Our original gut-check was that Walt and Mearsheimer were not anti-Semitic as much as just old doddering men. Their once-overwhelming academic and political influence plummeted after 9/11. The two craters in NYC were far more compelling than all of the realists' meticulous Excel spreadsheets on why working with radicals was the best we could do. It's gotta be tough to go from being at the apex of the Cold War worldview to having the Secretary of State publishing editorials about your irrelevance. Walt and Mearsheimer are almost pitiably obvious about some of this. Their malice about the Bush administration's missteps has all the subtlety of a spurned lover who obsessively fantasizes about how the person who left them is about to come crawling back begging for forgiveness.

So they looked around and evaluated the contemporary conventional wisdom of academia. Then they - quite reasonably from a certain point of view - just combined what they think is absolutely true with what all of the their listservs and colleagues seem to think is absolutely true. And so "America is declining because it's moving away from realism" was combined with "... and it's all Israel's fault." Ergo,. The Israel Lobby

And you can see how career academics might not notice how far off the reservation their remarkably anti-Semitic-ish screeching had taken them.

Start with Walt and Mearsheimer's immersion in narrowly-focused IR methodologies. Listening to Mearsheimer discuss the structure of influence in DC is like listening to a Kos commenter randomly blame every social ill on "the system" - except the average Kos commenter is so invested in sounding sophisticated that they would never hang their hat on something as mind-numbingly stupid as "AIPAC must be anti-American because Israel wouldn't need a lobby if it had same interests as America." So they really don't have that most fundamental academic check - the thing that distinguishes a lay intellectual from someone who's genuinely inside a theory - the sense of being able to feel when something that you're about to conclude simply can't be right. So it's not even so much that they don't know that the thing about "Israel not needing a lobby" is stupid - they know it's nonsense. What they lack is the ability to know just how stupid it sounds to everyone else, because - being outsiders themselves - they can't really know when their faux sophistication becomes laughable.

Now the broader Middle East debate stuff. Most normal human beings are not persuaded by arguments like "we're not anti-Semitic - we're not saying the Jews have taken over DC, we're just saying that the Jews' Christian agents have taken over DC". But if you're in academia and you see Juan Cole defended like that constantly - and you see people nodding their heads as if this is somehow persuasive - maybe you lose a sense for what counts as reasonable and unreasonable.

So maybe they lacked a sense for what people think about DC and how people talk about Israel, And maybe they were really desperate to sound cutting edge and relevant. And so maybe The Israel Lobby was just the shallow attempt of two declining academics to reassert their relevance by penning a thin intellectual justification for what was already obviously the conventional academic wisdom.

Except they're just enjoying this way too much. There's something much deeper and uglier here. From the suspiciously relieved clapping of their new-found leftist admirers to the strangely defiant tone with which they sneer about "Wolfowitz," "Perle," and "Feith" - it's the over-enthusiasm of thuggish cheats going through the motions of not saying out loud what everyone knows, of protecting an unseemly open secret.

First of all, it takes a lot to get any academic of any stripe to commit their credibility to something they demonstrably know little about - you have to really want whatever it is you're after. Venerable professors do not reduce themselves to the debating tactics of grade-schoolers unless something has already gone awry. Field-defining scholars do not commit basic errors of fact and methodology - something has to get almost pathological to cause that kind of scholarly implosion.

In Mearsheimer's case, this whole affair long ago became outright ugly. He literally becomes physically agitated during his rants about the "Jewish activists" and "major Jewish organizations" who control Washington. The link above goes to a report about him having to desperately clutch the podium to maintain even the thinnest appearance of self-control - he's that far gone.

So these two troll from conference to conference, and give their nudge-nudge wink-wink speeches about how "neo-conservatives" and "the Likud party" have corrupted American officials. Then they sit back and wallow in the cheap applause of academics who reassure them that their work is the pinnacle of scholarly insightful and bravery.

Never mind that until a couple of years ago those same academics were marching in the streets screaming that realism is the worldview of colonialist oppression. How very honest of everyone in the room. We're sure that these one-time academic revolutionaries changed their minds about Walt and Mearsheimer because The Israel Lobby is so objectively persuasive - because it's so well-argued.

But now we're kind of at an impasse: we want to end with a punchline about how this is at least the second time that Mearsheimer has risen to the top of a field by borrowing heavily from German theory, but that seems kind of heavy-handed. Also, it would be the second "they got it from Germany" joke in the post, which would risk overshadowing the contributions of hysterical British and French academics to the oh-so-sophisticated and objective anti-Israel cause.

How about this: while people can argue about the exact nature of Walt and Mearsheimer's motives, their defenders better have something better than the demonstrably false "they were guided only by careful scholarship." Something other than careful scholarship caused Walt and Mearsheimer to overlook obvious factual counter-examples and ignore obvious alternative explanations. And even if you could find some sort of intellectual justification for the suspiciously familiar accusations in the book - does anyone really want to defend that the corners of the academy that have most vociferously attacked reason and rationality in the last forty years have suddenly seen the light and embraced The Israel Lobby because of its sound application of realist principles?

UPDATE:. By request, a couple of the articles out this morning. Eh. For talking points, here's the JCPA's response. Blog-wise here's Powerline linking to the Foward editorial that may represent the only genuinely interesting new part of this thinly-intellectualized anti-Semitic cant.

References:
* John Mearsheimer - Not Anti-Semitic. Just Anti-Semiticish
* Walt and Mearsheimer's Best Defense For Their Anti-Semitic-ish Accusations Is In Trouble
* Brown University Outrage: Anti-Israel Academics Organize Conference To Attack Pro-Israel Critics, Shut Out Pro-Israel Speakers and Students

Previously:
* Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel [NYT]
* Reminder: Hysterical Anti-Zionism Doesn't Get You Off The Hook For Bigoted Anti-Semitism
* Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication (Updated)
* No Wonder They Never Get Anything Done

Cross-posted to:
* The Astute Bloggers