A "Progressive" Opinion

The Progressive magazine weighs in on the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, with an article titled “Israel controversy threatens free speech.”

Managing Editor Amitabh Pal writes:

I’ve read through both the London Review of Books piece and the actual academic paper....the professors’ analysis is a tad hyperbolic and has a conspiratorial whiff about it. The main problem with their thesis is that they take the actions of disparate supporters of Israeli policy and make their actions seem much more well coordinated than they actually are. They also overlook the fact that very often the reason that the United States pursues certain policies in the Middle East is because its aims are congruent with that of Israel and not necessarily due to the influence of AIPAC and other such organizations. Besides, there are other powerful lobbies at play in the Middle East that Mearsheimer and Walt ignore. “The oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests” possess “lobbying influence and campaign contributions [that] far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races,” Professor Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco has pointed out.

Mearsheimer and Walt also sometimes overstate their arguments. For instance, their assertion that the Palestinian issue is central to bin Laden’s obsessions is extremely debatable, as is their contention thatthe so-called Israel lobby was the critical factor behind the Iraq War.

However, this is the Progressive, so there is an inevitable “however”

However, their main points are not invalid: AIPAC and other unblinking backers of Israeli policy have a lot of influence, and their muscle-flexing has helped push the U.S. government into an unwise stance of almost unconditional support for Israel.

But from the reaction in certain quarters, you would think that Mearsheimer and Walt are completely out of line....Harvard itself has come under attack. Ardent Israel defenders such as Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz and New Republic Editor-in-Chief and Harvard lecturer Martin Peretz have harshly criticized the institution. Several donors have called the university to express their displeasure. …In response, Harvard has asked that its logo be removed from the paper on the website, and that a disclaimer stating that Harvard had nothing to do with the analysis be made stronger and more prominent.

Such episodes also tend to strengthen views abroad that U.S. foreign policy is controlled by Jewish Americans....The negative experience of Mearsheimer and Walt will probably deter other people from exploring the U.S.-Israel alliance. But discussion of this subject should not be off-limits. Any attempts to squelch discussion of this issue does free speech—and the U.S. itself—a disservice.

I guess we’ve officially entered a new era in scholarly criticism: You can bash an academic study for being hyperbolic, oversimplified, and conspiratorial—but, simultaneously praise its authors for challenging the status quo. (It’s not actual truth, just an incredible simulation!)

As always, I’m also a bit confused by the assertion that this controversy is threatening free speech. Are Walt and Mearsheimer in hiding? Has their paper been taken down from the website? Are their jobs at risk? Has anyone who publishes their work been threatened? Please, someone tell me how free speech has been undermined here?

To date, the collective "evidence" of this supposed suppression of free speech is:

(1) Walt was "fired" from his post as academic dean. A story that’s long been proven false.

(2) Harvard removed their logo from the paper. Oh, the horrors! Yet, the underlying intent here was not to discredit Walt and Mearsheimer. Dean David T. Ellwood explained that the paper’s logo was removed after some news agencies “were mistakenly reporting the paper as a ‘Harvard study’ written by ‘two Harvard researchers.’” The removal of the logo was supported by Walt. (Also, no logo appears on Alan Dershowitz’s rebuttal paper that has now been posted on the site. I’m outraged!)

(3) The Atlantic Monthly didn’t publish the W-T paper. Uh, maybe because, as Amitabh Pal is the first to admit, it’s not a very good article? (And has anyone actually asked W-T how many magazines they tried to publish their article in, before they were compelled to seek “intellectual sanctuary” across the Atlantic in the London Review of Books? WTF? Didn’t they bother calling The Nation?)

(4) “The negative experience of Mearsheimer and Walt will probably deter other people from exploring the U.S.-Israel alliance.” Yeah, we can already see how “exploring the U.S.-Israel alliance” has afflicted the career of Juan Cole.

I think it’s rather instructive to compare this controversy with the outrage surrounding the 1995 broadcast of Steven Emerson’s documentary “Jihad in America” on PBS. Muslim groups such as CAIR demanded that the program not be aired, calling it a racist, biased, and distorted documentary that offered cirumstantial evidence of a “grand Islamic conspiracy” against the West. Writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jack Shaheen, professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University, argued, “The program's poisonous images encourage Americans to believe that all Muslims in the United States and their charitable and academic organizations are laundering money for a holy war in the Mideast. As a result...some peace-loving Muslims who genuinely respect the United States will likely be victimized by vicious slurs or hate crimes." A few days after the program aired, Philip Wilcox, coordinator of the Office of Counter-Terrorism of the U.S. Department of State, weighed in on the debate and declared: "There is no link between Islam and violence and terrorism. That is a canard which we want to dismiss at the outset. Nor is there a worldwide Islamic network somehow waging jihad against the West. This is a concept that's brooded about sometimes, and there is virtually no intelligence information to suggest that such a network exists." Writing in The Nation, reporter Robert Friedman accused Emerson of "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs."

So, to recap: If you denounce a shoddy, academic documentary that purports to portray American Muslims as part of a conspiracy that threatens the security of the United States, then you are exercising your right to free speech. But, if you denounce a shoddy, academic study that purports to portray American Jews as part of a conspiracy that threatens the security of the United States, then you are suppressing free speech.