Michelle Goldberg: Yet Another Israeli Gatekeeper in the Alternative Media
There seems to be a bottomless well of these Israeli gatekeepers in the alternative media, always ready to muddy the waters when it comes to getting a handle on the Israel lobby. Michelle Goldberg is yet another one.
Regarding this quote:
[The Lobby] is, rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that encompasses Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and gentile. The power of this movement is deeply troubling -- it perverts American political discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab world, destroys many Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel. But to conflate this movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that is what Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently.
Goldberg has this exactly reversed. Mearsheimer and Walt took great care to separate the Israel lobby from American Jewry and "the Jews." I have also done so. For instance, I have pointed out emphatically on numerous occasions that 70% of American Jews oppose the Iraq War, and I have strongly condemned anti-Semitism wherever I see it. My condemnations have been sincere, because I greatly admire all the good things in the Jewish tradition and Jewish civilization which remain untarnished by what Zionism has turned into. I understand that Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz do not speak for Jewish civilization, but for only a deviant extremist strain of that civilization.
The party that bears the greatest responsibility by far for conflating the Israel lobby with "the Jews" is THE ISRAEL LOBBY ITSELF and even leading elements of the official, mainstream Jewish lobby, including the CPMAJO (Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations), which is the umbrella organization which includes AIPAC and the ADL.
The Israel lobby and the mainstream Jewish lobby have systematically worked to label all criticism of Israel, and of themselves, as "anti-Semitic" and an attack all on "the Jews" -- all Jews. In fact, they have used this tactic to try to bury the Mearsheimer/Walt paper.
I have just been forced to write off Michelle Goldberg as a serious or honest mind -- she, like Noam Chomsky, is part of the very same lobby which is under examination here. I'll never look at her writings on Israel in the same way again.
By the way, the Lobby does much more than endanger Israel -- it endangers the United States, the country I live in and love. It also endangers the entire Mideast, Europe and the entire world. The Lobby was the prime mover behind the $2 trillion disaster in Iraq and is the ringleader in trying to goad the United States into attacking Iran.
The CPMAJO has cultivated the friendship and careers of Christian Zionists like John Hagee, whose fanatical mission in life is to see the world destroyed as soon as possible, on the psychotic and deranged assumption that this will be a good thing for their cult of true believers. In other words, Zionism has metamorphosed into the world's most dangerous apocalyptic and suicidal cult -- a kind of Jonestown writ large. This cult controls the largest collection of WMDs on the face of the planet.
Given the urgency and extremity of the crisis that the Israel lobby has created, I have very little patience for Michelle Goldberg's cheesy apologetics.
Goldberg should be very angry about the conflation of the Israel lobby with American Jewry as a whole, and she should direct her ire at the appropriate target -- the Lobby itself. Mearsheimer and Walt deserve great credit for having the courage to speak truth to power -- they knew that they would be inundated with abuse, harassment, intimidation, threats and possibly worse before they released this paper to the world.
--- In political-research@yahoogroups.com, "LeaNder" <l.l.hahn@...> wrote:
>
> I followed Juan Cole's links, which led me here. Michelle Goldberg is
> the best I have read so far concerning the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. And
> our dear lists editor might be interested that she is about to publish
> a book about our Christian fundamentalist friends.
>
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393060942/103-9180560-8470220?v=glance\
> &n=283155
>
> "[The Lobby] is, rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that
> encompasses Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and
> gentile. The power of this movement is deeply troubling -- it perverts
> American political discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab
> world, destroys many Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel.
> But to conflate this movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that
> is what Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently."
>
>
> http://salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/18/lobby/print.html
>
> Is the "Israel lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies?
> Two leading academics have tried to break the taboo against criticizing
> Israel's powerful U.S. lobby. It's a worthy aim, but their clumsy
> argument may backfire.
>
> By Michelle Goldberg
>
> Apr. 18, 2006 | The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC,
> may be the most powerful lobby in the country. As its Web site says,
> "Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress -- at home
> and in Washington -- AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel
> legislative initiatives a year. From procuring nearly $3 billion in aid
> critical to Israel's security, to funding joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to
> build a defense against unconventional weapons, AIPAC members are
> involved in the most crucial issues facing Israel." At its conferences,
> a parade of politicians from both parties pay homage -- this year,
> speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader John
> Boehner and former Sen. John Edwards.
>
> All successful lobbies flaunt their power. But unlike, say, the Cuban
> lobby or the AARP, there's a taboo against outsiders discussing the
> influence of AIPAC or the Israel lobby more generally, or criticizing
> the way it shapes American policy. To do so raises the specter of
> poisonous old narratives about mysterious cabals and dual loyalties, of
> hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and "The
> International Jew." So a strange, dim silence surrounds the Israel
> lobby, and the hushed atmosphere nurtures conspiracy theories about a
> power so great and so secret that you can't even talk about it in
> public. Those conspiracy theories make the issue even more fraught,
> because respectable people don't want to provide fodder for the likes of
> former Klan leader David Duke, who writes on his Web site, "Just as
> Jewish Israel-Firsters dominate the mass media, so Congress and the
> President are afflicted by the Israeli Lobby. "
>
> Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, political science professors at
> Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, apparently hoped to
> break through the taboos with their baldly titled paper "The Israel
> Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." It was published last month in the
> London Review of Books and, in an expanded version, on the Web site of
> the Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is academic dean. The
> article argues that the United States' close relationship with Israel is
> not in America's national interest -- that it is, indeed,
> counterproductive -- and that it is sustained largely through the work
> of the Israel lobby (Walt and Mearsheimer refer to it, simply and
> ominously, as "the Lobby.") Walt and Mearsheimer also argue that the
> lobby was a major force pushing for war in Iraq, a war they vocally
> opposed.
