Many readers will already have seen that this blog was mentioned, along with Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Phil Weiss, and Steve Walt, as one of the sites “using the Internet to make anti-Semitism respectable,” in a Tablet article by their neoconservative politics columnist Lee Smith. The article is silly and substanceless enough that I won’t bother responding — Walt, Weiss, and Jerry Haber have already written fine rebuttals, and even journalists who are far from sympathetic to our politics, like JTA’s Ron Kampeas and the New Jersey Jewish News‘s Andrew Silow-Carroll, have picked apart Smith’s article for the idiocy that it is. (Although Kampeas feels compelled to take a gratuitous and frankly bizarre shot at Phil Weiss–he “gets up in the morning and plans a day that includes harming Jews”? Really, Ron? This is the kind of hysteria that one expects from Jeffrey Goldberg–who, no surprise, is the only source for Smith’s article.) I’ll just note how revealing it is that Smith is unable to produce a single instance of anti-Semitism from any of his targets, and is forced to rely on random and anonymous blog comments to make his case. His gloss on Jim’s political views also indicates that he has probably never read anything Jim’s written.
The real question is why the piece was published in the first place. I’ve written for Tablet before, and found the editors to be smart, thorough, and open-minded (as evidenced by their willingness to publish my piece in the first place). Reading Smith’s screed, I have to wonder how it made it through the publication process without anyone forcing him to provide some evidence for his claims.
More generally, it’s an interesting question why Smith has his gig at Tablet in the first place. I have no objection to the magazine airing neoconservative voices–they are a small minority in the American Jewish community, but an important one–but it is strange that the magazine would give its only weekly politics column to a neoconservative political operative who uses it exclusively as an echo chamber for talking points from Commentary and the Weekly Standard (where Smith also writes). I’ve gone through just about all of Smith’s Tablet columns, and virtually without fail they fall into one of two genres: there are hit pieces against whoever the neocons’ enemy of the week is (e.g. Trita Parsi, the Leveretts, and this latest article), and there are sycophantic puff pieces touting the wisdom of various Likudnik policymakers (e.g. Elliott Abrams, Michael Oren). Last week, he attempted a deeper think piece on Israel, Intellectuals, And The Fate Of Western Civilization, and it didn’t go too well–the kind of turgid pop philosophy that would be more at home in a college newspaper.
So why are we treated to Smith’s insights every week? Is it his good looks? His winning personality? A condition imposed by a funder? Regardless, his columns are jarringly out of place with the tenor of the rest of the magazine–and if his last couple are any indication, they’re only getting worse.
On WarinContext I actually remarked on the virulent comments there. There was a frenzy building–these frenzies do scare me–of anti-Israeli sentiment. I warned them that they were becoming what they were opposing. I was accused of being a Hasbarist. ME. So, yes this can get out of hand.
That said, the Anti-Israeli movement is so feckless and impotent that it is of little threat to anything but itself. The goal of the Anti-zionist campaign starts and hopefully stops with each party acknowledging the humanity (and rights) of the other. The Golden Rule is the only fair, universal creed. It requires us to see and remember the humanity of everyone around us.
Mobs, and group think can be powerful tides that wash over nations. That said, the anti-Islamic fervor is far more ubiquitous and pernicious. The hypocritical and self damning policies advocated by Michele Malkin and Jon Yoo stand out starkly. As those people venally apologize for wrongs committed against their own forbears.
There’s nothing particularly alluring about the truth. It doesn’t pay, serve masters, nor comply to any agenda. It has few advocates and fewer still earnestly seek it out. Our system of values puts no value on truth, hence it will remain ignored and irrelevant to policy or navigating our policies.
Regarding Peter H’s comment about anti-Muslim feeling, no doubt such feeling exists in America. I was confining myself to Vered’s remarks about anti-Semitism.
There are always going to be “antis” in any cross section of people. A small minority of Muslims believe that non-Muslims are sinful and wicked, inferior to Muslims. Every group has its haters. We have to do our best to marginalize these people and work for tolerance.
@badalero
OK, you’ve convinced me. The victims of the Seattle shooting were not shot because they were Jews. They were shot because they supported Israel and the media reported that the Jews, excuse me, the Israelis, were behind the war in Iraq. They should have known better than to express their opinions on world affairs.
Forgive me for being even more afraid now that you’re blaiming me (excuse me, my fear) for killing people in Iraq, Lebanon, and around the world. I’m apparently now fair game for similar Seattle shooters.
