Stephen Walt is a liar

Moralizing anti-Israel “realist” Stephen Walt is on the road trying to pre-sell his upcoming screed to Jews:

Walt — who penned the ["Israel Lobby"] paper with co-author John Mearsheimer — had come to hawk the book-length version of their findings to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in September.

“Both I and my co-author are pro-Israel,” [uh-huh --ed.] he said on Tuesday evening, in front of the audience gathered at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. “Our book does not question Israel’s right to exist [how decent of you  --ed.], and we make clear that lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie.”

Really? Here’s what I wrote about that in March 2006, when I first mentioned these two poisonous flame-throwers, whose conspiratorially copy-styled “Israel Lobby”-with-a-capital-L tells you all you need to know about their not-so-subtle insinuations:

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.

Now, in May 2007, Walt says that “lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie,” but in their paper, Walt and Mearsheimer suggested that the mere existence of the “Lobby” indicates that it’s not in the American interest.

Can I have some extra scoops of vanilla with that pie? And hold the cinnamon!

Walt seems to be trying to soften his paper’s grotesque scapegoating of Israel as the source of all of America’s troubles with the Muslim world.

Walt made his remarks at the Jewish Book Council’s “Meet the Authors” program, a sort of speed-dating for the literary set, in which each presenter is given two minutes to expound on his or her book before an audience of event coordinators from around the country.

Well, the joke is on Walt, because Jewish book groups are notorious in the book world for inviting tons of speakers and bringing in big audiences, who consistently fail to buy books at the event.

May that embarrassing tradition continue.