In Dark Times, Blame the Jews

[Behind the Aegis]

On the face of it, there's little that's new in the provocative research paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published online last week by two leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Their underlying thesis, that Israel's advocates have pressured America into an unjustified and damaging alliance with Israel, has been around for decades, flogged with little success by generations of Israel's detractors. Their more immediate argument, that Israel and its allies manipulated America into war with Iraq, has been simmering at the edges of the debate since before the invasion. By now it's part of our national background noise.

What is new and startling is the document's provenance. Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation's most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream.

Even more startling, given who they are, is the flimsiness of their work. Countless facts are simply wrong. Long stretches of argument are implausible, at times almost comically so. Much of their research is oddly amateurish, drawn not from credible documents or primary source interviews but from newspaper clippings, including dozens from this newspaper, seemingly dug up in quick Internet word searches aimed at proving a point, not exploring the truth. Some are wildly misquoted. An undergraduate submitting work like this would be laughed out of class. A dean apparently gets to see it posted on Harvard's Web site.

Considering the authors' credentials, the paper calls for substantive rebuttal by those who disagree. But that, as we'll see, is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. The larger, more urgent question is how things came to this pass. What could possibly have led two of the best and brightest foreign policy mandarins to compose and publish such an embarrassment?

more...

[rooboy]

1. This is the problem with a state based on religion or race.

You can never criticise the actions of its government - or even a significant minority - without being attacked for denigrating their race or religion. And the ones most guilty of the transgressions are the ones who scream the loudest.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. Like the Dubai deal?

[beam me up scottie]

6. Really?

You must have missed this article then: (hard to believe considering it was on the front page):

Anti-Semitism and the "New Jews"

March 21, 2005
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

ANTI-SEMITISM FROM THE LEFT

Anti-Semitism on the Left is generally not spoken about, but it's real and appears to be growing. For those so inclined, it's easy to slip from denunciations' of Israeli policy - many on the Left, including yours truly, are quite vocal on occasion in opposing Israeli policies and actions - to out-and-out anti-Semitism.

It's often difficult to locate that fine line. Jew-haters often can hide their true feelings and arguments inside broadsides against Israeli policy, but those opposed vehemently to certain Israeli policies (and I count myself as one of that breed) are definitely not anti-Jewish in this context. So how to tell the difference?

********

THERE IS NO VACCINE AGAINST HATE

Anti-Semitism is like a dormant virus, relatively quiet most of the time in respectable society and discourse, but which bursts out into the open now and again, usually in times of economic and psychological crisis. The resulting social rash can be deadly. And there is no vaccine, other than shining the light of truth on ignorance, with which to combat the disease of hate. (In America, overt racism against blacks similarly is a virus that tends to lie dormant until suddenly bursting out in tense times.)

*******

THE "NEW JEWS"

But there are Jews and there are those who might be considered the "new Jews," who take their lumps as well: homosexuals, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Palestinians and other Arabs in Israel and the U.S. (and often in Arab nations as well), African-Americans in the South and in the inner cities, Mexican immigrants, whoever. It's the same process of stereotyping and repression, which often leads to discrimination and violence, even when the group being victimized changes.

Again, this topic of anti-Semitism is enormous, and I only want to raise it here as a warning flag for the progressive Left, something we need to examine and deal with and expand out in thinking about how others are treated.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/crisis/06/052_bw.html

[burythehatchet]

2. Perfect

Even though the authors have immense credibility, because they state "the obvious which cannot be spoken", their work is an embarassment. BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT and BULLSHIT.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. No. Their "work" is an embarrassment for other reasons.

on edit: BTW....did you bother to read the article?

[beam me up scottie]

5. Excellent editorial.

Mearsheimer and Walt have no time for such subtleties. For them, the cause of Israel is inseparable from the ideological crusade of the past three years. The Israel they depict, in a relentless, selective marshaling of facts, half-truths and occasional untruths, is a moral burden and a strategic liability. It was conceived in racism and founded in "explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews." It has been bent since 1948 on expansionism and ethnic purification, and since 1967 on tightening its brutal grip on the West Bank and Gaza. The authors claim repeatedly that they do not question Israel's right to exist, but they spend page after page doing just that, with barely a hint of a counter-argument.

Then, having dismissed the case for Israel, they ask: "If neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel, how are we to explain it?" Their answer is "the Israel Lobby."

Their lobby is a sprawling alliance of Jewish organizations, major newspapers, Democratic and Republican politicians, liberal and conservative think tanks and more Jewish organizations, all single-mindedly determined to help Israel achieve its goals at the expense of American interests. "The core of the Lobby," they write, "is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests." To be sure, they hasten to add, "not all Jewish-Americans are part of the Lobby." One 2004 survey found that "roughly 36 percent of Jewish-Americans said they were either 'not very' or 'not at all' emotionally attached to Israel." Good news: No more than 64% of American Jews are out to undermine America.

Here, again, they protest: They do not mean to impugn. There is, they say, "nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel." They don't mean to suggest "the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti-Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

"These are dark, poisonous days we live in, and the poison is spreading."

[oblivious]

7. I was under the impression it was Muslims being blamed in these dark times

Or is it immigrants this week.

[mirandapriestly]

9. I know, no one has a problem with the Muslims being blamed

wonder why?

[riona]

8. And throw this article's contention into the mix

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1195568,00.html

"In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast."

[grottieyottie]

10. I prefer Levy's more balanced view thanks.

...Not yet a tipping point, but certainly time for a debate. Sadly, if predictably, response to the Harvard study has been characterized by a combination of the shrill and the smug. Avoidance of candid discussion might make good sense to the Lobby, but it is unlikely to either advance Israeli interests or the U.S.-Israel relationship.

...Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

...First, efforts to collapse the Israeli and neoconservative agendas into one have been a terrible mistake - and it is far from obvious which is the tail and which is the dog in this act of wagging. Iraqi turmoil and an Al-Qaida foothold there, growing Iranian regional leverage and the strengthening of Hamas in the PA are just a partial scorecard of the recent policy successes of AIPAC/neocon collaboration.

Second, Israel would do well to distance itself from our so-called "friends" on the Christian evangelical right. When one considers their support for Israel's own extremists, the celebration of our Prime Minister's physical demise as a "punishment from God" and their belief in our eventual conversion - or slaughter - then this is exposed as an alliance of sickening irresponsibility.

Third, Israel must not be party to the bullying tactics used to silence policy debate in the U.S. and the McCarthyite policing of academia by set-ups like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch. If nothing else, it is deeply un-Jewish. It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there.

Fourth, the Lobby even denies Israel a luxury that so many other countries benefit from: of having the excuse of external encouragement to do things that are domestically tricky but nationally necessary (remember Central Eastern European economic and democratic reform to gain EU entry in contrast with Israel's self-destructive settlement policy for continued U.S. aid).

Haaretz

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/698302.html