Monday, September 10, 2007
Jeff Robbins on the influence of foreign oil money as opposed to domestic-sourced lobbying: Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Israel Lobby
Georgetown and Harvard had no apparent qualms about accepting Prince Alwaleed's money. The director of Georgetown's newly-renamed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center rejected any suggestion that the Saudi magnate was attempting to use Saudi oil wealth to influence American policy in the Middle East. "There is nothing wrong with [Prince Alwaleed] expressing his opinion on American foreign policy," he said. "Clearly, it was done in a constructive way."...
...Although the aggressive deployment of petrodollars and oil-based influence from foreign sources aimed at advancing a pro-Arab line constitutes "nothing wrong" as far as Israel's critics are concerned, a new political fashion holds that there is something very wrong indeed about American Jews and other American backers of Israel expressing their support for Israel, and urging their political leaders to join them in that support.
Our major newspapers and networks, with correspondents in Israel able to take advantage of an Israeli political system that is a free-for-all and an astonishingly vibrant and self-critical Israeli press, report daily on every twist and turn of the conflict and are very frequently critical of Israel. As for American campuses, most objective observers would have little difficulty concluding that far from being criticism-free, they are in fact dominated by critics of Israel. Clearly, as strangleholds on criticism go, whatever stranglehold the pro-Israel community has on debate in the U.S. is a very loose one indeed.
If the charge that American Jews are able to stifle criticism of Israel is simply silly, the leveling of the charge that there is something nefarious about Jews urging support for the Jewish state raises questions about whether Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have descended into a certain ugliness. And the tactic of trying to neutralize those questions by loudly predicting that they will be asked, however clever a tactic it may be, does not neutralize them.
It is apparently the authors' position that, even in the face of the overwhelming leverage of an Arab world swimming in petrodollars, with a lock on the U.N. and an unlimited ability to pay for pro-Arab public relations, American Jews are obliged to stay silent. In essence, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have repackaged the "the-Jews-run-the-country" stuff which has long been the bread and butter of anti-Semites...
Related: The Ford Foundation is coming under fire again for funding a panel at which Mearsheimer will be speaking on academic freedom: Engel ‘Disappointed' by Ford Forum for Mearsheimer
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, co-author of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" with Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is scheduled to speak at Columbia's Heyman Center for the Humanities next month on the issue of free speech in academia. The October 30 panel, titled "Freedom and the University," is funded with a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for research and speaking events related to academic freedom...
Goal of Israel Lobby: to keep Saudi Arabia from depriving Israelis of their way of life in a way which is permanent.
Goal of Saudi Lobby: to deprive infidels their way of life in a way that is permanent.
and besides, if Mearsheimer does as well at Columbia as he did in a recent appearance in Baltimore, where he conceeded that Israel and "the Lobby" weren't prime movers and shakers behind the invasion of Iraq, who knows what else he might blurt out.
I hate to say this, but your second, "related" item seems to contradict your first.
In any case, I think that anyone who looks at the role of AIPAC but not that of the Saudis and oil companies, as well as the legions of retired diplomats who do p.r. for Arab countries, is not playing a fair game.
What is supposed to be the source for Jewish power? Jewish organizations collect money, but mainly from middle class or upper middle class donors. The dollars they can muster can't compare with that of the Saudis.
Jews protest against this or that speaker? Ill advised, since they provide more ammunition to the other side while achieving little, but I don't think that they'd be as effective as they sometimes are if the venues being protested didn't also fear opposition from the general public.
Votes? I wonder about that. I keep hearing about the power of Jewish voters. But even though Jews vote in high numbers, there are still rather few of them. Also, they mostly vote consistently Democratic (like the blacks and Hispanics), and it wouldn't make much difference if they didn't. Why? From what I can tell, the only swing state where there is a large critical mass of Jews is Florida. In other states where there are a number of Jew--like New York or New Jersey or California--the vote is mostly Democratic anyway.
I think that people who protest against Jewish power ignore two points that are the real sources of support for Israel: a general political culture that remains largely pro-Israel by tradition, and the fact that Israel is perceived by most American presidents, and by intelligence agencies, as a strategic asset, a dependable ally.
If a better, more productive and more stable ally were to emerge in the Middle East, then things would change. Especially if that were an ally that didn't cost us $3 billion a year. If our general public would go the way of Europeans and be more amenable to outspoken pro-Palestinianism, that would also make a difference. And there'd be very little that AIPAC or the ADL or Dershowitz could do.
