The polemic against an entity so nefarious it’s mostly uppercased as “The Lobby” by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer has received insufficient attention in America, the paper’s fans say. They should feel better now that the tract against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been echoed by anti-Semites at Turtle Bay.

It happened during a debate at a U.N. body so insignificant that it only received attention recently because its makeup turned it into a joke. Like the Human Rights Commission, which embarrassed even Secretary-General Annan when it elected Libya as its leader and voted America off, the Disarmament Commission last week welcomed Iran as a vice chairman.

Another vice chairman is Israel, which until lately was the only U.N. member state barred from joining any U.N. body. And so the stage was set for a confrontation between two armed foes charged with lowering armed tensions in the world.

The Israeli diplomat, Meir Yitzchaki, voiced the concerns, the Jewish state, whose officials are rarely heard in Turtle Bay’s inner sancta. The commission might want to start by addressing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he said. Reza Najafi of Iran countered with a call for the disarmament of Israel, which President Ahmadinejad threatened violently to wipe “off the map.”

The predictable debate was mundane enough until Mr. Najafi pulled the secret weapon. According to Mr. Yitzchaki, his Iranian colleague said the Israeli argument is nothing but “Zionist propaganda of the Jewish lobby in the United States.” In a first for Turtle Bay, the Lobby was made to sound even more sinister than its Jerusalem alleged puppet masters.

It could be a coincidence, but the Iranian attack on The Lobby occurred on the same day that the New York Times first touched on the Walt-Mearsheimer debate.

In a curious defense of the two scholars, a Times op-ed contributor, Tony Judt, argued that the anti-Zionist essay was met by “virtual silence in the mainstream media.” Similarly, essayist William Pfaff has noted from his Paris perch that “in the mainstream American press, only United Press International, the International Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post” covered it.

In fact, Americans widely discussed – and mostly in a critical tone – the paper by Mr. Walt of Harvard and Mr. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. First introduced to America by The New York Sun, the shoddy polemic is now far from unknown. Israeli columnists, naturally, also paid attention. Except for a small (but widely quoted) fringe, they largely panned the paper’s poor scholarship. The work of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer has been debated endlessly in talk shows on Arabic-language television stations such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

Meanwhile, admirers of anti-Semitic propaganda passed the paper around like candy. As David Duke told the Sun, the two university scholars “validate every major point I have been making.” Those points are also now made daily by propagandists for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

An Israeli-based Farsi broadcaster, Menashe Amir, sent me a Google link to a heavy-metal music video now popular in Germany at video.google.com.

Since virtually all the footage in it is taken from Iranian television images, Mr. Amir believes the video must have been commissioned by Iranian officials posted in Germany.

Drawing on techniques made famous by Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, the video juxtaposes images of Israeli anti-Palestinian Arab cruelty against a smiling, waving, elderly-kissing, finger-wagging Mr. Ahmadinejad. To seal its Nazi credentials, it ends with a tribute to a slew of Holocaust deniers, including Verbeke, Irving, Graf, Zundel, and Rudolf.

Sure enough, this Iranian-backed German video begins with the obligatory nod toward the Lobby, showing an image of President Bush standing in front an Israeli flag. Get it?

When successfully done by pro-Israelis, lobbying one’s government, as enshrined in the Constitution, is deemed by some university scholars to be an un-American activity. When criticized, those scholars cry “guilt by association.” Instead, they should note where their arguments fall on deaf ears, and where they find eager fans, and ask why.