Ever since professor-pundit Eric Alterman published it in April 2002, I’ve been wondering if anyone else noticed his enemies’ list of those American journalists who were not sufficiently anti-Israel.
Alterman’s chest-pounding performance went largely unnoticed. Except, one might argue, by then-Harvard president Larry Summers, who in September 2002 talked about a worrisome trend : anti-Semitism on the American left:
But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.
Some have speculated that Summers’s laying down that gauntlet eventually led to his recent unceremonious departure from Harvard.
Well, now we know that other “someones” noticed Eric Alterman’s 2002 research on the “pro-Israel bias” of the media–Professors John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt, who cite some of Alterman’s findings in their just-published “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Nothing infotaining in there, I’m afraid. The piece is an all-encompassing “realist” critique of every argument that could possibly be made in favor of Israel–including the moral one that led to its founding: the decimation of European Jewry in the Holocaust and the need for a homeland for the world’s remaining Jews. (It was a crime against the resident Palestinians.)
The good professors posit that support for Israel is the primary cause of many U.S. national security woes, and they make a cold-blooded case for cutting Israel loose. But their primary aim is to expose the nefarious Lobby that makes all this possible: AIPAC.
Let others give this the fisking it deserves. I will simply note that the professors’ logic skills are called into question by the first assertion they choose to footnote and the text of that citation:
…Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essential identical. (1)
Here’s the opener of footnote 1:
Indeed, the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about [emphasis added]. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact.
Uh-huh. By this logic, every “special interest group”–i.e., lobby–is proposing something against the American national interest.
Right?
Or is it only the Lobby?
7 comments ↓
[...] David Duke has managed to hijack a the project begun by Mearshimer and Walt to dismantle liberal support for Israel, which I mentioned here. [...]
[...] Christopher Hitchens, in a virtuoso performance, demolished the good professors (and landed a glancing blow on Harvard while he was at it) in a Slate piece a couple of days ago. It’s the fisking the professors deserve, as I mentioned here, and it comes from a longtime pro-Palestinian critic of Israel, although Hitchens has been labeled (not to say smeared) as a neocon fellow traveler (at the least) and thus his opinions on everything are looked upon with suspicion and distaste in the cohort…when they are not disregarded. Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total, perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass…. [...]
[...] In my original post about “The Israel Lobby,” I chose to fisk only one point of Professor Walt and Mearsheimer’s “working paper”: the howler in the first footnote, in which Walt and Mearsheimer claim that the existence of AIPAC per se means that its goals are not in the American interest (otherwise why would you need a lobby? was their point). [...]
[...] What Professors Walt and Mearsheimer didn’t reckon on is that their impudent tone would come through loud and clear, even to those who are skeptical of American policy toward Israel. Many of the press reports have picked up on–and underscored–the fact that Walt and Mearsheimer claim there’s no moral reason to be on Israel’s side. This goes far beyond their “realist” politics. It is a moral judgment, out of place in an academic paper. That’s why it doesn’t pass the smell test, as Hitchens said. (I wrote about this subject here and here and here and here.) In the FT piece I note above, Alan Dershowitz asks: “What would motivate two recognised academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites . . .  that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry and . . .  place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?†[...]
[...] ** I have written about Walt and Mearsheimer’s “scholarly paper” here and here and here and here. [...]
[...] Are you a blogger who feels insecure about criticizing Israel? Let Jewish bloggers lead the way through the land mines, says Matthew Yglesias as he hastens down the Jewish Lobby Is Too Powerful path blazed by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer (whom I first blasted here,*** in a post in which I also discussed Lawrence Summers’s fall 2002 warning about the rise of a new anti-Semitism on the American left): I know lots of liberals and talk to them. The number of rank-and-file liberal people who agree with the sorts of things Democrats have been saying about this is vanishingly small. And, indeed, what Israel is doing is certainly incompatible with the general liberal outlook on use of force questions. The Democrats aren’t expressing a mainstream liberal view of the situation, they bowing [sic] to pressure from the Lobby That Must Not Be Named. If we heard more from liberal bloggers, we’d be hearing commentary that ranged from somewhat critical to very critical. [...]
[...] I put together the list for my own benefit: to see the arc of my thoughts on the subject. They haven’t change much. Following is a list of posts, in chronological order, that explain why I think Walt and Mearsheimer deserve nothing but contempt. March 18 [...]
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