Credentials Abused

[Annie]

A link to the garbage:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

A link to one rebuttal:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1139395657538

Prominent Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is taking on the authors of the study, which blasted the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, AIPAC.

Dershowitz, one of Israel's strongest defenders in the American public and academic arena, was mentioned personally in the study as an "apologist" for Israel, claiming he is one of those responsible for endorsing the notion that Israel pursued peace in the Middle East for many years.

Dershowitz slammed the authors - Stephan Walt, from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago - and challenged them to a public debate at the Kennedy School.

"You have to counter this article", Dershowitz told The Jerusalem Post, "These are two serious scholars and you need to expose what they have done as ignorant propaganda".

Dershowitz, who is now working on a paper which will refute the claims in the Walt-Mearsheimer article, argues that there is no original material in it and that "the challenge is to find a single idea in the piece that does not already appear in hate websites. There is no scholarship here what so ever".

The article, titled "The Israel lobby and US foreign policy", claimed that the pro-Israel lobby in the US has caused policy makers to prefer Israel's interests over the interests of the US...

and another:

http://jewishworldreview.com/0306/wisse_israel_loby.php3

Harvard attack on ‘Israel lobby’ is actually a targeting of American public

By Ruth R. Wisse

A Cambridge luminary fires back

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | In Boston in the early 1980s, I was asked by an Irish cab driver what language I had been speaking with a fellow passenger we had just dropped off. When I told him, Hebrew, the language of Israel, the man exclaimed: "Israel! That's America's fighting front line! Israel fights our battles better than we could fight them ourselves."

Now Professors Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago would have us believe that the Boston cabbie was a dupe of the "unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." Their essay in the latest London Review of Books — based on a longer working paper on the Kennedy Center Web site — contends that the U.S. government and most of its citizens are fatally in thrall to a "coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." Though not all members of said "coalition" are Jews, and though not all Jews are members, the major schemers are such key organizations as the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, joined by neoconservatives, think tanks, and a large network of accomplices including (they will learn to their surprise) The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

The thesis of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer is remarkably broad and singleminded: A loose association of special-interest groups has persuaded the country to sacrifice its interests to a foreign power, thereby jeopardizing "not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world." Israel, it is claimed, hurts every facet of American life: U.S. emergency aid to Israel during the War of 1973 triggered a damaging OPEC oil embargo. Israel is a liability in the war on terror: It goaded the U.S. into the war in Iraq, betrays America through espionage, and destroys American democracy by quashing all criticism. Recently the Israel Lobby — a term the authors render with a sinister capital "L" — has begun to intimidate the universities by trying to create a field of Israel Studies and monitoring anti-Israel bias.

Were it not for the Lobby, the U.S. would have nothing to fear in the world, not even a nuclear threat from Iran: "If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran." Not Iran but the Lobby is the true threat to America's security by trying to compel the U.S. to oppose Iran against its interests. Most dangerously, Jews control the man at the top: In the spring of 2002 "[Ariel] Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed." Given the creative scope of these charges, one is surprised to find no hint of Israel's role in the spread of avian flu.

Organized as a prosecutorial indictment rather than an inquiry, the essay does not tell us why the "Israel Lobby" should have formed in the first place. The 21 countries of the Arab League with ties to 1.2 billion Muslims world-wide are nowhere present as active political agents. There is no mention of the Arab rejection of the United Nations's partition of Palestine in 1948; no 58-year Arab League boycott of Israel and companies trading with Israel; no Arab attacks of 1948, 1967 and 1973; no Arab-Soviet resolution at the U.N. defining Zionism as racism; no monetary and strategic support for Arab terrorism against Jews and Israel; and no Hamas dedication to destroying the Jewish state. The authors do not ask why Arab aggression and Muslim "rage against Israel" should have morphed into a war against the U.S. and the West. Israel's existence elicits Arab and Muslim hostility, hence in their view Israel is to blame for Arab and Muslim carnage.