>
> "In our piece, we argued that when people are critical of Israeli policy
> or the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the arguments are not taken on their
> merits," Mearsheimer says when reached by phone. "What happens instead
> is that the great silencer -- the charge of anti-Semitism -- is leveled
> at the critics."
>
> In this case, that's just what has happened. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel
> called the paper "the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel,"
> adding, "Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people
> would write reports like this." In a response to Walt and Mearsheimer
> published on the Kennedy School Web site last week, law professor Alan
> Dershowitz asked, "What would motivate two recognized academics to issue
> a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be
> used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence,
> that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will
> place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty
> to America?" Neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor Eliot A. Cohen
> penned a column about the paper in the Washington Post titled, "Yes,
> It's Anti-Semitic."
>
> On the surface, the whole imbroglio seemed like the latest version of a
> story that has replayed itself countless times in the last few years. A
> public figure strays outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion about
> Israel, or calls attention to the disproportionate influence wielded by
> supporters of Israel's right-wing political factions, and is immediately
> attacked as a bigot or a paranoid. It happened to Howard Dean during the
> Democratic primary, when he said that the United States should be
> "evenhanded" in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
> Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, admonished him; an
> Israeli newspaper suggested that his Jewish backing would dry up; and
> Nancy Pelosi wrote him an angry open letter. All this despite the fact
> that Dean's campaign was being co-chaired by a former president of
> AIPAC, and there was little daylight between his position on Israel and
> that of President Bush.
>
> Not even such a famous friend of Israel as Steven Spielberg is immune to
> this kind of mau-mauing. When his movie "Munich," about the Israeli
> response to the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972
> Olympics, was released last year, various commentators berated him for
> being insufficiently Manichean in his treatment of the conflict. As Leon
> Wieseltier wrote in the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic, "Palestinians
> murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience,
> Israelis show evidence of a conscience ... All these analogies begin to
> look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing
> out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian
> objective."
>
> At first glance, it seemed as if Walt and Mearsheimer were being run
> through a familiar wringer. Indeed, many of the charges against them
> have been grossly unfair. To their chagrin, David Duke has
> enthusiastically embraced the paper, calling it "a modern American
> declaration of independence." Some critics have used this to associate
> the authors with the former Klansman. "Walt, Mearsheimer, and Duke
> happen to have reached the same conclusions, and share the same interest
> in vilifying Jewish leaders and spouting conspiracy theories about
> Zionist plots against American interests," wrote Dershowitz. Stretching
> in a different direction, the Israeli historian Michael Oren, writing in
> the New Republic, blamed the affair on the malign influence of the late
> Edward Said and a postmodern coterie "infused with the nihilism of
> postmodern French philosophers." This charge was especially odd, since
> Walt and Mearsheimer are known as two of the foremost exponents of
> political realism, a hardheaded school of thought that owes far more to
> Henry Kissinger than to Michel Foucault.
>
> On one level, then, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are examples of
> the very phenomenon the writers describe. Yet for anyone who hopes for a
> more open and critical discussion of the Israel lobby, their paper
> presents profound problems. This is not just a case of brave academics
> telling taboo truths. In taking on a sensitive, fraught subject, one
> might expect such eminent scholars to make their case airtight. Instead,
> they've blundered forth with an article that has several factual
> mistakes and baffling omissions, one that seems expressly designed to
> elicit exactly the reaction it has received. The power of the Israel
> lobby is something that deserves a full and fearless airing, but this
> paper could make such an airing less, not more likely.
>
> Walt and Mearsheimer's paper began as an article commissioned by the
> Atlantic Monthly in 2002 on the subject of Israel and the U.S. National
> Interest. The magazine turned down the piece they submitted -- editor
> Cullen Murphy wrote them a letter explaining why, though none of them
> will comment on what it said. According to Mearsheimer, he and Walt
> thought the piece was dead, but then a scholar who'd read it put them in
> touch with the editor of the London Review of Books, who agreed to
> publish a rewritten version. They posted the expanded essay on the
> Harvard Web site to coincide with the London publication.
>
> The authors waste no time stating their case. "The U.S. national
> interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy," they
> write on the first page. "For the past several decades, however, and
> especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle
> East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of
> unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread
> democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion
> and jeopardized U.S. security."
>
> Even one sympathetic to Walt and Mearsheimer's criticism of the Israel
> lobby should be struck by this assertion. After all, there's a very
> strong case to be made that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy
> for the past several decades has been oil. Walt and Mearsheimer barely
> address oil, or the American relationship with Saudi Arabia. Similarly,
> in their view, the Iraq war had little to do with oil and much to do
> with Zionism.
>
> "There is virtually no evidence that oil was an important cause of the
> Iraq war," Mearsheimer says. "It is an intuitively plausible argument,
> but when you look for evidence that the oil companies were pushing for
> war, or that Paul Wolfowitz was thinking in terms of oil as a
> geopolitical weapon, you cannot find it. Instead, you find lots of
> evidence that the neoconservatives and the leaders of the Lobby were
> pushing hard for war against Iraq."
>
> In fact, though, such evidence does exist -- it has been compiled by
> Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Oil," by analysts like James Paul of
> the Global Policy Forum, and by Kevin Phillips in "American Theocracy."
> Phillips quotes James Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
> saying, "what they [the Bush administration] have in mind is
> denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil
> companies. The American oil companies are going to be the main
> beneficiaries of this war." In his memoir "The Right Man," David Frum,
> the former Bush speechwriter and neocon par excellence, wrote that
> Bush's campaign to bring freedom to the Middle East would also "bring
> new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool of oil."
