Dershowitz Responds to Walt and Mearsheimer Paper

By Published On: April 6, 2006

Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government Web site has published on its Web site Professor Alan Dershowitz’s paper responding to the Walt and Mearsheimer “Israel Lobby” piece.

Dershowitz, whose paper cites CAMERA’s detailed refutation of Walt and Mearsheimer’s claims, states:

As an advocate of free speech and an opponent of censorship based on political correctness, I welcome a serious, balanced, objective study of the influences of lobbies — including Israeli lobbies — on American foreign policy. I also welcome reasoned, contextual and comparative criticism of Israeli policies and actions. Let the marketplace of ideas remain open to all. But, as I will show, this study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in nuance and balance, so unscholarly in its approach, so riddled with obvious factual errors that could easily have been checked (but obviously were not), and so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive. …

This is not academic writing. There is no weighing of evidence. Mearsheimer and Walt simply chose the most insidious explanation – which also happened to be the least plausible explanation – and dismissed all other possibilities without even an acknowledgement that other interpretations are possible.

Read it here.

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