A new anti-Israel screed, posing as a serious academic “study”, is causing a stir in the United States, accusing the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC of essentially dictating American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Authored by two prominent professors, the document goes so far as to claim that it was supporters of Israel who pushed America into the Iraq war, and who regularly compel the US to act against its own national interests.

In other words, like anti-Semites have done throughout the centuries, they are blaming all of their country’s troubles on… the Jews.

Sadly, this wretched bit of propaganda will undoubtedly garner a great deal of attention, if only because its authors teach at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, two of the nation’s premier institutions.

The Palestinians are already using the document to score political points, distributing it as widely as they can.

But perhaps the most upsetting part of this sorry tale is to be found in the following line of the Ha’aretz story on the study, which describes the sources used by the authors of the report: “They rely mainly on an analysis of Israeli and American newspaper reports and studies, along with the findings of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem” (emphasis added).

So there you have it – Israel’s foes relying on material provided to them by an Israeli organization in order to besmirch the Jewish state.

It’s about time that groups such as B’Tselem stop playing into the hands of those who hate us.