WALT AND MEARSHEIMER'S FRAUDULENT "SCHOLARSHIP"

The Fraudulent Scholarship of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer (CAMERA)

"Israel Lobby" professors Walt and Mearsheimer charge that because of its alleged misdeeds Israel is an unworthy ally of the U.S., and cite as proof numerous seemingly damaging "quotations" from Israeli leaders. The problem is that all the quotations are from secondary sources or worse, and all are false.

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IS OLMERT CHANNELING CARTER, WALT AND MEARSHEIMER?

Olmert's Bizarre Reading List (Contentions)
Thanks to their highly controversial recent publications, former President Jimmy Carter and the academic tag-team of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have become persona non grata in much of the American Jewish community. Carter’s Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid argued that Israeli settlement in the West Bank—not terrorism, nor the ascendancy of Hamas—is the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy argued that U.S. policy in the Middle East is primarily driven by “American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests.”

Yet while the American Jewish community was busy debating whether these authors were anti-Semitic, conspiratorial, or simply misguided, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was apparently leafing through the two bestselling tomes for sound-bite material. Consider Olmert’s bizarre press statements following last week’s Annapolis Conference, in which he framed his pursuit of negotiations with terms perfectly agreeable to Cater, Walt, and Mearsheimer.

First, Olmert conceded to Carter’s claim that Israel faces a choice between peace or apartheid, saying:

If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.

Then, borrowing a page from the Walt-Mearsheimer playbook, Olmert argued that Israel must choose peace over apartheid to satisfy its supporters in the United States, who are essential to the Jewish state’s survival; as he told Haaretz:

The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.

Olmert should be taken to task for his carelessness. For starters, perhaps he needs to be reminded of his primary constituency. Olmert represents Israelis, and will need Israelis’ broad support to make the painful concessions that peace will require. It is truly hard to imagine Israelis being swayed by the prospective loss of American Jewish moral support for their government’s decisions, particularly when peace carries substantial risks for their personal security, first and foremost.

Furthermore, Olmert should be reminded of his secondary constituency: Palestinians, who will hardly be motivated to support peace with an Israeli prime minister who frames negotiations as a means of avoiding institutionalized racism. At least one Egyptian newspaper was aglow with headlines noting that the Israeli Prime Minister compared his state to apartheid South Africa. This is public diplomacy at its worst.

Olmert is going to have to learn to better represent Israelis and more effectively address Palestinians if forthcoming negotiations are to have any chance. On the other hand, in case negotiations fail, Olmert has done a good job of opening up a future position as a Middle East Fellow at the Carter Center.

CONSPIRACISTS HAVE IT BACKWARDS: JEWS HAVE TOO LITTLE POWER

Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close by Ruth Wisse (Wash Post)
These days, it's becoming downright chic to hint forebodingly that America's Jews are just too powerful. But whether it's the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt or former president Jimmy Carter, those who accuse modern Jews of having excessive clout are getting it precisely backward. In the real world, Jews have too little power and influence. They also have too little self-confidence about defending themselves.

Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California? If Jews are so powerful, why does Israel attract twice as many venture-capital investments as all of Europe, even while it's the only one of the United Nations' 192 member states that has been charged with racism for the crime of its existence? How powerful is that?

In fact, there's an excellent historical reason why Jewish intellectual achievement sits alongside political weakness. Simply put, Jewish achievement in other areas has come at the expense of political strength, and the strange relationship of Jews and power has made them history's favorite prey. Centuries of survival in other people's lands prevented Jews from achieving full acceptance -- and access to the levers of government. Some individual Jews may have lived large, but the Jewish people as a whole lived on sufferance, afraid to antagonize those from whom they sought tolerance.

These questions mean a lot to me. I'm often asked how I, a teacher of Yiddish literature, came to write about politics. But remember that the Yiddish language, developed by European Jews over almost a thousand years, was practically erased along with them in a mere six, 1939-45. So studying Yiddish literature, almost by definition, concentrates the mind on Jewish political disabilities.

