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Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel

munaeem | 20 August, 2007 13:11

via Spielgel

By Patricia Cohen

In an article last spring about the pro-Israel lobby, two scholars set off a firestorm of charges of anti-Semitism. Their new book on the topic has re-ignited the fire and led many to question the wisdom of providing a forum to what some consider a "conspiracy issue."

"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is not even in bookstores, but already anxieties have surfaced about the backlash it is stirring, with several institutions backing away from holding events with the authors.

John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, were not totally surprised by the reaction to their work. 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 as charges of anti-Semitism, shoddy scholarship and censorship ricocheted among prominent academics, writers, policymakers and advocates. In the book, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and embargoed until Sept. 4, they elaborate on and update their case.

 

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"Now that the cold war is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States," they write. "Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public or even raise the possibility" because the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful. They credit the lobby with shutting down talks with Syria and with moderates in Iran, preventing the United States from condemning Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon and with not pushing the Israelis hard enough to come to an agreement with the Palestinians. They also discuss Christian Zionists and the issue of dual loyalty.

Opponents are prepared. Also being released on Sept. 4 is "The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control" (Palgrave Macmillan) by Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. 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," George P. Shultz, a former secretary of state, says in the foreword. "This is a conspiracy theory pure and simple, and scholars at great universities should be ashamed to promulgate it."

The subject will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down or canceled events with the authors, mentioning unease with the controversy or the format.

The authors were particularly disturbed by the Chicago council's decision, since plans for that event were complete and both authors have frequently spoken there before. The two sent a four-page letter to 94 members of the council's board detailing what happened. "On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event," and that his decision "was based on the need 'to protect the institution.' He said that he had a serious 'political problem,' because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the council. 'This one is so hot,' Marshall maintained."

Mr. Mearsheimer later said of Mr. Bouton, "I had the sense that this phone call pained him deeply."

Mr. Bouton was out of town, but Rachel Bronson, vice president for programs and studies at the council, said, "Whenever we have topics that are particularly controversial or sensitive, we try to make sure someone from another point of view is there." In this case, she said, there was not sufficient time to set up that sort of panel before the council calendar went out. There are no plans to have the authors speak at a later date, however.

"One of the points we make in the book is that this is a subject that's very hard to talk about," Mr. Walt said in an interview from his office in Cambridge. "Organizations, no matter how strong their commitment to free speech, don't want to schedule something that's likely to cause controversy."

After the cancellation Roberta Rubin, owner of the Book Stall, a store in Winnetka, Ill., offered to help find a site for the authors. She said she tried a Jewish community center and two large downtown clubs but they all told her "they can't afford to bring in somebody 'too controversial.' " She added that even she was concerned about inviting authors who might offend customers.

Some of the planned sites, like the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, a cultural center in Washington, would have been host of an event if Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt appeared with opponents, said Esther Foer, the executive director.

Mr. Walt said, "Part of the game is to portray us as so extreme that we have to be balanced by someone from the 'other side.' " Besides, he added, when you're promoting a book, you want to present your ideas without appearing with someone who is trying to discredit you.

 

As for City University, Aoibheann Sweeney, director of the Center for the Humanities, said, "I looked at the introduction, and I didn't feel that the book was saying things differently enough" from the original article. Ms. Sweeney, who said she had consulted with others at City University, acknowledged that they had begun planning for an event in September moderated by J. J. Goldberg, the editor of The Forward, a leading American Jewish weekly, but once he chose not to participate, she decided to pass. Mr. Goldberg, who was traveling in Israel, said in a telephone interview that "there should be more of an open debate." But appearing alone with the authors would have given the impression that The Forward was presenting the event and thereby endorsing the book, he said, and he did not want to do that. A discussion with other speakers of differing views would have been different, he added.

"I don't think the book is very good," said Mr. Goldberg, who said he read a copy of the manuscript about six weeks ago. "They haven't really done original research. They haven't talked to the people who are being lobbied or those doing the lobbying."

Overall Mr. Mearsheimer said he thinks the response to their views will be "less ferocious than last time, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to make the argument in a convincing way that anyone who criticizes the lobby or Israel is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew." Both Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt pointed to the growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, criticism of Israel's war in Lebanon and the publication of former President Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" as making it somewhat easier to criticize Israel openly.

"This isn't a cabal; this isn't anything secretive," Mr. Walt said.

