Soccer Dad: Poisoned ivies

March 21, 2006

Poisoned ivies

I remember a remark about how it's good to have an open mind, but you have to be careful or else your brain will fall out. Or a quote attributed to George Orwell that "[o]ne has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool."

When one considers the state of America's presitigious universities it's hard not to think such things. While promoting themselves as bastions of free and independent inquiry, we find them championing despots who abhor the same. Simeltaneously we find them disparaging freedom.

Yale recently has accepted as a student, a former spokesman for the murderous Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. As John Fund who has covered this extensively writes

Are there no limits to how arrogant and out-of-touch America's Ivy League schools can get? Last week it emerged that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, is now a student at Yale while at the same time the school continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues for the right of its law school to exclude military recruiters.

And it's not just that the Ivy League lionizes tyrants - even if the Yale example is an extreme on, it accepts money from them too. And that has a very real effect. The money does not come without strings.

Columbia University has had a recent record of allowing its Middle Eastern studies department descend into anti-Israel propagandizing. Now, having been left off the list of institutions receiving money from Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, it has turned to another benefactor of even worse reputation: Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi. According to Mohamed Eljahmi

What is wrong with accepting Middle Eastern largesse? Seldom is the funding altruistic. Just as Alwaleed hopes to launder Saudi Arabia's image, so too does Qadhafi want to whitewash his interest. Just a month ago, Qadhafi's Revolutionary Committees and Libyan security shot and killed eleven people in Benghazi. Hundreds of Libyans � including my brother Fathi � remain in prison for the crime of speaking out in favor of multiparty elections.

Harvard is one of the universities that accepted the millions from Prince Alwaleed, and, just a few months later, a distinguished professor at its Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt, contributes to a paper called, simply, The Lobby. "The Lobby" purports to show that Israel wields disproportionate influence over American policy that is often inimical to American interests.

The paper is filled with unsupported allegations and sophomoric arguments; the fare you're more likely to read in an undergraduate newspaper than as a result of academic inquiry.

There is so much in the paper to dispute it is hard to limit myself, but I don't have time.

In the 1980's Israel's critics would lament Israel's imperfect morality. The Middle East, Charles Krauthammer wrote had become a "moral resort." (The Mideast as Moral Disneyland; Washington Post, Feb 5, 1988)

Israel's critics, so concerned about its soul, would have a little more credibility if they displayed equal concern for Israel's body. After all, it is that body-its right to mere existence-that has been the burning issue for 40 years now. Israelis don't crave the tears of the West's moral vacationers. They crave life. Any Arab negotiating partner who, like Sadat, fully declares that life to be an absolute given, will soon find across the table the kind of Jewish soul for which the moral nostalgics so ostentatiously pine.

Then Israel's critics would often lament that Israel's lost innocence was a reason more for sorrow than for anger and insisted that they only had Israel's best interests in mind. Walt and Mearsheimer thankfully have stripped away that pretense. They are not friends of Israel.

Though Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is one of the reasons they claim that Israel no longer has the moral authority to receive American support they don't even notice that views that were unheard of in Israel 20 years ago are now mainstream. And yet even as Prime Minister Sharon talked and his successor Ehud Olmert talk of withdrawing Israelis from more territory has Palestinian terror eased?

It hasn't. But that hasn't discouraged the professors.

Walt and Mearsheimer write

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn�t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he �would have joined a terrorist organisation�.

This is hard to take. Despite their disclaimer that terrorism is wrong the professors seem to justify the means because of the ends. But as Irshad Manji wrote in "How I learned to love the Wall"

For all the closings, however, Israel is open enough to tolerate lawsuits by civil society groups who despise every mile of the barrier. Mr. Sharon himself agreed to reroute sections of it when the Israel High Court ruled in favor of the complainants. Where else in the Middle East can Arabs and Jews work together so visibly to contest, and change, state policies?

Changes do and have come in Israel. Significant changes. (Admittedly I don't agree with all these changes.) And they've come about not due to terror, but to political activism. Yet the professors find that the terror of the Palestinians "isn't surprising."

The professors also write.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers� unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby�s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby�s task even easier.

How weak are pro-Arab interest groups? They probably don't have to exist? Why not? Because there are many people of influence who receive money from Arab interests and get to pursue the goals of their patrons with no scrutiny.

In the early 1980's Steven Emerson wrote "The American House of Saud" that uncovered this hidden influence. In his review of the book, Daniel Pipes wrote

A number of former ambassadors to the Arab countries are on the Saudi payroll. Mr. Emerson documents that one of them, Andrew I. Killgore, said in public that his company did not do public relations work for Saudi Arabia when in fact it did. Offered a chance to respond, Mr. Killgore did not deny the charge. Instead he accused me of wishing to "silence" him.

Killgore is important as he is one of the founders of the American Educational Trust that publishes the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Two years ago news organizations reported that a number of former diplomats wrote a letter to President Bush objecting to his Middle East policy. Though the BBC reported the participation of AET in organizing the signatories to the letter, most American news reports did not. In such a way did Saudi money silently effect the news. The lack of scrutiny does not mean that pro-Arab influence in American policy making (or in news coverage) does not exist. And it is that unreported influence that AIPAC exists to fight.

It's important to realize that the same money that finances AET, also now flows to the institutions that Stephen Walt is affiliated with.

Finally, it's worth noting that aspects of this intelectually bankrupt exercise are unfortunately hardly that far afield from mainstream thinking.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby�s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. �As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,� the Forward reported, �America�s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.� The editorial goes on to say that �concern for Israel�s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.�

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post wrote in 2003

"The Likudniks are really in charge now," said a senior government official, using a Yiddish term for supporters of Sharon's political party. Neumann agreed that Abrams's appointment was symbolically important, not least because Abrams's views were shared by his boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, by Vice President Cheney and by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "It's a strong lineup," he said.

As the American Thinker rightly brings up

But the professors want us to ignore the general disapproval of the war by American Jews, for what is important are the powerful neoconservative voices, who pushed Bush and Cheney to war. To believe this theory, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice and Colin Powell were mere pushovers and puppets for the likes of Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby.

"The Lobby" is little more than a sanitized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fact that David Duke has seized on it as exoneration tells you all you need to know about its poisonous content. Unfortunately it is a view that is all too accepted in certain precincts of American political, journalistic and academic life.

Technorati tags: John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, the Lobby, Israel, AIPAC.