Poor tortured Philip Weiss is trying to figure out if the attacks on the “Lobby” and pro-Israel Jews and Jewish neocons that he peddles on his blog are good for the Jews or bad for the Jews [e.a.]:

It’s true there are a lot of antisemites on my side of the fence, I can’t deny that. They show up in my comment section, and Richard Witty has told me that David Duke posts some of my posts.

Two years ago Tony Kushner said it gave him angst to speak out on the Israel/Palestinian issue in the noble way that he has for two reasons, because a lot of Jews were screaming at him that he was a terrible person, and of course you don’t always know who’s right; and also, because he didn’t want to be giving comfort to antisemites [an admirable sentiment, no? --ed.]

I don’t know what to do about it and frankly I don’t know how much to care.

Well, at least he’s honest about it …for a moment. He doesn’t actually care about the impact of his writings. And then he rationalizes his obsessive anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist screeds as a professional interest:

The chief issue here is journalistic. What is true and new and important? That’s your charge as a journalist.

Okay, dude—and what about your charge as, you know, a human being? one who attracts nasty, unapologetic anti-Semites to your site?

Weiss is still trying to work it out. While he works his head further up his ass, convinced that American Jews hold too much power, you may be interested to hear the opinion of a German journalist, Henryk Broder, who addressed the problem recently in a colloquium on anti-Semitism that took place in Germany, where they know a thing or two about the phenomenon.

And Broder suggests that we stop thinking in terms of the past and thing about the present—and the future [e.a.]:

[A]nti-Semitism is not a matter of a prejudice, but rather of a sort of resentment. …The distinction between a prejudice and a resentment is as follows: a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-Semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders. Smart Jews are arrogant and dumb Jews — and, yes, there are also dumb Jews — are a disgrace to Jewry. The anti-Semite blames Jews in principle for everything and its opposite. That is why there is no point in trying to debate anti-Semites or in wanting to convince them of the absurdity of their views. One has to marginalize anti-Semites: to isolate them in a sort of social quarantine. Society must make clear that it disdains both anti-Semitism and anti-Semites: just as it disdains parents beating their children and rape — including spousal rape — even though it well knows that it cannot monitor everything that transpires behind closed doors.

Well, Philip Weiss certainly doesn’t disdain intolerant, blinkered anti-Semites. He bends over backward to understand them:

Giraldi probably brings a little ethnic resentment to it, I read that in some of the lines that Pollak quotes. Not good, not very spiritually evolved. But is ethnic resentment in and of itself criminal or does it constitute hate speech?

Neither. It is a priori resentment, and nurturing it does not promote understanding between people or progress on social issues.

Broder has much to say on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, too, and you should read his whole address. But I’ll close with the kicker:

The modern anti-Semite pays tribute to Jews who have been dead for 60 years, but he resents it when living Jews take measures to defend themselves.

David Mamet, who has a place of honor on my blog, wrote this in the Forward (no longer available in the archives but still available here) long ago [e.a.]:

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don’t like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in “Exodus.” These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at “Sophie’s Choice,” sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at “The Diary of Anne Frank” ? we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any “Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism” but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself “why?” That is your debt to the Jews.

Andrew Sullivan, who carelessly endorsed Joe Klein’s lashing out at “Jewish neocons,” is very easy on himself in response to being called out by Max Boot:

I can’t speak for Joe, but I obviously feel somewhat shafted by some neocon arguments before the war - arguments that I took in good faith and now suspect were made in bad.

What kind of lame excuse is that for jumping on Klein’s slime wagon? You feel “somewhat shafted” and so you lash out at the Jews once a “good Jew” like Klein has signaled to you that it’s okay to do so?

What a turd.

Thanks to Steve Clemons, who sees this as a way to pressure Barack Obama, who has said that he would not engage Hamas, we now have a list of “great Americans” who endorse talking to the terrorist organization Hamas, which is dedicated, via its charter, to the destruction of our ally Israel:

They all signed a letter at the time of the Annapolis Summit to President Bush and Secretary of State Rice that said that:

As to Hamas, we believe that a genuine dialogue with the organization is far preferable to its isolation; it could be conducted, for example, by the UN and Quartet Middle East envoys. Promoting a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza would be a good starting point.

While he didn’t sign our letter, Colin Powell has also said that Hamas should not be isolated and must be engaged.

The roster of American leaders who led the letter are:

BRENT SCOWCROFT, ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, THOMAS PICKERING, CARLA HILLS, LEE HAMILTON, THEODORE SORENSEN, ERIC SHINSEKI, NANCY KASSEBAUM BAKER, and PAUL VOLCKER.

Others that are included on the roster of signatories are:

US AID Deputy Administrator HARRIET “HATTIE” BABBITT, former USIA Chief JOSEPH DUFFEY, former US Senator GARY HART, former US Senator LINCOLN CHAFEE, RAND Corporation Board Member and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Chair RITA HAUSER, former Assistant Secretary of State JAMES DOBBINS, former State Department Policy Planning Director MORTON HALPERIN, former Deputy Ambassador to the UN WILLIAM VAN DEN HEUVEL, former Israel Foreign Minister SCHLOMO BEN-AMI. . .
former US Senator BIRCH BAYH, former Congressman and Corning CEO AMO HOUGHTON Jr., former National Intelligence Council Chairman ROBERT HUTCHINGS, Fletcher School Dean and former U.S. Ambassador STEPHEN BOSWORTH, former Assistant Secretary of Defense LAWRENCE KORB, former American Political Science Association President and Columbia University professor ROBERT JERVIS, Kings College Terrorism Chair and New America Foundation Senior Fellow ANATOL LIEVEN, former National Security Agency Director Lt. General WILLIAM ODOM. . .

