The Lobby Strikes Back
Harvard study of Israeli lobby's influence costs the academic dean of the Kennedy School his job
by Justin Raimondo
The reaction to the Harvard University study by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," [.pdf] has been fury by the Lobby and its partisans – and a demotion for Walt, who, it was announced shortly after the paper's release, would be stepping down from his post as [academic] dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. As the New York Sun reports (via the Harvard Crimson):
"Yesterday's issue of The New York Sun reported that an 'observer' familiar with Harvard said that the University had received calls from 'pro-Israel donors' concerned about the KSG paper. One of the calls, the source told The Sun, was from Robert Belfer, a former Enron director who endowed Walt's professorship when he donated $7.5 million to the Kennedy School's Center for Science and International Affairs in 1997. 'Since the furor, Bob Belfer has called expressing his deep concerns and asked that Stephen not use his professorship title in publicity related to the article,' the source told The Sun."
The Kennedy School has removed its logo from the front page of the paper, and made more prominent a boilerplate statement to the effect that the school doesn't necessarily endorse any or all of the views expressed therein.
Now, somebody please tell me that Mearsheimer and Walt have overplayed the power and influence of the Lobby in American political life.
The hate campaign directed at Mearsheimer and Walt underscores and validates the study's contention that all attempts to objectively discuss our Israel-centric foreign policy and the pivotal role played by the Lobby are met with outright intimidation. We have O.J. Simpson defender and pro-Israel fanatic Alan Dershowitz claiming that the scholarly duo filched the majority of their sources from "hate sites" – although how Dershowitz knows this, without having looked directly over their shoulders as they wrote, is very far from clear. But don't worry, he assures us, a "team" of researchers on his staff is looking into the matter. One wonders if this is the same "team" that looked into the evidence and concluded that Simpson was innocent.
Virtually every mention of the study informs us that David Duke is among its most fervent defenders. The Boston Globe and the Washington Post both featured Duke's endorsement in their respective summaries of the controversy, and when the shameless Joe Scarborough of MSNBC had him on, he introduced the notorious racist this way:
"Thank you for being with us tonight, Mr. Duke. You have been attacked as a former Klansman, an anti-Semite, but tonight you're in league with Harvard University. Do you feel vindicated?"
Mearsheimer and Walt are the ones who should feel vindicated, because this sort of cheap demagoguery proves their point about the Lobby's modus operandi. Always they seek to set the terms of the debate in their favor: If you disagree with them and decry their influence, you're a "Nazi." How very convenient.
What would the Lobby do without the former Ku Klux Klan leader, who now inveighs against "ZOG" and the alleged perfidy of the Jews from somewhere in Central Europe? He ought to be getting some kind of stipend from them, in view of the tremendous service he performs: by setting up an avowed neo-Nazi as the chief spokesman for the other side, the Lobby gets to control the discourse.
Naturally, Scarborough would never have invited anyone like, say, Juan Cole on the show to defend the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. He might have invited any one of a number of people cited in the study's 200-plus footnotes, including Antiwar.com's Ran HaCohen. But that is expecting far too much of the Lobby and its allies: intellectual honesty is not one of their strong points.
The same trope is continued and expanded on with Max Boot's contribution to the debate, in which he conjures the ghost of Richard Hofstadter, departed neocon scholar of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which sought, back in the early 1960s, to show that "right-wing agitation" (i.e., mainstream conservatism) was a psychopathology, rather than a bona fide ideology, consisting of little more than paranoid fantasies brought on by acute "status resentment." Hofstadter, in turn, was simply carrying forward and applying the "social science" of Theodore Adorno, the Marxist sociologist who famously diagnosed opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies as evidence of an Oedipal "father complex." So far, it's the same old malarkey, minus the footnotes, until, at the end, Boot bares his teeth:
"After finishing their magnum opus, I was left with just one question: Why would the omnipotent Israel lobby (which, they claim, works so successfully 'to stifle criticism of Israel') allow such a scurrilous piece of pseudo-scholarship to be published? Then I noticed that Walt occupies a professorship endowed by Robert and Renee Belfer, Jewish philanthropists who are also supporters of Israel. The only explanation, I surmise, is that Walt must himself be an agent of those crafty Israelites, employed to make the anti-Israel case so unconvincingly that he discredits it. 'The Lobby' works in mysterious ways."
