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Paul Drake · 2006-04-01T21:04:07Z

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 B...

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Abzug Hoffman

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Somebody asked me what I meant when I said "America is over". I think I will send him Justin's love life article as an example of what I mean.

"Go, Nazis, Go!"

Posted : 22/06/2006 6:40 am

Chain

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The pdf, active link:

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf

John Creagh, I believe there was well documented info on either VNNF or SF that Raimondo had a Jew grandparent, though I haven't as yet been able to locate the proof. It was, as I recall, Raimondo's own words. Burrhas is right.

Posted : 22/06/2006 7:09 am

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