Committee for the Republic President WILLIAM NITZE, Brookings Visiting Senior Fellow DIANA VILLIERS NEGROPONTE, Former CIA Deputy Director JOHN McLAUGHLIN, former US Ambassador JOHN MALOTT, former EU Commissioner for Foreign Relations CHRISTOPHER PATTEN, former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East PAUL PILLAR, former US Senator LARRY PRESSLER, former US Ambassador FELIX ROHATYN. . .

MIT Center for International Studies Director RICHARD SAMUELS, retired Marine Corps General JOHN J. “JACK” SHEEHAN, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, Former Congressman STEPHEN SOLARZ, former First USA Bank CEO and Adagio Partners CEO RICHARD VAGUE, Former US Senator and UN Foundation President TIMOTHY WIRTH, and former US Ambassador and AIG Vice Chairman FRANK WISNER. . .

former New Jersey Governor and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN, Nixon Center President and National Interest Publisher DIMITRI SIMES, former National Security Advisor to Vice President Al Gore LEON FUERTH, Brookings Senior Fellow PHILIP GORDON, former US Ambassador to NATO ROBERT HUNTER, former Malaysia Deputy Prime Minister ANWAR IBRAHIM, former CIA Deputy Director JOHN McLAUGHLIN. . .

former State Department Chief of Staff LAWRENCE WILKERSON, Lehman Brothers Managing Director THEODORE ROOSEVELT IV, former US Ambassador JOSEPH WILSON, former Chief Monitor of the Middle East Roadmap at the Department of State JOHN S. WOLF — among others.

Maybe the New York Times is getting religion (no pun intended) in the face of the financial ruin or perhaps the timing is mere coincidence.

Today, in a shocker, the Gray Lady reveals (a few decades too late) that the Palestinians are running a vicious propaganda campaign against—surprise!—the Jews (all of them, everywhere):

Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace Effort

Ya think?

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.

In case any of the NYT’s readers thinks that Hamas’s complaints are legitimate, and that its charter, a “deeply anti-Semitic document” [you get extra points for that, NYT!  ---ed.]  is just politics [e.a.]:

Mark Regev, spokesman for Mr. Olmert, called on “Arab leaders who are moderate and believe in peace to speak out more strongly against extremist elements.” He called the “incitement to hatred and violence standard Hamas operating procedure,” adding, “In Hamas education and broadcasting they turn the suicide bomber who murders the innocent into a positive role model, and they portray Jews in the most negative terms, that too often reminds us of language used in Europe in the first half of the 20th century.”

The “serious question,” he said, “is what ethos are they promoting?”

Why, they’re promoting “resistance” against the eternally evil Jew, dontcha know?  And there are lots of Americans who want the eternally evil Jews of Israel to negotiate with those who look forward to a second holocaust.

No, I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s pretty, meaningless, but inspiring words (the exact same unoriginal words used by Deval Patrick, offered up to him and to Obama by their mutual media strategist, David Axelrod, as I mentioned here yesterday).

I’m talking about the poison emanating from the mouth Ahmadinejad:

Also Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent verbal attacks against Israel were unacceptable. …

The meeting [with Israel's UN ambassador Dan Gillerman] followed yet another verbal attack against Israel by Ahmadinejad .. .

“The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast,” the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran.

In the hour-long conversation with Ban, Gillerman said it is “outrageous for a member state to use racial, Nazi like statements against another member state.”

He said that such expressions warranted the condemnation of Iran by the international community.

Ban, who agreed to meet on very short notice, said such statements are “unacceptable and unforgivable,” according to Gillerman. Ban vowed to deal with the matter soon but did not explain how he intended to do so.

Iran wants Israel to take the threat of military force off the table. Good luck with that!

But 25 German professors’ conscience didn’t explode when they wrote a manifesto suggesting that Germany owes Israel nothing more, because it was the Nazis who helped establish the Jewish state in the first place.

Really!

Seriously!

The aforementioned professors stated that Germany helped strengthen the burgeoning State of Israel by deporting 160,000 German Jews during the Nazi reign. These refugees ultimately ended up in Israel and bolstered its Jewish population at the Arabs’ expense.

Furthermore, noted the professors, Germany has paid its “debt to the Jewish nation” in full through its reparations agreement with Israel.

Not only was the deportation of German Jews a good thing, according to these professors, but apparently the “indelible stain” of the Holocaust can be—and has been—fully repaid. The Jews got their money, after all.

Whereas the Holocaust was an indelible stain on the annals of German history, they stated, Germany must now improve its relations with the Arab world by taking on a more balanced approach to its foreign policy and its treatment of Israel.

With “balance” like this—a headlong rush of Europeans into the arms of “the Arab world”—the tilt against the world’s Jews, half of whom live in Israel, seems to be growing.

California congressman Tom Lantos apparently believes it’s now time to speak truth to faux-power***:

“Two generations after the Holocaust, I never thought - I could not even have imagined - that within the structure of the United Nations there would be some who would attempt to de-legitimatize the Jewish State, the State of Israel, founded and built by the remnants of European Jewry and by the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab lands,” read Lantos’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day speech.

Lantos lamented the fact that the UN chamber was too often the setting for “shameless invective against Israel,” adding that he was “deeply grateful for the numerous principled statesmen of many lands who regularly stand up against this outrage.”

Where are these “principled statesmen of many lands who stand up against this outrage”? I wonder. I haven’t heard them speak out.

But never mind. There’s more from Lantos [e.a.]:

He went on to say that this point was highlighted in the Durban anti-Racism conference the weekend before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“The United Nations was holding a conference meant to put an end to racism, a noble goal if ever there was one, but the occasion was hijacked by hate-filled and venomous leaders who perverted the noble idea of ending racism, and turned the conference into a lynch mob against Israel.