Judging from the initial reaction to their article (one of my students called it "wacko quacko"), the two professors may be subjected to more ridicule than rejoinder. Several Web sites are in the process of listing all their bloopers, distortions and omissions. Their tone resembles nothing so much as Wilhelm Marr's 1879 pamphlet, "The Victory of Judaism over Germandom," which declared of the Jews that "There is no stopping them . . . German culture has proved itself ineffective and powerless against this foreign power. This is a fact; a brute inexorable fact." A parallel edition of these two texts might highlight some American refinements on the European model, such as the anti-Semitic lie that "Israeli citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." In fact, unlike neighboring Arab countries, Israeli citizenship is not conditional on religion or race.

Yet it would be a mistake to treat this article on the "Israel Lobby" as an attack on Israel alone, or on its Jewish defenders, or on the organizations and individuals it singles out for condemnation. Its true target is the American public, which now supports Israel with higher levels of confidence than ever before. When the authors imply that the bipartisan support of Israel in Congress is a result of Jewish influence, they function as classic conspiracy theorists who attribute decisions to nefarious alliances rather than to the choices of a democratic electorate. Their contempt for fellow citizens dictates their claims of a gullible and stupid America. Their insistence that American support for Israel is bought and paid for by the Lobby heaps scorn on American judgment and values.

No wonder David Duke, white supremacist and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, claimed that this article "validated every major point I have been making since even before the [Iraq] war started." But he and Walt-Mearsheimer have it backwards: Americans don't support Israel because of the strength of any lobby; Israel earns American support the hard way, for the very reasons the Boston cabbie cited several decades ago.

 

[William Joyce]

Sorry, neoconners: there's no TOUCHING the credentials of Harvard and UChi (a conservative university), nor of the profs, nor of the study. All you can do, like the liberals you are, is cry and stamp your feet.

 

[Annie]

Sorry, neoconners: there's no TOUCHING the credentials of Harvard and UChi (a conservative university), nor of the profs, nor of the study. All you can do, like the liberals you are, is cry and stamp your feet.

:shocked: see bolded, above!

LOL! Perhaps in econ, a few in pols., you haven't visited sociology dept. I take it?

 

[Annie]

Yeah, there is. Many links:


http://informaticsmd.blogspot.com/2006/04/walt-and-mearsheimer-gone-to-mattress.html

Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Walt and Mearsheimer: Gone to the Mattress

In The Godfather, when one mob family carried out a drive-by shooting on another, the family would "go to the mattress" - hide out and sleep on mattresses well-removed from outside walls - until things cooled off. More on this below.

In response to a request to publish my post "The Silence of Walt and Mearsheimer: Is there a Ghost in the House?" as an article in another more mainstream venue, I received this reply:

Thank-you for sending this piece. I recognize your intent, and agree that the paper needs investigation that might well be considered forensic. But absent any evidence, it is not a good idea to question the actual authorship. Reckless charges (as this surely would be characterized) would not help debunk the paper. This is not to say that I rule out the possibility that you are correct. However, I do think it unlikely.

I am not aware if the authors have written other works together. But the sort of literary analysis of a jointly-authored work you suggest would inevitably be difficult. That sort of thing works best with a single author.

Your article could possibly be re-worked, however. You might well attempt to make a list of the faults (as you do) and then make a list of possible explanations for the authors’ departure from the standards of scholarship. It would, of course, be helpful to have a familiarity with their previously published work, to see if the current article represents a radical departure. My understanding is that both men have been antagonistic to Israel for quite some time. What I do not know is their previous standards of scholarship.

Perhaps the most striking element of the critique is its writer's apparent fear of addressing issues beyond the matter of the content of the paper in question. A clingy old belief that the authors, esteemed Ivy League professors, are just misguided rather than deliberately deceptive and of unseemly motive, seems operative.

Of course I have been disabused of that notion about high society academics as have others, as in here and here.

