could do was feature an interview with a cab driver & a cafe owner telling us what we already knew along with telling us breathlessly that a Hezbollah Beirut neighborhood is “truly another world” (whatever that means).

The main point of my trip to Lebanon was not in order to do the report for channel 10, but rather in order to write a 6-page cover story for Time Out Tel Aviv. I would send you the link to the article , but since you insist your Hebrew is really excellent I suggest you just google my name plus Beirut in order to find the piece. I am sure you will manage just fine.

The channel 10 piece received the most attention because TV is (unfortunately) more powerful medium than print (a); and because Al Manar dubbed the piece into Arabic and broadcast it one hour after it was broadcast in Israel (b). After Al Manar’s broadcast, Al Jazeera took up the “Zionist infiltrator” theme and then the story was all over the Arabic media.

I really think that you should help us to correct the reporting coming out of the Middle East. Why don’t you buy a ticket to Lebanon or Iraq and do some real, high-quality citizen journalism for your blog?

Goldman’s approach is very much focused on the human interest angle of people in the region.

Precisely. It’s what I’d call the Ladies Home Journal approach to journalism. There’s nothing wrong with human interest. The NY Times & Gideon Levy write enormously powerful stories about the IP conflict which contain strong human interest elements. But if ALL you focus on is the human interest & you don’t connect the human element to a larger idea then you’re left untethered & with no context in which to understand or judge anything, which is pretty much how she reported fr. Lebanon.

I strongly disagree about Totten & you should read my Larry of Arabia post about him. Visiting Kurdistan merely to snap pictures of villas & tell readers how similar they look to a typical American suburbs or visiting a Kurdish supermarket only to tell us that seeing Red Bull reminded him of supermarkets back home is ridiculous & insular journalism which Totten speicalizes in. He travels 10,000 miles only to tell us more about himself & Americans & than about the people & society he’s visiting. Asking dumb questions of Lebanese only to have them ask him if he’s an American spy & then yelling Nixon-like “I am NOT a spy” is typical of Totten.

Furthermore, she chose to publicize her Lebanon reporting in two U.S. right-wing media outlets, Pajamas Media and the Wall Street Journal (she was also on CNN). It is no accident that this happened. As far as I am concerned Goldman is the Michael Totten of Israeli journalism: a glib English-speaker who travels to slightly taboo places only to do journalism that sheds almost no light on the subject she’s reporting on.

If Abie Natan or Uri Avnery had gone to Lebanon they wouldn’t gone to interview Hassan Nasrallah or Fouad Siniora & you would’ve learned something from their reporting. None of this happened with Goldman. I realize that there were many built-in drawbacks to her visit to Lebanon that made such reporting difficult, if not impossible. But from the looks of it she never even tried to get those kinds of interviews or if she did I haven’t heard her say it.