When Jerusalem was crushed by Rome in the year 70 -- so brutally that, according to the historian Josephus, "no one visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited" -- some Jews stayed on, but the vast majority made their homes in foreign lands. For more than 18 centuries, Jews survived as a nation without three basic staples of nationhood: land, central government and independent means of self-defense.

Instead, Jews turned to strategies of accommodation. They provided goods and services to their gentile neighbors in return for being allowed to stay in the country. They became money-lenders, bankers, minters, craftsmen, midwives -- trades that gentiles would let them perform and that allowed Jews to observe their calendar, customs and religious laws. But they had no independent way to protect their achievements.

Unlike their Christian and Muslim overlords, Jews had good reasons to avoid irking those from whom they sought acceptance. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who called conversion to Christianity his "ticket of admission" to European culture, likened Jews to a prince whom "black magic" had transformed into a dog: "All week long he goes on scraping/Through life's excrement and sweepings/To the mockery of jeers of street boys." Only on Friday evenings, while ushering the Sabbath into his own home, does the dog resume its human shape. Heine saw that the humiliation of the Jews was offset by a moral serenity, and that their moral serenity was offset by acute political vulnerability.

The creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, after the carnage of the Holocaust, was supposed to change all this. But the newly formed Arab League made opposition to Israel the only common goal of its otherwise quarrelsome membership. The new United Nations, tribune of emerging post-colonial nations, did not protect Israel from assault, and over time the world body became a party to the Arab League's war against Jewish statehood.

Of course, Israel now had an army, and a formidable one at that. But the Israel Defense Forces did not change the Jews' existential condition as a minority; Israel was now a minority among the nations, contending with Arab states that sought to dominate or destroy it. Israel still lived by strategies of accommodation, trying to supply its neighborhood with useful services and goods such as medical, agricultural and technological know-how. In the 1990s, utopians such as Shimon Peres, now Israel's president, hailed a "new Middle East" of economic and political cooperation. When Peres and Israel's late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin installed Yasser Arafat as the head of a Palestinian proto-state, they began another doomed Jewish political experiment -- making Israel, as best I can figure, the first country in the world ever to arm its enemy in hopes of gaining security.

What about American Jewry? Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting U.S. ones. So have American Jews really begun to mobilize effectively to protect Israel, or are people again overstating Jewish power and its supposed dangers?

Consider the halls of ivy where, if anywhere, the intellectual firepower of Jews might be expected to be on display in defense of Jewish interests. At Columbia University, the late Edward Said used his authority as a teacher of comparative literature to apologize for Palestinian terrorism and condone Arab violence against Israel, including, in one instance, by personal example. (In 2000, a photographer for a French news agency snapped him in southern Lebanon tossing a rock toward an Israeli position.) Much of the Jewish professoriat looked the other way or signed his petitions.

Elsewhere in the academy, Jewish professors themselves lead the anti-Israel barrage. In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt expected Jewish organizations to sponsor their talks and complained of "censorship" when the groups did not. Clearly, there is nothing quite as fun -- or as lucrative -- as baiting Jews.

This is not the whole story, though. American Jews have learned from experience, and the United States has encouraged their maturation. During the 1970s and '80s, American Jews who were inspired by the biblical imperative to "redeem the captive" helped free their fellow Jews under Soviet rule. The Soviet Jewry movement gained traction in part because its goals coincided with Washington's Cold War strategy of encouraging communism to collapse from within.

