Israel Matzav

David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated By a Harvard Dean

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was "surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.

"I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is," he said in an e-mail. "It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started." Duke added that "the task before us is to wrest control of America's foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neocons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV."

Mr. Walt said last night, "I have always found Mr. Duke's views reprehensible, and I am sorry he sees this article as consistent with his view of the world."

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While the arguments in Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt's paper are hardly new - allegations of dual loyalty have flitted about the Internet since before the war, and the left-wing press in particular has focused on the role of the Pentagon in making the case for the war - the fact that these points are now being made by such establishment thinkers has raised concern among Israel's friends in America and cheers from their adversaries.

"The content is not significant. Those seeking to damage the U.S.-Israel relationship have been saying this for a while. The fact that it carries the imprimatur of the Harvard Kennedy School is. Those that don't know better would assume it has validity, when it doesn't," the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, said.

A professor at Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz, whom the authors call an "apologist" for Israel, said he found much of the paper to be "trash." He said, "It could have been written by Pat Buchanan, by David Duke, Noam Chomsky, and some of the less intelligent members of Hamas. An intelligent member of Hamas would not have made these mistakes."

Those mistakes for Mr. Dershowitz include, for example, the assertion that "There is no question, for example, that many Al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians," which Mr. Dershowitz says "is just absurd."

Mr. Dershowitz was particularly troubled by the claim in the paper that Israeli "citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." He pointed out that the authors had conflated Israel's law of return with its criteria for citizenship. "That's right from the neo Nazi Web sites. Anybody can be a citizen of Israel. He confuses the law of return for the criteria for citizenship. He never mentions that a Jew cannot be a citizen in Jordan and Saudi Arabia," Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Walt said on this citizenship point last night that he wanted to check into it. "We were not writing on Saudi Arabia and Jordan," he said.

Mr. Dershowitz also objected to the paper's claim that the 2000 Oslo offer to Yasser Arafat would have created "Bantustans." Mr. Dershowitz said, "They should talk to President Clinton about that. The West Bank territory would have been completely contiguous."

"What he is saying is, 'some of my best lobbyists are Jews. Don't confuse what we are saying with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'" Mr. Dershowitz said. "Sorry, but it sounds very similar to me. The only difference is the Protocols are a forgery, but this is actually written by two bigots."

[I don't know how much any of you know about Alan Dershowitz, but my understanding is that he grew up religious, and as a law student he was hired by one of the large Jewish law firms as a summer associate. When he announced that he would not work on the Sabbath, he was called into the senior partner's office and told that if he would not work on the Sabbath, he should not bother to return to the firm when he graduated law school. I trust that this story is still making the rounds in New York and that the New York lawyers reading this blog know of what firm I speak. CiJ]

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A former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Morris Amitay, who is quoted in the Kennedy School paper, minimized the document's significance. "I would be worried if Henry Kissinger was saying this. But who are these guys?" Mr. Amitay said. "As far as I'm concerned this is a tribute to the Jewish community. We couldn't do anything about Auschwitz, but look, we now control foreign policy for a region of the world so vital to American interests."

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:40 PM