The authors of the bombshell critique of the Israel lobby showed up two days ago on the Diane Rehm Show and I hear they’re on C-Span, too. And they’re on the cover of Foreign Policy.
Diane Rehm was their first broadcast appearance. Stephen Walt says they waited three months because they wanted the paper to be absorbed first as ideas, without having the discussion personalized to “John and Steve, rather than what we wrote.” Enough time has passed. “Now it’s time for us to start talking more openly about it.”
Just one statement the authors made the other day. Responding to Dennis Ross’s assertion that it’s fine that these issues are discussed, they should be debated, Mearsheimer pointed out that the paper couldn’t be published in the U.S. mainstream media, and Walt pointed out that they’ve paid a price for bringing this up. Just about every friend who has talked to him about the paper has said, “You’re never going to work in Washington.” It wasn’t Walt’s lifetime ambition to work in Washington, he said, and he isn’t complaining about his position in life. “But I find it interesting that that is so frequently the reaction, that this has made us compete pariahs. Quite remarkable.”
Clearly the attempt to demonise W & M has collapsed (it was late starting, anyway, since the advice peddled in places like the JPost was to wait and hope the W & M paper would be ignored, and to only attack if it wasn't).
An interesting question is whether the defense of W & M has been successful because it included so many Jews, or because it included so many non-Jews – I incline to the view that what is really being destroyed is the myth of jewish exceptionalism per se. The only powerful argument for jewish exceptionalism is the high mean verbal IQ of askhenazim, and this is something that can make them hated rather than loved by the rest-of-the-world, once it becomes nakedly visible.
Generally, jewish writers and pundits are their own worst enemies on all their own issues – they have developed a stance which being decoded comes out as "the fix is in, so f*** all of you who don't like us any more".
As to verbal dexterity, it is available in abundance in Commentary Magazine, where one may learn of the innate moral and intellectual superiority of Jews over all other lower forms of humanity, particularly Arabs. These lessons are delivered in a smug all-knowing condescending style that fairly shouts, "we may criticize all others, and we may criticize ourselves, but others may never criticize us." Or, "the evil of any atrocity we commit in the pursuit of our interests is always exceeded by its mention".