I don't think these professors are really anti-Semitic. What they are is worse than run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism because it affects everybody, Jews and non-Jews, in the U.S. Hear me out --
Walt and Mearsheimer are utilizing the same anti-Semitic tactics as despots who wish to distract their subjects from the malignant social ills that they themselves foster, but unlike despots who fabricate Jewish conspiracy theories out of a combination of opportunism and actual hate, these professors have written their essay and book based on the former motivation alone, opportunism.
Like bank robbers, their motivation for this outrage is primarily because “the Jews are thereâ€, are the target du jour of the Islamofascists (for now!), and have proven useful as punching bags to countless others in history.
The professors’ writings show no respect for the Jewish people and for their past persecutions, but the professors are not anti-Semitic, just amoral and opportunistic. Accusations of anti-Semitism are a distraction from the real issues.
Walt and Mearscheimer know full well there is no super-powerful "Jewish Lobbyâ€, that the pro-Israel lobbyists have competing counterparts representing many other causes and countries, and that the pro-Israel lobby is not particularly remarkable in this environment. They know full well that the misrepresentations of fact, omissions, things taken out of context, logical errors, etc. in their prior paper and this book are indeed risible, the trash produced by dilettantes, not by serious researchers.
But they don't care.
What would make them produce such garbage?
Fear of Islamofascism, and the standards of (mis)conduct that come right from the halls of academia with which they've lived their lives, notably amorality and betrayal of friends when some self-interest is served. (For professors, it's usually money and status.) They are clearly enthralled with university culture and attempting to export that pathologic "culture" to the rest of the world.
What is the "gain" here? In the main, I do think the reason d'atre of their book is one of appeasement and surrender to Islamofascism.
A few hundred million insane bloodthirsty Arabs and other followers of the death cult of Islam calling for Death to Israel and Death to America: what better way to appease them than writing a book that the authors hope will cause the U.S. to hang Israel out to dry in the face of genocidal maniacs, groups and countries like Hezbollah, Hamas, Ahmadinejad, Syria and Iran?
In fact, they are not anti-Semites. Rather, they are equal opportunity amoralists. If the Islamofascists were chanting “Death to Mexico! Death to America!â€, Walt and Mearsheimer would undoubtedly craft conspiracy theories that might justify allowing Osama and his minions to relocate from Waziristan to Acapulco.
University professors are renowned for turning on their friends, students and colleagues at the drop of a hat, if they see a personal gain in doing so. They could care less about ruining careers and lives. See for example, “Academic Tyranny: The Tale and the Lessonsâ€, Robert Weissberg, Review of Policy Research, Vol. 15 no. 4 P. 99-110, Dec. 1998, and especially "Authorship: The Coin of the Realm, The Source of Complaints" by Wilcox, Journal of the AMA, Vol. 280 No. 3, July 15, 1998 that describes how stealing of others’ work and career-ending professorial retaliation against those who complain is common at Walt's university, Harvard. Of course see www.thefire.org as well.
So, Walt and Mearsheimer wrote this book in all its faux-academic glory in the cowardly and academic-culture-inspired hope of spearheading a U.S. betrayal of its friend, Israel, in their hope that this will satiate the Islamofascists' appetite for blood and "honor."
They are incredibly reckless in this regard. Their book is quite socially irresponsible (not a new thing for academia). Their whole theme, abandonment of friends for supposed secondary gain, i.e., the appeasement of a brutal terrorist killer culture, is explicitly amoral (and likely immoral as well for those of us not prone to moral relativism) as well as anti-American.
They are using this book and likely their educational pulpits with students as a weapon, with the desired collateral damage of weakening the U.S. (Does anyone even need to ask anymore why Ivy professors might be against a strong United States?)
Walt and Mearsheimer, through their arrogance, stupidity, and exportation of academia’s amoral tyranny, are tacitly working for our enemies.
These professors are out of control, like a runaway locomotive, thanks to the cheerful support of opportunistic anti-Semites and the MSM (I’m not sure those two are entirely separable). They need to be stopped – however, accusations of anti-Semitism are a distraction and they know it.
Walt and Mearsheimer have more in common with Arthur Neville Chamberlain than David Ernest Duke or Alfred Charles Sharpton.
