ANOTHER LETTER OF THE WEEK

This none's from the Australian Financial Review

Mearsheimer’s views

In the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt introduced ancient anti-semitic slurs about Jewish power into the modern discourse, suggesting that a mysterious cabal of Jewish groups were somehow responsible for every US foreign policy blunder.

With that in mind, I was dismayed to read Robert Kaplan’s “Great power politics ” (Review, February 10) saying that the “real tragedy” of this is that it would threaten “to obscure the urgent and enduring message of Mearsheimer’s life’s work”. This is absolutely incorrect, the real tragedy of the incident is that it no longer raises an eyebrow when a widely read columnist can suggest that the “Jewish Lobby” is keeping Australia in Iraq; or that Mearsheimer can endorse a Holocaust revisionist such as author Gil Atzmon and still be credited as a serious political scientist. Averting tragedy does not require listening to Mearsheimer’s views on China, it requires ridding him of his academic recognition and throwing him into the cesspit where he belongs.

Justin Said Coogee NSW