Stephen Walt, Anti-Semites and the Islamist Lobby

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
02 April '13..

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their book “The Israel Lobby” in 2007, the respected American scholar Walter Russell Mead argued in a very critical review that this “may be a book that anti-Semites will love, but it is not necessarily an anti-Semitic book.” Mead also noted that the book was “written in haste” and predicted that it would “be repented at leisure.”

As it turned out, the assumption that Mearsheimer and Walt would have any regrets about writing “a book that anti-Semites will love” was all too optimistic.

Some four years later, Mead commented on reports that John Mearsheimer had endorsed a book written by “a Hitler Apologist and Holocaust Revisionist.” Mead noted politely that “this is not normally the intellectual company a Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago is expected to keep” and he suggested that “we may even hear some thoughts from Professor Walt about his co-author.”

Unfortunately, this was again an all too optimistic expectation, because Stephen Walt promptly used his blog at Foreign Policy to give his co-author a prominent platform to double down on his endorsement of the book in question and its author Gilad Atzmon.

At this point it was becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that both Walt and Mearsheimer didn’t mind at all if their writings appealed to people with openly antisemitic views. Indeed, whether intentionally or not, there can be little doubt that Walt and Mearsheimer have done much to mainstream antisemitism.

Now Stephen Walt has taken another step to confirm this conclusion. He has been featured as the March 2013 Guest Writer for the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), a website whose self-described mission is promoting “the Palestinian cause” by reaching out “to opinion makers and decision makers in a deliberate, organized and sustained manner.”

Fresnozionism - Stephen Walt blames AIPAC for budget crisis

Palestinian President Abbas 
meets with U.S. Congressional
 Delegation in Ramallah yesterday.
 Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is 
speaking to Abbas.

Fresnozionism.org
13 August '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/08/stephen-walt-blames-aipac-for-budget-crisis/

Stephen Walt, who has built a career — and it appears to be a lucrative one — on bashing Israel and skirting (maybe) the limits of antisemitism in his attacks on ‘The Lobby’, claims that AIPAC is worsening the US budget crisis:

After congressional shenanigans helped spark a major market sell-off and sparked fears of a double-dip recession, you’d think every single one of them would be heading back to their districts to figure out what their constituents wanted and to try to explain how they were going to help make things better. Or maybe a few of them would even spend the recess taking a crash course in macroeconomics and public finance, so that they could start exercising their public duties more responsibly.

But what did 81 of them decide to do instead? You guessed it: they are off on junkets to Israel, paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC spinoff that has been funding such trips for years. That’s right: during the August recess nearly a fifth of the U.S. Congress will visit a single country whose entire population is less than that of New York City.

Now since these trips will last only one week and cost US taxpayers nothing, one wonders why Walt is so excited. Apparently it’s because they might have the effect of making our congresspersons pro-Israel:

Such trips also expose these visitors to the policy preferences and basic worldview of Israel’s leaders, which is of course why AIEF pays for them.

Scary. But which leaders are they meeting with? Last week, the schedule was revealed in all of its sinister dimensions:

The delegation will visit both Israel and the West Bank, and is scheduled to meet with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

And what did they hear from President Abbas?

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with US lawmakers visiting the West Bank and Gaza Strip [sic] and urged them to lend their support to the formation of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital, the PA’s WAFA news agency reported on Friday.

Abbas reportedly stressed that the future state must be “empty of settlements” …

The Palestinian president stressed that the PA’s “first, second and third choice is to establish the Palestinian state through negotiations,” adding that Israel’s settlement policy was the main obstacle to the peace process. Abbas also assured the US legislators that his upcoming UN bid for statehood, though unilateral, does not contradict the essence of the peace process.

Abbas is being more than a little disingenuous here, since the obstacle to negotiations has been Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which continues to demand that Israel agree to give them everything they want before negotiations can start. And it is flat-out false that a unilateral declaration of statehood doesn’t contradict the peace process — it contradicts UNSC resolution 242 (and others), the Oslo interim agreement and the Road Map, all of which call for negotiations between the parties.

But Stephen Walt, who illustrated his article with a picture of known Jewish Zionist conspirators Foreign Minister Avigdor and Senator Joe Lieberman (who is not part of this trip), should be happy. Or perhaps he thinks our representatives should meet with Hamas, too?

