WASHINGTON – One of America’s most prominent Jewish advocacy organizations has jumped into the fray surrounding the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s academic paper about the “Israel lobby,” denouncing the paper as “a sloppy diatribe.” Criticism also came a New York legislator, who dismissed the study as a “prejudiced rant.”

The paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” was written by the academic dean of the Kennedy School, Stephen Walt, and a political science professor and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, and published by the Kennedy School.

In the 83-page “working paper,” the professors suggest that a vast network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq.

The paper has been the subject of sharp criticism from prominent Harvard faculty, Harvard students, and two members of Congress, with many detractors alleging that the document is riddled with factual inaccuracies and suffers from bias and faulty research.

The paper drew fire from the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, which issued late last week an “analysis” in response to the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, titled “Mearsheimer and Walt’s Anti-Israel Screed: A Relentless Assault in Scholarly Guise.”

The paper, the ADL asserts, is “one of the most unprofessional works coming out of respectable quarters,” and “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.”

“One does not have to take a pro-Israel position to recognize that the authors, despite their reputations, have no interest in producing a serious, balanced work,” the ADL states. “The result is a sloppy diatribe.”

Among the criticisms leveled in the ADL response is that the Walt- Mearsheimer paper indulges in an overly simplistic treatment of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, and that “The authors … are not interested in complex truths because they would undermine their goal to blame Israel for everything.”

The advocacy group also argues that Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer are working to “delegitimize the work of pro-Israel activists”; exaggerate Israel’s influence over America in the Iraq war and the current standoff with Iran; and ignore the threat of European anti-Semitism. The ADL urges “mainstream individuals and institutions” to recognize the paper’s “extremism.”

The Walt-Mearsheimer document also attracted more wary eyes from Congress over the weekend, when New York’s Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of Manhattan, joined Rep. Eliot Engel, Democrat of the Bronx, in condemning the paper.

“I read the whole 80-odd pages of it,” Mr. Nadler told The New York Sun yesterday, “and it’s not an academic paper. It’s a screed, it’s a rant – a prejudiced rant.”

In the paper, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer allege that the American Congress is manipulated by the Israel lobby, a charge Mr. Nadler denied while describing the paper as “a meretricious, dishonest piece of crap” and “a hatchet job on Israel and the United States disguised as a policy paper.”

Mr. Nadler said he did not believe federal funding should be withheld from Harvard in response to the paper’s publication, but said the proper response for individual lawmakers angered by the document was to continue fueling “public outcry” over the issue, “to get Harvard and the University of Chicago to disassociate themselves.” Mr. Nadler also called on Harvard to “review” the paper, “unless they want to say that’s the kind of work that they do.”

Phone and e-mail requests from the Sun for comment about the ongoing “lobby” paper situation to Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer since last week have not been returned.

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Harvard’s Paper on Israel Drew From Neo-Nazi Sites, March 24, 2006
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The Belfer Declaration, March 23, 2006
Harvard’s Paper on Israel Called ‘Trash’ By Solon, March 22, 2006
Kalb Upbraids Harvard Dean Over Israel, March 21, 2006
David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated By a Harvard Dean, March 20, 2006
Discredited Dean, March 20, 2006.
Harvard, Chicago, and the ‘Lobby’, March 17, 2006