Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Friday, March 24, 2006

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

So I've just finished reading the body of the so called "controversial" and "trash" paper, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and I'm left asking what is the controversy about?

Almost everything in the paper is something I and anyone else who has kept abreast of international and national news already knows. The paper clearly states what it means by the Lobby which is defined as a small group of Jews and non-Jews (who are mostly Christian Zionists) who do not represent the majority of American Jewery(or European for that matter), who are pro Israel and are defacto agents of the Israeli government. All the objections I've seen published so far have been clear slander (Antisemitism) or the usual "after the Holocaust you would think." comments. While there are many scholars who are claiming that the paper does not represent good scholarship (note: bad scholarship at Harvard? Who knew) I haven't yet seen a critique that negates the main thrust of the paper. I'll be on the lookout for any of it though. Feel free to post links to such things if they exist. Other critiques have been irrelevant issues (unfortunately a practice becoming more and more common in America) or innuendo about Nazism (unfounded by any of the text).

Since the paper is over 80 pages and heavily annotated I think the first question that should be asked of anybody who pops the "Holocaust" or "Anti-Semite" remark is if they had, in fact read the entire paper. See I've noticed that like the Bill Cosby speech, a whole lot of people have formed opinions based on things they heard reported and not based on the actual data. Matta fack, it happens here in the comments section a lot of times. I bet that this paper will simply drop off the radar because it names names and presents information that so far no one can credibly counter. David Horowiitz of Frontpage Mag tried but you know..it's David Horowitz, nuff said.

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1 comment:

Minister Faust said...

Prof. Asad Abu-Khalil of the Angry Arab Blogspot wrote his own critique of the paper, and Abu-Khalil can't be accused of being pro-Israel. He's also a pretty solid critic of Arab governments and tyranny of various Islamic authorities. His comments are excerpted here:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/20/21659/0421