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Jewish Groups Hold Fire on Harvard Report
Harvard University has distanced itself from a controversial report by a Harvard professor and another academic who accuse Washington’s pro-Israeli lobby of operating against U.S. interests. Versions of the report appeared in the London Review of Books and on Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Web site, NewsMax reported earlier. Now Harvard has decided to remove its logo from the report on the Web site. Harvard also added a disclaimer to the article that states it reflects only the views of its authors. And Robert Belfer, who gave the Kennedy School $7.5 million to help endow the chair now occupied by Professor Stephen Walt – co-author of the study along with John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago – called Harvard and asked that Walt be forbidden to use his title in publicizing the report, according to the New York Sun.
Story Continues Below But Jewish organizations by and large are holding back from strongly attacking the article to avoid drawing attention to it, the Jewish weekly Forward reports. "The key here is to not do what they probably want, which is to have this become a battle between us and them, or for them to say that they are being silenced,” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Forward.
And Ken Jacobsen, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said: "The truth is that this really wouldn’t be worth spending any time discussing if not for the fact of where these people are located and what their reputations are.” In their report, the professors attacked those on both the political left and right and said the pro-Israeli 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.
"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.” But as NewsMax reported last week, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) charges that the article "is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission.” Among the allegations in the report – all of which were refuted by CAMERA:
The highly criticized report, however, has aroused great interest in the Arab media. The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s office in Washington distributed it by e-mail to thousands of subscribers, and lobbyists for Arab states have been passing it around, according to another Jewish news source, Haaretz. The study also drew praise from former Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke. Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, a strong supporter of Israel, has challenged Mearsheimer and Walt to a debate, and the pair has said they would accept the challenge "under the appropriate circumstances.”
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