> After the conservative public interest group Judicial Watch filed a
> Freedom of Information Act request, a court ordered the Commerce
> Department to turn over documents from Cheney's Task Force; among them
> are Iraq oil maps and lists of foreign suitors for Iraqi oil-field
> contracts. And, of course, there's the fact that, as Baghdad burned
> immediately after the 2003 invasion, the only government building the
> Americans saw fit to protect was the oil ministry.
>
> This doesn't prove that oil was the only factor in the war, and that
> Israel had nothing to do with it. But it does suggest that oil was at
> least a factor, casting some doubt on Walt and Mearsheimer's assertion
> that "the war was due in large part to the lobby's influence, especially
> the neoconservatives within it."
>
> Perhaps they don't find any of the available evidence about the role of
> oil compelling, but that's not what they argue -- they simply ignore it.
> A similar pattern repeats throughout "The Israel Lobby." There is little
> nuance and few caveats; facts that run contrary to their thesis are
> simply left out or, in a few cases, twisted. In his response, Dershowitz
> finds several factual errors that make the authors seem strangely
> careless. Most relate to the moral case against Israel.
>
> As realists, Walt and Mearsheimer generally oppose giving idealism an
> important role in foreign policy decision-making. But because they argue
> in "The Israel Lobby" that considerations of morality can't account for
> America's support for Israel, they have to engage in moral arguments.
> "Viewed objectively, Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral
> basis for privileging it over the Palestinians," they write.
>
> As Walt and Mearsheimer surely know, that's a striking and hugely
> controversial claim. So it's odd that they weren't more careful in
> trying to back it up. Much of their case is compelling, but it is
> undermined by their own errors.
>
> They are certainly correct when they write that, while Israel's creation
> was largely a response to horrific crimes against the Jews, "[T]he
> creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent
> third party: the Palestinians.
>
> "Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from
> benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs," they continue, citing the
> work of famed Israeli historian Benny Morris. "The Arab inhabitants did
> resist the Zionists' encroachments, which is hardly surprising given
> that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands.
> The Zionists responded vigorously, and neither side owns the moral high
> ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the
> creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved explicit acts of ethnic
> cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews."
>
> All this has been documented, although it's not the whole story. If
> Americans tend to believe that Israel has the moral upper hand over the
> Palestinians, it's not because of the conditions of the country's
> founding, it's because of decades of Arab aggression and Palestinian
> terrorism. Amazingly, Walt and Mearsheimer don't even mention Fatah or
> Black September, Munich or Entebbe. One might argue that Israel has
> killed more Palestinians than visa versa, but it doesn't change the role
> of spectacular Palestinian terrorism in shaping American attitudes
> toward Israel.
>
> Worse still is the way Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes subtly twist the
> historical record to make their case against Israel even more damning.
> Dershowitz catches them quoting David Ben-Gurion strikingly out of
> context: "Ben-Gurion is ... quoted by Mearsheimer and Walt as saying
> that 'it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab
> population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion,' making it seem
> as if Ben-Gurion was advocating a 'brutal compulsion.' But they omit
> what Ben-Gurion said after that: 'but we should in no way make it part
> of our programme.' By omitting Ben-Gurion's critical conclusions, they
> falsely suggest that Ben-Gurion was proposing the opposite of what he
> said."
>
> They do something similar, though less serious, when they write that the
> Jewish newspaper the Forward once described Paul Wolfowitz as "the most
> hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration." As Forward editor
> J.J. Goldberg noted in an editorial, "A check of the endnotes shows that
> the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the
> conventional wisdom, not the Forward's view. The article was about a
> pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian
> rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong."
>
> Walt and Mearsheimer also confuse critical issues about Israeli
> citizenship, which they say is "based on the principal of blood
> kinship." That's simply not true -- as Dershowitz writes, "In reality, a
> person of any ethnicity or religion can become an Israeli citizen. In
> fact, approximately a quarter of Israel's citizens are not Jewish, a
> higher percentage of minority citizenry than in nearly any other country
> ... The paper's authors confuse Israel's law of return -- which was
> designed to grant asylum to those who were victims of anti-Semitism,
> including non-Jewish relatives of Jews -- with its law of citizenship."
>
> These errors, and others like them, don't nullify the paper's thesis,
> but they're evidence of a weird haphazardness. This is an enormously
> sensitive subject, but Walt and Mearsheimer's approach is too often
> clumsy and crude. That's especially true in their discussion of the
> divided loyalties of some American Jews, and of the pro-war
> manipulations of the lobby. They conflate groups that are merely
> sympathetic to Israel with those that actively back the hard-line
> policies of the Likud. Though they try to draw distinctions between the
> lobby and American Jewry more generally, they occasionally use the two
> terms interchangeably, citing Jewish campaign donations, for example, as
> evidence of the lobby's power.
>
> "The Lobby also has significant leverage over the Executive branch,"
> they write. "That power derives in part from the influence Jewish voters
> have on presidential elections. Despite their small numbers in the
> population (less than 3 percent), they make large campaign donations to
> candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that
> Democratic presidential candidates 'depend on Jewish supporters to
> supply as much as 60 percent of the money.'" This treatment of Jewish
> money as a monolithic force is both ugly and misleading; the agenda of
> liberal donors like George Soros and Peter Lewis is quite different from
> that of a hardcore Israel supporter like Jack Rosen, head of the
> American Jewish Congress. Anyway, the fact that Jews are crucial funders
> of Democrats is not evidence of their power over an executive branch
> that has been Republican for most of the last 25 years.
