Mearsheimer and Walt’s THE ISRAELI LOBBY doesn’t hold up under scrutiny of its footnotes
Thanks, Charles, for today’s post which questions the central (whitewashing) thesis of Georgetown prof Esposito’s “Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslim’s Really Think.” The expose comes from Martin Kramer so I visited Kramer’s excellent website and found there a similar debunking of the book “The Israeli Lobby”
~Memphis
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KICKING THE FOOTNOTES OF “THE ISRAELI LOBBY”
The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has 106 pages of footnotes—over 1,200 footnotes in total. The book’s boosters like to cite this fact as somehow proving the scholarly virtue of the authors. “Mearsheimer and Walt have corroborated all their arguments with a wealth of primary and secondary sources,” gushes one prof. In fact, most of the critics who have actually perused the footnotes have made the valid point that they almost never point to primary sources or interviews. The book was researched off the Internet, and the notes are just padding for a preconceived theory. But do the sources cited in the notes say what Mearsheimer and Walt say they say? Even this is doubtful. Here’s an example.
[…]
[After the example, Kramer concludes as follows: ]
Academic incompetence? Intellectual dishonesty? Over-reliance on the many “research assistants” and “fact-checkers” whom the authors acknowledge? All that really matters is that not one of these 1,200-plus notes should be taken at face value. Not only do the authors only cite sources that support their argument. They cite sources that don’t, while claiming that they do. How many other bogus references pad the back-matter of this book? We’ll probably never know, because no one will ever have the patience to wade through them all.