anti-Israel talking points

Are you a blogger who feels insecure about criticizing Israel? Let Jewish bloggers lead the way through the land mines, says Matthew Yglesias as he hastens down the Jewish Lobby Is Too Powerful path blazed by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer (whom I first blasted here, in a post in which I also discussed Lawrence Summers’s fall 2002 warning about the rise of a new anti-Semitism on the American left):

I know lots of liberals and talk to them. The number of rank-and-file liberal people who agree with the sorts of things Democrats have been saying about this is vanishingly small. And, indeed, what Israel is doing is certainly incompatible with the general liberal outlook on use of force questions. The Democrats aren’t expressing a mainstream liberal view of the situation, they bowing [sic] to pressure from the Lobby That Must Not Be Named. If we heard more from liberal bloggers, we’d be hearing commentary that ranged from somewhat critical to very critical.

I see this stance, first, as a big political problem for Yglesias’s “mainstream liberals,” because “what Israel is doing” is fighting a militarized Islamist terrorist organization. There is no such thing as a politically correct amount of force to use against people sworn to your destruction. The simple people who watch TV are way ahead of the “mainstream liberal” bloggers who opine (or don’t opine) about this.
This is not your father’s Middle East “cycle of violence.” The only people who don’t seem to get it are the silent bloggers of the left.

Leon Wieseltier—who is no stranger to disputes about this very issue—has great insight into this phenomenon:

“[Bloggers] are not in the complexity business on any issue. Maybe the problem is not complexity but complication — the way in which sympathy with Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, and therefore with the use of force, might complicate their lives in progressiveland, where they live.”

Status anxiety, of course. What else?

Too bad that in certain circles you have to criticize Israel in order to enjoy status.