The "let's be nice in our responses" school of thought would be appropriate if those who wrote such papers were impressed by our decorum in debates; unfortunately, they are not. If they were, they would not write scandalous papers that ignore almost every priniciple of good research and scholarship in the first place, aligning themselves with the beliefs of people such as David Duke and various Middle Eastern groups of note (for example, the ones that say "kill the Jews!"). And then hide.

As far as "making a list of possible explanations for the authors’ departure from the standards of scholarship", that seem to be an exercise in "beating a dead horse." Dershowitz and numerous others have already demolished the paper's content in numerous essays and analyses. There's nothing more to say in that regard. When the patient's dead and at room temperature, there's no need to keep checking for a pulse.

Those who feel the need to go any further in that domain are in perhaps a league with those who felt it was necessary to beat the dead horse bloody regarding the Rathergate documents (in reality, the belief that is was necessary to go beyond Charles Johnson's analysis on the one-in-a-zillion chance that there was some plausible alternate explanation was akin to believing that one should invest all of one's savings in tomorrow's lottery if the jackpot is large enough).

However, on the issue of motive and the paper's character, the 'possible explanations' fall into the following categories:

1. The authors, responsible academic leaders with fiduciary responsibilities to their organizations, innocently went on a reckless, drunken research joyride, abandoning all they knew and had practiced in years of academia, to produce a biased, defective paper that rivals The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its logical and factual distortions, omissions and defects;

2. The authors had someone else poorly skilled in research write the paper (ghost writer) and gave it their imprimatur after a cursory or non-existent review (perhaps this issue is unfamiliar to those outside medicine where ghost writing is all too common - although controversial and unwelcome);

3. The authors are simply misguided and need to be educated on doing better next time.

4. This paper was randomly written by one thousand chimpanzees placed before typewriters and put in a time dilation field in Harvard's physics department so as to have spent 10,000 years at the effort.

I vote for #2.

In effect, Walt and Mearsheimer have committed a drive-by shooting, poisoning rational discourse on the topic of the so-called "Israel/Jewish Lobby" vis-a-vis other lobbies (e.g., the Saudi lobby, the oil lobby) and on other Jewish issues for years to come, and have given the world's irrational or evil actors a Harvard imprimatur with which to justify their next pogrom.

In the lingo of gangsters, Walt and Mearsheimer have now "gone to the mattress" and are in hiding, not speaking about their masterpiece. As that masterpiece apparently first came on the scene in a London Review of Books essay ("The Israel Lobby") dated March 13, 2006, as of April 11:

Walt and Mearsheimer have now GONE TO THE MATTRESS for 29 days.

I will be keeping count.

posted by InformaticsMD @ 6:48 AM

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

The "let's be nice in our responses" school of thought would be appropriate if those who wrote such papers were impressed by our decorum in debates; unfortunately, they are not. If they were, they would not write scandalous papers that ignore almost every priniciple of good research and scholarship in the first place, aligning themselves with the beliefs of people such as David Duke and various Middle Eastern groups of note (for example, the ones that say "kill the Jews!"). And then hide.

Take, for instance, Alan Dershowitz's contribution to the non-discussion, which insists on discerning the supposedly hidden "motive" behind the Mearsheimer-Walt piece. It couldn't possibly be that they disagree with the Lobby's agenda, and honestly believe that the debate over the centrality of Israel to American policy in the Middle East has been skewed – oh no. They have to be "bigots" out to spread "anti-Semitic canards" – and the "proof" of this is that they supposedly garnered some of their quotes from "Internet hate sites."

How does Dershowitz know this? He claims his "staff" is compiling a "chart" that supposedly "proves" it. But since nothing short of looking over the authors' shoulders as they did their research could possibly "prove" such a thing, Dershowitz's "staff" is pissing in the wind. Dershowitz's whole case can be summed up as "David Duke believes the same thing – therefore, it can't be true." The logical fallacy involved here is too obvious to be pointed out. Suffice to say that this about sums up the entire strategy of the Lobby in all the years of its operation: anyone who opposes them is a "bigot," an "anti-Semite," and is spreading the modern day equivalent of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

http://antiwar.com/justin/

The bolded part is of course a classic, classic tactic of PC leftists. ie, You're against affirmative action and David Duke is too; therefore you're no different than David Duke.

