In my recent Ibishblog posting on Paul Berman's new book "The Flight of the Intellectuals" (Melville House, 2010), there was one crucial topic I deliberately did not directly address and that is important enough to warrant an altogether separate commentary: the vexed question of the relationship between Amin al-Husseini and the Nazis, and more generally and by extension, the Arabs and the Holocaust. On this subject Berman's book benefits greatly by being read alongside another important recently released volume, Gilbert Achcar's "The Arabs and the Holocaust" (Henry Holt, 2009).

For the second time, I'm compiling a group of questions submitted to the Ibishblog that I think can be dealt with relatively quickly under the rubric of a conceit in which readers interview me on a range of topics. It worked well enough last time. If anybody thinks these questions should be answered in a shorter individual postings, please let me know. I kind of like this format, even though it's long, because many of the questions do seem to work together in an interesting way, even though they are completely independently submitted.

Paul Berman's important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed, new book "The Flight of the Intellectuals" (Melville House, 2010) is an old-fashioned polemic that takes aim at two main targets.

David Frum recently suggested that Israel and the Palestinians can have “peace without the process,” based on the separation barrier becoming a de facto international border without the creation of an independent Palestinian state:

I don't usually use the Ibishblog for this kind of thing, but sometimes variations on a theme are absolutely necessary. As my regular readers will know, I was alarmed enough by the failed Times Square car bomb to agree to a couple of TV interview requests I would've normally turned down in recent years, and made, among others, two appearances on Fox News.

I receive a lot of very interesting questions through the "ask Ibish" form on the Ibishblog, and I try to answer most of them either directly via e-mail or, when warranted, through blog postings. I have a backlog of questions I think can be answered relatively briefly but deserve a public hearing, so rather than tackling each one individually, I've created a collective virtual interview based on a series of very recent interesting queries on matters related to Israel and the Palestinians.

Several years ago I decided for a number of reasons to try to cut back on the amount of television appearances I was making to concentrate on writing and other activities that allow for more thoughtful development of ideas and the communication of more serious concepts, most recently through the development of this blog.

A question has been posed to the Ibishblog via the Goldblog. Jeffrey Goldberg linked to some of my recent blog postings on his own blog at the Atlantic, and received the following query from a Goldblog reader:
But could Ibish please explain the two rebuffs? Has he faced up to the two rejected offers? I'd like to know. When the Palestinians do get their state, some of their own will eventually ask why the Barak and Olmert offers were passed up.

An Ibishblog reader asks me the following question:

For the past couple of years Professor John J. Mearsheimer has spoken at many Arab and Muslim American events, and in most of them he sensibly urged Arab and Muslim Americans to seek a working coalition with Jewish Americans in favor of a two-state solution. In fact, he has been a strong advocate of a two-state solution. Until yesterday, that is. Speaking at the Palestine Center in Washington, Mearsheimer suddenly reversed himself with astounding claims of prescience bordering on clairvoyance. He flatly declared: