Petition to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
My readers who teach or have taught in post-secondary education continue kindly to be invited to sign the petition against stigmatizing our colleagues John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard as "anti-Semites" merely for writing a critical appraisal of the role of the Israel lobby in US Middle East policy. They can be right or wrong, but that the paper is out of bounds because it is racist is absurd and also an idea dangerous to intellectual life.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/29/2006 06:05:00 AM
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2 Comments:
Professor Cole
Correct me if I am wrong in believing that Arabs are semites too. If I am right, why is the the accusation of anti-semitism labelled against those who dare to question Israel?
You don't have to belong to the Right to consider the Walt Mearsheimer paper antisemitic. You just have to read it with some objectivity.
I would also say that your petition is a straw man. Even those critics of the paper who have labeled the paper or its authors antisemitic did NOT dismiss the paper but addressed it, its information and its overall premise, sometimes at great lengths.
Far from stifling anybody, they welcomed a response from Walt and Mearsheimer. Tellingly, however, Walt and Mearsheimer have refused to address those points brought against them. In fact, the only counter-claim they have made is that they expected to be vilified. Boo hoo and sob, what martyrs and victims of the Jews, oops, I meant The Lobby, they have become. I'm no fan of Dershowitz, but your comments about his paper were unconvincing, and it is interesting that Walt and Mearsheimer have not seen fit to address the many salient points he and others have made.
The real objective of your petition, Dr. Cole, seems to be to prevent people from calling things as they see them. Perhaps it's you who would like to stifle people from speaking out against the clear antisemitism in that paper?
How do I know that it's clear antisemitism? Because according to the definition laid out by these two scholars, Jews who have never lobbied the US government to do anything with respect to Israel or any other area and Jews who did not support the Iraq war would be counted as members of "The Lobby" if they are in any way shape or form linked to any Jewish organization save for those that explicitly reject Israel.
Talk about accusations of dual loyalty!
Isn't that what you define as antisemitism in your petition post below?
Frankly, what surprises me most is that anybody would defend such a lousy paper. I kept rolling my eyes at the numerous errors, or the propensity to only review information through an anti-Israel prism. I cannot imagine how two serious scholars could write such an amateurish paper and it is astounding to see the support for something that would garner a "C" in any decent poli-sci or history paper.
That you go out of your way to defend such a paper, under the guise of protecting these two prominent scholars from the big bad Jews (isn't that why you are sending your petition to a Jewish organization?), is also telling. Gosh, looking at all those signatures by academics, I would almost begin to suspect some sort of cabal wants to tell me, a Jew, something. Good thing I'm not paranoid.
By the way, since I belong to no Jewish organization but do support Israel and consider myself a Zionist, my guess is that you can send all the petitions you want to the Big Bad Jewish People and I would still call an antisemitic paper antisemitic. Maybe next time they could write a better paper and then we could all have a REAL debate.
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