But not too mysterious. As we see, above, Belfer got on the phone to Harvard – and Walt was out of the dean's office in no time. To notice this, however, is "paranoid."
There have been a few substantive commentaries on the Mearsheimer-Walt study, to my knowledge, one by Daniel Drezner, and another by Daniel Levy, a former top adviser to Israel's prime minister, which originally appeared in Ha'aretz. Drezner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a very smart blogger, gives credit to the study for exploring truths that make people feel "very uncomfortable at cocktail parties," and concedes that there is much to be said for the thesis that Israel seems to dominate "some aspects" of U.S. policy-making. However, he nits and picks:
"Shot through these papers are an awful lot of casual assertions that don't hold up to close scrutiny. … The authors assert that, 'If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran.' I'm pretty sure that there's more to U.S. opposition to Iran possessing nuclear weapons than the protection of Israel."
It is true there may be other reasons why Washington might not want Iran to go nuclear, but there is no reason to believe that these might prevail over prudence in the absence of the Lobby's decisive influence. Drezner cites the study's contention that the Lobby's mere existence proves an imperfect congruence of Israeli and American interests – otherwise, "one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about." Drezner finds this "fascinating," he writes, because of
"The implicit assumptions contained within it: i) the only interest group in existence is the Lobby, and; ii) in the absence of the Lobby, a well-defined sense of national interest will always guide American foreign policy. It would be very problematic for good realists like Mearsheimer and Walt to allow for other interest groups – oil companies, for example – to exist. This would allow for a much greater role for domestic politics than realists ever care to admit."
Contra Drezner, Mearsheimer and Walt do not contend that the Lobby is the sole organization of its kind, only that they do a better job than anyone else. Far from denying the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy, the study shows that this sort of influence is decisive, especially in its discussion of the Christian evangelical-neocon convergence on the issue of Israel. Whether this comports with Drezner's understanding of "realism" is, really, irrelevant.
While Drezner does not agree with Mearsheimer and Walt, he is too intellectually honest to go along with the Smear Brigade's calumnies:
"On the one hand, it's a shame that this isn't being debated more widely in the mainstream press. On the other hand, it might be good if the mainstream media didn't cover it, if this New York Sun editorial is any indication:
"'It's going to be illuminating to watch how Harvard handles the controversy over the decision of its John F. Kennedy School of Government to issue a "Faculty Research Working Paper" on "The Israel Lobby" that is co-authored by its academic dean, Stephen Walt. On page one this morning we report that Dean Walt's paper has been met with praise by David Duke, the man the Anti-Defamation League calls "America's best-known racist." The controversy is still young. But it's not too early to suggest that it's going to be hard for Mr. Walt to maintain his credibility as a dean. We don't see it as a matter of academic freedom but simply as a matter of necessary quality control.'
"This is an absurd editorial – just about any argument out there is endorsed by one crackpot or another, so that does not mean the argument itself is automatically invalidated. As for Walt's sympathies towards David Duke, in the very story they cite, Walt is quoted as saying, 'I have always found Mr. Duke's views reprehensible, and I am sorry he sees this article as consistent with his view of the world.'
"I didn't say this explicitly in my last post, but let me do so here: Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science."
Bravo – except for the "piss-poor" stuff. Drezner should ask himself, however, why it is that the debate over this study is being engaged in such a vicious manner by opponents of the Harvard study. Doesn't that say something about the role of the Lobby and its methods, as characterized by Mearsheimer and Walt? Drezner believes the authors have failed to demonstrate that Israel is a strategic liability, that "U.S. foreign policy behavior" is determined "almost exclusively by the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'" and that the authors "omit consideration of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies." Fine. All those points are debatable. But they aren't being debated. Instead, the Lobby is busy smearing the authors and getting Walt kicked out of his job as Kennedy School dean.
