The conservative daily, The New York Sun reports that Alan Dershowitz wants Barack Obama to sever ties with former Carter security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski because he defended Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”. In fact, once informed that an Obama ad appeared on the Amazon page advertising the book, the Obama campaign had it removed. The Sun reports:

Amid a firestorm over an initial working paper Messrs . Mearsheimer and Walt published last year on the Israel lobby, Mr. Brzezinski rose to their defense, even as he demurred on the question of whether he agreed with their central arguments. The authors, he wrote in the journal Foreign Policy, “have rendered a public service by initiating a much-needed public debate on the role of the ‘ Israel lobby’ in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign took the opposite route earlier this week when notified that an ad for its Web site appeared on the Amazon.com page of the Mearsheimer-Walt book. The campaign immediately removed the ad, saying its placement was unintentional, and issued a statement saying Mr. Obama believed the arguments in the book were “just wrong.” “I’m glad he’s done that, but now he has to dissociate himself from Brzezinski,” Mr. Dershowitz said in an interview yesterday. He said the Mearsheimer-Walt book was “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community” and that Mr. Brzezinski’s comments in Foreign Policy last year amounted to an endorsement.

Harvard law professor and gadfly Alan Dershowitz, who supports Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and gave $1,000 to her campaign, also accused Brezinski of anti-Israel rhetoric, highlighting his criticism of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon last year.

In response, the Obama campaign released a statement from one of its top supporters in the Jewish community, Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida. ” Barack Obama has been a consistent supporter of Israel and this is an unfortunate case of a fabricated controversy for political reasons,” he said. “I speak with him often on Israel policy, and I can tell you firsthand that Barack Obama is opposed to the arguments presented in this book.”

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