Likewise, in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, American Jews can draw confidence from another intersection of interests, this time between Israeli and U.S. self-defense. The Arab war against Israel and radical Islam's war against the United States are in almost perfect alignment, which means that resistance to one supports resistance to the other. "We are all Jews now," former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. said after the September 2001 attacks. "We should all reflect upon the historic reality that when anti-Semitism raises its head, the rest of us, unless we are willing to live with a foot on our necks, will be the next targets." Since the days of Pharaoh, Jews have functioned as a lodestar of religious and political freedom: The Jews' attackers oppose such liberties, and their defenders promote them. The attackers have included Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, extreme nationalist parties from France to Poland, Arab autocrats trying to hold onto power and Islamist challengers trying to seize it. This rule of thumb has less to do with Jewish actions than with those who deal in anti-Jewish politics. A small people whose foes are prone to hugely inflate their image, Jews make a handy scapegoat for dictators. In its August meetings, according to the Hudson Institute, the "revamped" U.N. Human Rights Council directed three-quarters of its indictments of individual states against Israel -- and 2 percent against the thuggish regime running Burma.

I understand why some Jews and Israelis try to escape this assault through assimilation or denial, or even by joining their assailants. It's seductive to hope that by accommodating our enemies, we will be allowed to live in peace. But the strategy of accommodation that historically turned Jews into a no-fail target is the course least likely to stop ongoing acts of aggression against them. Indeed, anti-Jewish politics will end only when those who practice it accept the democratic values of religious pluralism and political choice -- or are forced to pay a high enough price for flouting them.

ISRAEL CONSPIRATISTS GATHER IN CHICAGO

Critics of Israel lobby gather on Mearsheimer's home turf By Ben Harris (JTA)
CHICAGO (JTA) -- Collectively, they have published more than a hundred books and countless articles. Four are tenured professors at elite American universities. Internet searches reveal them to be widely cited experts on international affairs and American foreign policy.

But there they were last week, at a conference hosted by the University of Chicago -- Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Tony Judt and fellow travelers -- warning that pressure from American Jewish groups is having a chilling effect on unpopular scholarship and freewheeling debate on university campuses.

"Universities are the one place in the United States where Israel tends to get treated like a normal country," said Mearsheimer, the University of Chica ... Full Story

COLBERT MOCKS MEARSHEIMER

Is Israel Lobby a laughing matter? (JPost)
Stephen Colbert, whose turn as a satirical ultra-conservative TV host entertains Comedy Central audiences nightly, was trying his darnedest to understand the arguments made in his guest's book.

So, brow knitted, he turned to John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, on Tuesday night's broadcast. "You say that the Israel lobby was influential in helping push for war with Iraq. Is that because the Israeli lobby knew there were so many pro-Israeli forces ready to take over in Iraq once Saddam fell?"

"No," Mearsheimer responded as the audience laughed.

Colbert tried again. "How do they influence United States policy to make the United States the largest single supplier of arms - to Saudi Arabia? How does that benefit them?"

The audience laughed again.

Still perplexed, Colbert later asked whether the US should cut off support to Israel, to which Mearsheimer replied that the US should continue to help Israel whenever its existence was threatened.

So Colbert followed up: "If we're not going to cut off aid to them, should we at least stop sending them Christmas cards? Cause they never send them back. It's always just a snowy field and the word 'blessing.'"

Mearsheimer joined in the audience's laughter, as he did at several other points during his brief interview on The Colbert Report, a popular late-night spoof of personality-driven pundit shows like Fox News' O'Reilly Factor. But several of the Jewish critics of Mearsheimer's book who watched the show said the joke was on him.

"I don't think he did himself any help. He got up there and Colbert basically made a fool of him," said Hadar Susskind, the Washington director for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA). The JCPA is described in the book, coauthored by Stephen Walt, as being part of the "Israel Lobby", a loose-knit group of organizations accused of hijacking American policy in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel.

SUVS > JEWS

Stephen Walt's Best Reasons to Abandon Israel (CAMERA)

Photoshopped image of Stephen Walt

And the number one reason Stephen Walt thinks American should dump one of its closest and allies and the only functioning democracy in the Middle East is ... " because we all like to drive SUVs ..."