You really have proven my point, far more than I would have wished, about how animus about Jews (excuse me, Israelis) can easily descend into violence or, just as bad, the acceptance of violence against Jews.
And, yes, it’s a tremendous luxury to have security systems. Sadly, it’s not such a tremendous luxury to need security systems because of animus against your identity. (By the way, you read the data wrong. Anti-black offenses were 3 times as common as anti-Jewish offenses and blacks are 6 times more populous than Jews in the U.S.) You make it sound like Jews are happy to have their windows look like cages and their front doors look like airport security lines.
@Mrein
I think you misunderstood me. Let me put in in two parts to make it easier understandable.
1. My point regarding the fear was, that the high level of fear of anti-jewish hate crimes in the U.S. is real, but not rational. See, in 2007, there were reported in total nine deadly hate crimes in the U.S.:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/table_02.htm
So what you guess, how many of them were anti-jewish, if anti-black hate crimes are three times more common than anti-jewish ones? I doubt there were many. At least not so many to have a rational fear to say “we stand at the knife edge of extinction” as Vered did.
Don’t get me wrong, each crime and especially each hate crime is one too much, but I don’t see a rational reason to fear to “stand at the knife edge of extinction” for jews today in general and especially in the U.S.
And my fear is, that such a high level of collective fear prepared in the past and still prepare today the ground for actions done in a pre-emptive way of highly exaggerated collective self-defense, which left scores of people dead in many countries. See the sixdaywar as an example for this. You may find it was legitimate pre-emptive collective Israeli self-defense fought in real fear, but many others see it as a blunt war of aggression.
2. My other point relates to the motivation of anti-jewish hate crimes in the U.S. An there I took as an example the “Seattle Jewish Federation shooting” 2006 you yourself brought up. It was an ugly hate crime. And when I analyse what was the motivation behind it, that I accept violence against Jews, but to understand what processes lead to such horror.
There clearly exists anti-jewish hate in the world out of no reason which reaches back for thousands of years. But the “Seattle Jewish Federation shooting” was different from such a motivation. You may read some details in Wikipedia. The perpetrator was clearly motivated by anger about what he considered murderous Israeli politics, their incitement of war against Iraq and the support of these politics by the Jewish communities in the US.
And see my citation of Shimon Peres, the Israeli government participated in building up the pretext for the war of aggression against Iraq, which was based on ugly lies. So that a foreign government cooperates with the US-government as partner in crime is nothing special. The British government supported the lies leading to this war and the mass murder of Iraqi people as well.
But the Israeli government claims to speak and act in the name of the jews, when it’s commiting it’s crimes. And most of the jewish community is not challenging this claim. Indeed, as I lined out, the “Seattle Jewish Federation” had support for Israel even on their website.
So, of course, you are right, when you claim a right for jews to “express their opinions on world affairs”. But can you imagine, that support for Israel is regarded by people having empathy with the victims of Israeli policies as support for wars of aggression, mass murder and ethnic cleansing? Can you imagine that people can become very angry when they have the impression that others cheerfully celebrate a bunch of liars and the mass murder of their brothers and sisters? I have the compassion with other people to be able to understand that people can become angry in such a case.
I’m off the opinion that the support of many jewish communities abroad for horrific actions done by the Israeli government contributes to anti-Semitism. So, what I think, what could be very helpful, to combat anti-jewish hate like that of the “Seattle Jewish Federation shooting”, would be, that jewish commuinities wil not allow the Israeli government to speak in the name of the jews and clearly distance themselves from the crimes committed by the Israeli government.
Hey Dan,
I like your work. Here’s a suggestion – For most of 2007 I was researching for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and during that time my friend Chris Rodda (now the head MRFF researcher) and I came up with a neat heuristic for dealing with this sort of thing:
Incompetence vs. complicity.
SO:
Lee Smith accuses a number of people of promoting anti-Semitism on what I would call rather flimsy grounds (to be rather charitable about it.)
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu’s close evangelical ally John Hagee has broadcast a conspiracy theory that the ADL identifies as “A Classic Anti-Semitic Myth” around the world. Literally.
See:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/7/29/174316/726
Evangelicals such as Hagee have been pumping out viciously anti-Jewish propaganda for decades. And as I chronicle in this mini-documentary, their propaganda is startlingly similar to Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.
See “American Dolchstoss”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFoLzPChDXg
Is Lee Smith unaware of this ? – If so, he’s incompetent. If he is aware, he’s complicit.
Incompetence vs. complicity – it’s a lose/lose.