Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23, the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows. Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges to debate.

Titled "The Israel Lobby," the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in America's siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans thought the Iraq War was about oil, but "the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure."

The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."

While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and outgoing academic dean. "It was inevitably going to take someone from Harvard ," says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies."

more

[Behind the Aegis]

1. Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong.

[blitzen]

4. Nice try...."As time passed a more rational debate began"...

you forget to include that part in your snippet. It happens to be the very next sentence.


By the way, I am "left-leaning," I am a "critic" (it is my job), and I don't dismiss the piece as "inflammatory and wrong."

[Behind the Aegis]

5. And?

[blitzen]

6. interesting rhetorical strategy...

to say nothing, to simply display one's indignance....rather insubstantial....


And?

[Behind the Aegis]

7. your comment was irrelvant...so, I asked "and?"

Most would understand that as "why did you post what you did?"

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Behind the Aegis]

9. for what?

Taking on ludicrous assertions? Not enough!

[Name removed]

10. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

21. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ShalachEtAmi]

29. If BTA is paid..he is doing a sterling job and they are sure getting ...

Their money`s worth..I am sure they are very happy with the fantastic job he is doing here....

Myself I think he is not being paid but deserves to be if anyone did pay for passion and conviction...

[Behind the Aegis]

36. I just got paid...

...I get paid in compliments by posters such as yourself! :cheers:

I guess some assume because one doesn't toe the party line (or what they think it should be) the poster must be a paid operative or some type of disruptor. It is almost humorous. The very idea that a discussion board would have posters with varying opinions on a variety of topics is lost on some. If we didn't have those opinions, then this would not be a discussion board, but an echo chamber.

[barb162]

40. Many thanks to Behind the Aegis, a wonderful poster!

I missed the subthread

It seems someone was suggesting there is only one line of politically correct thought?

[Andromeda]

41. Kudos to you , BtA

I respect you because you have the courage of your convictions and you're not afraid to say what you feel.

:toast:

[rman]

11. how can "a more rational debate" be irrelevant?

[blitzen]

12. thanks, rman....exactly!

i'm afraid this forum is not about dialogue...

[cali]

26. heh. Coming from someone who just accused

another poster of being a paid agent, that's pretty funny.

[ShalachEtAmi]

28. If its not about Dialogue..

Why do some people hang around `contributing`to the `dialogue` by chirping in the last few threads that the forums not about `dialogue` and they are leaving..

[Behind the Aegis]

13. I didn't say it was irrelevant.

[rman]

17. this would be funny if it weren't such a serious topic.

[Behind the Aegis]

19. that it would be....especially....

...if people knew what they were talking about in regards to the issues!

[Name removed]

22. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Behind the Aegis]

35. .

:eyes:

[Andromeda]

42. That's ridiculous...

BtA has more substance to his posts that some other people whose names I shall not mention. You really are no judge of what is and isn't substantional since it's subjective.

Besides, isn't that a personal attack---which is against DU rules.

[barb162]

39. That the Israel Lobby wags the tail of American foreign policy

is more than stinky.

[grottieyottie]

15. No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; Page A23

During the Jim Crow era, many American communists fiercely fought racism. This is a fact. It is also a fact that segregationists and others often smeared civil rights activists by calling them communists. This technique is sometimes called guilt by association and sometimes "McCarthyism." If you think it's dead, you have not been following the controversy over a long essay about the so-called "Israel Lobby."

On April 5, for instance, The Post ran an op-ed, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," by Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a respected defense intellectual. Cohen does not much like a paper on the Israel lobby that was written by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University. He found it anti-Semitic. I did not.

But I did find Cohen's piece to be offensive. It starts by noting that the paper, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," had been endorsed by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. It goes on to quote Duke, who, I am sure, has nodded his head in agreement over the years with an occasional piece of mine, as saying the paper is a "modern Declaration of American Independence." If you follow Cohen's reasoning, then you would have to conclude that David Duke and the Founding Fathers have something in common. I am not, as they say, willing to go there.