Daniel Levy, a former adviser in the office of Israel's prime minister, a member of the Israeli negotiating team at the Oslo B and Taba talks, and the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative, has the most thoughtful commentary to date, averring that the Harvard study "should serve as a wake-up call, on both sides of the ocean." He notes that "the tone of the report is harsh," and "jarring," that it "lacks finesse and nuance," but nevertheless,
"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."
Hear! Hear!
Levy goes on to note that the response to the study by the Lobby "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." In the course of his argument that the Lobby is just as bad for Israel as it is for America, Levy makes a salient point:
"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)."
The Lobby, by its success at neutralizing any effort to rein in the Israeli leadership's more extreme impulses, undermines the interests of the Jewish state. But the ideologues who make up the Lobby don't care about that: what they really care about is having the power to silence – and punish – their enemies.
The firing of Dean Walt is an outrage, one that should be met with a storm of indignation. That the Amen Corner would even attempt it – let alone go on the record as taking credit for it – is a testament to the Lobby's enduring and unchallenged power. It shows how the Lobby operates, and why they must be stopped before any real debate over the foreign policy of this country can be conducted.
The reasons for this extreme defensiveness on the part of the Lobby are not hard to discern. If they are the prime movers of U.S. foreign policy, then they do indeed have a lot to answer for. As the consequences of the Iraq war roll across our television screens, tracing a path of blood and mindless destruction, we have to wonder: who got us here? We have to question their motivations. And we have to ask: Why?
Who lied us into war? For whose sake did 2,300 American soldiers, and tens of thousands of Iraqis, die? Whose interests were served? The tip of the spear Mearsheimer and Walt have pricked the Lobby with is the contention that they were the decisive influence in pushing us into war with Iraq. And the howls that are coming from right, left, and center are proof enough that they have struck home.
Imagine: Our Own World...
[color="Sienna"]NO HOPE WITHOUT ROPE
Justin Raimondo is 1/4th jew and all faggot.
He does admit that Israel has too much influence over American foreign policy but he definitely does not "name the jew".
The man who believes that he has free will is more easily controlled since he will never think to look for the chains--Burrhus
[color="Red"]The jews are a problem--not our ONLY or SOLE problem, not responsible for EVERY problem faced by gentiles, not some ALL-POWERFUL race that we shouldn't bother trying to resist, not an EXCUSE for avoiding responsibilty for problems of our own making --but nonetheless, A REAL, SERIOUS PROBLEM.--Burrhus
Justin Raimondo is 1/4th jew and all faggot.
He does admit that Israel has too much influence over American foreign policy but he definitely does not "name the jew".
Your revelation is not news to me. Perhaps I should have asked,
"Does This Particular Article By Justin Name The jEW More So Than
His Earlier Stuff?"
What I'm after is this: Is the 'mainstream' moving our way?
Y? / N?
Imagine: Our Own World...
[color="Sienna"]NO HOPE WITHOUT ROPE
Israel is "the Jewish state" and Israeli influence is Jewish influence. So, yes, things have appeared to move our way since 9/11. He is saying the Israelis have control over our foreign policy, over any debate on our foreign policy, and over the professional lives of those who dissent from Israeli-controlled foreign policy.
While he can pick on Duke for being a Nazi, he is a fag and a jew and his message is filtered through the "untrustworthy" messenger image, just the same as Duke's. He also should be on a stipend from the Jews, by that token. Because Justin could never get a mainstream movement going. It always ends with him being a fag and a jew - he's not mainstream any more than the nazis are mainstream!
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
Your revelation is not news to me. Perhaps I should have asked,
"Does This Particular Article By Justin Name The jEW More So Than
His Earlier Stuff?"
