Please see my yesterday's posting (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20160220). It was still discussed five years ago on the Huffington Post. (Lily)
1. Jewish Current Issues（http://jpundit.typepad.com/jci/）
6 April 2006
Dershowitz's Response to Walt & Mearsheimer
Professor Alan Dershowitz has posted on the Harvard Kennedy School of Government website his 45-page (with 157 footnotes) response to the Walt & Mearsheimer paper on the “Israel Lobby.” In his response, Dershowitz expressly questions their motive:
[A]s I will show, this study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in nuance and balance, so unscholarly in its approach, so riddled with obvious factual errors that could easily have been checked (but obviously were not), and so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive: what would motivate two well recognized academics to depart so grossly from their usual standards of academic writing and research in order to produce a “study paper” that contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse? [Page 6].
Dershowitz repeats the question again 38 pages later, at the end of his paper, but does not answer it. After summarizing some of the more egregious factual mistakes and easily refutable distortions that even a serious student, much less a scholar, would never make, Dershowitz leaves it at this: “I simply do not understand, what is the motive?” (emphasis in original).
Perhaps, since Walt & Mearsheimer’s paper makes the same argument, in the same tone, with the same subtlety as such prior scholars as Charles Lindbergh (here), Louis Farrakhan (here) and David Duke (here), Dershowitz’s questions are simply rhetorical.
Or perhaps the failure to provide what, by the end of the paper, is an obvious answer is simply Dershowitz’s attempt to comply with the new Harvard Kennedy School “Guidelines for Submitting Responses to KSG Faculty Research Working Papers” (there do not appear to be any Guidelines for posting the “research working papers” themselves):
Full-time Harvard University faculty members may submit a response to a KSG faculty research working paper. To be eligible for posting on this website, all response papers must be academic in form and content, with references and footnotes as appropriate, must respond directly to the intellectual ideas and evidence presented in the original working paper, and must avoid ad hominem critiques.
By raising the elephant-in-the-room question but not answering it, Dershowitz may simply be trying to “respond directly to the intellectual ideas and evidence” presented by Walt & Mearsheimer -- such as they are -- without running afoul of the prohibited “ad hominem critique” that an explicit answer might necessarily entail.
But the failure to provide any alternative hypothesis is itself an answer (and in any event, the answer is here). It needs no further explication.
Maybe Walt & Mearsheimer will accept Dershowitz’s offer to debate, and try to acquit themselves of the charge that hangs heavily in the air. Perhaps they can prove their effort was simply an extremely shoddy piece of academic work.
But it has already had real world consequences -- not only for Jews and Israel but for Harvard as well -- and the extraordinary failure of Walt & Mearsheimer to observe basic standards of scholarly documentation and debate, and their consequent abuse of the Harvard website -- whatever their motives -- is a bell they cannot un-ring.
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2.NPR（http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5353855）
Paper on Israel Lobby Sparks Heated Debate
21 April 2006
by Deborah Amos
When two prominent American professors published their research on the U.S. relationship with Israel, their conclusions set off a firestorm of debate.
Mearsheimer & Walt's Paper
Mearsheimer and Walt's essay appeared in the London Review of Books on March 23. An unedited version of the paper is posted on Harvard's Web site.
John Mearsheimer, at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, at Harvard, published their latest research on a Harvard Web site and in abbreviated form in the London Review of Books last month. The paper, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," is an extensive work, and the uproar it ignited hasn't stopped.
Dershowitz's Reply
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz submitted a 40-page reply to Mearsheimer and Walt in which he compared their study to The Protocols of Zion, a historic anti-Semitic slur.
Read Dershowitz's Response
The key points of the paper can be summarized thus: U.S. support for Israel has been unwavering, but it is sometimes inconsistent with American interests.
The professors ask: Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security to advance the interests of another state? Their answer is what they call "the unmatched power of the Israel lobby."
The Response in the Op-Eds
Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, published an opinion piece in The New York Times in which he says the essay raises "pressing" questions that have "nothing to do with anti-Semitism."
In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, called Mearsheimer and Walt's conclusions "inept, even kooky academic work" and "anti-Semitic."
The authors state the lobby includes Americans in the Clinton administration, more in the Bush administration, along with Christian evangelicals, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, even editors at prominent American newspapers.
