Anti-Semitism At Harvard

But a more genteel, scholarly anti-Semitism, recalling the delicious anti-Semitism of a more enlightened age. Jew-hating is the new black:

Academic papers posted on a Harvard Web site don't normally attract enthusiastic praise from prominent white supremacists. But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has won David Duke's endorsement as "a modern Declaration of American Independence" and a vindication of the ex-Klansman's earlier work, presumably including his pathbreaking book, "Jewish Supremacism."

Walt and Mearsheimer contend that American national security dictates distancing ourselves from the state of Israel; that U.S. support for Israel has led to such disasters as America's status as the No. 1 target for Islamic terrorists; and that such an otherwise inexplicable departure from good sense can be accounted for only by the power of "The Lobby" (their capitalization), an overwhelmingly Jewish force abetted by some Christian evangelicals and a gentile neocon collaborator or two, who have hijacked American foreign policy and controlled it for decades.

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Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? 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.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends of Israel.

The notion that Jews control Republican foreign policy -- remember Nixon railing against Jewish liberals? or James Baker saying "Fuck the Jews, they didn't vote for us"? -- is simply laughable. There are important Jewish thinkers associated with the conservative movement -- some of the most influential thinkers, in fact -- but this influence comes through persuasion and argument, not through some sort political control (we need those 12% of 2% of Jews who vote Republicans, right? Otherwise we couldn't win New York State) or through some conspiracy-haunted cabal.

The Democratic Party, which receives 88% of the Jewish vote, tends on the whole to be more hostile to Israel.

How do they explain this?

Well-- Jews are crafty, and they're so diabolically conspiratorial it's hard to figure out what the hell they're up to.

Look, if it's true that such a small number of people control the world in such great disproportion to their numbers, then I say-- let them run the world. For crying out loud, if they're that freaking cunning and gifted by genius, then I for one welcome our New Zionist Jewish Caballist Overlords.

posted by Ace at 01:53 PM

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