Martin Kramer: Footnotes to Walt and Mearsheimer magnum opus lead nowhere

This is pretty devastating:

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 . . .

Ayein sham--read the rest.

Tags: Walt, Mearsheimer, Israel Lobby, Israel