Anti-Semi­tes are in full swing these days, claim­ing that a cabal of Jew­ish neo-con­ser­v­a­tives manip­u­lat­ed the Unit­ed States into the Iraqi war on Israel’s behalf. Specif­i­cal­ly, Paul Wol­fowitz, Richard Per­le, and oth­er Jews in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion have been accused of work­ing toward their objec­tive of pro­mot­ing democ­ra­cy in the Mid­dle East so as to make the region more secure for the Jew­ish state. The pur­pose of Stephen Schwartz’s pas­sion­ate book is to counter these lies, which have a wide influ­ence on the Islam­ic world as well as on too many pub­lic per­son­al­i­ties who should know bet­ter. Along the way, Schwartz, a jour­nal­ist who was the Forward’s bureau chief in Wash­ing­ton and a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to the Week­ly Stan­dard, and is the author of The Two Faces of Islam, is unspar­ing and vitu­per­a­tive in nam­ing those who have per­pe­trat­ed these libels as well as those on the Jew­ish left ( ​“polit­i­cal imbe­ciles such as Bar­bara Streisand, Rob Rein­er, Mira­max moguls Har­vey and Bob Wein­stein, and the abom­inable Nor­man Lear…”) who have staked out the neo-con­ser­v­a­tives as the vil­lains for the war. 

No Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion, how­ev­er, has been accused of influ­enc­ing Amer­i­can pol­i­cy in the Mid­dle East more than the Amer­i­can Israel Pub­lic Affairs Com­mit­tee (AIPAC). For anti-Semi­tes, the recent inves­ti­ga­tion by the FBI of AIPAC head Steve Rosen and ana­lyst Kei­th Weis­ser­man has lent cre­dence to the accu­sa­tion that Jews in gen­er­al and AIPAC in par­tic­u­lar owe their pri­ma­ry alle­giance to Israel. In addi­tion to show­ing how non­sen­si­cal these accu­sa­tions are, Schwartz also sug­gest that behind the inves­ti­ga­tion was the ani­mus held by the CIA/FBI toward the sup­posed alliance of neo-con­ser­v­a­tives and AIPAC to pro­mote the war against Iraq and pos­si­bly Iran. 

Schwartz’s book is writ­ten from the per­spec­tive of a neo-con­ser­v­a­tive who believes that the war to elim­i­nate Sad­dam was jus­ti­fied, and due to the strong ties which most Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tions have with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, they fail to under­stand that a demo­c­ra­t­ic Iraq in the long run will be good for the Jews. Aside from his pas­sion, Schwartz has writ­ten an impor­tant indict­ment of the Jew­ish lead­er­ship in Amer­i­ca but has also made some sur­pris­ing errors. Elia Kazan was Greek, not Jew­ish, and Samuel Gom­pers was not a Ger­man Jew; he was born in London.