What I'm after is this: Is the 'mainstream' moving our way?
Y? / N?
I have been reading Raimondo for years and he is very good on the war issue.
But he has never named the jew and has often made it clear that Israel is the problem but that jews are not. He has gotten more outspoken about Israel of late and about the jewish lobby in America but he lays the blame on a small cabal of neocons in the government and never on jews as a people.
The mainstream media is not moving our way. It is simply doing damage control by reporting things like Ahmadinejad's holocaust remarks and Charlie Sheen's 911 doubts. If they said nothing, people would begin to smell a cover-up, so they report the fact that these things are being said to make themselves look honest and uncontrolled.
However, I do think that the white masses in America are getting at least a glimpse of the truth about the jewish question now moreso than at any time since WWII.
Oh for the glory days of the 1930s when the jewish question was still a suitable topic for discussion in polite society.
One can hope.
The man who believes that he has free will is more easily controlled since he will never think to look for the chains--Burrhus
[color="Red"]The jews are a problem--not our ONLY or SOLE problem, not responsible for EVERY problem faced by gentiles, not some ALL-POWERFUL race that we shouldn't bother trying to resist, not an EXCUSE for avoiding responsibilty for problems of our own making --but nonetheless, A REAL, SERIOUS PROBLEM.--Burrhus
Your revelation is not news to me. Perhaps I should have asked,
"Does This Particular Article By Justin Name The jEW More So Than
His Earlier Stuff?"
What I'm after is this: Is the 'mainstream' moving our way?
Y? / N?
Here's Raimondo today, 3-4-06. Can't get more clear than this.
...It is ridiculous to identify the neocons as somehow representative of Jewish opinion on matters of foreign policy: not only is this demonstrably false, but it is also indicative of real anti-Semitism. David Duke inveighs against "the Jewish neocons," and the Lobby echoes his rhetoric, albeit from the opposite perspective. Both argue that we ought to dispense with the "code words" and call a spade a spade. But this is nonsense: as Mearsheimer and Walt point out, the distortion of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by the Lobby is no more in Israel's interest than it is in America's. Aside from that, the majority of American Jews are against this war, no doubt in greater proportion than the rest of the population.
The problem isn't "the Jews" – it's the Lobby. Until it is reined in by public awareness, and the appropriate legislation – which might start, for example, by requiring AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, like all the other lobbyists for foreign governments – the danger of a prolonged and widened war in the Middle East will continue unabated. Aside from that, however, what is needed is further investigation by Congress into the "faulty" intelligence that lured us into the Iraqi quagmire: I'd bet the ranch that a lot of it came directly from Tel Aviv to Washington...
The man who believes that he has free will is more easily controlled since he will never think to look for the chains--Burrhus
[color="Red"]The jews are a problem--not our ONLY or SOLE problem, not responsible for EVERY problem faced by gentiles, not some ALL-POWERFUL race that we shouldn't bother trying to resist, not an EXCUSE for avoiding responsibilty for problems of our own making --but nonetheless, A REAL, SERIOUS PROBLEM.--Burrhus
Burrhus beat me to it, but here is the whole article, which has some good stuff.
Think about it - they couldn't get their study published in America. And how many publishers are Jewish owned and operated? That must be a lot of Jews, rich American Jews, who want to protect AIPAC, which got us into the war. So how can the problem not be "the Jews"? They all stand with AIPAC, everyone of them.
April 3, 2006
Israel and Moral Blackmail
The Israel lobby is bringing out the big guns
by Justin Raimondo
The reaction to a pathbreaking – or, rather, taboo-busting – study of how and why Israel's interests came to be substituted for America's national interests in Washington policymaking circles, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," [.pdf] by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, has confirmed, in part, its thesis.
