This article was just posted by Cecilie Surasky of Muzzlewatch (Jewish Voice for Peace) indicating that right wing Zionist forces are now publicly shaping the agendas of presidential candidates, in this case, Barak Obama. It is not as if there were no proIsrael/proZionist organizations already positioned underground dictating the foreign policy stances of the candidates, but Obama’s employment of Brzezinski as a foreign policy advisor was perhaps too much for people like Dershowitz to remain quiet about.
And what was Obama’s response?
The title of Sarasky’s report is, After Finkelstein: Alan Dershowitz, a Clinton supporter, tells Obama to drop Brzezinski.
The conservative daily, The New York Sun reports that Alan Dershowitz wants Barack Obama to sever ties with former Carter security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski because he defended Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”. In fact, once informed that an Obama ad appeared on the Amazon page advertising the book, the Obama campaign had it removed. The Sun reports:
Amid a firestorm over an initial working paper Messrs . Mearsheimer and Walt published last year on the Israel lobby, Mr. Brzezinski rose to their defense, even as he demurred on the question of whether he agreed with their central arguments. The authors, he wrote in the journal Foreign Policy, “have rendered a public service by initiating a much-needed public debate on the role of the ` Israel lobby’ in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy.”
Mr. Obama’s campaign took the opposite route earlier this week when notified that an ad for its Web site appeared on the Amazon.com page of the Mearsheimer-Walt book. The campaign immediately removed the ad, saying its placement was unintentional, and issued a statement saying Mr. Obama believed the arguments in the book were “just wrong.” “I’m glad he’s done that, but now he has to dissociate himself from Brzezinski,” Mr. Dershowitz said in an interview yesterday. He said the Mearsheimer-Walt book was “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community” and that Mr. Brzezinski’s comments in Foreign Policy last year amounted to an endorsement.
Harvard law professor and gadfly Alan Dershowitz, who supports Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and gave $1,000 to her campaign, also accused Brzezinski of anti-Israel rhetoric, highlighting his criticism of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon last year.
In response, the Obama campaign released a statement from one of its top supporters in the Jewish community, Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida. ” Barack Obama has been a consistent supporter of Israel and this is an unfortunate case of a fabricated controversy for political reasons,” he said. “I speak with him often on Israel policy, and I can tell you firsthand that Barack Obama is opposed to the arguments presented in this book.”
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?p=242
Reprinted by permission.
A Nation article by Scott Sherman posted back on April 18, 2007, Sun-rise in New York, noted other instances of backtracking after the Sun took on supporters of the Mearsheimer and Walt book:
…the Sun uses tactics that would please the ghost of Walter Winchell. In March 2006 Seth Lipsky (editor) walked by Ira Stoll’s desk and heard him laughing. And with that laugh a Sun crusade was born. Stoll had been reading a Harvard University working paper by professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, of Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, titled “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” The barrage began with a piece by reporter Eli Lake, who contacted David Duke and then produced a page-one story announcing that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper was “winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.” (That story was headlined “David Duke Claims to be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean.”) A few days later another Sun story insisted, with no evidence, that the two professors had “culled sections of the paper from neo-Nazi and other anti-Israel hate Web sites.” (Walt and Mearsheimer dismissed the accusation as “absurd”; the link with David Duke, they said, is “guilt by association.”)
In its zeal to demolish Walt and Mearsheimer the Sun also chased their colleagues–including Marvin Kalb, who, like Walt, holds a post at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. A Sun editorial noted that Kalb had recently petitioned the Newspaper Association of America on a historical matter pertaining to Jewish journalists trapped in Hitler’s Germany, and went on, “Now–at a moment when Israelis and Jews everywhere are under attack in a global war against America and Israel launched by Islamofascists–the cat has got his tongue.” The next day the Sun printed a front-page story, “Kalb Upbraids Harvard Dean Over Israel,” in which Kalb proclaimed that the Walt-Mearsheimer paper “clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper.” Kalb declined to be interviewed by The Nation. (The same editorial warned Harvard to get its house in order and added, “The Ford Foundation recently had its own learning experience.”)
When Dershowitz, who undoubtedly believes that he recently undermined Norman Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul University, enters the fray publically, one can believe that heads may roll. Now there is no way Brzezinski will recant. So will it be bye, bye Brzezinski or will Obama hold fast?
