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Hard-hitting
critique or deadly lies?
Comments:
12

Hard-hitting
critique or deadly lies?
Comments:
1

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» Features
» Article

Aug 26, 2007 20:59 | Updated Aug 26,
2007 20:59
Hard-hitting
critique or deadly lies?

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Talkbacks for this article:
12

Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham H. Foxman
seeks in his new book, The Deadliest Lies, to refute
the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis.

Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti Defamation
League.
Photo: Ariel
Jerozolimski

RELATED

Bad
for the US, bad for Israel

Israel,
AIPAC won't parry Walt-Mearsheimer book

The self-proclaimed goal of Foxman's book is to "demolish
the claims of an all-powerful Israeli lobby and a global
Jewish conspiracy, revealing their historic roots in the most
virulent forms of bigotry."

Here are some excerpts from the ADL head's book, which is
published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Of course, the fact that there is a lobby (lower-case L)
made up of Americans who believe that US interests are best
served by a strong alliance with Israel is obvious and
non-controversial. The American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) bills itself as "America's Pro-Israel
Lobby."

It is registered as a domestic lobby, is supported by
donations from over l00,000 individual members, and receives
no financial backing from Israel or any other foreign entity.
There is nothing unusual about this. Spend ten minutes on
Google and you can easily find similar advocacy groups that
represent the interests of Irish Americans, Mexican Americans,
Indian Americans, Italian Americans and practically every
other imaginable ethnic and national group in the United
States. Only the American lobby for Israel seems to be subject
to such intense critical scrutiny and even demonization by
people like Mearsheimer and Walt.

The authors recognize that they are on shaky ground here.
They acknowledge that, in a democratic America, pro-Israel
activists have every right to lobby their government. They are
also careful to state that they are not suggesting any
conspiracy by Jews aimed at world domination, like that
depicted by the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. Mearsheimer and Walt clearly regard
themselves not as bigoted, but as serious scholars attempting
to make a responsible argument.

But their claims of even-handedness and objectivity, in the
end, are merely lip service, because of the nonstop
one-sidedness of their presentation, their gross exaggeration
of the power of the lobby, their disregard for the
consistently broad-based American public support for Israel,
their omission of the very many interests that the US has in a
strong and safe Israel, and their overriding theme that
policy-makers are controlled by the lobby. No matter how the
authors protest, all of this adds up to an effort to
delegitimize the work of pro-Israel activists.

Unfortunately for the authors, the idea that colleges and
universities in the United States are dominated by pro-Israeli
voices is absurdly laughable, even more so than their claims
that the Lobby controls Congress, the State Department and the
White House. Thus, Mearsheimer and Walt are forced to do a lot
of hedging and filling in their discussion of the Lobby and
academia. They admit that "the Lobby has had the most
difficulty stifling debate about Israel on college campuses,"
and in mild desperation they list many instances in which
pro-Israel advocates merely criticized or disagreed with
specific faculty members or university programs. For example,
the fact that writings by the late Palestinian scholar Edward
Said provoked "hundreds of e-mails, letters, and journalistic
accounts that call on [Columbia University] to denounce Said
and to either sanction or fire him" is cited as evidence of
the power of the Lobby on campus. The fact that Said never was
denounced, sanctioned or fired is apparently irrelevant.

The truth is that American college campuses are enormously
diverse from almost every point of view - and that includes
ideologically. In fact, many campuses have become hotbeds of
anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian, and, in a few cases, outright
anti-Semitic activism. Jewish organizations are working hard
to try to hold their own, but their voices are often being
drowned out by those of militant anti-Israel groups.

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Post
comment | Terms

12.
fatswaller
rudi - US (08/27/2007
16:18)

11.
Abe Foxman
Tom Lowe - USA (08/27/2007
13:42)

10.
Abe Foxman
Cheri - (08/27/2007
09:51)

9.
Abe Foxman
Gene - USA (08/27/2007
09:25)

8.
Abe, Eric and Joe, so you are from the, errr,
left side of the bench? The ones who happily
side with our detractors, or I missed something
in your
DB - (08/27/2007
07:39)

7.
Nice to see anti-semites lurking on
talkback.
dov epstein - israel
(08/27/2007 07:25)

6.
I look Forward to the Book. It's About
Time.
Ed Bruun - USA (08/27/2007
07:04)

5.
Foxman is Wrong
Institute for
Research - DC (08/27/2007 06:52)

4.
Give me a break
Joe - (08/27/2007
03:48)

3.
Laughable distortion of truth
Eric C.
Anderson - USA (08/27/2007 02:55)

2.
OUR AL SHARPTON WROTE A BOOK?
abe -
usa (08/27/2007 01:57)

1.
I hope the entire book is as good as the
excerpts.
Ronald - USA (08/26/2007
23:49)

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