Let us celebrate the moment. Today the great publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux has bought a full-page ad for Walt & Mearsheimer in the New York Times. Two years after The Atlantic refused to publish their work and they had to go to London to put out their ideas, amid warnings that they would blast their careers to hell, these two brave scholars have gained a strong foothold in the American discourse. History in front of us.
Perhaps most important, they have weathered the smears. They have gotten past the anti-semite badge. That attack failed. Today there is a full-page ad for them in the Times. And CFR’s Leslie Gelb conceded in yesterday’s Times: "Most unbiased students of the matter would probably agree that the
lobby is the single most influential force on American policy toward
Israel." At last that statement is made in the NYT, under the intellectual influence of these two scholars. Soon W&M will be on PBS and Stephen Coulbert. Oh my god, but our world has changed!
And what motivated these so-called realists? A moral understanding that Palestinian suffering must have a place in American politics (a moral understanding utterly lacking in eminence grise Gelb’s critical review).
A million people are now following in W&M’s footsteps. On Bill Maher’s show the other night, Janeane Garofalo and ex-CIA spook Michael Scheuer both went off on Israel, suggesting its security needs were the cause of the disaster in Iraq. The world is changing. And these two scholars deserve the credit. It is as I wrote: their book has the power of Silent Spring and The Jungle. A friend compares it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which transformed American attitudes towards slavery.
The new line of defense is in the Boston Globe, where Jeff Jacoby calls the book "The Big Lie About the Great Silencer." You are getting a ton of attention, Jacoby writes. No one has tried to silence you!
Mearsheimer and Walt are more than welcome to peddle their anti-Israel
message. But when all is said and done, most Americans just don’t buy
it.
This is an attempt to rewrite history and make a virtue (they have free speech!) of a necessity (we had to let them in!). Walt and Mearsheimer were silenced. Many others have been silenced. Now they are breaking thru, because of this book’s eloquence, and because Americans are hungry for a different point of view. The dam is breaking.
