"More than it should"?! Oh man, and you connected that with the word "fairness"?! Who decides which lobby "should" have how much power?! I guess that you'd be the one to usurp the adversarialist structure of the U.S. government and be the one to solely dictate the "common good"? The one who determines which lobby should get the most influence? The one who determines what is fair? If I were you, I'd first try reading Madison's Federalist Papers. For starters.
Your cited reference material ("The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy") is very misleading. I've read it. It's an oversimplification, ultimately an incomplete and biased analysis. Sadly, many have and will continue to use it as justification for the Turner Diaries ethos. You'd better believe that the same uneducated, paranoid persons that worship the Turner Diaries are using pseudo-intellectual books like this to justify their dreadfully misinformed positions.
In the book you mentioned, no effort is made by the authors to analyze the effect of Muslim aggression in the region. Everything wrong in the Middle East is laid at the foot of Israel and U.S. support of Israel. The authors do attempt to create the air of impartiality by rejecting "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and that lobbies that support Israel are completely acceptable…
However, the authors fail to lay any blame with the rest of the Middle East. For brevity, a quote from a review of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" makes the point: "...the political majority in Israel had been prepared to withdraw from most of the occupied territories to conclude a peace agreement with a Palestinian state — until the Al-Aksa intifada brought terrorism as deeply into sovereign, pre-1967 Israel as the Tel Aviv beachfront. Having withdrawn from all of Gaza in 2005, Israel received a steady barrage of rocket attacks, which undermined public support for further disengagement from portions, at least, of the West Bank. The authors do not have to concur with the Israeli reaction to those events, but they prove their intellectual dishonesty in barely even mentioning them."
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Another apt review excerpt summarizes the fundamental problem with books like “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy": "The answer to conspiracy theories about Jewish influence is not to pretend Jews don't have it. It's to say, as J.J. Goldberg has done in his book 'Jewish Power,' that playing the interest-group game within the law requires no apologies. And it's to say something that Mearsheimer and Walt simply refuse to believe: All the lobbying in the world on Israel's behalf couldn't have succeeded had there not also been enough voters, the vast number of them non-Jews, who genuinely do believe in the moral and strategic foundations of the unique, and uniquely controversial, U.S.-Israeli relationship."
Again, dead-on. The notion that the Jewish (or any other) lobby somehow controls the rest of us "sheeple" by slight-o-hand, misdirection, whatever is the ultimate self-tool. It's a central assumption/principle in the Turner Diaries ethos. It's the central assumption to nearly all forms fascism. Don't miss that most of these conspiracy theories operate on the assumption that "everyone's a fool except for you and me, and I'm not sure about you." If you do the extrapolations, you'll see that such a mindset leaves no room for other informed points of view; no room for dialogue. Therefore, if this mindset were dominant, there would be no vigorous, adversarialist idea exchange, just the so-called "luminary(ies)" to save you from whoever that they claim are controlling you. Once that’s accomplished, said luminary(ies), in their infinite generosity, will run the body politic for you the way it should be run- their idea of what’s “fair”. See the tragic cycle? See the hypocrisy?
Want to really be a sheep? Then buy into that crap; buy into the fact that there’s no meaningful exchange of ideas at work in the U.S., just a secret group of super-Jews running the world from inscrutable positions of ultimate influence. Sounds kinda like Nazi propaganda, doesn’t it?!
For me at least, "Res Ipsa Loquitur."
Think. Do some more reading. Again, start with Madison’s Federalist Papers.
-L
This comment was edited on Jan 19, 21:38.