My post of a few days ago, “My experience of Sept. 11, 2001,” was a discussion of my emotional state at that time. This follow-up, while also emotional, is meant to be a more analytical reflection.
A few years ago, someone misunderstood my point for the following statement, meant not to denigrate what happened on 9/11/2001, but rather to provide some historical perspective and a 
new measure for grasping the magnitude of the genocide against Jews during World War II:
I made a rough calculation of the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Using the approximate start date of June 22, 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, for its beginning — the Einsatzgruppen began their mass shootings at this time — I calculated that an average of over 29,000 Jews were murdered each week until the war ended on May 8, 1945. This was over 4,000 per day; in other words, the European Jewish population of 11 million suffered the equivalent of more than one and a third 9/11-size catastrophes everyday for three years and ten months.
Still, there’s no gainsaying that the somewhat smaller number of people murdered in this country on Sept. 11, 2001 has had a singular effect on the world since that day, and not for the better. One thing which galls me is the proliferation of antisemitic conspiracy theories, incorporating the events of Sept. 11. This came close to home a couple of years ago, when a long-time chum of my lady friend (I’m too old to have a “girlfriend”), visiting from out West, asked her in all earnestness why there were “no Jews” at the World Trade Center on that fateful day. This question ultimately derives from a pernicious Syrian newspaper story, four days after the attack, which gained life on the Web, alleging “that 4,000 Jews failed to show up for work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 after being warned by Israeli intelligence.”
Classic antisemitic conspiracy theories have in common the notion that Jews (about 0.25% of the world’s population) have special out-sized powers to shape the world according to some evil design. This kind of thinking led to the mother of all conspiratorial hallucinations in the Nazi notion that “the Jews” intended to destroy the “Aryan race” — when the exact opposite was true. Even today, the ill-defined “Israel Lobby” is said by two highly respected academics to have been a critical causal factor in pushing the United States into war in Iraq. Unlike the initially low-cost intervention in Afghanistan– an understandable and widely supported reaction to an attack directed from that country– the invasion of Iraq was an ill-advised unilateral initiative that won numerous recruits for violent anti-Western Jihad, while undermining the prospects for a peaceful evolution in Afghanistan.
I’m not arguing that Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt intended their work to be antisemitic, but they did a poor job of defining what they meant by such a lobby (for example, grouping together all pro-Israel groups under this label, including those that are clearly liberal and dovish) and conflating being “pro-Israel” with being “neo-conservative.” Nor did they credibly explain how a small coterie of second and third echelon neo-conservative bureaucrats (none of whom had cabinet rank), plus a few think-tank analysts and opinion journalists, could persuade the actual non-Jewish “deciders” of the George W. Bush administration at that time — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice — to invade Iraq if they hadn’t wanted to.
I’m also not suggesting that AIPAC— the official American-Jewish lobby for Israel– is not often extreme and problematic in its zeal. Although not right-wing in principle (unlike the really right-wing fringe group that the once mainstream Zionist Organization of America has become), AIPAC so annoyed Yitzhak Rabin for its lack of enthusiasm when he attempted to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Oslo peace process, that he encouraged the creation of the more clearly dovish Israel Policy Forum as an alternative pro-Israel address. In his 2009 book, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change, Dan Fleshler offers a better-informed and more nuanced look at the so-called Israel lobby than that offered by Mearsheimer and Walt.
Another good commentator on the lobby is Daniel Levy, a British-Israeli peace activist who helped draft the unofficial Geneva Accord of 2003 and now works on Middle East peace issues for think tanks in Washington, D.C., from where he also helped found J Street, the pro-Israel peace lobby. In Levy’s Haaretz newspaper review of Mearsheimer and Walt’s book in 2007, he blasts the organized Jewish community for “outsourcing” foreign policy issues to the neocons; but he also criticizes Mearsheimer and Walt for confusing cause and effect. Levy regarded support for the Iraq war by some Jewish organizations as a sales job for a decision that was already made by the Bush administration for its own reasons.
It should also be noted that even Mearsheimer and Walt, who are really not anti-Semites, understand that most American Jews are liberals and anti-war. But even if they were not, this would not make them worse than most American Christians, who lean more heavily toward the right politically than Jews generally do.
I appreciate Ralph Seliger’s piece because he attempts to bring reason into the ultra left’s conspiratorial theories which have created strange bed fellows, i.e. off the wall right wingers, long time anti-semites, and and some Arabs who are determined to de-legitimize Israel.
Good point – but maybe thats not the point – First pull the log from your own eye – and if those neoconners – wallstreet rip offs – free traders – globalist’s – are your log – then pull it out – because if that is not done – then and only then if thats not done does it give rise – to hate for all – those who done and those who did nothing – Think about it – How many times – have God’s people warned??? and they were killed??? Maybe the Old man is tired of trying to teach – a time limit of 10,000 years.
As I recall, the main thrust of Walt and Mearscheimer’s argument is that AIPAC along with its allies among its dispensationalist Christian groups have an influence on U.S. policy regarding Israel-Palestine which is both misrepresentative of attitudes among Jews in America and dispropportionate to the number of Jews in the American electorate. This is reflected in the the reluctance by the President and Congresspeople to apply real pressure on Israel regarding continuation of West Bank settlements, its muted critcism of the Gaza attack and opposition to the Palestinian application to the United Nations for independent statehood. This is not a conspiracy theory, but rather an observation on how power politics are being played.
Actually, M & W are not experts on Congressional lobbies; you should read Dan Fleshler, an author I’ve mentioned, on exactly this point. But where M & W really went astray is in identifying their ill-defined construct of “the Israel lobby” — one which went way beyond the bounds of AIPAC — as a “necessary” contributing cause for the Iraq war.
As for those other issues, which actually do pertain to Israel, none of them are simple matters of black & white. Pres. Obama now knows that it was a strategic error (although not a moral one) to insist on a settlement freeze, which then forced the Palestinians to concentrate on this one point of contention, instead of making every effort to negotiate a deal with Israel, without setting preconditions. Since Gaza is controlled by Hamas, with all the violence and hatred that this reactionary movement stands for, it is not hard for the right and center in the pro-Israel camp to see military action and/or the blockade as fully justified. And while it’s understandable for the Palestinians to want to go to the UN, to circumvent the frustrating path of negotiations, it is doubtful that this will bring them any closer to the state they seek.