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.American
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#15.. April 10,
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P. 13, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS * April 10, 2006...
Behind the Scenes
with Michael Collins Piper
Harvard Professor
Slams Israeli Lobby
By Michael Collins Piper
 |
It’s
received little attention among Americans who don’t follow
public affairs — and it’s not been widely mentioned
in the media across the country, at least thus far — but among
informed folks who closely follow the intrigues of the Israeli lobby,
the release of a new report critical of Israel and its lobby has
been the most talked-about subject of recent days.
Two of the most distinguished foreign policy specialists in the
American academic world — John Mearsheimer of the University
of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard — have released a paper,
entitled “The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” that has some less
than favorable things to say about Israel and the U.S. relationship
with that tiny, yet powerful, foreign nation.
The 83-page paper, which includes some 40 pages of detailed footnotes,
was first published on the Internet, but a pared-down rendition
of the paper was published on March 23 in The London
Review of Books. The article can be found on the internet
at www.ssrn.com or at Harvard’s
official web site, www.ksg.Harvard.edu/research/working_papers/index.htm.*
Ironically, as the New York-based newspaper, Forward,
put it on March 24, “there’s little that’s new”
in the report. Anyone who has been a reader of American
Free Press or who, going back to the 1960s and 1970s,
read other populist publications like Liberty Letter
or The Spotlight knows what’s now
being reported by the two academics.
Although America’s mainstream media always portrayed Israel
in the fondest light, free thinkers raised uncomfortable questions
that suggested the truth might be different. Such critics of the
U.S.-Israel axis were called “anti-Semites,” and “neo-Nazis”
and “haters.”
Worldwide, in contrast, Israel and its American lobby have not been
held in such esteem. In 2002, for example, South African Archbishop
Desmond Tutu, who — until then — was an icon of the
American press, shocked many when he asserted that in the United
States “the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal,”
because, Tutu said, “the Jewish lobby is powerful —
very powerful.”
Now Meirsheimer and Walt have stepped up to echo what critics of
Israel have been saying for years. However, what is disturbing to
pro-Israel forces is that the academics, as Forward
put it, “can’t be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream.”
As the Jewish weekly put it: “They are the mainstream.”
Walt has not only been a Harvard professor, but he’s also
the outgoing academic dean of the university’s John F. Kennedy
School of Government which Forward acknowledged
is “the nation’s most prestigious center of political
studies.”
In the wake of the firestorm directed at Harvard, the professors
removed the Kennedy School logo from the paper on the Internet.
Despite this, as the paper’s critics have noted, the genie
is out of the bottle and copies of the paper have been flying across
the globe via email.
As a result, a lot of people who previously were told that criticism
of Israel was the work of “haters” and “extremists”
are learning that two of the most respected American foreign affairs
specialists are saying some tough things about Israel, its Washington
lobby and the dangers of the lobby’s influence on U.S. foreign
policy making.
On March 25, the fiercely pro-Israel “Editorial Board”
column of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
took the professors to task but accurately noted that:
[The premise of Mearsheimer and Walt] is that Israel is a huge
strategic liability for the U.S. which wrecks our reputation in
the Arab world, complicates our diplomacy at the UN, inspires
Islamic fanaticism and terror, goads us into misbegotten wars
and makes us complicit in Israeli human rights abuses, all the
while costing some $3 billion a year.
Although the WSJ asserted Mearsheimer and Walt
are not necessarily “anti-Semitic,” their paper is “anti-Semitic
in effect.”
Meanwhile, pro-Israel elements are touting the claim by another
Harvard professor, pro-Israel agitator Alan Dershowitz, that the
two largely relied on material on “neo-Nazi” and “anti-Semitic”
web sites as their sources.
Dershowitz is not telling the truth. The most cursory examination
of the citations used by the duo demonstrates they used thoroughly
“mainstream” sources as documentation. The
Washington Post, The New York Times,
Israel’s Ha’aretz, the New
York-based Jewish Week, and the aforementioned
Forward were prominent among the sources.
In the meantime, on March 26, The New York Daily News,
owned by Mort Zuckerman, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents
of Major American Jewish Organizations — a major force in
the Israeli lobby — featured a commentary making the claim
that “there is no Israel ‘lobby.’”
Zuckerman’s tabloid repeated the old saw that Congress and
American presidents have been friends of Israel “out of humanitarian
concerns” and that the policies have nothing to do with any
powerful “lobby.”
However, that claim is refuted in the very first footnote in the
Mearsheimer-Walt report, which says: “The mere existence of
the lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not
in the American national interests. If it was, one would not need
an organized special interest group to bring it about. But because
Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political
pressure to keep U.S. support intact.”
And so it is.
* Note: this is a copyrighted
document. AFP is unable to reproduce and distribute this paper.
For those who do not have access to the Internet, it is suggested
that they go to a public library and have a librarian access the
relevant web site address cited and print out the 83-page document.
(Issue #15, April 10, 2006, American
Free Press)