American Jews who lobby on Israel's behalf are not all that different from the National Rifle Association, the anti-tax movement, AARP or the American Petroleum Institute, he said, "They just happen to be really good at it."

"It's the way American politics work," he continued. "Sometimes powerful interest groups get what they want, and it's not good for the country as a whole. I would say that about the farm lobby and about the Cuba lobby."

To the authors, dual loyalty is as American as Presidents' Day sales and "Law & Order" reruns. As Mr. Mearsheimer explained: "People are allowed to have multiple loyalties. They have religious loyalties, loyalty to family, to an organization and you can have loyalty to other countries. Someone who is Irish can have a loyalty to Ireland."

"The problem," he said "is when you raise the subject of dual loyalty, many people tend to think of it in the context of the old anti-Semitic canard and making the argument that Jews are disloyal to the U.S."

In print and in interviews both authors have stressed that they hold no animus towards Israel or Jews. "We think Israeli policy is fundamentally flawed," Mr. Mearsheimer said, "just as we think American policy is fundamentally flawed."

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Amir Emary | 25/08/2007, 21:18

All that proves the lobby is there and it is ready to accuse anyone who dare to question its secret agenda, of the usual accusation, that is of course antisemitism!
This is a serious issue that should really interest American people who believe America should be for its people not to be g#dragged all the time for the benefit of a foriegn little troublemaking country.

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TR | 26/08/2007, 02:19

For decades Israel has violated well established precepts of international law and defied numerous United Nations resolutions in its occupation of conquered lands, in extra-judicial killings, and in its repeated acts of military aggression.

Most of the world regards Israel's policies, and especially its oppression of Palestinians, as outrageous and criminal. This international consensus is reflected, for example, in numerous UN resolutions condemning Israel, which have been approved with overwhelming majorities.

"The whole world," United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan recently said, "is demanding that Israel withdraw [from occupied Palestinian territories]. I don't think the whole world ... can be wrong." [1]

Only in the United States do politicians and the media still fervently support Israel and its policies. For decades the US has provided Israel with crucial military, diplomatic and financial backing, including more than $3 billion each year in aid.

Why is the U.S. the only remaining bastion of support for Israel?

Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who was awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, has candidly identified the reason: "The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic," he said. "People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful." [2]

Bishop Tutu spoke the truth. Although Jews make up only about three percent of the US population, they wield immense power and influence — vastly more than any other ethnic or religious group.

As Jewish author and political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg has pointed out: [3]

Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely two percent of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, the New York Times ... The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked ...

Jews are only three percent of the nation's population and comprise eleven percent of what this study defines as the nation's elite. However, Jews constitute more than 25 percent of the elite journalists and publishers, more than 17 percent of the leaders of important voluntary and public interest organizations, and more than 15 percent of the top ranking civil servants.

Stephen Steinlight, former Director of National Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, similarly notes the "disproportionate political power" of Jews, which is "pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America." He goes on to explain that "Jewish economic influence and power are disproportionately concentrated in Hollywood, television, and in the news industry." [4]

Two well-known Jewish writers, Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, pointed out in their 1995 book, Jews and the New American Scene: [5]

During the last three decades Jews [in the United States] have made up 50 percent of the top two hundred intellectuals ... 20 percent of professors at the leading universities ... 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington ... 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the 50 top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.

The influence of American Jewry in Washington, notes the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post, is "far disproportionate to the size of the community, Jewish leaders and U.S. official acknowledge. But so is the amount of money they contribute to [election] campaigns." One member of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations "estimated Jews alone had contributed 50 percent of the funds for [President Bill] Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign." [6]

"It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture," acknowledges Michael Medved, a well-known Jewish author and film critic. "Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names." [7]

One person who has carefully studied this subject is Jonathan J. Goldberg, now editor of the influential Jewish community weekly Forward. In his 1996 book, Jewish Power, he wrote: [8]

In a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood studio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a statistical observation ...

Hollywood at the end of the twentieth century is still an industry with a pronounced ethnic tinge. Virtually all the senior executives at the major studios are Jews. Writers, producers, and to a lesser degree directors are disproportionately Jewish — one recent study showed the figure as high as 59 percent among top-grossing films.

The combined weight of so many Jews in one of America's most lucrative and important industries gives the Jews of Hollywood a great deal of political power. They are a major source of money for Democratic candidates.

