[Mb-civic] Yes, It's Anti-Semitic - Eliot A. Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Yes, It's Anti-Semitic
<>
By Eliot A. Cohen
The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 5, 2006; A23

Academic papers posted on a Harvard Web site don't normally attract 
enthusiastic praise from prominent white supremacists. But John 
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign 
Policy" has won David Duke's endorsement as "a modern Declaration of 
American Independence" and a vindication of the ex-Klansman's earlier 
work, presumably including his pathbreaking book, "Jewish Supremacism."

Walt and Mearsheimer contend that American national security dictates 
distancing ourselves from the state of Israel; that U.S. support for 
Israel has led to such disasters as America's status as the No. 1 target 
for Islamic terrorists; and that such an otherwise inexplicable 
departure from good sense can be accounted for only by the power of "The 
Lobby" (their capitalization), an overwhelmingly Jewish force abetted by 
some Christian evangelicals and a gentile neocon collaborator or two, 
who have hijacked American foreign policy and controlled it for decades.

One of Mearsheimer's University of Chicago colleagues has characterized 
this as "piss-poor, monocausal social science." It is indeed a wretched 
piece of scholarship. Israeli citizenship rests "on the principle of 
blood kinship," it says, and yet the country has a million non-Jewish 
citizens who vote. Osama bin Laden's grievance with the United States 
begins with Israel, it says -- but in fact his 1998 fatwa declaring war 
against this country began by denouncing the U.S. presence in Saudi 
Arabia and the suffering of the people of Iraq. "Other ethnic lobbies 
can only dream of having the political muscle" The Lobby has -- news to 
anyone advocating lifting the embargo on Fidel Castro's Cuba. The Iraq 
war stemmed from The Lobby's conception of Israel's interest -- yet, 
oddly, the war attracted the support of anti-Israel intellectuals such 
as Christopher Hitchens and mainstream publications such as The 
Economist. America's anti-Iran policy reflects the dictates of The Lobby 
-- but how to explain Europe's equally strong opposition to Iranian 
nuclear ambitions?

Oddly, these international relations realists -- who in their more 
normal academic lives declare that state interests determine policy, and 
domestic politics matters little -- have discovered the one case in 
which domestic politics has, for decades, determined the policy of the 
world's greatest state. Their theories proclaim the importance of power, 
not ideals, yet they abhor the thought of allying with the strongest 
military and most vibrant economy in the Middle East. Reporting 
persecution, they have declared that they could not publish their work 
in the United States, but they have neglected to name the academic 
journals that turned them down.

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by 
anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about 
Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of 
having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that 
manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects 
everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group 
and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- 
why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the 
Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning 
Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise 
Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous 
opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and 
Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public 
figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative 
Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), 
but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a 
rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends 
of Israel.

The authors dismiss or ignore past Arab threats to exterminate Israel, 
as well as the sewer of anti-Semitic literature that pollutes public 
discourse in the Arab world today. The most recent calls by Iran's 
fanatical -- and nuclear weapons-hungry -- president for Israel to be 
"wiped off the map" they brush aside as insignificant. There is nothing 
here about the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has poured into 
lobbying and academic institutions, or the wealth of Islamic studies 
programs on American campuses, though they note with suspicion some 130 
Jewish studies programs on those campuses. West Bank settlements get 
attention; terrorist butchery of civilians on buses or in shopping malls 
does not. To dispute their view of Israel is not to differ about policy 
but to act as a foreign agent.

If this sounds personal, it is, although I am only a footnote target for 
Mearsheimer and Walt. I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; 
sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation's military 
affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my 
family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son -- the third 
generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be 
home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his 
shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Other supposed members of "The Lobby" also have children in military 
service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy 
advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.

The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of 
Advanced International Studies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401282.html?nav=hcmodule
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