This is a difficult lecture to review. On the one hand, I am inclined to agree with the lecturers and their position, and I suspect I would enjoy their book. On the other, this particular presentation seems to contain very little factual information, thus rendering it largely uninteresting as a stand-alone piece.

The primary thesis of the book is that pro-Isreal lobbies (and they name APAC, the Anti-defamation League, Christians United for Israel, and others as examples) play a prominent role in dictating US foreign policy, often in ways that are detrimental to the interests of the United States and Isreal alike.

I suppose if that suggestion seems to you to be unusual or hard to believe, then this lecture might be of interest. But already being of that assumption, I was hoping for something more complete, and I did not get it. Worse, the lecturers did raise several points on which I was interested, but then failed to elaborate. Examples include the absence of evidence that oil lobbyists played any part in the push for war in Iraq, that Israel was in favor of war with Iraq only because it was assumed that Iran would be next, and that without APAC the push for war in Iraq would have failed.

But these points were stated without much support. This is perhaps due to support being presented in the book, but even so, that doesn't make the lecture any more interesting. Therefore, much as with The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, I would rate this as an uninteresting lecture about a potentially interesting book.

Links: http://forum-network.org/lecture/israel-lobby-governing-us-foreign-policy

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