On Walt, Mearsheimer, Weiss, Greenwald And Me

Pejman does his best to profess "shock" at some writers' view that the Israeli government has been damaging US interests and its own survival by its policies for the past few years, and that the immensely influential pro-Israel lobby bears some responsibility for enabling this. But in trying to find anti-Semitism in any of our writings, he comes up short. In fact, he honorably bears witness to the opposite:

For the record, Stephen Walt was a professor of mine for two classes back when he was at the University of Chicago. Part of the reason I consider it painful to write about what his place in the blogosphere has become is that in the time that I knew him, I never at any time heard him say, or even intimate anything that could be remotely considered anti-Semitic ...

I vividly remember how searing John Mearsheimer’s lecture on the Holocaust was, how powerful and unsparing his discussion was concerning the manner in which millions of Jews were massacred. He made sure that we, his students, fully absorbed the horrors attendant to the Holocaust, and in doing so, he did us a massive favor by ensuring that we were fully cognizant of the barbarism associated with the times.

There is no attempt to exonerate me from the Tablet's and The New Republic's baseless smears - but Google will do. What Pejman's point boils down to is that we, as writers, must constantly berate any and all vile anti-Semites who try to exploit or co-opt our arguments, without our knowledge. I guess I thought that went without saying. But my own diligence against anti-Semitism, in all its forms, in my own church in particular, is well-documented and has gone back decades.

I will not be intimidated from examining and criticizing both the actions of the Israeli government and the lobby that does so much to enable it, against what I believe are the long-term interests of the US and the West. Neither, I suspect, will the others now routinely targeted with these lies and smears.