WASHINGTON – The uproar over a paper co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government about what is described as the far-reaching influence of an “Israel lobby” erupted on Capitol Hill yesterday, as one congressman labeled the paper “trash” and described its authors as “anti-Semites.”

The paper also drew fire from Cambridge, Mass., as Harvard faculty members and students joined the chorus of denunciations. One day after Kennedy School scholar Marvin Kalb lambasted the paper’s authors for failing to meet basic quality standards for academic research, another Harvard professor, Ruth Wisse, called for the Kennedy School to withdraw the paper until the authors remedy their “poor scholarship.”

The paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” was written by the Kennedy School’s Stephen Walt and a political science professor and the codirector 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 allege 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.

Components of the purported network include nine major publications, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; “Christian evangelicals” including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; top-ranking officials in the Bush administration, and scholars at nine think tanks, including the Brookings Institution. The paper has won praise from Islamist groups and white supremacist and anti-Semite David Duke.

Yet the assessment of Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat of New York who is Jewish, was that the paper “really deserves the contempt of the American people,” and that it amounts to “the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel.”

“Given what happened in the Holocaust, it’s shameful that people would write reports like this,” the congressman said.

Mr. Engel, who represents the Bronx, also said he was resentful of the allegations that some “Israel Lobby” had hoodwinked the bulk of the American government across both parties. The congressman cited ongoing lobbying efforts by “hyphenated American communities” such as “Greek-American groups, Lebanese-American groups, Albanian-American groups, Irish-American groups” that are not the subjects of Harvard academic papers, and said: “So the premise of this report is that somehow Jewish-American groups should somehow be punished for being effective for organizing in behalf of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

Mr. Engel said he thought the “dishonest so-called intellectuals” who wrote the paper are “entitled to their stupidity” and was respectful of their right to publish it, but said he also supports “the right of the rest of us to expose them for being the anti-Semites they are.”

Also concerned yesterday were students and faculty at Harvard. Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature who is publicly supportive of Israel, said that beyond generating “anger” and “anxiety,” the result of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper “has really been consternation that professors of standing could produce a work of such poor scholarship, and belligerence.”

“I think the first thing to be done is to remove it from the Kennedy School’s Web site, until such time as the authors have revised it,” Ms. Wisse said. “If it’s called a working paper, then clearly it didn’t work.”

Yet “the most interesting reaction so far,” the professor added, “has been from students whom I’ve spoken to. They are really shocked by the lack of sophistication of the piece.”

One such student is Julie Silverstein, the president of the Jewish Student Caucus at the Kennedy School. Ms. Silverstein described the paper yesterday in an e-mail as “political rhetoric with an academic imprimatur,” adding: “I am very concerned that Walt’s piece will inflame the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bias that often hovers below the surface in academia.”

“At a time of rising global anti-Semitism, influential thought leaders like Mearsheimer and Walt bear a responsibility to ensure that their words are not distorted to further the ends of those who would intimidate or commit violence against Jews,” Ms. Silverstein added.

“Unfortunately, it seems that such care was not taken in this case,” she continued, saying students at the Kennedy School and across Harvard are working on a coordinated response to the paper.

Meanwhile, the working paper “has been the subject of contentious classroom debates which have put Jewish students on the defensive,” Ms. Silverstein, a second-year student in the Master in Public Policy program, said.

One of the organizations cited in the paper, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, issued its own response late Monday, denying claims made by Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer about Camera, and faulting the authors for their use of “bogus references.”

In one instance, Camera associate director Alex Safian wrote, the Walt-Mearsheimer paper alleges that “Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the U.S. military more directly involved in the Middle East, so it could help protect Israel,” citing a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century” in their footnotes.

Mr. Safian reported that a search of the paper returns only one mention of Israel, in the context of “Israeli and Saudi citizens” who “donned gas masks in nightly terror of Scud attacks” – a reference Mr. Safian said hardly proves the claim made by the authors when citing the report.

Phone and e-mail requests for comment from Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt late yesterday were not immediately returned.

Related articles & editorials:

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