[BRIEF NOTE] That Mearsheimer and Walt Paper

[rfmcdonald]

optimussven critiques Eliot Cohen's recent Washington Post article "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic", a response to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby", cached Google version here.

I generally share optimussven's sense that Cohen's overreacting, that he's conflating criticism of Israel and Israeli policies with an existential criticism of Israel's existence and the Jewish people, that he's assimilating the identification of an ethnic lobby to the stigmatization of an ethnic group as fundamentally foreign. Mind, people should watch out for these sloppy and bigoted responses, but assuming that Mearsheimer and Walt are motivated by sloppy bigotry is, well, sloppy. (They may well err, as Cohen points out with his observation of the Cuban-American lobby's determinative influence in the United States' Cuban embargo policy. Then again, Cuban-American geopolitical visions of the Caribbean have never been given full expression.) So far as I can tell, they do so honestly.