The paper has set off a bitter and growing controversy, with name-calling and worse. Mearsheimer and Walt said they expected criticism, but are surprised the attacks have become so personal. Both men now say they do not want to comment on the air on their research but will debate it in print.
Charges of Bigotry and Sloppy Research
A chorus of critics have charged that the research is filled with sloppy scholarship and outright bigotry. Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, says the article was anti-Semitic. "That's a controversial assertion that I'll stand by," he says.
For Cohen, the paper was an attack on American Jews.
"This was not an article about what America's policy should be in the Middle East. What it was, was fundamentally an attack on the loyalty of American Jews," Cohen says. He aired his opinions in The Washington Post.
"I resent it bitterly," he says, "because I've got a son who's a soldier in Baghdad dodging bombs for our country. To have anybody impugn my loyalty is just outrageous."
Harvard University and the University Of Chicago support Mearsheimer and Walt's right to publish. It's a classic case of academic freedom, say university officials, although Harvard's Kennedy School removed its logo from the essay's cover page online.
The Kennedy School invited Harvard faculty to comment on the paper. Among the many responses was a fiery 40-page critique by law professor Alan Dershowitz that compared the study to The Protocols of Zion, a historic anti-Semitic slur.
But there have been more substantive debates about some of the paper's most controversial claims. On terrorism, the authors write that "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel." And on Iraq, they argue that "pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical."
Mixed Response from Policy Makers
Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the paper does have flaws. But he has assigned it to his students at George Washington University and the College of William and Mary for discussion.
"I think it contains a lot of what I call the blinding flashes of the obvious," Wilkerson says. "But that said, [they are] blinding flashes of the obvious that people whispered in corners, not said out loud at cocktail parties, where someone else could hear you."
Now that those whispers have become a full-throated shouting match, what will students learn?
Ned Walker, president of the Middle East Institute and former U.S. ambassador in Egypt and Israel, says the paper has "a lot of holes." He says the analysis is flawed on the terrorism threat: It is not support for Israel that motivated Osama bin Laden to target the United States, Walker says. Rather, it was U.S. support for the Saudi government. Walker bristles at the notion that he or any other U.S. diplomat put Israel ahead of U.S. interests.
"I lived through all the history that these gentlemen write about, and I didn't recognize it, not from the way they described it — and I was in government all this time," Walker says.
But Michael Scheuer says that Mearsheimer and Walt are basically right. A former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, Scheuer is now a terrorism analyst for CBS News. On an antiwar Web site, Scheuer wrote that every government tries to influence public opinion. Mearsheimer and Walt, Scheuer says, have described one of the most successful campaigns in the United States.
"They should be credited for the courage they have had to actually present a paper on the subject," Scheuer says. "I hope they move on and do the Saudi lobby, which is probably more dangerous to the United States than the Israeli lobby."
An Overheated Debate?
Mearsheimer and Walt are not experts on the Middle East. They are prominent foreign-policy analysts and theorists, and are considered A-list scholars. They specialize in explaining how international politics works — which is why their latest research paper has received so much attention, including extensive debate in European and Israeli media.
Paul Findley, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, says the debate is long overdue.
"You can't imagine how pleased I was," Findley says. "I think I can pose as a foremost expert on the lobby for Israel, because I was the target the last three years I was in Congress."
Findley is a fierce critic of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians. Findley's lobby group, the Council for the National Interest, published a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the Israel lobby to be brought under control.
But the debate sparked by the Mearsheimer and Walt paper may not be the type of rational airing of ideas that Findley and his group have called for, says Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs.
"Unfortunately, Mearsheimer and Walt stated their case so strongly and over-broadly that it has produced the foreign-policy equivalent of a cable TV shout fest," Rose says. "They charge dual loyalty, while others charge anti-Semitism — and nobody gets educated on the actual issues involved."
If the intention was to kick off a debate, it certainly has — a raging debate. A check on Google shows hundreds of postings on the topic.
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3. Huffington Post（http://www.huffingtonpost.com/）
A Challenge to Walt and Mearsheimer's Publisher
25 May 2011
by Alan Dershowitz Criminal and civil liberties lawyer
Once again, Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer have disproved their own thesis.
