Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a largely discredited report alleging that the “Israel lobby” has distorted the foreign policy of the United States to the point of serious damage to U.S. interests, appeared at a panel discussion on Aug. 28 sponsored by the radical Islamist group CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations).
CAIR’s claims to be an “Islamic civil rights” group are belied by the fact that at least five of its employees and board members have been jailed or otherwise criminally implicated in terrorism or terror-related activities. That CAIR is supportive of terrorist groups, and closely tied to the Palestinian terror group Hamas in particular, is well known. A recent article in Middle East Quarterly, for example, quoted Steven Pomerantz, the FBI’s former chief of counterterrorism, as saying that “CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups.” According to the same article
the family of John P. O’Neill, Sr., the former FBI counterterrorism chief who perished at the World Trade Center, named CAIR in a lawsuit as having “been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism.”
It is nothing short of shocking that Walt, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, would agree to participate in CAIR’s panel on “The Israel Lobby and the U.S. Response to the War in Lebanon.” While they claim to be foreign policy “realists” with a patriotic concern for U.S. national interests, Walt and Mearsheimer choose to make common cause with a group that long defended Osama bin Laden, even after his first terror attacks against the United States, that advises Muslim Americans not to cooperate with law enforcement officials, and that has sponsored a number of events with William Baker, a known neo-Nazi. This does not exactly sound pro-American.
What did CAIR and the pro-Nazi Bill Baker have in common? A hatred of Israel. What do CAIR and Walt and Mearsheimer have in common? That might be a good question to ask of David Ellwood, Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard.
Click here to view the event on C-SPAN, and click here to see the Washington Post’s rather amusing demolition of the professors’ presentation.