“Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic”

By Published On: April 5, 2006

An Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post, entitled “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic,” weighs in on the widely criticized Walt and Mearsheimer working paper on the “Israel Lobby.” After explaining why he calls the piece a “wretched piece of scholarship,” Eliot A. Cohen, the Op-Ed writer and a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, reaches a couple of conclusions.

On whether the paper is anti-Semitic, he writes:

If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information — why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Hinting at the paper’s underlying attempt to repress pro-Israel voices, Cohen writes that

To dispute [Walt and Mearsheimer’s] view of Israel is not to differ about policy but to act as a foreign agent.

Might Cohen, then, be acting as a “foreign agent”? He notes:

I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation’s military affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son — the third generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Other supposed members of “The Lobby” also have children in military service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.

Read the whole piece here.

radioislam cartoon.gif
Cartoon found on the virulently anti-Semitic Radio Islam Web site.
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