I Have a Question, Doctors
A few years ago, two professors wrote a book. Stephen Walt (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (Chicago) published The Israel Lobby in 2007, and it made quite a splash. Its central thesis was that US foreign policy was directed by Israel and its friends, to the detriment of America’s real interests. In other words, the Jews are running this country.
Accusations of anti-Semitism arose, but were deftly parried by the authors and their defenders. It’s about Israel, they responded; it has nothing to do with Jews!
(This is why I wish that Ben Gurion had given the Zionist entity a different name, like maybe Semitia. But then the world’s W’s and M’s would have patiently explained that they are not anti-Semites, but anti-Semitians. If he’d named it Jewland, W and M could explain that their problem is with Jewlandians, not Jews. Oh, well.)
Here I note that I venture no judgment on the inner prejudices of W and M. But I do note that if you check their book on Amazon, you will learn that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Beyond Chutzpah; On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism; Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid (by Jimmy Carter); The Holocaust Industry; and The Power of Israel in the United States.” I know that guilt is not proven by association. You may draw your own conclusions.
So, in the dark days of the dreaded neocon likudnik administration of George W. Bush, professors M and W surveyed US mideast policy and made an interesting discovery. Every action occurred in Israel. The Muslim states were mere passive observers, reacting to Israeli and US provocations. The best example was in their look at Iran.
“Israel’s perception of the Iranian threat underwent a fundamental change in the early 1990’s, as evidence of Teheran’s nuclear ambitions began to accumulate. Israeli leaders began warning Washington in 1993 that Iran was a grave threat not only to Israel but to the US as well. There has been no letup in that alarmist and aggressive rhetoric since then, largely because Iran has continued to move ahead on the nuclear front.” Continue reading ‘Paging Dr. Walt and Dr. Mearsheimer’