>
> One could go on and on in this way, listing logical errors and
> over-generalizations. And that's unfortunate, because it clouds what is
> valuable in "The Israel Lobby." Walt and Mearsheimer are correct, after
> all, in arguing that discussion about Israel is hugely circumscribed in
> mainstream American media and politics. Citing the liberal, pro-Israel
> journalist Eric Alterman, they write that the public debate among Middle
> East pundits "is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing
> Israel. [Alterman] lists 61 columnists and commentators who can be
> counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.
> Conversely, Alterman found just five pundits who consistently criticize
> Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally
> publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of
> opinion clearly favors the other side." A person who got all their
> information from the American media would have little idea about the
> ways Jewish settlers continue to appropriate land in the West Bank,
> harassing local Palestinian farmers and uprooting their crops. Indeed,
> one can find far more critical coverage of the Israeli occupation in
> liberal Israeli newspapers like Haaretz than in any American daily.
>
> And this gets at the real problem. It's not that the lobby supports
> Israel, it's that it consistently supports right-wing, irredentist
> factions in Israel. In doing so, it is out of step with most American
> Jewish opinion as well as much Israeli opinion, and yet it manages to
> act as if it speaks for both groups. The result is American policies
> that tacitly accept Israel expansionism, despite the fact that most
> American Jews favor territorial concessions. There are structural
> explanations for why the Israel lobby has been able to amass such
> influence despite how unrepresentative it is. Walt and Mearsheimer,
> unfortunately, lack the subtlety to explore them.
>
> A few others have, though -- Michael Massing wrote a hugely informative
> article about the Israel lobby for the American Prospect in 2002. Those
> who are most adept at influencing government policy in the Middle East,
> Massing wrote, "do not necessarily represent the broad range of Jewish
> views on the subject. At a time when Palestinian terror bombings grow
> more horrific daily and Israel military action in the occupied
> territories grows steadily harsher, the bias in political representation
> has complicated negotiations and reduced the likelihood that the United
> States will be able to mediate the conflict successfully."
>
> As Massing explained, the two most important pro-Israel lobbying outfits
> are AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
> Organizations. Both are controlled by hard-liners and have been
> consistently biased toward the Likud, so much so that, as Massing
> writes, when the Labor Party's Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister, he
> told AIPAC that it would no longer be Jerusalem's representative in
> Washington. "[I]n contrast to the bullish statements AIPAC had issued on
> behalf of the Likud government, its board remained largely silent on
> Rabin's peace initiative," Massing wrote.
>
> Indeed, AIPAC went out of its way to sabotage Rabin. In 1995, wrote
> Massing, its board "took up an issue calculated to impede Rabin's
> efforts: the location of the U.S. embassy in Israel." Like most
> countries, the United States had its embassy in Tel Aviv because of
> Jerusalem's contested status. Under Oslo, talks on the future of the
> city were set to begin in 1996. "Flexing its muscle in Congress, [AIPAC]
> got 93 of 100 senators to sign a letter urging the administration to
> move the embassy by 1999, regardless of what happened in the
> negotiations. Going further, it got Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who was
> preparing to run for president against Bill Clinton, to introduce a bill
> that would make the transfer mandatory by that year."
>
> That bill was opposed by both Clinton and, importantly, the Israeli
> government. "Members of the Likud, by contrast, were jubilant," Massing
> wrote. This episode goes to show that the Israel lobby is not, as Walt
> and Mearsheimer say, "a de facto agent for a foreign government." It is,
> rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that encompasses
> Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and gentile. The power
> of this movement is deeply troubling -- it perverts American political
> discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab world, destroys many
> Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel. But to conflate this
> movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that is what Walt and
> Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently.
>
> They note the difference between the two, but then they ignore it,
> writing, for example, "There are also Jewish senators and congressmen
> who work to make U.S. foreign policy support Israel's interests." They
> argue as if there's no need to point out the distinction between, say,
> Joe Lieberman, one of the Iraq war's staunchest supporters, and Russ
> Feingold, one of its steadiest opponents. In their formulation, the fact
> that a congressman is Jewish creates suspicion of dual loyalties.
>
> This accounts for some of the shock commentators have felt reading "The
> Israel Lobby." While some of the outrage is part of the predictable
> hysteria that accompanies any serious criticism of Israel, there's more
> to it than that. There is, after all, a reason for the taboo surrounding
> talk of Jewish power and treachery. Tales of Jewish groups using money
> and secret influence to twist politics for their own, unpatriotic ends
> are a hallmark of reaction, spouted by everyone from the Nazis to Father
> Charles Coughlin to David Duke. Walt and Mearsheimer are not
> anti-Semites, or aligned with anti-Semitic forces. They seem, however,
> somewhat oblivious as to why the issue they've taken on is so horribly
> sensitive, and they make little effort to address the causes of the
> taboo they're trying to dislodge.
>
> "They overlook the fact that the notion of this Jewish cabal with
> mystical powers has been an excuse for genocide for centuries," says the
> Forward's Goldberg, adding that you have to be careful "if you're going
> to wander into that."
>
> Likewise, there is a history to countries, during crises of national
> morale, blaming their predicaments on Jewish manipulation. This is part
> of what frightens Goldberg. "America right now, I think people are going
> nuts," he says. "You look at all the things going on, the Arctic is
> melting, the world hates us, we've bankrupted ourselves as a nation, you
> can name three or four things that are inconceivably bad. You don't want
> to blame the American public -- we elected this guy, twice. We can't be
> that nuts. Somebody must have done this to us."
>
> For Goldberg, the paper is a worrying sign that a domestic version of
> the Dolchstosslegende -- the conviction that Germany lost World War I
> because Jews "stabbed it in the back" -- could somehow take root in
> America. "If Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer can buy into this stuff,
> I guess anybody can," says Goldberg. "I actually didn't believe it was
> possible. I'm one of those weirdoes who thought it wasn't going to
> happen here. I found their document scary because it is so illogical and
> so passionate."
