The Lobby

I purchased a copy of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Walt and Mearsheimer, largely out of spite after reading (as much as I could stand) a review in the cretinous "Pajamas Media" by Lee Smith, who argues:

The key difference between most anti-Semitic tracts of the pre-Holocaust period and The Israel Lobby is Israel itself; after all, Zionism, arises under the same auspices as the Protocols – the international system of state sovereignty. Theodor Herzl believed that once the Jews had a state of their own and the Jews could take their place among nations, the Jewish problem would go away and Jews would become like everyone else. However, as The Israel Lobby shows, the irrational obsession with Israel as the root of all problems in the Middle East and US policy there, the willful misrepresentation of Israeli policies, and holding the Jewish state to standards in war and peace that not even the United States cares to observe, never mind, say, the Islamic Republic of Iran – Herzl on this count at least was wrong. A Jewish state has done nothing to curtail anti-Semitism.

I won't get around to reading the book right away, but I await the reviews that most likely appear in The American Conservatve, The New York Review of Books and perhaps a few other publications that will be illuminating rather than hysterical.