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The Western Press and Hezbollah

Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
10 July '10

Even after Octavia Nasr apologized for her ill-advised “tweet” over the July 4 holiday expressing her “respect” for the recently deceased Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, CNN fired its senior editor for Middle East affairs. And now bloggers and journalists are up in arms. Some are blaming the job action on “neoconservatives,” which presumably includes THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Daniel Halper who commented on Nasr’s “tweet” here. Israel Lobby author Stephen Walt writes that CNN’s “spineless response” is “one more reason why mainstream journalism is increasingly seen as morally bankrupt.”

Walt and some of the others have half a point--why is Nasr being singled out for openly expressing the U.S. media’s default position on Hezbollah, Fadlallah’s one-time colleagues? For instance, does anyone doubt that the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh “respects” the late cleric’s even more vicious rival, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, whom he interviewed in the pages of the New Yorker?

(Read full article)

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Religion of Yes

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has always been divisive; now it’s being used as a wedge


Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
28 April '10

It’s a bright and warm spring Washington afternoon, a climate perfectly suited to a gathering of one of Washington’s most cheerfully sunny organizations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. With U.S.-Israel relations at an all-time low, and both Washington and Jerusalem facing serious foreign threats, the institute’s 25th-anniversary meeting at the Renaissance Hotel is an optimistic, celebratory affair. With Lebanese lobbyists, Palestinian activists, and Turkish journalists mingling among institution trustees and other interested members of the American Jewish community, the scene in the beige ballroom resembles a gathering of a large extended family.

While the Institute produces sober analyses on a host of regional concerns from Turkey to the Persian Gulf, it is best known as the home away from home of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is no surprise that the hottest topic of conversation at this family gathering is the seeming apostasy of everyone’s favorite uncle, Aaron David Miller. A former high-ranking State Department official who helped inaugurate the peace process in 1988 as an aide to Secretary of State James Baker and continued to knock Israeli and Arab heads together under President Bill Clinton, Miller just announced in a cover story in the new Foreign Policy that he no longer believes in the peace process. Recalling the hopefulness of the early 1990s and the Oslo process, Miller writes: “America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I’d become a believer. I’m not anymore.”

Most people in the room don’t know what to make of Miller’s apparent about-face on the single issue that has united the major institutional players in the American Jewish community’s foreign policy establishment from the Washington Institute to American Israel Public Affairs Committee for the past two decades. Combined with the recent vitriolic public attacks on Obama adviser Dennis Ross from outside and within the Administration for his supposed “dual loyalties” and insufficient dedication to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which Ross oversaw under President Bill Clinton, Miller’s article suggests that a watershed moment has been reached in the history of the peace process, which once served to show how American Jews could serve their country while also helping to bring peace to Israel. It has become a dead letter—or, at worst, a wedge to pry Jews out of decision-making positions in the U.S. government and suggest that the interests of the United States and Israel are necessarily opposed to each other.

(Read full article)

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The chronologically-challenged Stephen Walt

Martin Kramer
Inside the Middle East/JPost
11 February '10

In the past, I've demolished Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's claim that Israel and its friends drove the United States to war with Iraq. I did it when they published their article, and did it again when they published their book, The Israel Lobby. It's a conspiracy theory, pure and simple. And because Walt is a conspiracy theorist, he does what they all do: he rips evidence out of context.

Here's his latest grasp at a straw: his claim that Tony Blair has "revealed" that "Israel officials were involved in those discussions" on Iraq held between Blair and George Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Walt brings as evidence this quote from Blair's testimony to the UK commission investigating the Iraq war:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

Walt's conclusion: "Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war." Walt goes on to declare that "more evidence of their influence [of Israel and the Israel lobby] on the decision for war will leak out," and that "Blair's testimony is evidence of that process at work."

When people who don't know much about the Middle East, like Stephen Walt, pose as experts, they make basic mistakes of chronology. So let me remind him of exactly what coincided with the Crawford meeting of April 6-7, 2002.

