Actual Study Disputes CAIR-Bears Mearsheimer and Walt

At The Corner, Michael Rubin asks How Important is the Israel Lobby?

And the answer falls short of what CAIR Bears Mearsheimer and Walt claim:

In the academy today, politics of research are more important than the supporting evidence. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt became academic pop stars when they used the internet to research and produce, under Harvard’s banner, a polemic blaming the Israel Lobby for skewing American policy away from Washington’s natural interests.

Now David Verbeeten has done research, not on internet blog, but rather in libraries and archives (imagine that!), and looked at U.S. policy going back to the Eisenhower administration. He shows how the White House and State Department played realpolitik and sought to align U.S. policy with the more numerous and oil-rich Arab states but, over time, successive administrations learned the hard way that Israel was a truer ally.

What’s really sad is that people will take a second mortgage to send their kids to Harvard or Chicago and, so long as their politics are correct for the academy, professors needn’t bother to do their homework.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Israel Lobby and Mearsheimer and Walt.