[lbo-talk] The Banality of anti-Israel Lobby Doctrine

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Fri Aug 6 18:56:01 PDT 2010


On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 9:35 PM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:

You can see it with the gun lobby --
> there's no elite consensus that a heavily-armed citizenry serves
> the interests of capitalism; many elite elements would no doubt
> argue the contrary; and yet the gun lobby hasn't yet made itself
> enough of a problem to be shut down. Fetus freaks, same thing.

Your examples here are perfect illustrations of my own nuanced difference with the Mearsheimer-Walt "lobby" hypothesis (or at least the vulgarization of it's that's frequently bandied about). Like Zionism, the gun-rights and anti-abortion tendencies are social movements that happen to include lobbies. But the part is not synonymous with the whole. Focusing on a few offices on K Street (or, in the case of Zionism, a plethora of them) while ignoring the thousands of organizations and millions of people behind them can hardly offer an accurate understanding of the situation. Pretending that Zionism holds its power in the United States only because its lobbyists are clever with money and influence may or may not be anti-Semitic, but more importantly, it's just dumb.

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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