"The Lobby," as the authors call it, effectively works to control the debate over our Israel-centric policy in the Middle East by ensuring that there is no debate. Congress has been captured through their exemplary use of pressure tactics, and the editorial pages of the nation's newspapers and magazines are also dominated by the Israel-Firsters, where the same imbalance prevails. In a hint of what these two distinguished scholars had to go through to get their study published, they aver: "It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one."
It turns out that, before turning to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government – where Walt is academic dean (albeit not for long) – they attempted to get a version of their study published in an American magazine:
"John Mearsheimer says that the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication. 'I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States,' Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was originally commissioned in the fall of 2002 by one of America's leading magazines, 'but the publishers told us that it was virtually impossible to get the piece published in the United States.' Most scholars, policymakers and journalists know that 'the whole subject of the Israel lobby and American foreign policy is a third-rail issue,' he said. 'Publishers understand that if they publish a piece like ours it would cause them all sorts of problems.'"
Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books – which published a shortened version – tells the Guardian that the piece "was originally written for, but rejected by, the Atlantic Monthly and picked up by the LRB, when Wilmers 'became aware of its existence.'"
In an important sense, then, it appears that, like Palestine, the American literary and political scene is Israeli-occupied territory. As Mearsheimer and Walt point out, academia, too, suffers from the pro-Israel version of the Inquisition, suffering extensive efforts to "police" campuses for evidence of "anti-Israel" sentiments. As if to verify this charge, the authors have run smack up against the campus Thought Police, with Harvard University taking the unusual step of pulling its logo from their piece, altering and making a boilerplate disclaimer more prominent, and finally announcing that Walt would be resigning shortly from his post as academic dean.
This question of Walt's resignation has aroused some interest – especially since it was made shortly after major Harvard contributor Robert Belfer (who gave $7.5 million to the Kennedy School in 1997) expressed his displeasure. This concatenation of events has occasioned a denial by Walt, who says that his stepping down had nothing to do with the controversy surrounding his work. This echoes the official statement put out by Harvard, as well as an e-mail to me by Melodie Jackson, the Kennedy School's director of communications and public affairs:
"There is no connection between the conclusion of Professor Walt's term as academic dean and the discussion around his recent paper. As agreed a year ago, professor Walt's term as academic dean will expire at the end of this academic year and has absolutely no connection to the current conversation around his paper."
Well, then, that's that – right? Move along, nothing to see here. But not quite. As the Harvard Crimson reports:
"[Kennedy School Dean David T.] Ellwood said that he sent an e-mail to Kennedy School faculty members on Feb. 21 – before the uproar over the article – informing them that Walt would end his term as academic dean in June. Ellwood said he also asked professors for recommendations regarding the search for the next academic dean.
"When asked to provide the Feb. 21 e-mail to The Crimson, Kennedy School spokeswoman Melodie Jackson declined to do so. …
"Walt's term as academic dean will be one year shorter than that of his predecessor, Frederick Schauer, who held the post from 1997 to 2002. Though Ellwood's statement made reference to a 'normal three-year cycle' of academic deans, three-year terms have not been the norm for administrators who have held that post in recent years.
"Ellwood himself held the post for a year before joining the Clinton administration in 1993, and he returned to the school in 1995 to serve a two-year term as academic dean. Alan A. Altshuler held the post for two years during Ellwood's absence. And before that, Albert Carnesale was the school's academic dean for a decade."
It seems clear that Walt, loyal to Harvard, and understandably not wanting to widen the breach between himself and the university administration, is stretching the truth, to put it charitably. He says the decision to alter the disclaimer and remove the Harvard logo from his work was made to correct a misimpression that the study was the work of "two Harvard researchers," and that their work constituted an "official report." However, I can't find a single news story about this brouhaha that falsely reports Professor Mearsheimer as resident at Harvard: all correctly describe him as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Furthermore, it is difficult to define what would constitute an "official report." Universities publish all sorts of research on a wide variety of topics, written from any number of perspectives: the decision to publish implies that the university has held the work to a high academic standard and found it at least acceptable, if not exemplary. It never constitutes "official" agreement with the views expressed therein.