“As the situation galloped toward the surreal and the gathering veered away from its intended topics of ethnic violence, racism or slavery in many countries and toward condemnation of the one democratic state in the Middle East, it was sadly evident to me that this potentially history-making conference was becoming a travesty,” continued Lantos’s speech.

The congressman, whose mother was killed in Auschwitz, said that having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, the Durban conference was the “most sickening and unabashed” display of hate for Jews he had seen since the Nazi period.

I’m grateful to Congressman Lantos, who is the chairman of the House Committe on Foreign Affairs, for his very speedy response—only six and a half years later—to the grotesque spectacle that was Durban.
One question: what’s he going to do about Durban II, which is in the planning stages?
——–
*** The UN is a useless organization, with no power and, in any case, no desire to use it even if it had power, even on behalf of good—or else it would have intervened in the many, many conflicts that have arisen since its establishment.

Nevertheless, it is among the “international institutions” favored by the left wing of the Democratic Party.

A new poll finds that 82% of Israeli teenagers believe that the Holocaust could happen again. That’s a staggering figure, and I’m not sure what it means, but I do know that Israeli kids are taught about the Holocaust:

 Most highschoolers, 54%, stated that they learned about the Holocaust through a school expedition to Poland. Eighteen percent of students learned about the Holocaust through documentary films, and only 12% indicated that they learned about the Holocaust through their regular history classes.

I never forget the Holocaust, but it happens that today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Spare a thought.

Holocaust Day Photo: AP

Michael Oren notes [$$ ?] that Israelis are feeling both stumped and betrayed by Bush’s mystifying new “policy” toward the Israelis and the Palestinians:

No wonder Israelis are stumped. While the old George Bush deemed the end of terror as imperative for peace and the containment of Iran as the prerequisite for eliminating terror, the new George Bush focuses on Israeli settlement-building and hesitates to confront Tehran. It is uncertain which of the two is visiting Israel today and what policies he may pursue. …

Presidential visits are always characterized as “historic,” but Mr. Bush’s trip to the Jewish state is marked by a lack of momentousness. Cross-signals and contradictory policies have clouded a celebration for one of Israel’s firmest friends. Israelis will greet Mr. Bush exuberantly, but his departure may leave them grappling with terror largely on their own.

Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer are still pissing all over Israel and its American “false friends” who (conspiratorially, through the media and the power of money) insist that America support Israel without qualifications. This time they’ve added to the conspiracy Jewish voters, who are heavily represented in states with many electoral votes [e.a.].

Such pandering [by all presidential contenders] is hardly surprising, because contenders for high office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel’s staunchest supporters — the Israel lobby, as we have termed it — expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or “Christian Zionists,” two groups that are deeply engaged in the political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even well-intentioned criticism of Israel’s policies may lead these groups to turn against them and back their opponents instead.

If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel’s friends in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support. And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP base.

What would Walt and Mearsheimer suggest as a solution to the vexing problem of the sinister influence of Israel, Zionism, and American Jews on the American voter, citizen, and imagination? Allow only a certain number of Jewish voters into polling places, perhaps? Or none at all?

Philip Weiss discovers anti-democratic extremism.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:

We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.

Posted by: Realist | December 28, 2007 at 07:57 AM

For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:

Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.

This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.

Britain’s largest Muslim group decides that it will acknowledge the Holocaust after all:

Britain’s largest Muslim organisation is to end its boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) voted this weekend to halt its protest because of concerns that it made the organisation vulnerable to charges of antiSemitism. Representatives have controversially stayed away from Holocaust Memorial Day activities, which began in 2001.

The Council, which had wanted to rename the event (one suggestion was Genocide Memorial Day) to focus attention on other genocides, expects to lose members as a result of its 18-8 vote to end its boycott of the event.

Good. Let the hard-liners separate themselves from the rest. It makes them easier to scrutinize.

Am I obsessed with blasting Walt and Mearsheimer? You betcha.

The Economist ’s review pretty much explains why I’m so obsessed:

FROM the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the 19th century to the charter of Hamas, the Palestinians’ Islamist movement, a common claim by anti-Semites has been that Jews trick great powers into needless wars. That is why an article published in March 2006 by two American academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, caused such outrage. Writing in the London Review of Books, they argued that the activities of Israel and its supporters were the “critical” reason for America’s invasion of Iraq. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld may have thought that they were acting in America’s interests, but were in fact acting in Israel’s. Like previous American governments, the Bush administration had been turned by clever lobbying into what Lenin would have called Zionism’s useful idiots.

This startling thesis is, to say the least, provocative. Since it implies that American boys are dying in Iraq for the sake of Israel, the authors must have known that it would stir up painful questions about the true loyalties of American Jews and therefore attract fiery criticism. But there is no evidence that Mr Mearsheimer and Mr Walt were motivated by any anti-Jewish prejudice.

It’s a fool’s game to say that the authors were motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice. Their motivation is beside the point, and in any case unprovable (much like the authors’ thesis that the cabal-like not-cabal called the Lobby has “too much” power [how much is too much?] and “undue” influence [how much is due influence]?).

What matters is that in order to attract attention to their cause—which is to separate Americans from their sentimental attachment to Israel—Walt and Mearsheimer were willing, even eager, to bait Jews by making the most foul millennia-old accusations against them. They did this promiscuously, and with defiant disregard for the consequences.

What were they thinking?

Were they clueless? Or did they simply feel confident and optimistic about the friendly reception they would receive from Americans who, like them, think that the power of American Jews is a boil to be lanced?

To be continued, I’m sure … to my regret.