Reflecting their role in the American media, Jews are routinely portrayed as high-minded, altruistic, trustworthy, compassionate, and deserving of sympathy and support. While millions of Americans readily accept such stereotyped imagery, not everyone is impressed. "I am very angry with some of the Jews," complained actor Marlon Brando during a 1996 interview. "They know perfectly well what their responsibilities are ... Hollywood is run by Jews. It's owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering." [9]
A Well-Entrenched Factor

The intimidating power of the "Jewish lobby" is not a new phenomenon, but has long been an important factor in American life.

In 1941 Charles Lindbergh spoke about the danger of Jewish power in the media and government. The shy 39-year-old — known around the world for his epic 1927 New York to Paris flight, the first solo trans-Atlantic crossing — was addressing 7,000 people in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, about the dangers of US involvement in the war then raging in Europe. The three most important groups pressing America into war, he explained, were the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration.

Of the Jews, he said: "Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." Lindbergh went on:

... For reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, [they] wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

In 1978, Jewish American scholar Alfred M. Lilienthal wrote in his detailed study, The Zionist Connection: [10]

How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people?... It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has molded this unprecedented power ... In the larger metropolitan areas, the Jewish-Zionist connection thoroughly pervades affluent financial, commercial, social, entertainment, and art circles.

As a result of the Jewish grip on the media, wrote Lilienthal, news coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in American television, newspapers and magazines is relentlessly sympathetic to Israel. This is manifest, for example, in the misleading portrayal of Palestinian "terrorism." As Lilienthal put it: "One-sided reportage on terrorism, in which cause is never related to effect, was assured because the most effective component of the Jewish connection is probably that of media control."
One-Sided 'Holocaust' History

The Jewish hold on cultural and academic life has had a profound impact on how Americans look at the past. Nowhere is the well entrenched Judeocentric view of history more obvious than in the "Holocaust" media campaign, which focuses on the fate of Jews in Europe during World War II.

Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has remarked: [11]

Whether presented authentically or inauthentically, in accordance with the historical facts or in contradiction to them, with empathy and understanding or as monumental kitsch, the Holocaust has become a ruling symbol of our culture ... Hardly a month goes by without a new TV production, a new film, a new drama, new books, prose or poetry, dealing with the subject, and the flood is increasing rather than abating.

Non-Jewish suffering simply does not merit comparable attention. Overshadowed in the focus on Jewish victimization are, for example, the tens of millions of victims of America's World War II ally, Stalinist Russia, along with the tens of millions of victims of China's Maoist regime, as well as the 12 to 14 million Germans, victims of the flight and expulsion of 1944-1949, of whom some two million lost their lives.

The well-financed Holocaust media and "educational" campaign is crucially important to the interests of Israel. Paula Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, has observed: "With regard to Israel, the Holocaust may be used to forestall political criticism and suppress debate; it reinforces the sense of Jews as an eternally beleaguered people who can rely for their defense only upon themselves. The invocation of the suffering endured by the Jews under the Nazis often takes the place of rational argument, and is expected to convince doubters of the legitimacy of current Israeli government policy." [12]

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who has taught political science at City University of New York (Hunter College), says in his book, The Holocaust Industry, that "invoking The Holocaust" is "a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews." [13] "By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure ... Organized Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible policies." He writes of the brazen "shakedown" of Germany, Switzerland and other countries by Israel and organized Jewry "to extort billions of dollars." "The Holocaust," Finkelstein predicts, "may yet turn out to be the 'greatest robbery in the history of mankind'."

Jews in Israel feel free to act brutally against Arabs, writes Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, "believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own." [14]

Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has spoken with blunt exasperation about the Jewish-Israeli hold on the United States: [15]

I've never seen a President — I don't care who he is — stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on.

Today the danger is greater than ever. Israel and Jewish organizations, in collaboration with this country's pro-Zionist "amen corner," are prodding the United States — the world's foremost military and economic power — into new wars against Israel's enemies. As the French ambassador in London recently acknowledged, Israel — which he called "that shitty little country" — is a threat to world peace. "Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?," he said. [16]

To sum up: Jews wield immense power and influence in the United States. The "Jewish lobby" is a decisive factor in US support for Israel. Jewish-Zionist interests are not identical to American interests. In fact, they often conflict.

As long as the "very powerful" Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic Jewish distortion of current affairs and history, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the U.S. political system, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the Israeli threat to peace.

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