I’m disappointed with the short shrift I got in “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I’m mentioned, but in error:

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, for example, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged studies to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars prompted a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites studies to report alleged anti-Israel behavior at U.S. colleges.

As Pipes has pointed out in a correction, “Martin Kramer had no role in founding Campus Watch.” I also clarified that fact when Pipes launched his site, since some people openly assumed I had to be behind it. (I did endorse Campus Watch, and still think all the whining about it is just so much… whining.) I guess Mearsheimer and Walt didn’t do their homework, or relied on sloppy grad students to do their “research.” (It’s a Harvard tradition.)

But surely I deserve condemnation for my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America? The Washington Institute for Near East Policy published it a year before Campus Watch. “The Israel Lobby” is loaded with fat footnotes, many of them referencing journalistic junk, so it would have raised the overall level to have cited my book. Well, I take some comfort in the fact that it’s just a working paper, so maybe they’ll fix the mistake and rectify the omission. I’ll have the publisher send them copies with this entry.

P.S. to John and Steve: I am a sorry excuse for a neoconservative.

Addendum: The Campus Watch error is repeated in an otherwise sensible article by French analyst Justin Vaïsse in Libération. Sloppy.

Update: Justin Vaïsse has had the error noted and corrected in the online article. I am grateful to him.