Antisemitism

They of All People

January 30, 2013

. (Updated) It has been a fascinating week in anti-Semitism, but then they all are. The more I witness it, the more persuaded I become of the identity of the purer, more direct forms and the ignorant forms. After all, much ignorance – lack of knowledge and sophistication – is open with wonder and without [...]

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Two Epistemic Closures: The GOP and Israel-Critics

January 28, 2013

. (This commentary originally appeared in the Algemeiner on January 25, 2013.) What do Tuesday’s election results remind us of? They should recall the result of November’s U.S. elections. Against all evidence – and here I do mean all evidence – Mitt Romney and Republicans of every stripe, from Tea Party to establishment, genuinely believed that they [...]

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The Hagelian Dialectic

January 7, 2013

. This commentary first appeared in the Algemeiner on January 4. Today, President Obama announced his nomination of Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense. The Chuck Hagel trial balloon has been aloft for weeks now, not to burst or land – since its lofting was never officially acknowledged – until either he [...]

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When Is an Open-Air Prison a Terrorist Camp?

December 13, 2012

. (This post originally appeared in the Algemeiner on December 11, 2012.) It is a term we hear a lot in the twenty-first century anti-Israel propaganda storm, flung wildly against the truth – that Gaza is an “open-air” prison. We hear it not only from Arab and Muslim anti-Semites and the committed anti-Israel ideologues, but [...]

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Reflections on the Spirit of Resistance

November 22, 2012

. Paul Newman’s 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, the apex of journeyman Stuart Rosenberg’s directorial career, imbued popular culture with many iconic scenes and memorable lines. (“What we have here – is failure to communicate.” “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”) Among the famous scenes is that of the prison camp boxing match [...]

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Not So Random Questions, Facts, & Observations about Gaza & Israel

November 17, 2012

. If forces in Mexico – drug cartels, for instance – were firing rockets and missiles into an area roughly covering 25% of the United States this is what it would look like. If the U.S. equivalent of one million Israelis were under threat of this bombardment on a daily basis, running for cover, hiding [...]

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The Dangers of Golden Dawn – and National Public Radio

November 13, 2012

. Where do we find the licensing body for the journalistic profession? Who are the determinants of journalistic malpractice? There are none. Sanction for malpractice can be found only in the response of the audience. What price will National Public Radio pay for the following travesty, aired this morning and, of course, disseminated widely, such [...]

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Maureen Dowd and her Critics

September 24, 2012

. A couple of interesting comments from Noga and David on my post, “A Political Hall of Mirrors,” prompts these further considerations on the reaction to Maureen Dowd’s neocon puppet master column. I don’t think this is a subject in which people need necessarily hold hard positions unwaveringly and completely opposed to differing views. Of [...]

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A Political Hall of Mirrors

September 18, 2012

. Bob from Brockley writes (from Brockley, I presume) to offer compliment and commentary to my last post on Maureen Dowd. Bob and I are usually in close alignment on such issues as have arisen from Dowd’s recent column on the neocons. In this case not. Bob (whom, if you don’t, you really should be [...]

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(Updated) Impenetrable: The Hollow Rhetoric of Judith Butler

September 10, 2012

. (Update) Tomorrow, September 11, 2012, the birthday of Theodor Adorno, and only chronologically coincident with the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attack, Judith Butler is set to receive the triennial Adorno Prize, awarded by the city of Frankfurt. Resonant with the themes addressed in the commentary below, originally posted last week at the Algemeiner, is this [...]

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The Palestinian Failure

August 16, 2012

. Some nations are lucky in their leaders. For decades now, academic historians have downplayed the significance of the leader – the “great man” – in the understanding of historical epochs and focused their attention elsewhere. Still, you cannot study the early American republic without renewed appreciation for the role of George Washington. How lucky was the U.S. again [...]

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Anti-Labor, Anti-Free Press, Anti-Gay, Anti-Israel

August 8, 2012

. Some people never get the point. Some people once got the point, or claimed to, claimed to see it – there it is, over there – and then they got their hands on the point and stretched the point, to make a point, turned it inside out, inverted and perverted the point, developed a [...]

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How Fast, So Furious, the Grim-faced Libertarian Falls in the Forest

July 1, 2012

. Lost amid the attention to the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act was the House vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress – the first sitting cabinet member to be so cited in the history of the United States. Maliciously partisan Republicans went ahead with this vote on [...]

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“What Must Be Said” Is Nothing

April 12, 2012

. I have heard it said – better, I have read it in a tweet – that Gunther Grass could hardly have been expected, at 17, to resist recruitment into the Waffen SS. That odd, indirect defense of the sham poetry Grass did not write but typed up to attack Israel delivers an unexpected enlightenment: [...]

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“How the Left Turned Against the Jews”

March 30, 2012

. Nick Cohen at Standpoint writing, in “How the Left Turned Against the Jews,” about Colin Shindler’s new book, Israel and the European Left: But in a strange manner few discuss, the death of Communism has freed far-Left ideas from the cage of the Cold War. When the far Left was a global force, the [...]

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“Israel Firster”: Anatomy of a Smear

February 2, 2012

. There are many aspects to the current controversy over use of the “Israel Firster” term. There are people who use the term – continue to use it, resistantly defending its use – and there are those who criticize them for it. The critics claim that adopters of the term are continuing an ages-old anti-Semitic [...]

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Tyranny of Victimhood: Why the Guardian gives a free ride to reactionary Palestinian movement

November 17, 2011

. This is cross-posted by CiF Watch managing editor, Adam Levick. Yesterday, some anti-Israel agitators pretended to be “civil rights” activists by riding on buses Israeli citizens in the territories use to travel to Jerusalem. These buses do not allow non-citizens (without proper permits) to enter communities in Judea and Samaria in order to stop potential Palestinian terror [...]

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Anatomy of an Anti-Semite

November 15, 2011

. Ross Vachon (of Malibu, CA, he informs) has reappeared. A month and a half after I pinned him wriggling to the specimen board in ‘Anti-Semitism, the Ur-Hatred,” he has apparently taken time to emerge from his burrow and discover what I observed of him. He had originally written me privately, in response to “The [...]

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The Putrid Cynicism of the Emergency Committee for Israel

October 13, 2011

. Friend and managing editor of CiF Watch Adam Levick has offered a link in the comments section to my last post on Occupy Wall Street. I can imagine the concerns that prompted Adam’s offering. I would share them if I thought they were real. They are not. The link is to a one minute video [...]

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Dear Nicholas Kristof, You Are a Fool

October 7, 2011

. Let’s begin with the title of that ejaculation of tendentious nonsense you and The New York Times have passed off as thoughtful commentary by a serious commentator on international affairs. “Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?” Really, you mean that? You haven’t heard that spoken around the block a time or two. It’s your [...]

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How We Lived on It (42) – Anti-Semitism, the Ur-Hatred

October 1, 2011

. I’ve been thinking since I wrote “The Uncanny John Mearsheimer,” in which I by the way proposed Jewish anti-Semitism and black-for-white passing as Ur forms of the uncanny, that anti-Semitism is one of the Ur forms of hatred – the group form. Hatred of the other, expressed as demonization, is a primal emotion. In [...]

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