OBAMA'S CAMPAIGN WEBSITE FEATURES ATTACK ON "ISRAEL LOBBY"

Slow Lerners (WSJ-BOTW)
Oh, isn't this lovely: Barack Obama's campaign Web site is featuring an article called "The Israel Lobby--Bad for the U.S., Bad for Israel, Bad for the Jews" by the far-left Michael Lerner. In fairness, this appears on a "community blog," which we assume is an unmoderated forum for Obama fans.

UPDATED: OBAMA ADVISOR DEFENDS ANTI-SEMITIC BOOK

Obama advisor worries Israel supporters (Politico)
Barack Obama is outlining his views on the Iraq war in a major speech Wednesday in Iowa, and bringing along a gray-haired source of foreign policy gravitas: Zbigniew Brzezinksi, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, who says that Obama offers “a new definition of America's role in the world.”

With the gravity, though, comes a some baggage.

Brzezinski, 79, stepped into the crossfire this summer when he published an essay in the summer issue of the journal Foreign Policy, defending a controversial new book about the power of the “Israel Lobby” in American politics.

The book’s authors, Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, thanked him for his “incisive defense.”

SEE ALSO: Dershowitz: Obama Should Repudiate Brzezinski (NYSun)

SEE ALSO: The Zbig Lie by Noah Pollak (Contentions)
On Wednesday, the Obama campaign received an important new endorsement: Zbigniew Brzezinski, best known for having been Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, introduced Obama on the occasion of his Iraq speech in Iowa. Expect to hear a great deal from Brzezinski about his triumphs of Middle East diplomacy, which he—not to mention Jimmy Carter—is quite fond of recounting. “The fact of the matter is that I’m part of the only administration that brought about peace between Israel and its neighbors,” Brzezinski told NBC News on the day Obama delivered his Iraq policy speech. “And so I’m proud of my record in the Middle East.”

This is a deceptive attempt at rewriting history, one that Brzezinski and his gang have been pursuing for years in an effort to manufacture retroactively a success story for the Carter administration. The administration didn’t “bring about” peace between Israel and Egypt so much as hold a summit at Camp David to work out the details after Israel and Egypt had already committed themselves, independently and entirely in pursuit of their own interests, to a peace treaty. From the outset of the Carter administration, the American commitment had been not to a deal between Israel and Egypt, but to a comprehensive resolution of the Palestinian question, and it was during the administration’s busy pursuit of a renewed Geneva Conference, inclusive of the Soviet Union, Israel, and the PLO, that the Israel-Egypt deal essentially fell into Carter’s lap.

In the mid-1970’s, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian dictator, was in a bad position: The war he launched in 1973 to wrest the Sinai back from Israel had been a humiliating catastrophe, and he was under growing internal pressure to do something—anything—to salvage Egypt’s honor and retrieve its lost territory. Sidelined by the Carter administration’s focus on the Palestinians, Sadat’s only option was to pursue the Sinai through peaceful means, by directly engaging Israel. A series of monumental and previously unthinkable events took place: In November 1977, Sadat announced to the Egyptian parliament that “Israel will be astonished to hear me say now, before you, that I am prepared to go to their own house, to the Knesset itself, to talk to them.” Four days later Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin formally invited Sadat to Jerusalem, and a week later Sadat’s plane touched down at Ben Gurion airport. Sadat visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and then addressed the Knesset, declaring that “we accept living with you in peace and justice.” All of this happened entirely independent of—and actually in defiance of—the Carter administration, whose agenda in the region was entirely focused on laying the groundwork for the hoped-for Geneva Conference (which never ended up happening).

The Carter administration was caught completely off guard by this sudden rapprochement, and had no option but to try to include itself as much as possible in the dealmaking. By the time the Camp David summit was convened in September 1978, the only thorny issue left to resolve was the question of whether there would be any Israeli presence left in the Sinai as part of a peace treaty; Begin was initially intransigent on the question, but eventually conceded to a complete withdrawal. Peace between Israel and Egypt was born.

