In the Washington Post, Eliot Cohen calls the Mearsheimer/Walt thing by its proper name:

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends of Israel.

The authors dismiss or ignore past Arab threats to exterminate Israel, as well as the sewer of anti-Semitic literature that pollutes public discourse in the Arab world today. The most recent calls by Iran’s fanatical -- and nuclear weapons-hungry -- president for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ they brush aside as insignificant. There is nothing here about the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has poured into lobbying and academic institutions, or the wealth of Islamic studies programs on American campuses, though they note with suspicion some 130 Jewish studies programs on those campuses. West Bank settlements get attention; terrorist butchery of civilians on buses or in shopping malls does not. To dispute their view of Israel is not to differ about policy but to act as a foreign agent.

Quite so. Cohen’s robust assertion that this is indeed the Prejudice That Dare Not Speak Its Name addresses head on one of the most twisted aspects of this whole phenomenon of Judeophobia dressed up lightly as Israel-hatred. It is the claim made by these Judeophobes that they are being persecuted for daring to criticise Israel.

This is based on the further assertion that anyone who criticises Israel is accused of antisemitism. This is demonstrably untrue and is itself a smear designed to stifle the exposure of Judeophobia. On the basis of this monotonously repeated calumny, anyone who accuses a Judeophobe of expressing prejudice towards Jews is declared guilty of stifling freedom of speech. So people like Mearsheimer and Walt can come up with the most egregious libels against American Jews – accusing them of being agents of a foreign power and a conspiracy to subvert America, the tropes of classical antisemitism -- but as long as they are demonising either Israel or Jewish support for Israel they believe they are immune from such a label.

They are the enemies of the enemies of Judeophobia, and Israel is their get-out-of-Judeophobia-jail-free card. Thus protected, they can then accuse the Jews who cry foul at such prejudice of persecuting them. Thus it becomes impossible for a Jew to identify the canard -- as in Mearsheimer and Walt -- that the Jews are a global conspiracy, without such an identification proving by definition that they are indeed such a conspiracy. Merely stating that the claim of a Jewish conspiracy is a vile Judeophobic canard proves that such a conspiracy is true. QED.

It was this thinking that lay behind the disgusting debate put on by the Economist magazine in London a while back on the motion ‘The enemies of antisemitism are the new McCarthyites’. Yup, that’s right – anyone who called attention to the outbreak of Judeophobia was a McCarthyite, because they were trying to sanitise the crimes of Israel. It was at this debate that the view was also expressed that any British Jew who supported Israel’s policies was guilty of ‘dual loyalty’ and not properly British. Clearly, if anyone was in danger of being intimidated here, it was precisely such a Jew; yet according to the Economist motion’s proposers, it was those making such a vile smear who were the ‘victims’ of an attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Thus hate speech becomes a ‘human right’; and its victims must be condemned for attacking freedom of speech if they dare protest at being thus smeared or libelled.

The fact is, of course, that those Judeophobes who so noisily proclaim on every possible platform that they are being silenced cannot support their claim because it is self-evidently absurd. As Cohen observes of Mearsheimer and Walt:

Reporting persecution, they have declared that they could not publish their work in the United States, but they have neglected to name the academic journals that turned them down.

The Financial Times -- of all papers -- has been taking a deeply unpleasant position on this controversy. In a leader on April 1 (subscription only) it wrote:

Moral blackmail - the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and US support for it will lead to charges of antisemitism - is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters. Judgment of the precise value of the Walt-Mearscheimer paper has been swept aside by a wave of condemnation. Their scholarship has been derided and their motives impugned, while Harvard has energetically disassociated itself from their views. Mr Walt's position as academic dean of the Kennedy School is in doubt.* Honest and informed debate is the foundation of freedom and progress and a precondition of sound policy. It is, to say the least, odd when dissent in such a central area of policy is forced offshore or reduced to the status of samizdat. On various counts, this is a shame and a self-inflicted wound no society built on freedom should allow.

In the FT two days later Mark Mazower claimed – in an article in which he did not question or criticise the Mearsheimer and Walt smear of a Zionist /Jewish conspiracy and lobbed some additional stink-bombs of his own – that fear of being tarred an antisemite meant that criticism of Israel was being

put under surveillance and inhibited.

Where? How? What are he and the FT editor talking about? There’s no evidence of this happening at all. On the contrary, one can hardly open a newspaper or political magazine or go to a public meeting without being assailed by claims of the perfidy of the global Zionist/Jewish conspiracy. What these FT writers are saying is that any protest against such claims is somehow illegitimate. Hate speech against Jews must not be criticised. Is it not therefore they themselves who are therefore seeking to shut down debate?

Those on the left who spew out their vile calumnies about the global Zionist/Jewish conspiracy do not lose their jobs, or fail to get published in academic journals, or find their media appearances curtailed. Au contraire – such views are a positive requirement for a stellar position in the most fashionable circles. It is those who defend Israel’s right to defend itself against mass murder and who insist on identifying the Judeophobia that is currently rampant who find they can’t get published, or are denied the airwaves or restricted to their ‘voice of lunacy’ slot, and are generally treated as pariahs – and most particularly if they are Jews.

For Jews in Britain, the price of admission to the counsels of the powerful is to dump on Israel big-time. A similar situation is surely occurring in the rest of what passes for the civilised world; which is at least partly why so many Israeli academics and other Jews are in the very forefront of the new Judeophobia. It was ever thus; many of the fathers of 19th and 20th century antisemitism were Jews, and before that medieval Christian Jew-hatred was promulgated by conversos who yielded to none in their infliction of anti-Jewish terror. Doing the dirty work of the enemies of the Jewish people is, for some, the price of Jewish survival. It is a pathological defence mechanism against an apparently endless cosmic hatred; it is disgusting; it is lethal.

But then of course, to say this is to be guilty of trying to shut down debate -- and is therefore an opinion the utterance of which must not be allowed.

*Update: three days after its leader appeared, the FT published the following letter:

From Prof Stephen M. Walt.

Sir, Your editorial ("America and Israel", April 1/2) on our article analysing the impact of the Israel lobby was a welcome call for a serious discussion of these issues. Unfortunately, it also contained a factual error regarding the end of my term as academic dean of the Kennedy School.

I began a three-year term in July 2002, and agreed to a one-year extension last year. The faculty was officially notified in mid-February that I would step down at the end of the academic year. This announcement was sent nearly a month before the article in question appeared. There is, in short, no connection whatsoever between these events. Harvard University and the University of Chicago (where my co-author, John Mearsheimer, teaches) have behaved admirably throughout, and have consistently defended the core principles of academic freedom and scholarly debate.