Soccer Dad: Where are they?

March 28, 2006

Where are they?

In a famous Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, Garrett Morris took umbrage at the portrayal of black women in a ong by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. At the end of an outraged polemic, Morris switches his tone and asks "Where are they?"

As I follow the uproar of the Harvard "working paper" called "The Lobby" by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, I sort of feel the same way. Where's the influence you speak of? I wish I had it.

Meryl Yourish doesn't address that, but she writes

The real purpose of the paper was to get the lies out there. To make people think less of Israel and Jews. To give the haters another source from which to quote. Watch as these quotes go unchallenged in more and more places. Watch as how, instead of critically examining the paper, people will simply take it at face value and use it as more ammunition against Israel. And more ammunition against American Jews.

As if she needed proof, the Iran Press Service offers this article

The pro-Israel lobby in the United States has manipulated Washington's policies in the Middle East to the point where it is the U.S. that does most of the fighting, dying and rebuilding while Israel reaps most of the security benefits, argues a new study by two U.S. scholars.

"This situation has no equal in American political history", says the 83-page study, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy".

Similarly, Jewish Current Issues looks at the paper again and concludes

Sometimes, to paraphrase a Jewish insight from another context, a shoddy piece of academic work is simply a shoddy piece of academic work.

But the Walt/Mearsheimer paper is so shoddy it is hard to think of an alternative explanation, and there is a certain mindset evident in its language that recalls earlier allegations of a �Jewish Lobby.�

Boker Tov Boulder sees a timeless message in the lesson of the paper.

Despite some sensible arguments in support of the war on terror, Christopher Hitchens proves that he's no friend of Israel. However he exaggerates the evil of Israel (in his view) he notes

However, Mearsheimer and Walt present the situation as one where the Jewish tail wags the American dog, and where the United States has gone to war in Iraq to gratify Ariel Sharon, and where the alliance between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of Osama Bin Laden. This is partly misleading and partly creepy. If the Jewish stranglehold on policy has been so absolute since the days of Harry Truman, then what was Gen. Eisenhower thinking when, on the eve of an election 50 years ago, he peremptorily ordered Ben Gurion out of Sinai and Gaza on pain of canceling the sale of Israeli bonds?

But while he finds the exaggeration of Jewish/Israeli power "creepy", he suffers from a disconnect in the first sentence

It's slightly hard to understand the fuss generated by the article on the Israeli lobby produced by the joint labors of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was published in the London Review of Books.

The fuss is precisely over that "creepy" portrayal.

The Weekly Standard though hits a different nail on the head

Honest scholars of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be amused to learn that the word OPEC appears only once in the 83-page paper and that "AIPAC and its allies . . . have no serious opponents in the lobbying world." Men perspire and ladies glow, goes the adage. So Arabs, we suppose, don't lobby, they just bestow gifts, like the $20 million Saudi prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abd al-Aziz Al-Saud recently gave to the Kennedy School.

And that, for now, is the last word.

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