(Read full article)
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Blumenthal Lets It Slip

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
27 October 09

Jeffrey Goldberg catches Max Blumenthal telling a nugget of truth at J Street about the authors of the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Blumenthal at the J Street fest declared:

I personally think they provided cover for J Street to be able to exist to fill this void but Jeremy capitulated, he sort of prostrated himself before the serious man, Jeffrey Goldberg, and he said yes, it’s true they wrote the modern version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they’re anti-Semites. And to me, when you call Stephen Walt and John Meirsheimer anti-Semites — first of all it raises the question: if you’re going to capitulate before Jeffrey Goldberg, if you can’t stand up to Jeffrey Goldberg, how can we trust you to stand up against the settlers, how can we trust you to stand up against the government of Netanyahu and Lieberman?

Just think, the book that made it onto Osama bin Laden’s list also provided “cover” for J Street.

As an aside, it is remarkable that the villains in the J Street drama are Goldberg, Netanyahu, and Lieberman. Hmm. You’d think a pro-Israel group would think of the “enemies” as being those who hide behind women’s skirts and use baby carriages as barricades. But no, the focus of J Street’s ire is the Jews who disagree with J Street and criticize its grab bag of Israel-hating friends and allies. They are not, it seems, “pro-Israel” but “anti-pro-Israel.” Or maybe they should be renamed in honor of their intellectual godfathers: W and M Street.

The Places Stephen Walt Goes

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
04 October 09

A Norwegian university has decided to assemble a cast of Israel haters to teach a seminar on Israel. Ilan Pappe, of Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine notoriety, is involved. Pappe, a Marxist Israeli who left his native land for the UK—which is far more welcoming of people like him who support economic and academic boycotts and the destruction of Israel—will be joined by a group of similarly obscure quasi-academics whose major qualification is their hatred of Israel. As Haaretz reports,

Other speakers invited by NTNU Dean Torbjorn Digernes include Moshe Zuckermann, who in a January interview for Deutschlandradio—a widely-heard German program—said that operation Cast Lead cost hundreds of thousands of Gazan lives.

The members of the seminar’s organizing committee—Morten Levin, Ann Rudinow Saetnan and Rune Skarstein—have all signed a call for an academic boycott of Israel.

Who would feel comfortable sharing the stage with such people? Well, Stephen Walt, of course, who has joined the seminar as a lecturer. For someone who was once lauded as one of America’s greatest foreign-policy thinkers, it must be a little embarrassing to be forced to take your act to an obscure university set in a small city of a country whose major export is pacifistic moralizing. Or maybe Walt’s desire to participate in some high-octane Israel-bashing is so intense that he can only get his fix abroad, what with all the intimidation from the Israel lobby in the U.S. Who knows.

During the Chas Freeman controversy, one of Walt’s ways of defending Freeman was to compile lists of American Jews who opposed his nomination and accuse them of dual loyalties and then express puzzlement at how anyone could suspect him of animosity to Israel. After all, as he insisted, he and his co-author, John Mearsheimer,

have consistently declared our support for a Jewish state, said we “admired its many achievements,” and wrote that the United States “should come to Israel’s aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy.”

Stephen Walt is just a concerned friend, you see. Is it really possible that he is traveling all the way to Norway to appear next to Ilan Pappe so he can declare to the assembled his admiration for Israel’s many achievements and his support for the Jewish state?

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File Under Chutzpah

By Stephen Pollard August 26, 2009

Stephen Walt, of 'Walt and Mearsheime Israel Lobby' fame, has done more than most people on the planet to make Israel-baiting a mass sport. And it's that atmosphere which has led to the explosion in demands for a boycott.

So you wouldn't expect to read this at the end of a long post on his blog singing the praises of Neve Gordon, the Israeli academic who last week called for a boycott:

I might add that I dont support the "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
Movement" myself. This is partly because I'm uncomfortable with even
mild forms of collective punishment and partly because, like Gordon
himself, I do worry about the double-standard issue (i.e., if you think
it's ok to boycott Israel, why not China or Burma or any number of
other countries?). And I'm especially leery of efforts to interfere
with academic exchanges, because I don't like anything that interferes
with free speech or obstructs the free flow of ideas. But I respect
Gordon's motives and his op-ed did make me wonder: what if he's correct
and this is in fact the only way to get a two-state solution? Making
people think is something scholars are supposed to do, right?

So after spending years spewing out bile and giving spurious academic legitimacy to traditional lies about those manipulative, secretive Israelis running US foreign policy, he casually mentions that he doesn't actually support the genie he has let out of the bottle.

Chutzpah is being kind. I can think of other words to use.