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April 06, 2006
Dershowitz Responds to Walt and Mearsheimer Paper
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.
Posted by GI at April 6, 2006 02:48 PM
Comments
It is easy to be a member of the majority. One can either ignore minorities or persecute them simply for being minorities. It must be intellectually satisfactory for some in the ruling class to declare their enemies lurk behind cloaked motives and nefarious agendas.
Anti-Semitism is nothing original. It is the oldest ploy of the insecure and intellectually limited. It takes little to ascribe sinister motives to those whose very presence is feared. It lights a candle against one’s own darkness. That we expose its existence and let in the light is a sadly never-ending necessity.
That Harvard and the University of Chicago, homes to such lights as Dershowitz, Kissinger, and Milton Friedman, could shelter such buffoons disturbs me more than the silliness of their hackneyed conclusions. Since neither of these bastions of higher learning seems capable of speaking out against Messrs. Mearsheimer (Nazi aspirations, huh?) and Walt’s assertions that The Jews are the driving force behind American foreign policy and military interventions, I fear we have returned to pre World War II days when Jews were subject to quotas at most colleges, though our intellectual aptitude alone might have indicated that we could have filled a very large proportion of the student body.
It is important that as Jews we remove our considerable financial support from such educational “places". Our largesse in the form of endowments, charitable gifts, and the enrollment of our brightest sons and daughters should be bestowed upon those that find their voices to speak out vigorously against anti-Semitism.
Marlane Buckner
Parkton, MD
Posted by: Marlane Buckner at April 6, 2006 05:03 PM
As an American, I am appalled at the blatant anti-Semitism in this "report".
As a political Conservative, I continue to be amazed by the American Jewry's continued support of the Left. The secular left is coming after the rights of the Christian religious and soon they will be coming for the rest of the religious folk in America. Heads up!!
Posted by: john425 at April 13, 2006 06:35 PM
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