Are Walt/Mearsheimer Anti-Semitic?

Bret Stephens’s editorial from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal is not posted on OpinionJournal.com (strange, since Walt/Mearsheimer has identified the Journal’s editorial page as part of the Israel Lobby), so here is an excerpt:

Imagine a conspiracy so vast the only person not in on it is you.  In 1998, Hollywood indulged that conceit in “The Truman Show,” a film about a reality show so all-encompassing that its unwitting hero, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), has no idea the very world he inhabits is a stage. Now imagine a conspiracy that makes Truman [Burbanks] of us all.  According to professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, it’s called “The Israel Lobby.” . . .

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is part of it.  Fair enough.  But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features?  Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people — every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here . . .

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic.  But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect.

I have resisted the temptation to charge Walt and Mearsheimer with anti-Semitism, either of intent or effect.  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.”  Compare these two statements:

“[T]he leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. . . . We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. . . . [N]o person of honesty and vision can look on [the Jews’] pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them.”

— Charles Lindbergh, in a speech at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa on September 11, 1941.

Why  has  the  United  States  been  willing  to  set  aside  its  own  security  in  order  to advance  the  interests  of  another  state? . . .  It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the United States to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security.  If their efforts to shape U.S. policy succeed . . . the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.

— Walt/Mearsheimer, in “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

It is one thing to see such language in a political speech 65 years ago.  But one would not have thought that an allegation of “duping the goyim and getting them to fight their wars” would appear in 2006 in a “Faculty Working Paper” at Harvard.

Elsewhere on the topic of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper:  Atlas Shrugged has an excellent series of posts.  Boker tov, Boulder! has still more essential follow-up posts (here and here and here).  The Neocon Express calls a meeting of the Vast Israel Lobby Conspiracy (for April 1).  Snapshots notes that Footnote 181 joins Footnote 40 in the academic Hall of Shame, and In Context has a very significant post that notes the problems start in the very first footnote and keep going.  The Media Monitor underscores an important point that “has made barely a dent in the American Jewish consciousness.”  And even the Guardian runs an interesting thread of comments on the paper.