Philip Weiss has read Walt and Mearsheimer’s book [emphasis in the title is in the original]:

‘The Jungle,’ ‘Silent Spring,’ ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’–And Now, ‘The Israel Lobby’

Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby is being published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. [e.a.]

Legendary And dated? As in superseded by even greater works of moral beauty by the same authors, something like, say, Our Kampf? or perhaps Our Jihad?

But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, Wess dares to dream:

So [The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy] will be passed around, it will be taught. Serious people will press it on other serious people. Political aides will hand it to other political aides. It may have to wear brown-paper covers in Congress, at the State Department and at Hillels, but it will be read hungrily. Young progressive Jews will read it. Arabs will translate it into Arabic. It will go like lightning around Europe. Israelis will snap it up (the book is actually very respectful of Israel; it’s America that has the big problem), and someday it will come out in Hebrew. It will work on people. It will show what independent people ought to do when they form ideas, and others will chime in. A politician will finally speak out, with Walt and Mearsheimer as his or her role model.

I can hardly wait. And I’m not alone.

Michael Gerson had a few choice words for Walt and Mearsheimer:

Walt and Mearsheimer are careful to say they are not anti-Semitic or conspiracy-minded. But their main inference [sic]– that Israel, the Israel lobby and Jewish neoconservatives called the shots for Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld — is not only rubbish, it is dangerous rubbish. As “mainstream” scholars, Walt and Mearsheimer cannot avoid the historical pedigree of this kind of charge. Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war and secretly control political structures.

These academics may not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is the way it begins. This is the way it always begins.

Ron Rosenbaum called bullshit on Walt and Mearsheimer’s alleged “realism”:

To me, the real problem is not whether The Israel Lobby pleases this Grand Kleagle or that, or the one-sidedness of its depiction of Israel and its supporters, so much as the profound failure of the moral imagination that the book reflects. A failure to connect with the historical experience of Jews that motivates their support of Israel. A failure to empathize with the real danger the 6 million Jews of Israel face: the threat of a second Holocaust.

Leslie Gelb excoriated them for roiling the waters purely to gain vindication for their views about Iraq:

The inevitable last question is this: Why have two such serious students of United States foreign policy written so weak a book and added fuel, inadvertently, to the fires of anti-Semitism? The answer lies in their treatment of the Iraq war.

Mearsheimer and Walt should feel very proud, indeed, for their foresight in opposing the Iraq war. Their writings were more on target than anyone’s, and they are justifiably mystified about how the United States could have been so stupid and self-destructive. They appear to have reasoned that a mistake of this magnitude could have been fostered only by some irresistible force. And the only such force they can conjure from the landscape of the powerful is the Israel lobby, as embodied by neoconservative gladiators like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the authors’ words, “the lobby did not cause the war by itself. … But absent the lobby’s influence, there almost certainly would not have been a war. The lobby was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a war that is a strategic disaster for the United States and a boon for Iran, Israel’s most serious regional adversary.”

Their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong — is so overwhelming that they minimize two key facts. First, America’s foreign policy community, including many Democrats as well as Republicans, supported the war for the very same reasons that Wolfowitz and the lobby did — namely, the fact that Hussein seemed to pose a present or future threat to American national interests. Second, the real play-callers behind the war were President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They hardly have a history of being in the pockets of the Jewish lobby (more like the oil lobby’s), and they aren’t remotely neoconservatives. The more we know, the clearer it is that the White House went to war primarily to erase the “blunder” of the elder Bush in not finishing off Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

The authors, however, are feeling so satisfied with themselves, if their remarks to the Los Angeles Times editorial board are any indication, that Walt now blames the limitations of language—”lobby” is a “crude” term, Walt admits—for their inability to get their point across.

In this formulation, it’s not their intemperate blanket condemnation of anyone who supports Israel that’s to blame for the hostile reaction to their so-called “argument”; rather, Walt suggests, Americans have been so thoroughly brainwashed by Israel supporters that we no longer have the language to describe such a magical group as the “lobby”—or, more precisely, “the Lobby,” as it was forever imprinted on the minds of those who follow such arcane debates.

What’s crude here is not just the insult “Lobby.” It’s Walt and Mearsheimer’s continued slippery reluctance to define this amoeba-like group that they claim has “too much power” (by what measure?) and is asserting undue influence over American policy against the national interest. This group, they say under skeptical questioning by the L.A. Times’s editorial board, is forever changing its shape and its dimensions to include this person or that; this organization or that; this group of people or that. And all the while, Walt and Mearsheimer keep insisting, they’re not talking about a “cabal,” so what’s the problem?

Here’s the problem: when you describe a group with the mystical powers of a “cabal” but keep insisting that it isn’t a cabal because you’re not referring to it as a “cabal,” it gives off the unmistakable odor of skunk, and weasel.

Read this exchange and see if you don’t agree [e.a.]

Mearsheimer: … if you have a policy of unconditional aid, if you have a policy where you can’t criticize Israel in the United States without getting smeared, you’re going to give that state a lot of room to get itself in trouble. And our argument again is that it would be better if that aid were conditional and we were allowed to have an open debate about Israeli policy and the Israeli-U.S. relationship.

Walt: That is, something similar to the debate that happens in Israel itself, where you have a very wide-open debate about what their policies are and whether they make sense, and where you find lots more people willing to take positions similar to ours than you would here in the United States.

Tim: Then why is the book called The Israel Lobby and not The Pro-Settlement Lobby or The Likudnik Lobby?

Mearsheimer: For the very simple reason that the lobby is not monolithic or homogeneous. There are groups inside the lobby that are opposed to settlements; there are groups inside the lobby that are in favor of settlements. Also you want to remember, we’re not arguing that this is a Jewish lobby. Despite our best efforts to make the case clear that this is the Israel lobby and not the Jewish lobby, people continue to talk as if we’re only talking about Jews.

