Over the weekend we noted the Rolling Stone fantasia by James Bamford on Michael Ledeen and the purported neoconservative cabal plotting war on Iran in “Stoned” and “Stoned: Bamford errata.” Today Middle East Quarterly editor and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Michael Rubin writes with an addendum:
To expand a little bit on Rolling Stone’s standards: The magazine has hired former blogger and American Prospect contributor Robert Dreyfuss. What Dreyfuss omits from his c.v. is that he long served as “Middle East Intelligence Director” for the Executive Intelligence Review, the magazine of Lyndon LaRouche.
His first book, Hostage to Khomeini, was published by the LaRouche organization and dedicated to his colleagues there. A scanned copy of the book is here. Dreyfuss’s acknowledgements are on page x in the preface. In the book, he theorizes that the Islamic Revolution was an elaborate British plot and that Professor Bernard Lewis is a “radical traitor” who plots the break-up of the Middle East.
Dreyfuss confirmed his past participation in the LaRouche cult by e-mail to me on June 13, 2005. While he has said he has since cut his ties, his writing and methodology have not changed….
The Rolling Stone and American Prospect’s embrace of Dreyfuss and his theories reflects the standard of self-described progressives who let their Bush-hatred trump the most basic journalistic standards. What really is sad is that The American Prospect continues to endorse the book Dreyfuss wrote for LaRouche.
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