It is undeniable that the Mearsheimer-Walt study was singled out for special treatment: out of all the "working papers" published by Harvard, only this one now lacks the university's logo. Only this one has special language appended to it putting the reader on notice that neither Harvard nor the University of Chicago "take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty." Ouch! If that isn't a slap in the face – impugning their scholarship – then I don't know what is. (Go here to see the difference between the treatment afforded the Mearsheimer-Walt "working paper" and others recently published.)
The controversy has certainly been as instructive as it's been ugly. Not only has the Lobby revealed itself by such a visible and vocal baring of its very pointed teeth, but we have also seen some remarkable alliances forged in its defense. Who would have thought that Christopher Hitchens would be on the same side of the barricades as Noam Chomsky? Not since the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact have we seen such a mind-blowing convergence.
Like that previous rapprochement, however, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense: after all, these two do have something in common – a monomaniacal focus on the military and political supremacy of the U.S. Chomsky sees it as a bad thing, while Hitchens sees it as a positive development, yet they come together in averring that the omnipotent warlords of Washington could not possibly have been captured by a foreign lobby. The former sees the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis as a diversion away from his anti-capitalist message and the "war for oil" spiel we are so used to hearing, while the latter derides as "smelly" the very idea that Israel had anything to do with us going to war against Iraq. Both go all the way back to the days of Dwight Eisenhower to chronicle incidents of U.S.-Israel disharmony. The problem with this argument is that the study says the consolidation of the Lobby's power was achieved much later, after the 1973 war. But ideologues have a habit of ignoring bothersome details.
While complimenting Mearsheimer and Walt for taking what he admits is a "courageous stand," Chomsky says he doesn't find their argument "very convincing." He attributes the causes of our Middle East policy of "regime change" and perpetual war to "strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage," rather than the machinations of the Lobby. The proof? Haven't the oil companies made "profits beyond the dreams of avarice?" What more do we need to know?
Oh, and don't forget how Israel performed a great "service" for the evil American capitalists by "smashing secular Arab nationalism, which threatened to divert resources to domestic needs." Leaving aside the oddity of a professed "anarchist" like Chomsky pining for the "independent nationalism" of the "secular" Arab leaders, killers like Nasser and the Mesopotamian Ba'athists, the big problem for Chomsky and his co-thinkers on the Left is that their reasoning is dizzyingly circular. They ascribe everything to the machinations of a "corporate" cabal, but their case is stated in terms of the broadest generalities, leaving the details to the imagination.
It is the lack of details, however, that is most telling. Because wars are started not by abstract "forces" nor by ideological constructs floating in mid-air, but by individuals – not corporate entities, but specific government officials, their advisers and employees. One could say that, in the abstract, the "stovepiping" of false information about Iraq's alleged WMD was the result of late capitalism's moral corruption and the "class interests" of Scooter Libby, but most people would find such a formulation baffling – and it is certainly inadequate.
The question of how and why we were lied into war is a matter of fact, not ideology. Abstract "forces" had nothing to do with it: specific individuals carried out specific acts. The misinformation that was deliberately planted was produced not by decaying capitalism, but by the decayed moral sense of certain government officials. And I'd be very surprised if the Niger uranium forgeries were fabricated by capitalists in top hats.
The confluence of views on this matter between Chomsky and the War Party – not only Hitchens, but Martin Peretz, whose magazine, The New Republic, has long been the house organ of the Lobby – is, as the Marxists used to say, no accident. Peretz, too, wants to know why Mearsheimer and Walt give a free pass to Big Oil, not to mention the supposedly powerful Saudi lobby. What I want to know is where was the Saudi lobby when the U.S. decided to invade and occupy Iraq? Apparently they went missing in action. As for attributing the genesis of the war to oil companies, is the editor of The New Republic confessing, in public, that in all those long years of agitation for war with Iraq, his magazine was merely the instrument of "strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage," as the Chomskyite jargon would phrase it?