...There is hardly a stronger, more odious, accusation than anti-Semitism. It comes freighted with more than a thousand years of tragic history, culminating in the Holocaust. The mere suggestion of it is enough for any sane person to hold his tongue.

SNIP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/24/AR2006042401396.html

Ivins: Professors have the audacity to examine Israel's lobbying in U.S.
By Molly Ivins
CNN

AUSTIN, Texas - One of the consistent deformities in American policy debate has been challenged by a couple of professors, and the reaction proves their point so neatly it's almost funny.
A working paper by John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, called ''The Israel Lobby'' was printed in the London Review of Books earlier this month. And all hell broke loose in the more excitable reaches of journalism and academe.
For having the sheer effrontery to point out the painfully obvious - that there is an Israel lobby in the United States - Mearsheimer and Walt have been accused of being anti-Semitic, nutty and guilty of ''kooky academic work.'' Alan Dershowitz, who seems to be easily upset, went totally ballistic over the mild, academic, not to suggest pretty boring article by Mearsheimer and Walt, calling them ''liars'' and ''bigots.''
Of course there is an Israeli lobby in America - its leading working group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC calls itself ''America's Pro-Israel Lobby,'' and it attempts to influence U.S. legislation and policy.
Several national Jewish organizations lobby from time to time. Big deal - why is anyone pretending this non-news requires falling on the floor and howling? Because of this weird deformity of debate.
In the United States, we do not have full-throated, full-throttle debate about Israel. In Israel, they have it as a matter of course, but the truth is that the accusation of anti-Semi- tism is far too often raised in this country against anyone who criticizes the government of Israel.

SNIP
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/26/ivins.israelilobby/

[grottieyottie]

16. Robert Fisk: United States of Israel?

Robert Fisk: United States of Israel?

The Independent

When two of America's most distinguished academics dared to suggest that US foreign policy was being driven by a powerful 'Israel Lobby' whose influence was incompatible with their nation's own interests, they knew they would face allegations of anti-Semitism. But the episode has prompted America's Jewish liberals to confront their own complacency. Might the tide be turning?
Published: 27 April 2006

Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately avoided the television shows because we don't think we can discuss these important issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities who wrote about the lobby - and we want to open the way to serious discussion about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East."

"John" is John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the "war on terror", that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress - so much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there - and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.

SNIP

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article360492.ece

[grottieyottie]

18. A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy

A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy

By TONY JUDT
Published: April 19, 2006
New York Times OpEd

IN its March 23rd issue the London Review of Books, a respected British journal, published an essay titled "The Israel Lobby." The authors are two distinguished American academics (Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago) who posted a longer (83-page) version of their text on the Web site of Harvard's Kennedy School.

As they must have anticipated, the essay has run into a firestorm of vituperation and refutation. Critics have charged that their scholarship is shoddy and that their claims are, in the words of the columnist Christopher Hitchens, "slightly but unmistakably smelly." The smell in question, of course, is that of anti-Semitism.

This somewhat hysterical response is regrettable. In spite of its provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious. But it makes two distinct and important claims. The first is that uncritical support for Israel across the decades has not served America's best interests. This is an assertion that can be debated on its merits. The authors' second claim is more controversial: American foreign policy choices, they write, have for years been distorted by one domestic pressure group, the "Israel Lobby." Some would prefer, when explaining American actions overseas, to point a finger at the domestic "energy lobby." Others might blame the influence of Wilsonian idealism, or imperial practices left over from the cold war. But that a powerful Israel lobby exists could hardly be denied by anyone who knows how Washington works. Its core is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its penumbra a variety of national Jewish organizations.

Does the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course — that is one of its goals. And it has been rather successful: Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid and American responses to Israeli behavior have been overwhelmingly uncritical or supportive. But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment. Prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq; but the United States would probably be in Iraq today even if there had been no Israel lobby. Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?" I think it is; but that too is an issue for legitimate debate.

The essay and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original — and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices. Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

SNIP

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/opinion/19judt.html?ex=1146369600&en=24ce67f8824e9e9c&ei=5070

[Behind the Aegis]

20. .

:eyes:

[grottieyottie]

23. Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong

Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong

Not these 'left-leaning' critics.

