De Pro Israel Lobby 8

De Amerikaanse journalist Norman Solomon schrijft: 'Foreclosing a Media Debate on U.S. Policies Toward Israel. Weeks after a British magazine published a long article by two American professors titled “The Israel Lobby,” the outrage continues to howl through mainstream U.S. media. A Los Angeles Times Op-Ed article by Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot helped to set a common tone. He condemned a working paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was excerpted last month in the London Review of Books. The working paper, Boot proclaimed, is “nutty.” And he strongly implied that the two professors—Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at Harvard—are anti-Semitic. Many who went on the media attack did more than imply. On April 3, for instance, the same day that The Philadelphia Inquirer reprinted Boot’s piece from the L.A. Times, a notably similar Op-Ed appeared in The Boston Herald under the headline “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard.” And so it goes in the national media echo chamber. When a Johns Hopkins University professor weighed in Wednesday on the Op-Ed page of The Washington Post, the headline was blunt: “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.” The piece flatly called the Mearsheimer-Walt essay “kooky academic work”—and “anti-Semitic.” But nothing in the essay is anti-Semitic. Some of the analysis from Mearsheimer and Walt is arguable. A number of major factors affect Uncle Sam’s Middle East policies, in addition to pro-Israel pressures. But no one can credibly deny that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, where politicians know that they can criticize Israel only at their political peril. Overall, the Mearsheimer-Walt essay makes many solid points about destructive aspects of U.S. support for the Israeli government. Their assessments deserve serious consideration. For several decades, to the present moment, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian people has amounted to methodical and despicable violations of human rights. Yet criticism of those policies from anyone (including American Jews such as myself) routinely results in accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry.' Lees verder: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060409_
israel_moral_blackmail_and_the_anti_semitic_defense/