>
> Goldberg grants that Walt and Mearsheimer are "right that the Jewish
> community and the pro-Israel lobby, separately and in different ways,
> make it hard to have a debate, partly on purpose and partly because
> there's a level of emotion there." Before a rational discussion can
> proceed, some of that emotion has to be defused. Instead, it's been
> stoked.
>
> Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer will likely pay a professional price,
> one that exceeds whatever criticism they deserve for their maladroit
> arguments. Walt will soon be stepping down from his job as academic dean
> -- something he says was in the works well before the paper's
> publication -- and it's unlikely he'll ever be put in such a position
> again. "It is too soon to tell what all of the repercussions will be,
> but we believed going into this that both of us would pay a significant
> price in our professional lives," says Mearsheimer. "We think, for
> example, that it would be almost impossible for Steve to ever be a
> high-level administrator at Harvard or any other top university. It is
> also highly unlikely that either one of us would ever get appointed to
> an important government position after this article. Plus there will be
> conferences and meetings that we won't be invited to because of the
> piece."
>
> Other ambitious academicians may take notice and leave this subject
> alone, even if they could shed more light on it than Walt and
> Mearsheimer did. It would be a strange irony indeed if as a result of
> their attempt to break the taboo, it ended up stronger than ever.
>
> -- By Michelle Goldberg
>
>
> I followed Juan Cole's links, which led me here. Michelle Goldberg is
> the best I have read so far concerning the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. And
> our dear lists editor might be interested that she is about to publish
> a book about our Christian fundamentalist friends.
>
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393060942/103-9180560-8470220?v=glance\
> &n=283155
>
> "[The Lobby] is, rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that
> encompasses Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and
> gentile. The power of this movement is deeply troubling -- it perverts
> American political discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab
> world, destroys many Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel.
> But to conflate this movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that
> is what Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently."
>
>
> http://salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/18/lobby/print.html
>
> Is the "Israel lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies?
> Two leading academics have tried to break the taboo against criticizing
> Israel's powerful U.S. lobby. It's a worthy aim, but their clumsy
> argument may backfire.
>
> By Michelle Goldberg
>
> Apr. 18, 2006 | The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC,
> may be the most powerful lobby in the country. As its Web site says,
> "Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress -- at home
> and in Washington -- AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel
> legislative initiatives a year. From procuring nearly $3 billion in aid
> critical to Israel's security, to funding joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to
> build a defense against unconventional weapons, AIPAC members are
> involved in the most crucial issues facing Israel." At its conferences,
> a parade of politicians from both parties pay homage -- this year,
> speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader John
> Boehner and former Sen. John Edwards.
>
> All successful lobbies flaunt their power. But unlike, say, the Cuban
> lobby or the AARP, there's a taboo against outsiders discussing the
> influence of AIPAC or the Israel lobby more generally, or criticizing
> the way it shapes American policy. To do so raises the specter of
> poisonous old narratives about mysterious cabals and dual loyalties, of
> hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and "The
> International Jew." So a strange, dim silence surrounds the Israel
> lobby, and the hushed atmosphere nurtures conspiracy theories about a
> power so great and so secret that you can't even talk about it in
> public. Those conspiracy theories make the issue even more fraught,
> because respectable people don't want to provide fodder for the likes of
> former Klan leader David Duke, who writes on his Web site, "Just as
> Jewish Israel-Firsters dominate the mass media, so Congress and the
> President are afflicted by the Israeli Lobby. "
>
> Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, political science professors at
> Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, apparently hoped to
> break through the taboos with their baldly titled paper "The Israel
> Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." It was published last month in the
> London Review of Books and, in an expanded version, on the Web site of
> the Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is academic dean. The
> article argues that the United States' close relationship with Israel is
> not in America's national interest -- that it is, indeed,
> counterproductive -- and that it is sustained largely through the work
> of the Israel lobby (Walt and Mearsheimer refer to it, simply and
> ominously, as "the Lobby.") Walt and Mearsheimer also argue that the
> lobby was a major force pushing for war in Iraq, a war they vocally
> opposed.
>
> "In our piece, we argued that when people are critical of Israeli policy
> or the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the arguments are not taken on their
> merits," Mearsheimer says when reached by phone. "What happens instead
> is that the great silencer -- the charge of anti-Semitism -- is leveled
> at the critics."
>
> In this case, that's just what has happened. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel
> called the paper "the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel,"
> adding, "Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people
> would write reports like this." In a response to Walt and Mearsheimer
> published on the Kennedy School Web site last week, law professor Alan
> Dershowitz asked, "What would motivate two recognized academics to issue
> a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be
> used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence,
> that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will
> place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty
> to America?" Neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor Eliot A. Cohen
> penned a column about the paper in the Washington Post titled, "Yes,
> It's Anti-Semitic."
>
> On the surface, the whole imbroglio seemed like the latest version of a
> story that has replayed itself countless times in the last few years. A
> public figure strays outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion about
> Israel, or calls attention to the disproportionate influence wielded by
> supporters of Israel's right-wing political factions, and is immediately
> attacked as a bigot or a paranoid. It happened to Howard Dean during the
> Democratic primary, when he said that the United States should be
> "evenhanded" in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
> Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, admonished him; an
> Israeli newspaper suggested that his Jewish backing would dry up; and
> Nancy Pelosi wrote him an angry open letter. All this despite the fact
> that Dean's campaign was being co-chaired by a former president of
> AIPAC, and there was little daylight between his position on Israel and
> that of President Bush.
