No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

No, It's Not Anti-Semitic: "No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 25, 2006; A23

During the Jim Crow era, many American communists fiercely fought racism. This is a fact. It is also a fact that segregationists and others often smeared civil rights activists by calling them communists. This technique is sometimes called guilt by association and sometimes 'McCarthyism.' If you think it's dead, you have not been following the controversy over a long essay about the so-called 'Israel Lobby.'
On April 5, for instance, The Post ran an op-ed, 'Yes, It's Anti-Semitic,' by Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a respected defense intellectual. Cohen does not much like a paper on the Israel lobby that was written by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University. He found it anti-Semitic. I did not.
But I did find Cohen's piece to be offensive. It starts by noting that the paper, titled 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,' had been endorsed by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. It goes on to quote Duke, who, I am sure, has nodded his head in agreement over the years with an occasional piece of mine, as saying the paper is a 'modern Declaration of American Independence.' If you follow Cohen's reasoning, then you would have to conclude that David Duke and the Founding Fathers have something in common. I am not, as they say, willing to go there.
Unfortunately, Cohen's piece is not unique. The New York Sun reported on its front page of March 24 an allegation from Alan Dershowitz that some of the quotes from the Israel lobby paper 'appear on hate sites.' Maybe they do, but Mearsheimer and Walt took those quotes (about "