And so today, when Brzezinski brags to the press about how his dedication to diplomacy got results—as opposed, he intones, to the senseless warmongering of the Bush administration—we are witnessing a self-aggrandizing swindle, an attempt not only at enhancing the legacy of the Carter administration but of advancing the proposition that in the Middle East, peace is always possible with the right amount of skilled and dedicated American diplomacy.

The true lesson of the Egypt-Israel rapprochement is actually the opposite of what people like Brzezinski would like it to be: It is a lesson in the sometimes irrelevance of American diplomacy in forging peace between nations, and more importantly it is an example of the reality that peace between implacable foes is usually only possible when one has so thoroughly beaten the other on the battlefield that the defeated party is left with only one option, to sue for peace. People like Brzezinski would like us to believe that heroic diplomacy in 1978 midwifed a peace treaty. Candidate Obama will be ill-served listening to this nonsense.

THE "ISRAEL LOBBY" MYTH

The "Israel Lobby" Myth - George P. Shultz (U.S. News)

• Israel is a free, democratic, open, and relentlessly self-analytical place. To hear harsh criticism of Israel's policies and leaders, listen to the Israelis. So questioning Israel for its actions is legitimate, but lies are something else.
• The catalog of lies about Jews is long and astonishingly crude, matched only by the suffering that has followed their promulgation. Defaming the Jews by disputing their rightful place among the peoples of the world has been a long-running, well-documented, and disgraceful series of episodes across history. Again and again a time has come when legitimate criticism slips across an invisible line into what might be called the "badlands," a place where those who should be regarded as worthy adversaries in debate are turned into scapegoats, targets, all-purpose objects of blame.
• In America, thousands of groups vie for influence. Among these are Jewish groups that have come under renewed criticism for being part of an all-powerful "Israel lobby," most notably in a book published last week by Profs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Jewish groups also largely agree that the United States should support Israel. But the notion that they have anything like a uniform agenda and that U.S. policy in Israel and the Middle East is the result of this influence is simply wrong.
• Another tried and true method for damaging the well-being and security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel is a dangerously false analogy. Witness former President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine-Peace Not Apartheid. Here the association on the one hand is between Israel's existentially threatened position and the measures it has taken to protect its population from terrorist attacks, driven by an ideology bent on the complete eradication of the State of Israel, and, on the other, the racist oppression of South Africa's black population by the white Boer regime.
• The United States supports Israel not because of favoritism based on political pressure or influence but because the American people, and their leaders, say that supporting Israel is politically sound and morally just.
• Those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong. They are wrong because support for Israel is in our best interests. They are wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily to win America's support.

See also: California Literary Review chooses Hamas supporter to review "The Israel Lobby" (Elder of Ziyon). Who is this Hamas supporter? It's the former U.S. Senator who blames 9/11 on .... the Joooozzzzz!

See also Unfair Charge vs. Israeli Lobby - Steve Huntley
In 2003 John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago was one of nearly 1,000 American academics signing a letter suggesting Israel would exploit the U.S. invasion of Iraq to expel millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip - and maybe also Arab Israelis from Israel itself! It was a preposterous notion then and looks even more ridiculous today. The view embraced by Mearsheimer displayed a profound misunderstanding and ignorance not only of Israeli society but also of the moral culture of American Jews. The notion that 5 million Jews in Israel would carry out ethnic cleansing of more than 4 million Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and that Americans Jews would sanction it staggers the imagination. To believe that requires a bias against Israel so deep seated that it defies reality. Whether it spills over into anti-Semitism, I'll leave for you to judge. (Chicago Sun-Times)

See also Engel "Disappointed" by Ford Forum for Mearsheimer - Annie Karni
The Ford Foundation, which came under congressional scrutiny in 2003 for supporting groups committed to destroying Israel, is again drawing censure, this time for funding a panel at Columbia University highlighting a professor who blames Israel and its American supporters for the Iraq War and for al-Qaeda terrorism against America. Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 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.

