Outside Speakers at Montana
By Stewart Justman, Michael S. Mayer
To The Editor:
In the September–October issue of Academe, Richard Drake defends both his decision to bring Stephen Walt to the University of Montana as a presidential lecturer and his refusal to bring someone to present an alternative view. Drake accuses us of seeking to restrict speech. In fact, no one attempted to infringe Walt’s free speech; rather, we called on Drake to bring a speaker to present the other side. For more than twenty years, Drake has been sole arbiter of who is invited to the University of Montana as presidential lecturers. As his article reveals, he has abandoned even the semblance of impartiality.
Given space limitations, we cannot engage Drake’s disingenuous defense of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt; we refer readers to our response on Academe’s blog and to reviews by Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs, Benny Morris in the New Republic, and Bret Stephens in Commentary.
One can criticize Israel, its policies, and American policy without getting in the gutter of anti-Semitism. Mearsheimer and Walt could not resist. They allege that Jewish congressional staffers put their Jewishness ahead of American interests and attempt to prove the charge by quoting someone who makes it. The accusation of “dual loyalty” is one of the most incendiary tropes of classical anti-Semitism. To argue, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that the Jews are America’s misfortune (because they have made us a target of terrorism) is no less incendiary.
Drake defends Walt against the charge of anti-Semitism by telling us that Walt claims not to be an anti-Semite and believes that Israel has a right to exist. Surely, it is not necessary to announce oneself an anti-Semite or to advocate the extermination of a nation or a people to qualify as an anti-Semite.
Stewart Justman (Liberal Studies)
Michael S. Mayer (History)
University of Montana
Drake Responds:
All of the issues raised by Justman and Mayer can be related to their original charge, that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are venomous anti-Semites. I have been coordinating the President’s Lecture Series for more than twenty years, and none of the issues that they now raise ever had come up before Walt stepped onto our campus. Therefore, let us consider the real issue in this case, their indictment of Walt and Mearsheimer.
In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Walt and Mearsheimer show that long before 9/11, neoconservative pundits, policy makers, and think tanks with ties to Likud had been pushing for the United States to attack Iraq. They guide the reader through a long sequence of neoconservative op-ed pieces, articles, and policy declarations going back to 1996. The neoconservative campaign continued relentlessly right up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Walt and Mearsheimer identify the campaign as “a critical element” in the decision to go to war. They do not say that Israel controls all American foreign policy in the Middle East. The lobby, however, was able to achieve its objective in this particular case.
Mearsheimer and Walt also do not say “that the Jews are America’s misfortune.” This is precisely the opposite of the argument that they make. They say that the broader Jewish community was not eager for the war in Iraq. The war came about in part because of the lobby, but not as a plot. The lobby worked completely in the open and left a long paper trail that Mearsheimer and Walt analyze according to the canons of their research specialty as eminent political scientists: pressure group politics. The overheated rhetoric about anti-Semitism and the other misrepresentations by Justman and Mayer do not lend themselves to a careful examination of these facts.
Richard Drake (History)
University of Montana
|