The reason you can never win with a conspiracy theorist is that when evidence bears him out, he’s right, and when the evidence proves him wrong, it’s because there’s a coverup to hide the truth. It’s a classic lose-lose situation.
And it is being used skillfully by the authors of “The Israel Lobby,” the pseudo-scholarly paper that blames all of America’s troubles with the Arab and Islamic world on Israel. Witness the words of one of the authors to the Washington Post:
In an e-mail interview, Mearsheimer explained what he feels accounts for the difference between the international reaction to the study and the response in Israel and the U.S.
“I think the Israel lobby is mainly responsible for the difference in the reactions to our piece at home and abroad,” he replied. “I think that most Americans, like most foreigners, understand that the main points in our article are correct. Christopher Hitchens put the point well in Slate when he said, “Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total, perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass.”
“The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is that you cannot say that in the United States without being accused of anti-Semitism and bringing a storm down on yourself, ” Mearsheimer wrote.
This is in response to an article that quotes world opinion as in favor of the paper (but the part of the world that is quoted mostly happens to be in the Islamic part of the world that also hates Israel, such as Yemen, Qatar, Pakistan, and Malaysia). I’m shocked, shocked, that these newspapers would agree with the theme of the paper.
Funny, I also thought that Walt and Mearsheimer weren’t talking to anyone except those that were prepared to have a scholarly discussion on the paper. Guess Mearsheimer made an exception in this case.
Imagine that? If you make anti-Semitic remarks in the US somebody calls you an antisemite. Ooooh, we must be on the verge of fascism.
At the risk of sounding tu quoque, what did a Saudi Prince’s donation of twenty million dollars to the Kennedy School recently have to do with Dean Walt’s “research paper”?
Radical Arabs’ hostility to the USA began in the first Eisenhower Administration when Nasser decided to become the enemy of the US. Since he wanted to be a socialist dictator it made more sense for him to be “nonaligned” in favor of the USSR than with the US, despite the earnest efforts of the Eisenhower Administration to make him a friend of the US. At the time the policy of the US was very cool towards Israel (it did not warm up until the Kennedy Administration). Under Eisenhower the US had an arms embargo on Israel.
Nasser’s Egypt spent many years and great efforts at propagandizing against the US in the Arab world. Such is Egypt’s cultural influence there that this enmity has had lasting results, and the Islamists have inherited it despite their on-again-off-again hostility to the secular dictators. The anti-American propaganda lies of the Soviets have also had an influence. These intellectual toxins have spread to other parts of the world now. It is the other side of the coin now of antisemitism, the two are inextricably intertwined. The Islamists also hate the USA for its “Immorality”, such as allowing women out of the house without being covered from head to foot or allowing mixed dancing (a practice that shocked Sayyid Qutb in 1948 and helped convice him of the evil of Western culture). So the USA would be in trouble in the Muslim world even if there were no Israel, and the origin of the anti-American movement there has little or nothing to do with Israel.