Central to Walt and Mearsheimer's hate-filled screed against Jewish participation in American politics was their assertion that it is perilous to speak out against Israel. Anyone who does so, wrote the authors, faces squashing at the hands of the "Israel Lobby," a shady conglomeration of lobbyists, journalists, philanthropists, academics, and public servants. "The core of the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests" over those of the United States.
One has to wonder just how powerful this Israel Lobby is if, since exposing the Lobby and decrying its tactics and objectives, Walt and Mearsheimer have become international celebrities and campus rock-stars. In fact, things have gotten so bad for Walt and Mearsheimer that just last week The Forward announced their book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux to publish an expanded version of their Israel Lobby paper.
Apparently, like God, the Israel Lobby works in mysterious ways. (Perhaps that explains Walt and Mearsheimer's ascribing vengeful omnipotence to Jews.)
We now see that Caroline Glick was right after all:
Walt and Mearsheimer - who are both rational men - undoubtedly considered the likely consequences of publishing their views and concluded that the anti-Israel nature of their article would shield them from criticisms of its substandard academic quality. That is, they believe that hostility towards Israel is so acceptable in the US that authors of shoddy research whose publication would normally destroy their professional reputations can get away with substandard work if it that work relates to Israel.
Soon after Walt and Mearsheimer published their rant, I responded with a 44-page catalogue of errors (longer than the text of their original paper). You can find my rebuttal here:
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/dershowitzreply.pdf
I'll briefly review only a few representative mistakes:
• Walt and Mearsheimer update the centuries-old "blood libel" by claiming that citizenship in Israel is based on "blood kinship."
• On two separate occasions, Walt and Mearsheimer intentionally quote David ben-Gurion out of context so as to make it appear that he is saying the exact opposite of what he actually said.
• The authors claims that "Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better-equipped, and better-led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence...."
• They insist that "The mainstream Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi-national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine."
• They repeat Yasir Arafat's "Bantustan" accusation - that Prime Minister Barak didn't offer the Palestinians a contiguous West Bank in 2000 - concluding, contrary to the published maps, that "no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own."
Regardless of one's views on the validity of Walt and Mearsheimer's conclusions, no one who has commented on the Israel Lobby paper - aside from perhaps David Duke, who supported it wholeheartedly - has failed to mention that the writers' scholarship was sloppy and that they included numerous factual inaccuracies.
And these are only some of the errors of commission. There are countless errors of omission, such as a failure to take account of the influence of Saudi and oil lobbyists on American foreign policy. The worst offense of all in the Walt-Mearsheimer paper is their conspiratorial worldview, in which Jews dupe Gentiles into "fighting, dying ... and paying" for wars that are not in America's interest. Indeed, they refer to Jewish "influence" and "manipulation" thirty-four times in the span of their paper. As an editorial in The Forward concluded:
Countless facts are simply wrong. Long stretches of argument are implausible, at times almost comically so. Much of their research is oddly amateurish, drawn not from credible [sources].... Some are wildly misquoted. An undergraduate submitting work like this would be laughed out of class
I concluded my own rebuttal like this: "I challenge Mearsheimer and Walt to look me in the eye and tell me that because I am a proud Jew and a critical supporter of Israel, I am disloyal to my country." Despite my many challenges to debate, Walt and Mearsheimer have refused to defend their ideas against critical peer review. Their public appearances have tended to be in front of fawning crowds, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, where, the Washington Post reported, Mearsheimer did not even make a pretense of distinguishing between Jews and Israel: "Mearsheimer made no such distinctions as he used 'Jewish activists,' 'major Jewish organizations' and the 'Israel lobby' interchangeably." Only recently did Mearsheimer agree to appear in an actual debate, held at Cooper Union late last month.
Since Walt and Mearsheimer will not answer my challenge, I now issue a new one to their publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Read my rebuttal and those published elsewhere so that you can ensure that the same errors are not included in the book form of The Israel Lobby. You are now on notice of the type of research and scholarship Walt and Mearsheimer put into their initial paper. If you let them include the same false facts and distorted quotations, you will be as guilty of academic fraud as they are. If you insist that they remove or correct their blatant falsehoods, and if they do so, that will be a long overdue acknowledgement that their original paper was riddled with errors - all of which went against Israel.
Let's see how Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Walt and Mearsheimer deal with this challenge.
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