I like Spinsanity.

On occasion, though, the Spinsanity crew can get a little too over-eager. And it shows.

Yesterday, for instance, Ben Fritz attempted to deconstruct the latest Victor Davis Hanson piece (“On Hating Israel”), but what he wound up doing instead was opening himself up to the kinds of charges he strains to level against Hanson.

Fritz begins:

One of the most frequently used tactics of the manipulative rhetoric we track is to take a political issue with strong emotional resonance and use it to justify a totally separate and irrelevant agenda. The attacks of September 11 provided one such occasion, as pundits and politicians used the threat of terrorism to justify everything from ending immigration to attacking former President Clinton’s personal misconduct. Unsurprisingly, this tactic has come up again in the debate over the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Victor Davis Hanson launched one of the most aggressive examples in yesterday’s National Review Online. The piece is replete with ad hoc psychologizing about the reasons why some Westerners support the Palestinian cause, from pandering to Muslims to fear of terrorism [my emphasis].

Leaving aside for the moment that any argument made from ascribed motives is open to the charge of “ad hoc psychologizing” (which means, roughly, “ascribing motives” — a rhetorical maneuver Ted Barlow and I discuss here), the assumption that Fritz starts from — that Hanson’s essay is an “aggressive” example of taking “a political issue with strong emotional resonance” and using it “to justify a totally separate and irrelevant agenda” — is faulty. What Fritz wants to argue (using his own formulation as a template) is that Hanson is taking the “ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and using it to justify a “totally separate and irrelevant attack” on “liberals” who support the Palestinian cause.

But Hanson does no such thing. For him, the critique of those who support the Palestine cause is precisely the point of the essay (and so hardly “separate and irrelevant”) — and the specific targets of his critique are “affluent European and American leftists” (hardly the same as your garden variety, TNR-reading social liberals — though in his zeal to reveal Hanson’s “agenda,” Fritz conveniently conflates the two).

Seizing on this sentence, which he assures us is “just the beginning” of Hanson’s “groundless assumptions and jargon”…

Partly Marxist, partly ignorant, and mostly naive, these insufferable and affluent European and American leftists see their solidarity with Palestinians as inseparable from their own embarrassed personas.

…Fritz argues that these “very broad charges against liberal supporters of the Palestinians” are “justified by nothing more than their view of the Israel-Palestine situation.”

Which, admittedly, sounds quite damning — until you untangle the accusation (in the form of a paraphrase), and find this rather benign assertion: “Hanson’s charges against affluent leftists who support the Palestinian cause are justified by nothing more than the arguments he makes in support of such charges.”

Fritz continues:

Hanson tries to delegitimize support for Palestinians by associating it with Marxism and embarrassed, affluent Westerners, while also delegitimizing liberals in general by saying their support for Palestinians stems from ignorance and naivete. Both are irrational associations unsupported by logical reasoning.

The only possible way to justify this, of course, is to totally ignore all legitimate reasons people might have for supporting the Palestinian cause [my emphasis].

“The only possible way”? Not so. Another way to justify this association of Palestinian support with Marxism, for example, is to include the holding of a Marxist view of history as among the legitimate reasons some people might support the Palestinian cause — particularly, European and American leftists. Fritz doesn’t bother explaining how associating “leftism” with Marxism is irrational (it’s not; the two are intimately related) — nor how critiquing pro-Palestinian Marxists as “partly ignorant” and “mostly naive” is based upon “irrational associations unsupported by logical reasoning.” (Presumably, Hanson is being faulted for not offering a sustained critique of Marxism, one that argues the shortcomings of the ideology; but even Fritz must admit that this column is hardly the place for such a potentially lengthy endeavor.)

Mr. Fritz concludes:

If Hanson wants to make his case for Israel, he should do so without assuming motivations and making cheap, jargon-based associations. Instead, he turns a piece supposedly about the Middle East crisis into a broadside against liberalism heavy on the pseudo-psychology and light on reason.

To which one might reply, “should Hanson wish solely to make a case for Israel, he might indeed be better served by leaving out such tangential issues as the motivations animating those “European and American leftists” who support the Palestinian cause.

Conversely, though — should Hanson wish to make a case for why he believes certain folks on the left hate Israel (and that’s what he’s doing in this essay) — he’s clearly best served by making educated assumptions about the motivations for such hatred, assumptions Mr. Fritz shrugs off as so much “ad hoc psychologizing.” Short of making such assumptions, Hanson would be left to rely on the justifications offered by those he is critiquing — justifications he earlier in his essay debunks using the very logic and historical support called for by Mr. Fritz.

Hell, Hanson might even title such a speculative essay on the motives behind hatred of Israel, “On Hating Israel”…

In the end, the force of Mr. Fritz’s critique depends upon his assigning to Mr. Hanson’s essay a purpose it never purports to have; in doing so, Mr. Fritz is able to reveal an “agenda” his depicts as at odds with the essay’s “purpose” — a purpose that he (but not Hanson) ascribes to the essay.

And that kind of ad hoc psychologizing will not stand.

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