AIPAC's Complaint

AIPAC's Complaint: "The University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer is among America's most admired political scientists. Stephen Walt is the academic dean and a chaired professor at Harvard's Kennedy School. Neither man has ever made any remotely racist or anti-Semitic utterance in the public sphere. And yet because they recently published an essay in The London Review of Books and (with full scholarly apparatus) on the Kennedy School website that critically and--this is key--unsentimentally examines the role of the 'Israel lobby' in the making of US foreign policy, these two scholars have been subjected to a relentless barrage of vituperative insults in which the accusation 'anti-Semite' is merely the beginning. Just a few of the most colorful: 'Crackpot' (Martin Peretz); 'Could have been written by Pat Buchanan, by David Duke, Noam Chomsky, and some of the less intelligent members of Hamas' (Alan Dershowitz); 'As scholarly as...Welch and McCarthy--and just as nutty' (Max Boot); 'puts The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to shame' (Josef Joffe); 'resembles nothing so much as Wilhelm Marr's 1879 pamphlet The Victory of Judaism Over Germandom' (Ruth Wisse); 'dishonest so-called intellectuals...entitled to their stupidity' (New York Representative Eliot Engel)."

"One is tempted to point out that the authors themselves predicted the likelihood of such a reception, and by provoking it they have proved their point."