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Attack on 'Pro-Israel Lobby' Has Flaws
Two of America’s top scholars have created a furor by publishing a scathing attack on Washington’s pro-Israel lobby, claiming the lobby operates against U.S. interests. In an article published in the London Review of Books and on Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Web site, professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School charged that the Israel lobby has seized control of American foreign policy. But the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reports that the professors’ article "is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission.” In their piece, the professors attacked those on both the political left and right and said the lobby includes such diverse entities as the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial boards, Sen. Hillary Clinton, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Story Continues Below "The overall thrust of the U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the ‘Israel lobby,’” the authors wrote in their introduction. "[No] lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest.” The CAMERA report examines the article in detail and points to these "errors”:
"After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was horrified that the Saudis were considering a U.S. offer to send troops to protect the Kingdom. Bin Laden urged against what he saw as sacrilege ... "The attacks against the Unites States, in Saudi Arabia, in Kenya and Tanzania, in Yemen, and finally on the U.S. homeland on 9/11, had nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with U.S. support for Arab regimes. It should be noted also that al-Qaida never even tried to attack an Israeli target, much less Israel itself, until after 9/11.”
CAMERA notes: "What they don’t tell readers is that after the State Department report was released its credibility was shredded. Richard Clarke, for example, then the official in the State Department responsible for overseeing arms transfers, and later President Clinton’s counter-terrorism chief, stated there was one, minor improper transfer, not a pattern of them.”
CAMERA’s report by Alex Safian states: "This claim, which originated in an extremely controversial sentencing memorandum submitted by Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, is known to be false. "Prof. Angelo Codevilla [former senior staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and an intelligence specialist] declared in an interview that the memo ‘reportedly said the Israelis sold part of the information to the Soviet Union. All of these things are not only untrue, they were known by Weinberger not to be true.’”
In fact, Israel had only three tanks, five artillery pieces and 35 aircraft in the first critical weeks of the war, while the Arabs had 270 tanks, 150 artillery pieces and 300 aircraft, CAMERA points out, adding that the Israelis won "because they were fighting for their lives, unlike the Arab forces.”
But CAMERA notes that Ambassador Dennis Ross, President Clinton’s chief Middle East negotiator, has stated that under the offer "the Palestinians would have in the West Bank an area that was contiguous. Those who say there were cantons, completely untrue. It was contiguous ... And to connect Gaza with the West Bank, there would have been an elevated highway, an elevated railroad, to ensure that there would be not just safe passage for the Palestinians, but free passage.”
"This report is easily searched, and it mentions Israel only once: ‘Ever since the Persian Gulf War of 1991, when an Iraqi Scud missile hit a Saudi warehouse in which American soldiers were sleeping, causing the largest single number of casualties in the war; when Israeli and Saudi citizens donned gas masks in nightly terror of Scud attacks; and when the great "Scud Hunt” proved to be an elusive game that absorbed a huge proportion of U.S. aircraft, the value of the ballistic missile has been clear to America’s adversaries.’ "Obviously this report offers no support whatsoever for the claim that Israel wants the U.S. to fight its battles. Whether this is a careless mistake, or something more serious, it only further undermines the credibility of the authors.”
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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