The Aggravator

Hey, Lefty

I am neither a conservative nor a liberal but would describe myself as a mostly snoring observer of the world political scene. In other words, I have no philosophies, positions or passions whatsoever. I tune in occasionally, but only to see what everyone’s yapping about.

What can I say? It’s entertainment, and it’s free.

But last week a headline in The New York Times really grabbed my attention. “Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor,” it hollered. Could it be that the world, having finally run out of scurrilous calumnies to fling, had finally gotten around to accusing the Jews of being anti-Semites?!
What kind of crazy gentiles could cook up such an outrage? Well, as it turns out, it was the good folks at the American Jewish Committee.

It was the AJC that posted on its Web site (http://www.ajc.org) a long essay titled, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism.” According to The Times, the essay states that “a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.”

The Times goes on to report that “in an introduction to the essay, David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes, ‘Perhaps the most surprising - and distressing - feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish state.’”

I’m not sure what kind of Jews David A. Harris associates with, but I’m shocked that he’s “surprised.”

One need only read the letters page of our own eminent Jewish Times each week to see that plenty of Jews openly disagree with Israeli policies, and even more were against removing a tyrant like Saddam Hussein, though he sponsored terrorists thirsty for Jewish blood.

But calling liberal Jews anti-Semites? That seems a bit harsh. Are they really that hateful, or just crack-potty, misguided and oblivious?

For the most part, they are still clinging to a past when the political left was a humanistic solver of social injustices. Jews like the heroic Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King’s close confidant and adviser, put their lives at peril for non-violent change.

But just about two decades after the sublimity of “I Have A Dream” came the stupidity of “Hymietown.” What seemed like an off-the-cuff remark by Dr. King’s unworthy successor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, turned out to be a harbinger of a movement that has become increasingly hostile to Jews.

Recently, former President Bill Clinton went to the Middle East and, in a speech, bogusly equated Danish cartoons about Islam with European anti-Semitism. Just this year, former President Jimmy Carter wrote a new book in which he implied that Israelis were racists and American Jews were manipulating the political process and the media to cover them. Who on the left spoke out to denounceeither man?

In fact, there was more sanctimonious rage when Sen. Joe Biden referred to Sen. Barack Obama as “articulate.”

I don’t think that left-leaning Jews are anti-Semites, they just don’t understand that their simplistic movement reduces the entire world into two groups: victims and devils. Jewish liberals see themselves comfortably in the victim subset. But their left-wing compatriots see something else in the Jews. They see inordinate wealth and the secret, mysterious strings of power. They see devils.

So the moral of the story is that garden-variety Jews should not call left-wing Jews anti-Semites. After all, the rest of the world’s leftists probably just see us all boiling in the same pot.