Oh the irony. The Forward tells us that Stephen Walt,
…made a presentation at this year’s 9th Annual Jewish Book Network conference. The event, which is run by the Jewish Book Council, connects authors with directors at the nearly 100 sites that host Jewish book programs, including JCCs, synagogues, Hillels, Jewish federations, synagogues and other related organizations
And what was Mr. Walt, who has a chair at Harvard funded by a Zionist Jew, peddling to this audience? Why, the book-length version of their “The Israel Lobby” paper which will be published by the prominent publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Yeah, a couple of those guys were Jewish, too. When is the book coming out? September, the month when we Jews Members of the Lobby celebrate Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur.
That is very considerate of Mr. Walt and Mr. Mearsheimer. It must be fascinating for them, who publicly proclaimed that they couldn’t get their shoddy paper published in the U.S., to receive not only endless media and academic attention, but also a publishing deal from a Jewish-founded press and a marketing engagement to the central meeting of all Jewish book-buying organizations in the country. Boy, it’s so hard for an anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish author to be heard these days. Where is Norm Finkelstein to bitch about this?
I guess the organizers of the Jewish Book Network didn’t consider the fact that Walt & Mearsheimer weren’t just speaking about AIPAC in their paper or in their upcoming book. No, no, no. You see, their shoddy paper, “The Israel Lobby,” lists the very organizations present at the book fair as well as their membership as The Israel Lobby. Anybody who supports Israel directly OR indirectly, according to the thesis of these two men, is part of this powerful group that makes the U.S. function in contradiction with its true interests and particularly in line with the interests of an unjust, unfair, war-crime committing, unsupportive-of-the-U.S., country called Israel. That is their thesis, plain and simple.
So yup, call it chutzpah or call it savvy, these guys went to the lion’s den, to sell a bunch of the very people they’ve libeled the very book which libels them. You have to wonder how many grandmas were in that room.
Some of you may enjoy reading my previous post, The Mother of All Hatchet Jobs – Farrar, Straus and Giroux to publish 21st Century Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which also includes links to some other posts about these two serious scholars who have contributed more in the past year to negative stereotyping of the Jewish community in mainstream American life than anybody has for decades. Well, Jimmy Carter is trying, but he, like everyone else seeking to justify whatever negative thing they have to say about Jews, Israel, Zionists, etc., refers to “The Israel Lobby.” After all, these guys are scholars from good universities and they claim to support Israel.
“Both I and my co-author are pro-Israel,” he said on Tuesday evening, in front of the audience gathered at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. “Our book does not question Israel’s right to exist, and we make clear that lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie. But we also argue that some organizations advocate policies out of step with the broader community for which they claim to speak.”
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Perhaps Mr. Walt should re-read his own paper?
This kind of snappy, serious writing is in astonishingly short supply these days, and TM should be syndicalized as a columnist immediately. Now get serious and do it. Get an agent and do it. It doesn’t seem to take too much of your time from your day job, anyway. Most people’s heads are full of glue these days, so you can’t just blog and enjoy yourself. You have to step up to the plate. You can try your thoughts out with the Jewlicious-o-sphere to refine them and then upload to the rest of the world.