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http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_co...x_article=1446
Contrary to Walt and Mearsheimer, however, the “facts” they recount are in many cases not facts at all, and therefore are – and ought to be – in serious dispute. A critical example of this are the numerous quotations Walt and Mearsheimer attribute to Israeli leaders to make the argument that there is no moral case for a close relationship with Israel. In other words, that Israel is bad. Every one of these quotations is false or falsified, violating the basic requirement in scholarly writing that quotations be scrupulously accurate, presented in full context, and if at all possible taken from primary sources. Merely having a footnoted citation for some alleged quotation is not enough, especially in a controversial field where polemical writers may well be distorting the historical record for their own partisan purposes. Indeed, relying on such partisan sources for a fact or quotation is worse than giving no attribution at all, since the footnote that buttresses a false claim is itself a further deception. While one of the falsified quotations attributed to David Ben Gurion in the paper is partially corrected in the book, the authors also added to the book new falsified quotations attributed to Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan and others. Compounding matters is that Professors Walt and Mearsheimer and their publisher were warned about the faulty quotations in the original paper. All in all, this is therefore a grave violation of scholarly norms for which Walt and Mearsheimer should be held to account. |
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