Who’s in the lobby?

Tim: You mentioned the uh, the non…mono…lithicism of the lobby. And looking through the book, it’s weird to me to think that there’s some team that comprises Martin Indyk, Daniel Pipes, you know, I’m trying to think of a third…I mean, this is really a wide-ranging group of, you know, Abe…

Mearsheimer: Henry Siegman. Do you know Henry Siegman? He was head of the American Jewish Congress. But again, there’s no reason why people inside the lobby can’t be very critical of Israel. Let me give you an example: One of the best reviews of our book, one of the most favorable reactions inside the United States, came from M.J. Rosenberg, who used to work for AIPAC. He said very nice things about the book.

Nick: My, one of my, one of the things that confuses me as I read the book is that you are, you talk in these, often about the lobby. The lobby does this, the lobby does that. The lobby seems so broad as you’ve defined it that it’s hard for me to, to know if that’s a meaningful group that you’re talking about. The differences go broader than Martin Indyk…

Walt: Martin got his start working for AIPAC. He helped found the Institute for Near East Policy.

Nick: He falls clearly in the…

Walt: And that’s not to say that he hasn’t advocated positions, both in his official capacity and outside it, that John and I would agree with. He’s a two-state-solution person; he understands that getting this thing shut down is in everybody’s interest. We might disagree on some other issues. That said, he’s not someone who would ever say the United States should make its support for Israel conditional on ending the settlements. He’s never advocated that, he… [e.a.]

im: So that’s what defines your presence in the lobby, is unconditional support?

Susan Brenneman: Yeah, and not just support but by support you mean aid?

Stephen: Aid and diplomatic support. And again, you’ve got, the way we define it… I think we laid this out as clearly as… You’ve got to be actively working. It’s not just somebody who has an attitude toward Israel. You’ve got to spend some part of your daily life trying to advance that particular goal. I’d also point out, like all other interest groups, these are fuzzy groups, right? I mean, there are people who are clearly in the core: Abraham Foxman, nobody’s really going to argue whether he’s a member. But you’re going to have some people who are further out, to where you get to people who are clearly not in the lobby. And there are going to be some cases in between where you can argue back and forth, and they might change their minds. I acknowledge that the term “lobby” has a certain crude quality to it, but almost due to the limitations of language. One of the things we did was we often used phrases like “groups within the lobby,” “organizations in the lobby,” “organizations and individuals in the lobby…” Trying to underscore to the reader that this is not a monolith. This is not a Comintern that gives orders to the followers. That there are issues where they genuinely disagree.

These two still cannot explain what they mean by “the lobby,” and they blame the constraints of language. Get this: The phenomenon they discern is so unique that language cannot even properly describe it. But they know it when they see it, and they know it’s very bad for America!

And Philip Weiss is eager to spread the seed of these “scholars.”

The mind reels.

The Forward steps up to make the case—again—against Walt and Mearsheimer. Only this time, they’ve read not just the professors’ juvenile article but their book as well:

The professors’ basic argument is that America’s support for Israel is an anomaly. Israel’s origins and behavior are so reprehensible, they wrote, that “neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel.” No, it’s all because of the influence of the “Israel Lobby.” There is, they cautioned, nothing illicit about lobbying. Lobbying is part of American democracy. But the Israel Lobby has “a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress,” controls key access to the executive branch and suppresses dissent throughout society. Its “not surprising” goal, they wrote, is to weaken Israel’s enemies to the point that “Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.”

More shocking, considering the professors’ distinguished resumes — Walt was academic dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, Mearsheimer a leading foreign policy expert at the University of Chicago — was their shoddy research. They invented historical facts.They twisted quotes. …

Most of the paper’s flaws survive in the book, but the longer format allowed the introduction of whole new stretches of substandard work.

The substandard work and shoddy scholarship will survive, because the professors’ charges are sensational—as they intend them to be, which the Forward makes clear. But they’re a long way from reaching their goal of freeing America from the immoral, reprehensible, dark influence of satanic Israel.

Rudy Giuliani said it best in his Foreign Affairs article:

America’s commitment to Israel’s security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy.

Well, “permanent” is a strong word. But a 10-year $30 billion commitment is pretty darn close.

The good professors’ timing is a wee bit off. But the work of anti-Semites is never done. Which is why I and people like me—who know that public anti-Semitism is the harbinger of humanity’s darkest impulses coming to the fore—will not rest until every one of their words and innuendoes has been revealed for the pernicious, evil scapegoating it is.

And we will mock Philip Weiss mercilessly.

The lament of “realists” Walt and Mearsheimer, who have been cruelly denied their right to speak in Chicago in support of their upcoming book, for which Farrar Straus & Giroux paid them close to $1 million:

Our book does not question Israel’s right to exist and does not portray pro-Israel groups in the United States as some sort of conspiracy to “control” U.S. foreign policy.

Why do these two shitballs keep apologizing if they’ve done nothing wrong?***

——————-
*** I’ve written way too many posts about these reprehensible so-called scholars and am too lazy to link. If you’re interested, do a search.

Posted: Sun, 03 Jun 2007

The British teachers’ union vote to encourage a boycott of Israeli academicians has been followed in quick order by a similar vote by Britain’s largest trade union, Unisom, which has threatened an economic and cultural boycott of Israel.

In a preamble, the motion “notes that, during 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon and Gaza, withheld tax revenues form the Palestine Authority and refused dialogue with the elected Authority following the democratic elections of January 2006, resealed the borders of Gaza, expanded illegal settlements in the West Bank, and continued the construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall.”

It accused the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair of adopting “a consistent stand in support of the Israeli government throughout the shameful events of 2006, even joining the U.S. in failing to call for a cease-fire amidst worldwide condemnation of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.”

