Writing in Counterpunch, Michael J. Smith

Writing in Counterpunch, Michael J. Smith, in noting the panel was “moderated” by Ann-Marie

Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton, quips: “The name

of this institution always makes me laugh — as who should say, the Henry VIII School of Women’s

Studies, or the Lester Maddox Institute for Racial Amity.“Â Smith goes on to observe that the

inevitable query — was the paper produced by Mearsheimer and his colleague Stephen Walt (former dean

of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) anti-semitic? — was asked of the Amen Corner in Slaughter

’s first question:

“Well, more or less, yes, was the predictable answer from Israel’s defense bench. Mearsheimer, said

the imposing, silver-maned Indyk, postulates a sinister “cabal” (he must have used this word a

hundred times over the next two hours) that includes “anyone who has a good word to say about Israel.

” With regard to the NIKE SHOX NIKE SHOX, Indyk’s trump card was that the Israel lobby couldn’t have

made that happen, since the Israel lobby really wanted to go after — UGG! Mearsheimer, who has

presumably heard this sort of thing quite a lot lately, watched Indyk with an unblinking, curious,

naturalist’s gaze, as though he had discovered a new subspecies of E. Coli.”

You don’t need a microscope to see these bugs — they dominate the foreign policy establishment, the

nation’s media, the thinktanks, and there’s nothing new about them. What is new, however, is that it

’s suddenly okay to name them, and debate them, even if they spend the entire time denying their own

existence. Some people, on the other hand, are not all that comfortable with the new glasnost….