"It's disappointing that the Ford Foundation would make Mearsheimer one of the highlights of what they're funding," said Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat of the Bronx. "If the Ford Foundation is going to say they've changed their attitudes, doing something like this only calls into question whether they've got the message and changed." The executive director of the NGO Monitor, Gerald Steinberg, said that by funding a panel where Mearsheimer is scheduled to speak, the Ford Foundation risks reneging on that promise by underwriting at Columbia the kind of falsehoods it was funding at Durban. "He [Mearsheimer] won't debate the assertions and the things they say," said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "They never engaged anyone from the 'lobby.' They hide behind the guise of academic freedom when they're the ones denying us free speech. It seems a little out of place for them to speak on academic freedom." (New York Sun)

IGNORING ARAB LOBBYING

Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Israel Lobby - Jeff Robbins (WSJ)
A crop of Israel's critics - most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer - have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by preemptively predicting that "the Jewish lobby" will accuse them of it.

The Saudis have not been shy about supplementing their considerable leverage in the U.S. by targeting expenditures to affect the debate over Middle East policy by funding think tanks, Middle East studies programs, advocacy groups, community centers and other institutions. Just last year Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown Universities for programs in Islamic studies.

Walt and Mearsheimer have repackaged the "the-Jews-run-the-country" stuff which has long been the bread and butter of anti-Semites. But if anti-Semitism is too harsh a term, perhaps one can conclude that "anti-Jewish bias" fits the bill here. After all, where there is nothing wrong with foreign money from Arab countries advancing a pro-Arab agenda, in Walt's and Mearsheimer's world there is something very wrong with American citizens who are Jewish exercising their civic right to speak out on behalf of Israel and taking issue with the pro-Arab agenda.

PARADE OF HORRIBLES TO RALLY FOR FINKELSTEIN

Rallying for Finkelstein
Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Tony Judt and John Mearsheimer will be convening a teach-in at DePaul in October to protest on behalf of the soon-to-be ex-DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein. (Atlantic Online)

UNDERSTANDING THE U.S.-ISRAEL ALLIANCE

Understanding the U.S.-Israel Alliance: An Israeli Response to the Walt-Mearsheimer Claim - Dore Gold (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)

• Contrary to the assertions of Professors Stephen Walt of Harvard University and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, who claim that no compelling strategic argument can explain American support for Israel, which they argue has been promoted by "the unmatched power of the Israel lobby," the two countries have, in fact, developed strong strategic ties over the years that have evolved into a unique alliance.
• As early as December 27, 1962, President John F. Kennedy told Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir: "The United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to what it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs." During the Cold War, the U.S. and Israel had a joint strategic interest in defeating the aggression of Soviet-backed rogue states in the Middle East. This began when Nasser's Egypt intervened in the Arabian Peninsula in 1962, through Yemen, and in 1970 when Syria invaded Jordan.
• Presently, Arming Israel Lessens Nuclear Danger - Ariel Ilan Roth
  Critics such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue in their forthcoming book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, that subsidized sales to Israel, like the one announced in July, are evidence of the chokehold that pro-Israel lobbyists exercise on broader U.S. foreign policy in the volatile Middle East. In reality, these subsidized sales are not so much a chokehold as a cork: Supplying Israel with large quantities of advanced conventional weapons keeps the Mideast nuclear genie in its bottle for a little longer. This is precisely what the U.S. wants and an incontestable national strategic interest. (Baltimore Sun)U.S.-Israeli defense ties have grown even tighter. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 15, 2007, USEUCOM commander General Bantz J. Craddock stated that Israel was America's "closest ally" in the Middle East and that it "consistently and directly" supported U.S. interests. This professional evaluation of the U.S.-Israel relationship flies in the face of Walt and Mearsheimer's assertion that Israel is a "strategic burden" that does not serve the American national interest.
• Because many elements of this strategic relationship are kept secret - particularly in the intelligence field - it is difficult for academics and pundits to assess the true value of U.S.-Israel ties. Nonetheless, General George F. Keegan, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence chief, disclosed in 1986 that he could not have obtained the same intelligence that he received from Israel if he had "five CIAs." During his interview, at which time the Cold War was still raging, he added: "The ability of the U.S. Air Force in particular, and the Army in general, to defend whatever position it has in NATO owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any single source of intelligence."