Now the Israeli parliament is debating a consumer boycott of all British goods, according to The Times (London):

The proposed Bill is aimed at punishing Britain for recent threats from its largest trade union and UCU, the university lecturers’ union, to boycott Israel for occupying Palestinian land. The prospect of a boycott has prompted concern among the Israeli public. Leading commentators denounced the moves as anti-Semitic. Now a group of politicians has promised a harsh response, calling for Israel to begin its own boycott against Britain.

According to some Israeli critics, the government hasn’t done enough to counter the growing threats, says the Jerusalem Post:

The scheduled governmental meeting comes as some in the Foreign Ministry have said privately that Israel has not done enough over the last few months - as various groups in Britain debated boycott and divesture - to protest these moves, and to persuade the British government to register its opposition loudly and publicly as well.

Livni spoke to British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett about the matter on Friday and said that Israel viewed these steps “gravely” and that they stood in complete opposition to the good relations that exist between the two countries.

That’s the drama that’s taking place on the world stage. Via Normblog, Shalom Lappin gives a preview of what will happen behind the closed doors of academia as a result of the boycott vote, which requires follow-up votes—not to Israelis but to British Jews [e.a.]:

Several people have suggested that the boycott resolutions of the UCU and other unions are ineffective, and so need not be taken seriously. It is true that these resolutions have not interfered with institutional scientific cooperation between Israel and Britain. However, it would be foolishly insouciant to treat them as unimportant. The primary purpose of the boycott campaign is not to change Israeli government policy but to undermine the legitimacy of Israel as a country. It aims to isolate, not its political leaders and policy makers, but its people as a whole. It is, then, a form of branding which seeks to mark a group of people as social outcasts. The main damage that it does is to provide cover for acts of blatant discrimination against Israeli academics, committed by individual researchers acting as journal editors, conference organizers, tenure or appointment consultants, and in similar roles. We have seen several high profile cases of such individual boycott actions within the UK over the past seven years. This trend is likely to gather momentum if the boycott campaign continues unchecked.

In the end, the boycott is a far greater threat to the Jewish community in Britain than it is to Israeli academics. The latter will sustain robust research and teaching careers through a multitude of international connections that do not involve British institutions. Boycott actions constitute, at most, an unpleasant inconvenience for them. Alternative venues for publication and joint research can, in most cases, be easily arranged. However, British Jewish academics (and British Jews in general) will increasingly find themselves facing a stark choice. Either they endorse the boycott campaign and dance to its tune (as a number of prominent Jewish public figures have noisily done), or they face the prospect of being identified as Israel’s supporters, with the public exclusion that this entails. Cowering in fearful silence will offer increasingly limited protection against a movement determined to make the Israel-Palestine conflict the defining issue on which one’s claim to moral and political decency depends. In a polarizing environment of this sort, the fabric of normal collegial relations and academic life begins to unravel. This emerging dilemma is a reflection of the increasing isolation into which the British Jewish community at large is being forced.

Thus does anti-Zionism become politically correct—the only right way to think and behave. And via this soft totalitarianism hysterical, terrified, cowardly British leftists try to appease the Muslim masses at home in Britain. Brilliant strategy!

Moralizing anti-Israel “realist” Stephen Walt is on the road trying to pre-sell his upcoming screed to Jews:

Walt — who penned the ["Israel Lobby"] paper with co-author John Mearsheimer — had come to hawk the book-length version of their findings to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in September.

“Both I and my co-author are pro-Israel,” [uh-huh --ed.] he said on Tuesday evening, in front of the audience gathered at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. “Our book does not question Israel’s right to exist [how decent of you  --ed.], and we make clear that lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie.”

Really? Here’s what I wrote about that in March 2006, when I first mentioned these two poisonous flame-throwers, whose conspiratorially copy-styled “Israel Lobby”-with-a-capital-L tells you all you need to know about their not-so-subtle insinuations:

Let others give this the fisking it deserves. I will simply note that the professors’ logic skills are called into question by the first assertion they choose to footnote and the text of that citation:

…Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essential identical. (1)

Here’s the opener of footnote 1:

Indeed, the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about [emphasis added]. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact.

Now, in May 2007, Walt says that “lobbying for Israel is as American as apple pie,” but in their paper, Walt and Mearsheimer suggested that the mere existence of the “Lobby” indicates that it’s not in the American interest.

Can I have some extra scoops of vanilla with that pie? And hold the cinnamon!

Walt seems to be trying to soften his paper’s grotesque scapegoating of Israel as the source of all of America’s troubles with the Muslim world.

Walt made his remarks at the Jewish Book Council’s “Meet the Authors” program, a sort of speed-dating for the literary set, in which each presenter is given two minutes to expound on his or her book before an audience of event coordinators from around the country.

Well, the joke is on Walt, because Jewish book groups are notorious in the book world for inviting tons of speakers and bringing in big audiences, who consistently fail to buy books at the event.

May that embarrassing tradition continue.

Ido Hevroni bucks up his Israeli colleagues who are upset by the British teachers’ union vote to boycott Israeli academicians:

[N]o need to worry, my friends - after all, the weather in England is not the best, and they are rather tightfisted when it comes to scholarships.  …

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate some overjoyed far-left Israeli academicians … You managed to make the world hate us, you managed to completely twist the truth regarding our difficult battle with Palestinian murderers, and you managed to find a scapegoat for a world that sees fit to ignore the genocide in Darfur, the cutting off of hands in Saudi Arabia, and executions in the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps now you will even get a tempting offer from a leading Islamic college. …

[P]ersonally I’m not moved by the by the boycott call. I do not mean to underestimate the value or achievements of British academia, but I don’t care about it. When those entrusted with freedom of thought and human research fail to grasp how distorted their ideas are as a result of a mental illness, known as anti-Semitism, there is nothing left to do but feel sorry for them.

