A paper was published two weeks ago claiming that Jews exert undue influence on the government of the United States, convincing the government to follow the interests of Jews even when it is against the best interests of the country. The Jews have “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security”. They are “unhealthy for democracy” and “increase the terrorist danger that all states face”. They must be recognized and stopped.

The Palestinian Authority’s American Mission and the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood have both praised the article. After expressing appreciation to the article’s authors for “validat(ing) every major point I have been making since even before the war even started”, David Duke had the following to say: “The task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neo-cons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV.”

So who wrote the article and where was it published? Was it written by people who have already established themselves as people who are against the Jewish people and Israel? Hanan Ashrawi? Noam Chomsky? Osama Bin Laden?

Nope. It was written by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. If you are not familiar with the names of the authors, Mearsheimer is the “R. Wendell Harrison Distiguished Service Professor of Political Science” at the University of Chicago. Walt is the “Belfer Professor of International Relations” and Academic Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Political Science at Harvard University. The paper they have released is entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” and is available for download from a Harvard University website. It is 82 pages long (nearly half of which is endnotes and sources).So what? They are obviously very respected academics. They have obviously thoroughly researched their sources. If they say it, it must be true. Right?

Not everyone seems to think so. CAMERA has published a point-by-point refutation fo the article, starting off their analysis with the following remarks:

reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in “serious dispute.”

In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk.

Alan Dershowitz had the following to say (from New York Sun, 3/24/06):

“What we’re discovering first of all is that the quotes that they use are not only wrenched out of context, but they are the common quotes that appear on hate sites,” Mr. Dershowitz, who is identified in the paper as part of the “lobby,” told The New York Sun yesterday.

“The wrenching out of context is done by the hate sites,and then [the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they’ve gotten them from hate sites.

“They didn’t do direct research, they didn’t do primary research,” Mr. Dershowitz said of the paper’s authors. “They’re just taking ideas that already existed out there in hate sites – in the work of Chomsky, in the work of Buchanan, and in the work of David Duke – and they’re claiming it as their scholarship.”

Harvard has already distanced themselves from the paper (they had their logo removed from the first page, and had the following disclaimer put in:

The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.

The most concerning part of this is not that David Duke supports their positions. He is in the Ku Klux Klan. He has been saying this stuff for years. What is alarming is where it came from – two respected professors from two of the top Political Science schools in the country. What a few years ago was reserved for people who preached hate for a living is now acceptable for a Harvard Dean.

This is expressed very well by an In Dark Times, Blame the Jews, an editorial in The Forward:

What is new and startling is the document’s provenance. Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America’s most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation’s most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it’s tempting, they can’t be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream.

…Some of Israel’s more overheated defenders were trying this week to diagnose the problem as a character flaw in the authors. Their solution is to counterattack. That’s a mistake. Leaving aside the folly of trying to answer a claim that Israel is a bully by bullying the messenger, the response misses the point. Mearsheimer and Walt are products of their time.

These are dark, poisonous days we live in, and the poison is spreading. In Iraq, America has stumbled into a quagmire of historic proportions, with global consequences that are proving nothing short of catastrophic. If that weren’t enough, our nation is nearly bankrupt, with a national debt nearly equal to our Gross Domestic Product. And the Arctic is melting. The miscalculations seem inexplicable. There must be someone to blame.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, at the sight of respected professors, and not only professors, coming unhinged.

The Mearsheimer-Walt paper shows how far the notion that Israel is to blame for the Iraq War has moved from the crackpot fringe to the center. Three years ago it was heard mainly from campus radicals. Two years ago it started getting picked up by a handful of Washington insiders, memorably including Senator Ernest Hollings and General Anthony Zinni. Now it’s reached the heart of the academic establishment.

These are scary times we live in. In some ways, starting to echo many of the events in pre-WWII Germany (and every other time that Jews have been expelled from the countries of the world over the years). Though the holocaust was only 60 years ago, already its historical validity and magnitude is being contested. Today by crackpots, tomorrow by Harvard Professors. It is for these reasons that having a strong Israel is even more important today – now more then ever.

(Cross-posted on Newsvine).