Of all the commentary on this subject – and there has been a lot – the most rational, aside from Daniel Levy's, is to be found in a Financial Times editorial:
"Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defence of open debate and free enquiry shut down – at least among much of America's political elite – once the subject turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby's role in shaping US foreign policy.
"Even though policy toward the Middle East is arguably the single biggest determinant of America's reputation in the world, any attempt to rethink this from first principles is politically risky.
"Examining the specific role of organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, commonly considered to be the most effective lobby group in the US apart from the National Rifle Association, is something to be undertaken with caution."
The Lobby has nothing to worry about from the Noam Chomskys of this world. No amount of evidence can prove the Chomskyite case that abstract economic forces somehow unleashed the U.S. military on the people of Iraq, and are now threatening Iran with more of the same. In this way, the real culprits are let off the hook, while popular ire is directed at a conjuration of shadows.
Any attempt to cut through this smokescreen is met with an organized campaign of calumny, exemplified by the smears aimed at Mearsheimer and Walt. Alan Dershowitz screeches that the Harvard paper is the equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and virtually every news story about the matter mentions neo-Nazi David Duke in the same breath as the academic dean of the Kennedy School and his co-author, the foremost advocate of foreign policy "realism." The Financial Times rightly diagnoses the problem:
"Only a UK publication, the London Review of Books, was prepared to carry their critique, in the same way that it was Prospect, a British monthly journal, that four years ago published a path-breaking study of the Israel lobby by the American analyst, Michael Lind.
"Moral blackmail – the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and US support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism – is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters."
I emphasize the phrase "moral blackmail" because it aptly characterizes what the foreign policy community and the people of the United States are being subjected to. As we awaken from the fever-dream induced by war propaganda and recover our senses, we look around at the disaster unfolding in the Middle East and ask: How did we get here? The Lobby is right to feel endangered by this question: several administration figures, including Douglas Feith, a former top Pentagon official, are being investigated for having unusually "close" relations with the government of Israel. The Larry Franklin spy case is not being prosecuted – against a veritable tsunami of criticism, including from the judge – for nothing.
As we learn more about the activities of Scooter Libby, and more indictments come down, the key role of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration as the sparkplugs who ignited this war will become as plain as the wart on Ahmed Chalabi's nose. To Hitchens and the rest of the neocon fellow travelers, this is merely "code" for "the Jews." This is the sort of moral blackmail that has always ended all discussion of this vitally important topic – but not anymore.
It is ridiculous to identify the neocons as somehow representative of Jewish opinion on matters of foreign policy: not only is this demonstrably false, but it is also indicative of real anti-Semitism. David Duke inveighs against "the Jewish neocons," and the Lobby echoes his rhetoric, albeit from the opposite perspective. Both argue that we ought to dispense with the "code words" and call a spade a spade. But this is nonsense: as Mearsheimer and Walt point out, the distortion of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by the Lobby is no more in Israel's interest than it is in America's. Aside from that, the majority of American Jews are against this war, no doubt in greater proportion than the rest of the population.
The problem isn't "the Jews" – it's the Lobby. Until it is reined in by public awareness, and the appropriate legislation – which might start, for example, by requiring AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, like all the other lobbyists for foreign governments – the danger of a prolonged and widened war in the Middle East will continue unabated. Aside from that, however, what is needed is further investigation by Congress into the "faulty" intelligence that lured us into the Iraqi quagmire: I'd bet the ranch that a lot of it came directly from Tel Aviv to Washington.
I might add this dollop from the Financial Times editorial:
"Judgment of the precise value of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper has been swept aside by a wave of condemnation. Their scholarship has been derided and their motives impugned, while Harvard has energetically disassociated itself from their views. Mr Walt's position as academic dean of the Kennedy School is in doubt."