And for our modern world and what it has come to.

On August 16, 2005, introducing a new a new blog, “It Shines for All,” Gawker described its sponsor, the New York Sun, thus:

that preferred small-circulation newspaper of New York’s wealthy right-wing Zionists

That was a relatively good-humored if pointed description. Today, Gawker goes nuclear, referring to the Sun as

a Zionist daily rag.

What gives with using “Zionist” as an adjective and a slur?

All of you oversensitive Anglophiles should sit this one out, because I’m about to violate the Eleventh Commandment:

Palestinians Abduct British Journalist; British Journalists Union Boycotts Israel

I’m not sure what Israel’s crime is, but I hope it’s the craven, abject British National Union of Journalist (probably—and pathetically and wrongheadedly—hoping to ingratiate itself with whoever kidnapped Alan Johnston) that will get the punishment for publicly violating journalism’s code of ethics to take sides: to assert its solidarity with “the Palestinian people” [a faux-pious dodge,*** which fails to distinguish between those murderous Palestinians whose clearly stated and oft-repeated goal is to eliminate Israel and Israelis from existence and those not-murderous Palestinians who wish to get on with their lives and are willing to give peace in exchange for land or rich bribes]”

the Palestinian people — notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting

and at the same time to attack Israel for

a “savage pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza.”

Happily, not all British journalists agree with the NUJ, and some of those who disagree have been quite outspoken in their opinions:

The NUJ also cited Israel’s “continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hizballah.”

“What kind of language is this?” [Toby] Harnden [the Telegraph's D.C. correspondent] asked. “It is tendentious and politically loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness.”

Simon McGregor-Wood of ABC News, who chairs the Foreign Press Association in Israel, said the NUJ’s statements “seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity.”

“I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.

No kidding!

———-

*** I am grateful to the British journalist Nick Cohen for pointing this out in print.  He put it like this:

It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. …

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.

we remember

People pass through the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ ,’work makes one free’, gate at Auschwitz, in the annual March of the Living, a trek between two former Nazi-run death camps to mourn victims of the Holocaust and celebrate the existence of the Jewish state, in Oswiecim, Poland, Monday, April 16, 2007. The march starts at the smaller Auschwitz site and leads to the sprawling Birkenau death camp, which housed the main gas chambers. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Remembrance in Poland following dedication of the Belzec memorial, June 2004.

The World Zionist Organization jumps into the viral war of words between Ahmadinejad and the Jews.

Click here for details.

There is a great unsolved mystery that is nagging at me. When Tony Judt and other deeply-concerned-about-their-brethren, non-anti-Semitic Jews suggest that Israel should become a bi-national state, where should all those newly stateless Wandering Jews go?

That question had been keeping me up nights as I wondered how I could fit my deep distress for the stateless Palestinians into my Leftist-and-deeply-sympathetic-to-Israel worldview.

Now I can report that I am finally at peace. I am sure to be able to sleep well tonight, for the first time in years, because I found the answer.

China, it seems, is a nation of philo-Semites—at least they’re philo about the Jews’ enviable talent for making money:

SHANGHAI — Showcased in bookstores between biographies of Andrew Carnegie and the newest treatise by China’s president are stacks of works built on a stereotype.

One promises “The Eight Most Valuable Business Secrets of the Jewish.”

Another title teases readers with “The Legend of Jewish Wealth.” A third provides a look at “Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives.”

Also:

Positive stereotypes about Jews and their supposed business prowess have given the Jewish community iconic status in the eyes of the Chinese public.

Israelis: get thee to Shaghai! (again)

p.s. The writer who filed this report for the WaPo, Ariana Eunjung Cha, helpfully explains that

[i]n the United States, where making broad generalizations about races, cultures or religions has become unacceptable in most circles, the titles of some of these books might make people cringe. Throughout history and around the world, even outwardly innocuous and broadly accepted characterizations of Jews have sometimes formed the basis for eventual campaigns of violent anti-Semitism.

I’m curious about who the intended audience for this remark is. (Ms. Enjung Cha lists her credential as “Washington Post Foreign Service.”)

Broad generalizations about Jews—albeit via code words: “neocon,” “Likudnik,” “cabal,” “AIPAC,” “influence,” “agent,” “dual loyalties,” and “New York money people” come immediately to mind—are all the rage. Particularly on the left, and particularly in the leftosphere.

John Judis and Matthew Yglesias might want to take note of this. But then they may be caught up in the War on Martin Peretz, which is so much more important.

The left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has written a “practical guide” for identifying anti-Semitism. I will reprint the whole thing, because I think this is important:

“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

In addition, such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collective. Anti-Semitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, in visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.Contemporary examples of anti-Semitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

 

b Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion

b Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or about the power of Jews as a collective - including, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a global Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions

b Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoings committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews

b Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters during World War II (Holocaust denial)

b Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust

b Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations. Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel include:

b Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor

b Applying double standards by requiring Israel to behave in a manner not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation

b Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis

b Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis

b Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel

However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law (for example, denial of the Holocaust or distribution of anti-Semitic materials in some countries). Criminal acts are anti-Semitic when the targets of attacks, whether they are people or property - such as buildings, schools, places of worship and cemeteries - are selected because they are, or are perceived to be, Jewish or linked to Jews. Anti-Semitic discrimination means denying Jews the opportunities or services available to others and is illegal in many countries.

Ha’aretz doesn’t say this, but I will: the “new” anti-Semitism is worse (much, much worse) than the “old” anti-Semitism, for the simple reason that it is taking place after the planned and systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews—aka the Holocaust.