Arming Israel Lessens Nuclear Danger - Ariel Ilan Roth
Critics such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue in their forthcoming book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, that subsidized sales to Israel, like the one announced in July, are evidence of the chokehold that pro-Israel lobbyists exercise on broader U.S. foreign policy in the volatile Middle East. In reality, these subsidized sales are not so much a chokehold as a cork: Supplying Israel with large quantities of advanced conventional weapons keeps the Mideast nuclear genie in its bottle for a little longer. This is precisely what the U.S. wants and an incontestable national strategic interest. (Baltimore Sun)

CNN: RELIGIOUS JEWS SAME AS SUICIDE BOMBERS

God's Jewish Warriors - CNN's Abomination
CNN's "God's Warriors," hosted by Christiane Amanpour, is a three-part series intended to examine the growing role of religious fundamentalism in today's world. Unfortunately, the first program in the series, "God's Jewish Warriors," is one of the most grossly distorted programs to appear on mainstream American television in many years. It is false in its basic premise, established in the opening scene in which Jewish (and Christian) religious fervency is equated with that of Muslims heard endorsing "martyrdom," or suicide-killing. There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent jihadist Muslim campaigns underway across the globe, either in numbers of perpetrators engaged or in the magnitude of death and destruction wrought. While in reality Jewish "terrorism" is virtually non-existent, the program magnifies at length the few instances of violence or attempted violence by religiously-motivated Jewish individuals - including having to go all the way back to 1980.

Disproportionate reliance on partisan voices, some extreme figures, skews the message dramatically. Jimmy Carter and John Mearsheimer, chief proponents of the discredited canards about Jews subverting American national interests to those of Israel, are repeatedly and respectfully interviewed. (CAMERA)

SEE ALSO: CNN Moral Equivalence Marathon, Part 1 ; CNN Moral Equivalence Marathon, Part 2 (LGF)

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)

NEW JEWISH CONSPIRACY BOOK ON THE WAY

Waiting For Walt and Mearsheimer (BackSpin)
In a few weeks, this book might actually push Harry Potter out of the news. MondoWeiss points out that people are already lining up on the issue of Walt and Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby," due to be released in book form this September. Spoiler alert.

SEE: ANTI-SEMITIC PROFESSORS TO WRITE BOOK ; PROFESSOR: ISRAEL LOBBY CAUSED 9/11 ATTACK AND IRAQ WAR ; PROFESSORS OF HATE FEATURED AT ANTI-ISRAEL FORUM ; JUST A WEE BIT OF ANTI-SEMITISM ; WALKS LIKE A DUCK ; NOT SO GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

ANTI-SEMITIC PROFESSORS TO WRITE BOOK

Walt and Mearsheimer Book In the Works (Backspin)
The Harvard Crimson reports that Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are writing a book. Care to guess the topic?

Two leading political scientists are writing a book extending their controversial argument that the domestic pro-Israel lobby bends U.S. foreign policy disproportionately in favor of Israel, one of the authors, Stephen M. Walt of the Kennedy School of Government, confirmed yesterday....

The forthcoming book will be published by New York-based Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is due out in September, according to Walt, who declined to answer other
questions about the book. Mearsheimer did not respond to phone calls to his office in Chicago.

How timely. Exactly one year ago, [BackSpin] blogged a number of responses to their study.