Tuesday, August 29, 2006

More commentary from the "blame-the-Jews-fest" at the CAIR-Walt/Mearsheimer presentation yesterday at the National Press Club, broadcast on C-SPAN.

Pronouncing Blame on the Israel Lobby by Dana Milbank in the Washignton Post.  (And Dana is no fan of Bush's Middle East policy, that's for sure).

Walt singled out two Jews who worked at the Pentagon for their pro-Israel views. "People like Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith . . . advocate policies they think are good for Israel and the United States alike," he said. "We don't think there's anything wrong with that, but we also don't think there's anything wrong for others to point out that these individuals do have attachments that shape how they think about the Middle East."


"Attachments" sounds much better than "dual loyalties." But why single out Wolfowitz and Feith and not their non-Jewish boss, Donald Rumsfeld?


"I could have mentioned non-Jewish people like John Bolton," Walt allowed when the question was put to him.



Israel Critics: Israel Planned Lebanon War

Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy Center and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago spoke Monday at a Washington forum hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, expanding on their paper “The Israel Lobby” in the wake of the Lebanon war.


“They came up with a plan and they briefed it to the United States in the weeks and months before July 12,” when Hezbollah rocket attacks and a cross-border raid precipitated the 34-day war, Mearsheimer said.


Asked to produce evidence, Mearsheimer said “everybody understood” that Israel was waiting for a pretext for war.


I'm still a little confused as to why a supposed civil rights organization is involved in sponsoring a press conference that is trying to limit the free speech influence of people who don't support their political view.

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