A lengthy preamble

One of those great debates is heating up again, and it’s already getting ugly. This time it’s “Does anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism?” and, like most great debates, it’s not new. The latest round seems to have been sparked by Larry Summers’ recent speech at Harvard, to which many on the left took great exception. Mr. Summers pointed out that the trend that’s been spreading like a bad rash on college campuses of singling out Israel, among all the nations of the world, for condemnation, academic boycott and divestiture represents anti-Semitism in its “effect,” if not in its “intent.” Mr. Summers tried to suggest that any campaign that disproportionately singles out one group or entity for criticism or attack reflects a bias on the part of its participants and tends to encourage more of the same (can you say "ethnic profiling?).

Not to be deterred, the campaign’s sponsors make noises about their right to free speech and continue fabricating comparisons to South Africa and Nazi Germany to bolster their arguments. These loathsome comparisons, as intended, push enough of the right buttons that they’re getting some traction. I’m going to have to leave it to someone else or at least another day to address even a few of the many, many reasons why these comparisons have no basis in reality, but it doesn’t really matter. The anti-Semites have found a useful drum and they’re going to keep beating it even though its message is patently false.

Cathy Young published this excellent op-ed in the Boston Globe, which has been widely linked and widely acclaimed by the anti-anti-Semites among us. In it, she tries to explain to those who didn’t get it the first several dozen times around why legitimate criticism of Israel is not the same thing as inflammatory, disingenuous rhetoric aimed at justifying the dismantling of the Jewish State and the re-dispersion of the Jewish People. But judging by responses like this, she’s preaching to the choir because the other side just can’t hear her.

This apparently overwhelming need to rally to the defense of what truly is blatant anti-Semitism on the part of many on the left is what’s so frightening about this entire exercise. Why is their hatred of Israel and their demonization of its leaders so important to them that they’ll seize on every lie, every fabrication, each and every misrepresentation as if it were their last morsel of sustenance? And this is no less true of Jewish anti-Semites, by the way, than of others. In fact, much of the most virulently anti-Zionist propaganda I’ve heard comes from Jewish sources. So when, at Meryl’s suggestion, I browsed on over to read Barry’s post and immediately noticed a positive reference to Tikkun (and, worse yet, to Kim Chernin’s nonsensical “ Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial”), I knew this was going to be a long day.

I really do want to move on to Esther Kaplan and will do so momentarily, but first a few comments on what’s up at Amptoons. Barry asks this question.

Ms. Young, who is best known as an anti-feminist writer, must realize "feminazi" is a common term among her fellow travelers; so why hasn't she called them on it? Why is calling Ariel Sharon a nazi anti-Semitic, but calling Gloria Steinem a nazi not worth objecting to?

I’d like to believe that he’s just pulling our leg a little with this one, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. Okay, true or false: Nazi is to Jew as Nazi is to feminist? I don’t think so. Did the Nazi Party ever declare the extermination of women to be its primary goal? Did Hitler endanger his global war effort and the safety of his people for the sake of murdering a few more feminists? That would be a no. Making comparisons between feminists and Nazis is odious, yes, but no one that I know of has ever accused feminists of “crimes against humanity,” or of “perpetrating a Holocaust.” That’s because, with the notable exception of Ann Coulter, most of the right tries to refrain from that particular sort of sanctimonious overblown mendacious hyperbole in its arguments. You know, it’s a sad day when I find myself on this side of the political divide. The loony lefties are pushing me, I swear, right into the path of an oncoming freight train. And I have plenty of company.

But I digress. It’s hard to avoid because there are so many tempting sidetracks popping up here at every turn. Like where Barry accuses Young and Larry Summers of “silenc[ing] legitimate criticism of Israel.” Again, can he be serious? Who has been silenced? Certainly not the rioting mob at Concordia University in Montreal last month, or the relatively peaceful anti-Israel demonstrators at Netanyahu’s speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. Certainly not Tikkun or Rabbis for Human Rights and certainly not CAIR or the Electronic Intifada. Not that I necessarily consider these to be sources of “legitimate criticism,” but let’s get real. No one is being silenced here.

I don’t think Barry’s claim that “Young's critique assumes the word "Judaism" refers only to the religion” requires much discussion. He just needs to read the paragraph he quoted again. Carefully. Especially this part:

But it's naive at best to reduce anti-Semitism to anti-Judaism. Hitler viewed Jews as a race, not members of a religion. Anti- Semitism in the Soviet Union, where Jews were almost universally nonobservant and culturally assimilated, also focused on Jewishness as ethnicity.

But I do have to take serious issue with this accusation:

The damage is that by conflating real anti-Semites with non-anti-Semitic activists like Hurst, Young makes the term "anti-Semitic" meaningless. Whether she knows it or not, she's part of a growing effort to destroy the English word for "discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group," replacing it with a word that means "liberal criticism of Israel, regardless of if it says anything against Jews."

Just because some anti-Semites are able to pretty themselves up enough to fool some of the people some of the time, doesn’t mean that we should ignore their anti-Semitism. Moreover, giving people like John Hurst the benefit of the doubt and assuming that perhaps they don’t realize that the effect, if not the intent, of their position is anti-Semitic, it behooves us to point this out to them -- as often and as forcefully as necessary.

Well, I’ve digressed entirely too much, it seems, to get to Ms. Kaplan in this post. I’ll have to do that a bit later, hopefully today (but probably tomorrow). In the meantime, though, I’ll try to make one last point here on the detour. I really don’t think it’s useful to keep a tally of which side of the political spectrum is doing a better job of bashing anti-Semites. Nor do I see any evidence that Cathy Young or anyone else is using the issue of anti-Semitism to "score partisan points." The fact is that the moderate left (which is where Barry has placed himself) and the moderate right seem to be equally embarrassed by the traditional anti-Semites at their extremes and equally unabashed by the presence of those on their nearer fringe (Pat Buchanan and Jesse Jackson come to mind). But this debate is about the latent anti-Semitism of those who will stretch to believe a lie against Israel but resolutely ignore every accurate accusation against her enemies, and this particular type of anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of the left.

Once upon a time, at least in this country, the left was largely associated with the values of tolerance, equality and mutual respect. For many, those values now seem to be taking a back seat to a new agenda that's as biased, narrow-minded and judgmental as the agenda of the old right used to be. That's precisely why many of us who have spent much of our lives in leftist trenches are now poking our heads out to see if there might be a better alternative elsewhere.