Regarding Cravatts:
If the Israel lobby were able to attain its objectives through legitimate, rational and honest means, it wouldn't need to rely so heavily, and so conspicuously, on black ops, intimidation, bullying, threats, censorship, disinformation, blackmail, emotional appeals, illegal spying, lies, bribery, personal attacks, financial coercion, verbal violence, blacklisting and similar tactics.
The Israel lobby is a radically different kind of lobby than every other lobby in American political life: it is much more sinister.
Nothing has been more effective in proving Mearsheimer's and Walt's thesis than the methods that the Israel lobby has used to reply to it. One can criticize the oil lobby, the tobacco lobby or the military-industrial complex in America without being subjected to the deluge of fanatical hatred which Mearsheimer and Walt have endured in recent weeks. Where there is so much visible verbal violence in evidence, you can be guaranteed that there are less visible black ops in play.
The central role that the Israel lobby has played in engineering the Iraq War, and in now agitating for an Iran War, may well prove to be a turning point in its career in the United States. It is not going to be able to deny its activities on these matters, after splattering them all over the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN for the last four years. Major historians are going to have a field day in sorting through and analyzing this material. Mearsheimer and Walt are just the beginning of the process.
The smartest thing for the Israel lobby to do would be to back off and greatly lower its profile. But it won't do this. The more it is challenged, the greater its extremism.
Increasingly, and especially after reading John Hagee's latest book, I am beginning to realize that the Israel lobby bears all the hallmarks of a radical cult -- Jonestown writ large.
Think I am being alarmist? On the relations between the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and Christian Armageddonist John Hagee, see:
One thing is for certain: the Israel lobby doesn't represent the views of the majority of Jews in America.
LeaNder <l.l.hahn@web.de> wrote:
--- In political-research@yahoogroups.com, "Sean McBride"
<smcbride2@...> wrote:
I will, even managed to find it on the Havard site after a while
without your link. Not now though, I have my own reading list at the
moment, I am trying to get at possible roots in the discussion of the
multiculturalism vs the melting pot, that has been fascinating me for
quite some time now. Or more precisely the US scholor's position in
the debate that multiculturalism is a(n elite sponsored) strategy to
divide the masses in little enclaves that then fight each other.
What really puzzles me though is the statement by Cravatts:
"The characterization of pro-Israel lobbying byorganizations and
high-placed government officials as "manipulation"-coercive,
underhanded actions whose end result would not otherwise honestly,
fairly, or reasonably be achieved-this language is the very tone that
has drawn such immediate and thunderous denunciation of the piece."
Isn't this somehow business as usual in politics?
-b
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