I've been away from my computer for a few days--July 4th and all that and return to try to catch up. And find an intense debate, angels on the head of a pin kind of debate, as to whether Juan Cole's calling Wolfowitz a "Lukidnik" is anti-semitic.
About as inconsequential a debate as one can imagine. Save that the historically important term, anti-semitism, has been pretty much vetted of its power by these kinds of charges. For my money, it's like opponents of affirmative action calling affirmative action racist. The term "racism" loses much if not all of its important historical meaning.
We have a right wing in this country that thought it could denude the left of some of its language by invoking the PC label. Unfortunately, it was more successful than it should have been. It drew on excesses, which is the standard operating mode of the anti-PC crowd, to condemn all instances. Thus, it found it self championing the use of serious racial slurs as counter to PC.
Somewhat the same is now happening to anti-semitic. Criticisms, I repeat, of the Sharon administration's policies get labeled anti-Israeli and then, one slight step further, anti-semitic. It's comparable to criticisms of the Bush administration's foreign policy being labeled anti-American, then one step further, as John Ashcroft so publicly did, being labeled giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
I liked John McCain's bit of funning of the Bush administration yesterday in which he said of himself, he was a uniter not a divider because he was featured in campaign ads for both campaigns. |