That said, as Abraham Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and many others as well have observed (documented at the CAMERA - Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America story “Updated Roundup of Coverage of the Walt/Mearsheimer Israel Lobby Controversy†at http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=189&x_article=1105), Walt & Mearsheimer's faux-scholarship is "riddled with errors" that tend to slant it "in the exact same direction, thus we are dealing not with a little unfortunate carelessness but with a culpable degree of bias."
I submit again that their "carelessness and bias" is most likely knowing and deliberate, but not due to anti-Semitism. Its purpose is promoting appeasement and the weakening of America, at a cost to Israelis and Jews the professors are indifferent to and simply don't care about, typical of Ivy professors who want their way, period.
There is a term for deliberate and knowing falsification in academia for any secondary purpose:
Academic Fraud.
Walt and Mearshiemer have placed themselves in the same league as Finkelstein, Chomsky, and other academic fabricators.
Charges of anti-Semitism are a distraction from their motivations. Charges of academic incompetence are not highly credible considering the experience, resources and positions of these professors.
Charges of deliberate academic fraud are, I believe, closer to reality, and perhaps hold the key to successful challenging of this dangerous charade.
In summary, Walt and Mearsheimer’s distortions are knowing and deliberate, in the interest of appeasement of Islamofascism and the weakening of the “imperialist AmeriKKKa.†The Israelis and Jews make good cannon fodder because “they’re there†and have a historical track record of serving this purpose for despots. W&M malign the Jews not out of anti-Semitism but out of amoral academic convenience.
This is worse than run-of-the-mill professorial anti-Semitism due to its generalized, nihilistic stupidity.
My only hope is that these professors are doing this of their own volition, and that there are no “handlers†involved.
- ERIS
Mearsheimer and Walt will speak at Cambridge Forum on Monday, October 29 at 7:30 pm. Cambridge Forum is held at 3 Church Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge. For more info: Cambridge Forum
The endgame of M&W is cutting Israel loose, stopping all American aid, cooperation and support, either militarily or politically, and invest those resources in the much more profitable Arab states. Some would say that this hardly counts for antisemitism. Their hostility to Israel derives not from personal animus towards Jews but from a purely business, economic and political sense: There are 400 million Arabs and 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. Interest dictates that the wishes of such a vast number of people will prevail over the safeguarding of the tiny Jewish minority from which little profit can be extracted.
So in order to let this interest get its heyday, they must create the correct atmosphere, make a case of the vileness of Israel and its bidders, the powerful Jews of America. And if a lie, no matter how big, is needed to make that case, then lie they will.
It is very simple. Antisemitism is defamation writ large. M&W defame and lie in order to make Jews appear criminal and power-hungry. So while they may not be antisemitic in inclination, they are antisemitic in fact. A Soprano-like morality prevails: the harm done to the other is not instigated by any personal animus. Strictly business.
So when they deny any antisemitic motivation, they cannot be taken seriously. One thing an antisemite cannot do is determine who is an antisemite.
A local talk show host, Michael A. Smerconish, who I previously thought to be pro-Israel, has bought into what Walt & Mearsheimer are selling, hook, line and sinker. Then again, his favourite guest (or one of his favourite guests), is Michael Scheuer, who is also no friend of Israel.
Looks like I am going to lose my one and only conservative talk show in the area..............
I saw that, here. CAIR is touting it in their latest email. Too bad, I remember the radio stint in Israel he's talking about. It's still online.
It's too bad, but let's also acknowledge that sometimes people *can* actually be a little quick with AS card.
The Walt & Mearsheimer bandwagon just picked up another member, local (in my area) talking head Michael A. Smerconish. I had thought that he was a fairly reliable supporter of Israel, but that is not the case. I guess that he shouldn't be surprised; one of his favourite guests--if not his favourite--is Michael Scheuer, who definitely dislikes Israel.
BHG
BHG,
Smerconish's "mentor" in law was James Beasley of the medical malpractice firm Beasley Casey Erbstein in Philadelphia. Big time leftists.
One of the partners of the firm, a colleague of Smerconish, was a drunk and on drugs and it resulted in about 15 major malpractice cases being dropped because the lawyer Tom Smith was ignoring the court requests for reponses. The cases miraculously got reinstated a few years later, but at great loss to the victims.
I do not make this up. See http://www.aopc.org/OpPosting/disciplinaryboard/dboardopinions/21DB2000-Smith.pdf
Interesting info, Anonymous, but Smerconish is a Republican.
BHG
Israel serves to address Genesis 16:12 which I believe to be a medical diagnosis.