For his Connecticut insurgency, Joe Lieberman amassed $13.8 million as of 9/30 (per the FEC). Ned Lamont was gasping away at about $9 million. Big stakes. One of Lieberman’s more generous enablers is Robert Belfer, energy executive, who lives in New York. He and his wife Renee look to have given about 8 large to the diminutive power-mad son of a liquor-store-owner.
I wish I could take credit for my clever headline. I can’t, the highly-influential New York Sun came up with it, last spring, a week after the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby was printed by the London Review of Books. The Sun was calling Belfer out, because he’s a big philanthropist to Jewish causes and also funds the Belfer center at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Stephen M. Walt, one of the authors of the Israel lobby paper, holds the Robert and Renee Belfer chair in international relations there.
The Sun reported that Belfer was not pleased by Walt’s scholarship, and had made a call about it. At the time I believe Belfer had no public comment. But the Sun and others were pressing Belfer to renounce Walt, take back his money, make Walt sit on a cold metal folding chair instead of a Belfer, etc. There was also talk that Walt was being asked not to use Belfer’s name in public statements on the Israel lobby. Indeed, when Walt and Mearsheimer’s National Press Club event was organized by the Islamic group CAIR in late August, CAIR’s press release identified them simply as professors.
Big deal. Walt still holds the Belfer chair at Harvard. It does not appear that Robert Belfer has forced him to revoke anything, or has taken his money back. I imagine there’s been a lot of pressure on Steve Walt, professional and social, at Harvard, and I hope we will read that story one day in his and Mearsheimer’s book for FSG. But Belfer, too, has been pressured; and I’m going to take things at face value and say, People have behaved in a sophisticated and mature way here, even members of the Loose Coalition of Affinity for Israel (formerly known as the Israel lobby). Props to Robert Belfer.
Harvard took their seal off the published paper, slapped on an oversized consumer warning that they don't necessarily agree with it, and allowed Alan Dershowitz to put up a hastily written attack piece. They have only taken these steps with one of the papers published by the Kennedy School of Government.
Robert Belfer demanded that Walt not use his official title in any publicity for the study. And although it may be unrelated, Walt lost his position as the academic dean of the Kennedy School ended shortly after the paper was published.
Are these the signs of a healthy academic environment? What was Phil Weiss expecting, that Walt would be shipped off to the gulag?
Here is the official Phil Weiss ( I hate the fact that I was born Jewish and won't rest until Israel is exterminated ) over under beting line. At least 9 out of every 10 columns will have some variation on the evil nefarious Jewish Lobby, the apartheid Zionist entity, or the general vulgarity of world Jewry. Not to mention the nobility and general peacefullness of the Palestinians specifically or the Arabs in general. And if they are violent in any way the Jews/Israeli nazis drove them to it. A maximum of one out of every ten columns will be on another topic. Even Julius Streicher took a break every now and then.
Well I for one don't find American society suffering from TOO MUCH discussion of the lobby. So I say bravo to Phil Weiss and all those brave enough to talk about it.
By the way, you seem to find the subject pretty interesting. ;)
Ingrid, Brave, you have got to be kiding. He gets plaudits for this in the circles he runs in. The evils of the LOBBY, that gets you free dinners in his milieu. You want brave, write about the Moslems. That takes courage because if they don't like what you write they'll come and burn down your house and kill your kids.
BP, you are a peddler of hate and fear.
The idea of people like you in a position to influence our country frightens me. It can't turn out well.
little phillie weiss keeps banging away at this, but the Walt/Mearsheimer paper has already been addressed intelligently;
fighting words: A wartime lexicon.
Overstating Jewish Power
Mearsheimer and Walt give too much credit to the Israeli lobby.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 27, 2006, at 1:47 PM ET
It's slightly hard to understand the fuss generated by the article on the Israeli lobby produced by the joint labors of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was published in the London Review of Books. My guess is that the Harvard logo has something to do with it, but then I don't understand why the doings of that campus get so much media attention, either.
The essay itself, mostly a very average "realist" and centrist critique of the influence of Israel, contains much that is true and a little that is original. But what is original is not true and what is true is not original.
Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total, perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass. I would have gone further than Mearsheimer and Walt and pointed up the role of Israel in supporting apartheid in South Africa, in providing arms and training for dictators in Congo and Guatemala, and helping reactionary circles in America do their dirty work?most notably during the Iran-Contra assault on the Constitution and in the emergence of the alliance between Likud and the Christian right. Counterarguments concerning Israel's help in the Cold War and in the region do not really outweigh these points.