>
> Not even such a famous friend of Israel as Steven Spielberg is immune to
> this kind of mau-mauing. When his movie "Munich," about the Israeli
> response to the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972
> Olympics, was released last year, various commentators berated him for
> being insufficiently Manichean in his treatment of the conflict. As Leon
> Wieseltier wrote in the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic, "Palestinians
> murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience,
> Israelis show evidence of a conscience ... All these analogies begin to
> look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing
> out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian
> objective."
>
> At first glance, it seemed as if Walt and Mearsheimer were being run
> through a familiar wringer. Indeed, many of the charges against them
> have been grossly unfair. To their chagrin, David Duke has
> enthusiastically embraced the paper, calling it "a modern American
> declaration of independence." Some critics have used this to associate
> the authors with the former Klansman. "Walt, Mearsheimer, and Duke
> happen to have reached the same conclusions, and share the same interest
> in vilifying Jewish leaders and spouting conspiracy theories about
> Zionist plots against American interests," wrote Dershowitz. Stretching
> in a different direction, the Israeli historian Michael Oren, writing in
> the New Republic, blamed the affair on the malign influence of the late
> Edward Said and a postmodern coterie "infused with the nihilism of
> postmodern French philosophers." This charge was especially odd, since
> Walt and Mearsheimer are known as two of the foremost exponents of
> political realism, a hardheaded school of thought that owes far more to
> Henry Kissinger than to Michel Foucault.
>
> On one level, then, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are examples of
> the very phenomenon the writers describe. Yet for anyone who hopes for a
> more open and critical discussion of the Israel lobby, their paper
> presents profound problems. This is not just a case of brave academics
> telling taboo truths. In taking on a sensitive, fraught subject, one
> might expect such eminent scholars to make their case airtight. Instead,
> they've blundered forth with an article that has several factual
> mistakes and baffling omissions, one that seems expressly designed to
> elicit exactly the reaction it has received. The power of the Israel
> lobby is something that deserves a full and fearless airing, but this
> paper could make such an airing less, not more likely.
>
> Walt and Mearsheimer's paper began as an article commissioned by the
> Atlantic Monthly in 2002 on the subject of Israel and the U.S. National
> Interest. The magazine turned down the piece they submitted -- editor
> Cullen Murphy wrote them a letter explaining why, though none of them
> will comment on what it said. According to Mearsheimer, he and Walt
> thought the piece was dead, but then a scholar who'd read it put them in
> touch with the editor of the London Review of Books, who agreed to
> publish a rewritten version. They posted the expanded essay on the
> Harvard Web site to coincide with the London publication.
>
> The authors waste no time stating their case. "The U.S. national
> interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy," they
> write on the first page. "For the past several decades, however, and
> especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle
> East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of
> unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread
> democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion
> and jeopardized U.S. security."
>
> Even one sympathetic to Walt and Mearsheimer's criticism of the Israel
> lobby should be struck by this assertion. After all, there's a very
> strong case to be made that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy
> for the past several decades has been oil. Walt and Mearsheimer barely
> address oil, or the American relationship with Saudi Arabia. Similarly,
> in their view, the Iraq war had little to do with oil and much to do
> with Zionism.
>
> "There is virtually no evidence that oil was an important cause of the
> Iraq war," Mearsheimer says. "It is an intuitively plausible argument,
> but when you look for evidence that the oil companies were pushing for
> war, or that Paul Wolfowitz was thinking in terms of oil as a
> geopolitical weapon, you cannot find it. Instead, you find lots of
> evidence that the neoconservatives and the leaders of the Lobby were
> pushing hard for war against Iraq."
>
> In fact, though, such evidence does exist -- it has been compiled by
> Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Oil," by analysts like James Paul of
> the Global Policy Forum, and by Kevin Phillips in "American Theocracy."
> Phillips quotes James Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
> saying, "what they [the Bush administration] have in mind is
> denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil
> companies. The American oil companies are going to be the main
> beneficiaries of this war." In his memoir "The Right Man," David Frum,
> the former Bush speechwriter and neocon par excellence, wrote that
> Bush's campaign to bring freedom to the Middle East would also "bring
> new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool of oil."
> After the conservative public interest group Judicial Watch filed a
> Freedom of Information Act request, a court ordered the Commerce
> Department to turn over documents from Cheney's Task Force; among them
> are Iraq oil maps and lists of foreign suitors for Iraqi oil-field
> contracts. And, of course, there's the fact that, as Baghdad burned
> immediately after the 2003 invasion, the only government building the
> Americans saw fit to protect was the oil ministry.
>
> This doesn't prove that oil was the only factor in the war, and that
> Israel had nothing to do with it. But it does suggest that oil was at
> least a factor, casting some doubt on Walt and Mearsheimer's assertion
> that "the war was due in large part to the lobby's influence, especially
> the neoconservatives within it."
>
> Perhaps they don't find any of the available evidence about the role of
> oil compelling, but that's not what they argue -- they simply ignore it.
> A similar pattern repeats throughout "The Israel Lobby." There is little
> nuance and few caveats; facts that run contrary to their thesis are
> simply left out or, in a few cases, twisted. In his response, Dershowitz
> finds several factual errors that make the authors seem strangely
> careless. Most relate to the moral case against Israel.
>
> As realists, Walt and Mearsheimer generally oppose giving idealism an
> important role in foreign policy decision-making. But because they argue
> in "The Israel Lobby" that considerations of morality can't account for
> America's support for Israel, they have to engage in moral arguments.
> "Viewed objectively, Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral
> basis for privileging it over the Palestinians," they write.
