AIPAC Debate

For this blog, we are supposed to respond to a four minute segment of the McNeil News Hour Debate, specifically regarding to The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (released March 23, 2006) by John Mercheimer (a professor at the University of Chicago) and Stephen Wald (a professor at Harvard), and The Deadliest Lies by Abraham H. Foxman (director of the anti-defamation league).


The whole discussion was sparked when, “A year ago, two American political scientists raised a storm with an article asserting that Israel and its supporters in the United States have far too much influence over American policy.” Meircheimer and Wald assert that the US’s support of Israel is a “strategic liability” for America. Conversely, Foxman insists that The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy is built on “half-truths” and “distortions.”


For the McNeil Debate, Mercheimer and Wald were invited on the show to comment, as well as Foxman. Basically, Mercheimer and Wald believe that were it not for AIPAC, we would not have gone to war in Iraq, which was a bad move (also according to them).


I personally think we would have gone to war anyway, support AIPAC, and think that if anything, AIPAC doesn’t have enough influence in America.


As a side note, one of the most powerful images I saw in the AIPAC videos was the poster where someone had written ‘Holocaust’, but had rendered the o’s into handcuffs with a pair of hands grasping upward through them.