Hi LindyBill,
In response, I am going to publish a PM I sent to Rascal, who was writing to assure me that just because he (she?) opposed the current Israeli government, he was not anti-Semitic:
I have a difference of opinion on the behavior of Israel lately. But that makes me in no way anti-semetic. Because my acceptance is at such a deep level that when I reed anti-Semetic comments I think "I can't believe they are saying this" "It must be a mistake or some crummy publication.
Well first of all, I think you can understand why I may be a little more sensitized to this stuff than you are.
Second, I do not think that lots of people who oppose current Israeli policies, like you, or Tony Judt or Anthony Lewis, just to name a couple, are the least bit anti-Semitic. I just think they're well-intentioned but wrong. Different kettle of fish entirely.
Third, what I feel quite sure of, is that anti-Semitism - the old-fashioned Protocols of the Elders of Zion type of anti-Semitism - is in a process of rehabilitation. For fifty years after the Holocaust, it was off the table, beyond the pale. Now it is coming back into play. Not only is the whole Arab world seething with it, but the far-left in Europe, and America too, is picking it up. For fifty years it hid under the rocks, now it is crawling back into the sunlight.
Liberal American opinion has been quite slow to notice this. For a long time papers like the New York Times exercised a kind of strict self-censorship on the subject, as if to accuse the Arabs (let alone left-wing, excuse me, "progressive" Europeans) of anti-Semitism was unacceptably prejudiced even if the charge could clearly be substantiated with evidence. Organizations like MEMRI have done a service translating this stuff into English, not the mention the unwitting contributions of the Arab News.
I am not the only one to notice this by a long shot. The bloggers Charles Johnson (LGF) and Damian Perry (Daimnation!) have been keeping track of it. Damian notes that not only did writer A.N.Wilson quote a Holocaust-denier as a reliable source, but he stood by the story when it was pointed out to him that he was quoting a Holocaust-denier as an authority. Damian comments,
"Hey, they might be Nazis, but they have a point." I'm hearing this sort of rhetoric quite a bit lately, and almost all of it is coming from the far left. Slowly but surely, the "revisionists" are gaining in respectability, mainly thanks to people like Mr. Wilson.
How long will it be before a high-profile left-wing European journalist, writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict, slips up and says something like "the Holocaust, in which the Germans allegedly killed six million Jews"? I really don't think such a day is too far off.
damianpenny.blogspot.com |