>
> As Walt and Mearsheimer surely know, that's a striking and hugely
> controversial claim. So it's odd that they weren't more careful in
> trying to back it up. Much of their case is compelling, but it is
> undermined by their own errors.
>
> They are certainly correct when they write that, while Israel's creation
> was largely a response to horrific crimes against the Jews, "[T]he
> creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent
> third party: the Palestinians.
>
> "Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from
> benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs," they continue, citing the
> work of famed Israeli historian Benny Morris. "The Arab inhabitants did
> resist the Zionists' encroachments, which is hardly surprising given
> that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands.
> The Zionists responded vigorously, and neither side owns the moral high
> ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the
> creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved explicit acts of ethnic
> cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews."
>
> All this has been documented, although it's not the whole story. If
> Americans tend to believe that Israel has the moral upper hand over the
> Palestinians, it's not because of the conditions of the country's
> founding, it's because of decades of Arab aggression and Palestinian
> terrorism. Amazingly, Walt and Mearsheimer don't even mention Fatah or
> Black September, Munich or Entebbe. One might argue that Israel has
> killed more Palestinians than visa versa, but it doesn't change the role
> of spectacular Palestinian terrorism in shaping American attitudes
> toward Israel.
>
> Worse still is the way Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes subtly twist the
> historical record to make their case against Israel even more damning.
> Dershowitz catches them quoting David Ben-Gurion strikingly out of
> context: "Ben-Gurion is ... quoted by Mearsheimer and Walt as saying
> that 'it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab
> population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion,' making it seem
> as if Ben-Gurion was advocating a 'brutal compulsion.' But they omit
> what Ben-Gurion said after that: 'but we should in no way make it part
> of our programme.' By omitting Ben-Gurion's critical conclusions, they
> falsely suggest that Ben-Gurion was proposing the opposite of what he
> said."
>
> They do something similar, though less serious, when they write that the
> Jewish newspaper the Forward once described Paul Wolfowitz as "the most
> hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration." As Forward editor
> J.J. Goldberg noted in an editorial, "A check of the endnotes shows that
> the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the
> conventional wisdom, not the Forward's view. The article was about a
> pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian
> rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong."
>
> Walt and Mearsheimer also confuse critical issues about Israeli
> citizenship, which they say is "based on the principal of blood
> kinship." That's simply not true -- as Dershowitz writes, "In reality, a
> person of any ethnicity or religion can become an Israeli citizen. In
> fact, approximately a quarter of Israel's citizens are not Jewish, a
> higher percentage of minority citizenry than in nearly any other country
> ... The paper's authors confuse Israel's law of return -- which was
> designed to grant asylum to those who were victims of anti-Semitism,
> including non-Jewish relatives of Jews -- with its law of citizenship."
>
> These errors, and others like them, don't nullify the paper's thesis,
> but they're evidence of a weird haphazardness. This is an enormously
> sensitive subject, but Walt and Mearsheimer's approach is too often
> clumsy and crude. That's especially true in their discussion of the
> divided loyalties of some American Jews, and of the pro-war
> manipulations of the lobby. They conflate groups that are merely
> sympathetic to Israel with those that actively back the hard-line
> policies of the Likud. Though they try to draw distinctions between the
> lobby and American Jewry more generally, they occasionally use the two
> terms interchangeably, citing Jewish campaign donations, for example, as
> evidence of the lobby's power.
>
> "The Lobby also has significant leverage over the Executive branch,"
> they write. "That power derives in part from the influence Jewish voters
> have on presidential elections. Despite their small numbers in the
> population (less than 3 percent), they make large campaign donations to
> candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that
> Democratic presidential candidates 'depend on Jewish supporters to
> supply as much as 60 percent of the money.'" This treatment of Jewish
> money as a monolithic force is both ugly and misleading; the agenda of
> liberal donors like George Soros and Peter Lewis is quite different from
> that of a hardcore Israel supporter like Jack Rosen, head of the
> American Jewish Congress. Anyway, the fact that Jews are crucial funders
> of Democrats is not evidence of their power over an executive branch
> that has been Republican for most of the last 25 years.
>
> One could go on and on in this way, listing logical errors and
> over-generalizations. And that's unfortunate, because it clouds what is
> valuable in "The Israel Lobby." Walt and Mearsheimer are correct, after
> all, in arguing that discussion about Israel is hugely circumscribed in
> mainstream American media and politics. Citing the liberal, pro-Israel
> journalist Eric Alterman, they write that the public debate among Middle
> East pundits "is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing
> Israel. [Alterman] lists 61 columnists and commentators who can be
> counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.
> Conversely, Alterman found just five pundits who consistently criticize
> Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally
> publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of
> opinion clearly favors the other side." A person who got all their
> information from the American media would have little idea about the
> ways Jewish settlers continue to appropriate land in the West Bank,
> harassing local Palestinian farmers and uprooting their crops. Indeed,
> one can find far more critical coverage of the Israeli occupation in
> liberal Israeli newspapers like Haaretz than in any American daily.
>
> And this gets at the real problem. It's not that the lobby supports
> Israel, it's that it consistently supports right-wing, irredentist
> factions in Israel. In doing so, it is out of step with most American
> Jewish opinion as well as much Israeli opinion, and yet it manages to
> act as if it speaks for both groups. The result is American policies
> that tacitly accept Israel expansionism, despite the fact that most
> American Jews favor territorial concessions. There are structural
> explanations for why the Israel lobby has been able to amass such
> influence despite how unrepresentative it is. Walt and Mearsheimer,
> unfortunately, lack the subtlety to explore them.