How does the boiled crow taste?

[Behind the Aegis]

34. I didn't say THOSE critics were the ones, did I?

So, no crow pie for me today...

[Andromeda]

43. Here we go again...

This kind of one-ups-man-ship is just plain childish and proves nothing. You just make people further entrenched in their own opinions when you attempt to demean somebody that doesn't share your views.

Maybe if you listened to other opinions, really listened, you would find that there might be a great deal that you could learn.

[blitzen]

2. on this issue, see www.juancole.com

[blitzen]

3. self-delete (dupe)

[Scurrilous]

14. You might enjoy this:

John Fund vs. Juan Cole

http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/04/john_fund_vs_ju.php

[adriennui]

24. damn, people are wising up

to my plan to control the US, then the world and ultimately the universe.

i spend my time plotting with the mossad to make mischief around the world and victimize everyone who doesn't agree with us.

today is friday....gonna count my pieces of gold and throw darts at my map.....hmmmm, let me see which country i can destabilize.

[pelsar]

25. damned if you do..and damned if you dont...

well after your done "plotting to take over the world" i'll let you ponder on the reaction to pseudo intellectual paper, which reads like a freshman writing course in reactionary cultures 101

choice one: the traditional choice of the jews and the preferred one from the non jews: not saying a word, keeping their head down, and pray the "storm passes over without too many anti semtic responses

choice two: make a stink about it...and thereby "prove that the jews control the media and the world. (though i'm not sure how protesting does that.....)


2,000+ years of choice one didnt go over so well, choice two is more amusing..just reading all the whyinng about how the jews/israelis control the media, art programs etc...i guess its better this way......let them be the ones who are "scared"

[adriennui]

27. so true

the world hasn't quite accepted the fact that israel will fight and not roll over.

the passive jew is ancient history (thank goodness).

[ShalachEtAmi]

30. I vote choice 2 ..

Thats what Israel was created for..Jews fighting back...finally...

[meti57b]

31. Good point! It puts us in control of our own security and self-defense....

... something that we hadn't had for a very long time and we were nearly wiped out because we didn't have it.

[Coastie for Truth]

32. I do give the study some credibility.

I give the study as much credibility as I give to Professor David Pimentel and Professor Tad Patzek (they posited that ethanol synthesis uses more energy then the ethanol contains), and to Professor Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University (he posited that "irreducible complexity" proves "intelligent design."), and Professor Lester Lave of Carnegie Mellon (he posited that a Prius uses more gasoline and generates more green house gases then a Corolla - because it gets better mileage and therefore encourages the wasteful Prius driver to drive many more miles).

The AIPAC Lobby wouldn't make a pimple on retired ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond's left butt cheek (he's the PhD chemical engineer who got a $400 MILLION retirement package - and said that "global warming is junk science").

What does Uri Avnery say about the real power of AIPAC on real issues?

Really? What about the American aim of getting their hands on the main oil reserves of the world, in order to dominate the world economy? What about the aim of placing an American garrison in the center of the main oil-producing area, on top of the Iraqi oil, between the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Caspian Sea? What about the immense influence of the big oil companies on the Bush family? What about the big multinational corporations, whose outstanding representative is Dick Cheney, that hoped to make hundreds of billions from the "reconstruction of Iraq"? ---

It is not about Israel or Zionists - it is about oil, BIG OIL, and $70 plus a barrel, and $3.19 for self serve regular, and assuring American access to and hegemony over the oil and oil lands(


Believe me - I've got doctorates - been an energy executive (okay - "only" solar energy and "electric cars") and an academician (okay - only "engineering")

[Lurking Dem]

33. How does one take seriously

a writer (and editor) who doesn't know the difference between "ferment" and "foment"?

Or, maybe, reading the Mearsheimer/Walt paper leads to beer drinking?

[Poll_Blind]

37. Shh, I was enjoying the hell out of that. It really is telling, isn't it?

PB

[cali]

38. nah, it bothered me too so I looked it up before

I posted about it being used incorrectily. The author uses it just fine. My dictionary gives as one of the definitions; agitation, tumult. foment means to incite.