The Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ decision to cancel a forum about a controversial upcoming book on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy has sparked a heated debate about free speech.
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a book due out in September by University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, argues that the pro-Israel lobby has had a negative effect on U.S. foreign policy.
Expanding on a previous academic article that caused uproar and protest, Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the Israel lobby — including Jewish organizations, Christian fundamentalists and neo-conservatives — helped, among other actions, to stop diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Syria and hampered efforts to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is a non-partisan organization founded in 1922 that holds public forums on international issues such as immigration and world trade. The organization also conducts public opinion polls about foreign affairs.
The council had planned to hold a public discussion of the book in September with the two authors. But in late July, the council decided to scrap the program.
Council President Marshall Bouton, who made the decision to cancel, said he was not trying to stifle free speech nor shy away from public discussion of a controversial issue. Rather, Bouton said, he preferred that the authors appear in “an appropriate forum” balanced by an opposing viewpoint. Neither council board members who are Jewish nor pro-Israeli groups influenced his decision or pressured him, Bouton said.
“It was my decision and mine alone,” he told the Tribune. “It was not our intention to prevent their views from reaching the ears of our audience.”
But in a letter sent to the council’s 94 board members shortly after the decision, Mearsheimer and Walt said they felt political pressure was behind the move.
“On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us [Mearsheimer] and informed him that he was canceling the event,” they wrote. “He said he felt ‘extremely uncomfortable making this call’ and that his decision did not reflect his personal view on the subject of our book. Instead, he explained that his decision was based on the need ‘to protect the institution.'”
In a telephone interview with the Tribune, Mearsheimer said a council scheduler told him that the council was “feeling heat” over the authors’ anticipated appearance before Bouton called to cancel. Bouton confirmed to him that the council was facing criticism, Mearsheimer said.
“If he wasn’t protecting the council from the lobby, who was he protecting it from?” Mearsheimer asked, in wondering whom the authors’ appearance would harm.
In the end, the authors have been censored, Mearsheimer said.
“The bottom line is that preventing us from speaking before the council is not the way we are supposed to be conducting public debate on important issues in the United States,” he said.
The book is an extension of a controversial essay published by the authors in March 2006 in the London Review of Books and is expected to draw stinging challenges from pro-Israeli groups. The essay sparked intense debate, drawing criticism in academic and political circles that the authors showed poor scholarship, had an undue anti-Israel bias and even displayed anti-Semitic tendencies. Mearsheimer and Walt deny any hostility to Jews or Israel.
Still, the council’s decision has led several scholars in the Chicago area to say it buckled to pressures to muzzle debate. Rumors are flying through academic circles in Chicago of the council wilting under strong-arm tactics — even though council leaders deny it.
“It’s a huge mistake,” George Bisharat, a professor of at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, said of the council’s decision to cancel the event (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“It will ultimately cause more harm to the institution than would have been caused by holding the debate,” he said. “These institutions thrive when they are seen as arenas for public discussion of difficult issues. If they begin to appear to bend with the political winds and be susceptible to influence, and ultimately engage in what is essentially a form of censorship, their reputation will be damaged.”
Bouton admits embarrassment over the council first scheduling, then canceling the authors’ appearance. He blamed “an internal miscommunication” that allowed a staff member to book the authors through their publisher without knowing Bouton’s wishes of having a balanced forum.
Before canceling the appearance, the council contacted Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, to possibly provide a counterpoint to Mearsheimer and Walt, but it had been unable to reconcile the potential speakers’ schedules, said Rachel Bronson, the council’s vice president for programs and studies.
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Foxman is publishing his own book, “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control” (published by Palgrave Macmillan) in early September as a response to Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments. An ADL spokesman confirmed that Foxman was contacted by the council, but he could not speak Sept. 27, the date scheduled for the forum.
Bouton said the council remains committed to rescheduling the authors in a forum with people representing counterpoints. But Mearsheimer and Walt have not announced plans to appear at any substitute forum in Chicago. Mearsheimer declined to comment when asked whether the authors would attend a future council forum.
But Todd Winer, a spokesman for the Chicago chapter of the American Jewish Committee, said his organization would likely not dignify Mearsheimer and Walt’s book — which he called “shoddy scholarship that doesn’t really present anything new” — with the attention that would come along with a forum (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
“The whole idea that they’re somehow being censored is a bit of a stretch, given that they’re publishing a book by a major American publisher,” Winer said, referring to the New York publishing company of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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