Questions for Walt and Mearsheimer

Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have been invited to speak at Hebrew University. They will continue to pedal their bigoted drivel about the iron grip, the Jewish lobby - which they call the "Israel Lobby," in capital letters - holds over American foreign policy. They will claim, as they did in their previous writings, that Israel's birth was an original sin and crime, that Israel holds the moral low ground, and that if the cause of Israel were in any way deserving of American support, it would not need a lobby. They don't make similar claims about the powerful Saudi lobby or the numerous other lobbies that have been part of America since the days of Thomas Jefferson. If just causes did not need lobbies, then it would follow that the causes of civil rights, civil liberties, gay rights, environmental rights, the rights of the elderly, etc. would all be unjust since each of them has high-powered and effective lobbies. 

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Oxford Union gives new meaning to the word 'debate'

In October of 2007 I wrote an obituary for the Oxford Union. This student-run group purports to be one of the most distinguished debating societies in the world. Yet its debates have become more one-sided, more absurd, and more trivial than most bar room brawls. 

The scheduled debate that led me to write the October obituary was supposed to be on the following proposition:  "This house believes that one state is the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict." Nothing wrong with that (other than that no one would dream of proposing a similar topic with regard to India-Pakistan-Bangladesh or any of the other divided states in the world today). The problem was with the debaters selected by the Oxford Union to defend the two-state solution, which is synonymous with Israel's right to exist.

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