American Dolchstosslegende?

Over at Salon, Michelle Goldberg (inevitably) weighs in on the Walt-Mearsheimer controversy. Her article offers what has emerged as the predictable narrative among W-T's "progressive" supporters: Condemn the paper's scholarship, but praise the authors' courage for taking on the almighty Israel Lobby.

Still, I give her (some) credit for at least acknowledging what other authors have conveniently ignored: That the W-T paper has sparked an emotional firestorm not because it critiques AIPAC and U.S. policies toward Israel, but because it bears more than a passing resemblance to some rather ugly, age-old canards.

She offers this observation from Forward editor J.J. Goldberg:

For Goldberg, the paper is a worrying sign that a domestic version of the Dolchstosslegende -- the conviction that Germany lost World War I because Jews "stabbed it in the back" -- could somehow take root in America. "If Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer can buy into this stuff, I guess anybody can," says Goldberg. "I actually didn't believe it was possible. I'm one of those weirdoes who thought it wasn't going to happen here. I found their document scary because it is so illogical and so passionate."

Interestingly, another author offers a similar sentiment, albeit from a somewhat surprising source. Writing in Political Affairs Magazine, the online journal of Marxist thought, Norman Markowitz observes:

In the region, the disastrous policies of the Bush administration in Iraq and toward Iran have created great fear – on all sides of the political spectrum – of a search for scapegoats. For example, a recent article in the London Review of Books by two ruling class scholars, Stephen Walt of the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and John Mearscheimer of the University of Chicago, titled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," has caused an international stir by portraying the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) as manipulating US foreign policy as completely as Iago manipulated Othello.

Unlike the left anti-Semitism of the past, what Marxists called the "socialism of fools" in the 19th century, it is written in the language of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times – to and for elites.