BACKLASH OVER ANTI-ISRAEL, JEWISH CONSPIRACY BOOK

Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel - Patricia Cohen
The forthcoming publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt is stirring a backlash, with several institutions backing away from holding events with the authors. An article last spring in the London Review of Books outlining their argument - that a powerful pro-Israel lobby has a pernicious influence on American policy - set off a firestorm of charges of anti-Semitism and shoddy scholarship.

Opponents are prepared. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control by Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, includes a foreword by former secretary of state George P. Shultz who says the notion that pro-Israel groups "have anything like a uniform agenda, and that U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East is the result of their influence, is simply wrong....This is a conspiracy theory pure and simple, and scholars at great universities should be ashamed to promulgate it." (New York Times)