Informant38

Yes, It's True:

"I resent it bitterly," he says, "because I've got a son who's a soldier in Baghdad dodging bombs for our country. To have anybody impugn my loyalty is just outrageous."

Elliot Cohen in the Washington Post links Walt&Mearsheimer with David Duke, thereby immediately confirming one of their secondary theses - that accusations of anti-Semitism are shielding Jewish intrigue in American political affairs.
-

...claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original — and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices.

Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

Tony Judt in the New York Times, linking people like Elliot Cohen with people like Christopher Hitchens in a very brave but at the same time somewhat tepid sort of almost-defense of W&M which is really only the simple assertion that serious ideas should be debated openly in a democracy.
-

This particular lobby – which the authors ominously capitalize and reference with the definite article (“the Lobby”) – uses the undue influence of Jews in America to get the United States to do the “fighting, dying … and paying” for wars that are not in its own interest, causing American soldiers to die for Israeli interests. It was “the Lobby” that, according to Walt and Mearsheimer, drove the United States into the war against Iraq, and threatens to drive us into a war against Iran. In other words, real Americans are being killed because other Americans, whose primary loyalty is to the Jewish nation, are manipulating America’s political, media, academic and cultural leaders, as well as ordinary American citizens. American Jews who support Israel – even in a critical way – are thus being disloyal to the United States by placing the interests of a foreign state above the interests of their own country.

The fierce and unyielding Alan Dershowitz in a 40-page reply to M&W, in a research paper published by Harvard Law School.
-
Links courtesy the functionally invertebrate NPR