Being oblivious to the existence of the “new” anti-Semitism is understandable—most people don’t follow the news. Denying it in the face of five years’ worth of published evidence to the contrary is foolish. Abetting anti-Semitism is immoral.

And to save this post from being a total downer, I will add that it sounds like Judith Regan, far from being anti-Semitic, as she was accused of being, rather admires the Jews:

We had to make our own group, [Regan] said, like the Jews.

Of course, she’s singling them out. So maybe she is an anti-Semite? Never mind…

In a November 2001 New York Times Magazine essay titled “The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism” (a free copy of which you can find here), Jonathan Rosen examined his multilayered feelings and reactions to 9/11, some of which he traced to his family background:

You don’t have to read a lot of Freud to discover that the key to healthy life is the ability to fend off reality to a certain extent. Deny reality too much, of course, and you’re crazy; too little and you’re merely miserable. My own private balancing act has involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered [in the Holocaust] grandparents and trying to live a modern American life. …

My father’s refugee sense of the world was something that both informed me and that I worked to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to recognize that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience alien to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn’t want ancient European anti-Semitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil. …

It would be wrong to say that everything changed on the 11th of September for me. Like the man in the Hemingway novel who went bankrupt two ways — gradually and then suddenly — my awareness of things had also been growing slowly.

Rosen, for whom it was second nature to compartmentalize his having grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust from his feelings as a “modern American,” went on to say that he was shaken out of this carefully calibrated “balancing act” by events and trends he observed even before 9/11.

I’d gotten a whiff of this back in early September [2001], while following the United Nations conference on racism and discrimination in Durban, South Africa, where the Arab Lawyers Union distributed booklets at the conference containing anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews with fangs dripping blood — a mere sideshow to the isolation of Israel and the equating of Zionism with racism that ultimately led to the United States’ withdrawal.

Singling out Israel made of a modern nation an archetypal villain — Jews were the problem and the countries of the world were figuring out the solution. This was hardly new in the history of the United Nations, but there was something so naked about the resurrected Nazi propaganda and the anti-Semitism fueling the political denunciations that I felt kidnapped by history. The past had come calling.

Rosen was one of the first to write about a post-9/11 Jewish malaise, and also about the uneasy status of the world’s 13 milion Jews after this event. Within a couple of years, there would be an entire body of literature about the subject (Ron Rosenbaum’s 2004 anthology Those Who Forget the Past is an excellent place to start your reading).

Nevertheless, despite the copious attention that the troubling subject of a newly resurgent worldwide anti-Semitism has received during the past five years in the popular press (not to mention the blogosphere), James Traub, in today’s New York Times Magazine, writes about it as if it were some kind of exotica that he is introducing into the American national discourse for the first time.

What’s more, he’s got Abe Foxman of the ADL playing the role of Chicken Little.

[I]n the world of Jewish leaders, one man stands alone in the annals of gevalthood — Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League and scourge of anti-Semites of high estate and low, in Hollywood and Tehran, on campus and in the tabloids. …
“I haven’t done gevalt for 30 years,” Foxman said, though some might argue otherwise. “But never before has there been such a threat to Israel and to the Jewish people from a geopolitical conglomerate — the Arab world, with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with its position that it will not recognize Israel. The vise is closing.”

The United States, Foxman added, is “the only — the only — country in the world that is consistently willing to stand up to hypocrisy, to double standards, to triple standards, which always has the guts to say no.” And now he sees this great bulwark crumbling. …
But what really makes Abe Foxman shray (cry) gevalt is the claim that an “Israel lobby” or a “Jewish lobby” — Aipac and the A.D.L. and a few others — has effectively gained control over U.S. policy toward the Middle East and suppressed voices calling for alternative policies.

Though he loathes Foxman’s style, Traub is even more dismissive of Foxman’s primary targets—Walt and Mearsheimer—and he delivers devastating criticisms of their arguments:

At times, Mearsheimer and Walt come very close to describing the Israel lobby as something like a fifth column. …Throwing aside all the circumlocutions with which the subject is usually addressed, as well as most of the ethical and historical premises, Mearsheimer and Walt insisted that Israel had neither a strategic nor a moral claim on American sympathies. Israel was not an asset but a “liability” in the war on terror; indeed, “the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel.” And while “there is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence,” the country’s “past and present conduct” brutal mistreatment of Palestinians, refusing serious peace offers, even spying on the United States “offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.”

How, then, to explain so one-sided a policy? “The unmatched power,” they argue, “of the Israel lobby.” …

The article loosed a flood of fevered editorials, labored rebuttals and bare-knuckle debates. …

The most trenchant criticism was also the most simple: Even if the authors didn’t believe that Israel has legitimate moral claims, the American people do, and it was this widespread support, more than any unholy machinations, that explained the continuing support of Israel even in the face of the terrorist threat.

Traub is so incisive about this major flaw in the Walt and Mearsheimer paper (a point I made long ago, when I wrote that it’s notable that an “academic” paper that’s supposed to reflect a “Realist” international relations point of view leans so heavily on moral considerations) that I wish he’d offer equally incisive suggestions about how best to communicate the dangers of anti-Semitism to an oblivious and/or complacent populace.

Instead, Traub goes on the attack against Foxman for his…irrelevance.

Foxman is an anachronism. The demographic of which he is a member — Holocaust survivor — is rapidly disappearing. Younger people don’t know quite what to make of him.

And he claims that Foxman isn’t interested in learning to talk to a new generation of confident, “less affiliated” Jews.

“It’s not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not,” Foxman snapped when I raised the subject. “I do feel. And I’ve got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this.”

Unfortunately, I believe Foxman is right: a pernicious anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide. But we do need to learn to address it in an effective way.

More about this another time.

Jimmy won’t de