>
> A few others have, though -- Michael Massing wrote a hugely informative
> article about the Israel lobby for the American Prospect in 2002. Those
> who are most adept at influencing government policy in the Middle East,
> Massing wrote, "do not necessarily represent the broad range of Jewish
> views on the subject. At a time when Palestinian terror bombings grow
> more horrific daily and Israel military action in the occupied
> territories grows steadily harsher, the bias in political representation
> has complicated negotiations and reduced the likelihood that the United
> States will be able to mediate the conflict successfully."
>
> As Massing explained, the two most important pro-Israel lobbying outfits
> are AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
> Organizations. Both are controlled by hard-liners and have been
> consistently biased toward the Likud, so much so that, as Massing
> writes, when the Labor Party's Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister, he
> told AIPAC that it would no longer be Jerusalem's representative in
> Washington. "[I]n contrast to the bullish statements AIPAC had issued on
> behalf of the Likud government, its board remained largely silent on
> Rabin's peace initiative," Massing wrote.
>
> Indeed, AIPAC went out of its way to sabotage Rabin. In 1995, wrote
> Massing, its board "took up an issue calculated to impede Rabin's
> efforts: the location of the U.S. embassy in Israel." Like most
> countries, the United States had its embassy in Tel Aviv because of
> Jerusalem's contested status. Under Oslo, talks on the future of the
> city were set to begin in 1996. "Flexing its muscle in Congress, [AIPAC]
> got 93 of 100 senators to sign a letter urging the administration to
> move the embassy by 1999, regardless of what happened in the
> negotiations. Going further, it got Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who was
> preparing to run for president against Bill Clinton, to introduce a bill
> that would make the transfer mandatory by that year."
>
> That bill was opposed by both Clinton and, importantly, the Israeli
> government. "Members of the Likud, by contrast, were jubilant," Massing
> wrote. This episode goes to show that the Israel lobby is not, as Walt
> and Mearsheimer say, "a de facto agent for a foreign government." It is,
> rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that encompasses
> Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and gentile. The power
> of this movement is deeply troubling -- it perverts American political
> discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab world, destroys many
> Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel. But to conflate this
> movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that is what Walt and
> Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently.
>
> They note the difference between the two, but then they ignore it,
> writing, for example, "There are also Jewish senators and congressmen
> who work to make U.S. foreign policy support Israel's interests." They
> argue as if there's no need to point out the distinction between, say,
> Joe Lieberman, one of the Iraq war's staunchest supporters, and Russ
> Feingold, one of its steadiest opponents. In their formulation, the fact
> that a congressman is Jewish creates suspicion of dual loyalties.
>
> This accounts for some of the shock commentators have felt reading "The
> Israel Lobby." While some of the outrage is part of the predictable
> hysteria that accompanies any serious criticism of Israel, there's more
> to it than that. There is, after all, a reason for the taboo surrounding
> talk of Jewish power and treachery. Tales of Jewish groups using money
> and secret influence to twist politics for their own, unpatriotic ends
> are a hallmark of reaction, spouted by everyone from the Nazis to Father
> Charles Coughlin to David Duke. Walt and Mearsheimer are not
> anti-Semites, or aligned with anti-Semitic forces. They seem, however,
> somewhat oblivious as to why the issue they've taken on is so horribly
> sensitive, and they make little effort to address the causes of the
> taboo they're trying to dislodge.
>
> "They overlook the fact that the notion of this Jewish cabal with
> mystical powers has been an excuse for genocide for centuries," says the
> Forward's Goldberg, adding that you have to be careful "if you're going
> to wander into that."
>
> Likewise, there is a history to countries, during crises of national
> morale, blaming their predicaments on Jewish manipulation. This is part
> of what frightens Goldberg. "America right now, I think people are going
> nuts," he says. "You look at all the things going on, the Arctic is
> melting, the world hates us, we've bankrupted ourselves as a nation, you
> can name three or four things that are inconceivably bad. You don't want
> to blame the American public -- we elected this guy, twice. We can't be
> that nuts. Somebody must have done this to us."
>
> For Goldberg, the paper is a worrying sign that a domestic version of
> the Dolchstosslegende -- the conviction that Germany lost World War I
> because Jews "stabbed it in the back" -- could somehow take root in
> America. "If Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer can buy into this stuff,
> I guess anybody can," says Goldberg. "I actually didn't believe it was
> possible. I'm one of those weirdoes who thought it wasn't going to
> happen here. I found their document scary because it is so illogical and
> so passionate."
>
> Goldberg grants that Walt and Mearsheimer are "right that the Jewish
> community and the pro-Israel lobby, separately and in different ways,
> make it hard to have a debate, partly on purpose and partly because
> there's a level of emotion there." Before a rational discussion can
> proceed, some of that emotion has to be defused. Instead, it's been
> stoked.
>
> Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer will likely pay a professional price,
> one that exceeds whatever criticism they deserve for their maladroit
> arguments. Walt will soon be stepping down from his job as academic dean
> -- something he says was in the works well before the paper's
> publication -- and it's unlikely he'll ever be put in such a position
> again. "It is too soon to tell what all of the repercussions will be,
> but we believed going into this that both of us would pay a significant
> price in our professional lives," says Mearsheimer. "We think, for
> example, that it would be almost impossible for Steve to ever be a
> high-level administrator at Harvard or any other top university. It is
> also highly unlikely that either one of us would ever get appointed to
> an important government position after this article. Plus there will be
> conferences and meetings that we won't be invited to because of the
> piece."
>
> Other ambitious academicians may take notice and leave this subject
> alone, even if they could shed more light on it than Walt and
> Mearsheimer did. It would be a strange irony indeed if as a result of
> their attempt to break the taboo, it ended up stronger than ever.
>
> -- By Michelle Goldberg
>
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