 

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008252

Terrorism and Trivial Truths
"A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up outside a fast-food restaurant in a bustling area of Tel Aviv during the Passover holiday Monday, killing eight other people and wounding at least 49 in the deadliest Palestinian attack in more than a year," the Associated Press reports. This is in Tel Aviv, not the disputed territories:

The Palestinians' new Hamas leaders called the attack a legitimate response to Israeli "aggression." Israel said it held Hamas ultimately responsible--even though a different militant group, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility--and would respond "as necessary." . . .

Witness Israel Yaakov said the blast killed a woman standing near her husband and children.

"The father was traumatized. He went into shock. He ran to the children to gather them up and the children were screaming, 'Mom! Mom!' and she wasn't answering, she was dead already . . . it's a shocking scene," Yaakov said.

Another witness, 62-year-old Sonya Levy, said she had just finished shopping when the blast occurred.

"I was about to get into my car, and boom! There was an explosion. A bit of human flesh landed on my car and I started to scream," she said.
​

Are you inclined to sympathize with Israel when you read about something like this? If so, leading scholars say you're wrong. According to a paper by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, "The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn't surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions." Furthermore, there is no "compelling moral case for US backing" of Israel.

Last month we dissected the argument by which Mearsheimer and Walt purported to discredit Israel morally. Far from an evenhanded consideration of the facts on both sides of the issue, it turns out to be radically biased. Mearsheimer and Walt admit only evidence depicting the Jewish state as wicked, ignoring both mitigating factors and the evils committed by Israel's adversaries. This, we submitted, is an anti-Semitic argument, for it is constructed in such a way that Israel cannot win, even if the facts are on its side.

As far as we know, neither Mearsheimer nor Walt nor any of their supporters have offered any substantive defense of their moral condemnation of Israel. Our criticism of it appears to stand unrebutted. This is not to say there have not been efforts to defend Mearsheimer and Walt's work. As we noted Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an op-ed piece by Edward Peck, a former ambassador now affiliated with the California-based Independent Institute (not the Colorado-based Independence Institute), titled "Of Course There Is an Israel Lobby." On Friday David Theroux, head of the Independent Institute, emailed us a response to our item from Peck, which you can read in its entirety here.

Peck's latest response adds little to his Post-Gazette piece. He claims that our criticism, along with that of law professor David Bernstein, further demonstrates the truth of Mearsheimer and Walt's claim that there exists an "Israel Lobby." But this is an evasion. Mearsheimer and Walt's argument can be summarized as follows:

* Premise: "Neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel."

* Conclusion: "The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby."

What is controversial about the Mearsheimer-Walt paper is the premise: that U.S. support for Israel is strategically and morally unjustified. Peck, however, pretends that the argument is something like this:

* Premise: Many Americans are strong supporters of Israel.

* Conclusion: The "Israel Lobby" exists.
​

Whether this conclusion follows from the premise is a question of semantics; one could dispute whether it makes sense to characterize a journalist who has never lobbied an elected official in his life (i.e., this columnist) as part of a "lobby." But for the sake of argument, let's accept the widest possible definition of the "Israel Lobby": all Americans who strongly support the Jewish state. By that definition, we certainly qualify--and proudly so.

But also by that definition, Peck's version of the Mearsheimer-Walt argument is a truism. In other words, rather than defend the argument they actually made, Peck has recast it as a trivial truth.

Peck claims in his response to us that "those with differing views [from those of the 'Israel Lobby'] encounter highly restricted opportunities to express them in the media"--this, in case you missed it, in a response we have published in full, here. He complains of a lack of "open public discussion," when in fact the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has prompted a great deal of discussion.

If that discussion has been one-sided, it is because Mearsheimer, Walt and their supporters--including Peck--have not, in the face of serious, substantive criticism, defended the claim that support for Israel is strategically and morally unjustified. In our estimation, this is because that claim is indefensible.