When David Duke Agrees With You(Welcome,
Daou Report and
Memeorandum readers!)
It's a good sign that
you're wrong.
But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will.
Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was "surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.
"I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is," he said in an e-mail. "It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started." Duke added that "the task before us is to wrest control of America's foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neocons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV."This intersection of the antiwar Left and the neo-Nazi right is resulting in all sorts of oddball combinations, like
Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com being published in the American Conservative (Pat Buchanan's contribution to the political debate), and
Lew Rockwell showing up as a regular on the Huffington Post.
An abridged version of the paper can
be read here, while the
full version is here. A good
rebuttal of the main points is here.
The American Thinker has a
good piece on Walt & Mearsheimer's article. See
also Daniel Drezner.