No one is buying Harvard's denials, least of all the Lobby. They glory in their power: note how the New York Sun, a house organ of the Israel-Firsters, was gloating all last week over the troubles inflicted on the authors of the Harvard study. The Lobby means business: like the Mafia, which likes to make an example of recalcitrants who fail to pay protection money, they want people to take notice of their ruthlessness. Fear prevents debate – and a real debate is what the Lobby can least afford.
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
But he has never named the jew and has often made it clear that Israel is the problem but that jews are not.
I agree.
The mainstream media is not moving our way.
However, I do think that the white masses in America are getting at least a glimpse of the truth about the jewish question now moreso than at any time since WWII.
The mainstream media is not going to change, but independent thinkers searching for answers will eventually come upon sites such as VNN and be influenced by them.
Justin Raimondo is 1/4th jew and all faggot.
He does admit that Israel has too much influence over American foreign policy but he definitely does not "name the jew".
I have often seen Raimondo referred to as 1/4 jew around here. He doesn't hide his homosexuality, and has referred to his Sicilian roots, but where did he ever say he was 1/4 jew? I tried to find this and couldn't. Links please?
I have often seen Raimondo referred to as 1/4 jew around here. He doesn't hide his homosexuality, and has referred to his Sicilian roots, but where did he ever say he was 1/4 jew? I tried to find this and couldn't. Links please?
A vague, perhaps faulty, memory, many or all of the facts may be wrong - I think this came out of fight JR was having with another SF fag jew named Schwartz. They both used to be commie jews togther. Schwartz is now a "Muslim" activist and Justin an antiwar activist. A few years ago they used to write vicious exposes of each other, and Schwartz would say that Justin's true name is Dennis and he is part Jewish.
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
I have often seen Raimondo referred to as 1/4 jew around here. He doesn't hide his homosexuality, and has referred to his Sicilian roots, but where did he ever say he was 1/4 jew? I tried to find this and couldn't. Links please?
I have been reading Raimondo for over 4 years. I recall some years ago that someone accused him of being an anti-semite. In his response he said that that was silly considering that he was 1/4th jew.
I can't find a link to that article since Antiwar.com doesn't have an internal text search option. So I may have remembered incorrectly about his jewishness and be wrong. But I do have a pretty good memory usually.
The man who believes that he has free will is more easily controlled since he will never think to look for the chains--Burrhus
[color="Red"]The jews are a problem--not our ONLY or SOLE problem, not responsible for EVERY problem faced by gentiles, not some ALL-POWERFUL race that we shouldn't bother trying to resist, not an EXCUSE for avoiding responsibilty for problems of our own making --but nonetheless, A REAL, SERIOUS PROBLEM.--Burrhus
Only slightly off topic, but never mind. Try reading Justin Raimondo's antiwar.com essay of today. First sentence is "It started with a kiss."
I did not know that JR was light in the loafers, and I guess I am slow, but it took a few megabytes (or whatever they're called) before I figured out that he is desperate to have some beautiful young Moroccan boy stay in the USA and not be deported. He is so desperate for money that he is asking us who read antiwar.com to donate toward legal fees to keep his little "buddy" in that purportedly freest of all free countries, the United States of Amurrikwa.
Oh, shit - just read this for yourselves. I can't believe I actually donated to antiwar.com. The site is being used to rope people in to JR's personal problems and projects.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9181
Just what we need in this country -- another shitskin faggot.
I have often seen Raimondo referred to as 1/4 jew around here. He doesn't hide his homosexuality, and has referred to his Sicilian roots, but where did he ever say he was 1/4 jew? I tried to find this and couldn't. Links please?
Eric Garris (Antiwar.com managing editor): "Justin isn't any part Jewish."
Hey jews monitoring this board:
Here's your chance to get back at a longstanding enemy of Israel (he opposes the Iraq war and the prospective Iran war). Pull strings behind the scenes to get Justin's butt-buddy back on the next plane to Morocco. Come on, if you can block a professor from getting hired, surely you can get an asylum application denied. Show Raimondo who's boss!