Politically Incorrect But True

Running with the jackals of hate [Excerpts]

By Jonathan Tobin

Sometimes, the most daring thing a scholar or an organization can do is to mention the obvious. That is a lesson that Indiana University's Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld and the American Jewish Committee have recently learned to their sorrow.

Rosenfeld is the author of a 30-page study titled " 'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," which was published in December by AJCommittee. In it Rosenfeld, briefly surveys the international rise of anti-Semitism and then goes on to touch on the various excesses of intellectual anti-Zionists with an emphasis on those leftist Jews who are important elements in the massive contemporary assault on Israel.

Rosenfeld's conclusion is that those Jewish writers and thinkers who have aided the assault on Israel's legitimacy and its right to exist cannot pretend that their stand is unrelated to the wave of violent Jew-hatred, which is itself largely focused on the delegitimization of Israel and Jewish self-defense. He rightly asserts that anti-Zionist Jewish authors such as British historian Jacqueline Rose, New York University's Tony Judt and Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner have been carrying the intellectual water for a weird coalition of the far-left, the far-right, and the Arab and Islamic propagandists.

Rosenfeld is careful to specify that questioning policies of Israeli governments is not the same as being anti-Israel, let alone anti-Semitic. But he has the bad manners to point out that those who aggressively question Israel's right to have any government or to defend itself against those who seek to destroy it are, at best, unwitting allies of a growing anti-Jewish movement.

It is not innuendo to note, as Rosenfeld does, that calling Israel a "Nazi state" and urging its dismantling is not unrelated to the attacks on Jews in Europe or to the verbal violence against Israel that is becoming bolder here. That anti-Zionism has established a beachhead among leftist intellectuals and academics in this country cannot be denied.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0207/tobin021907.php3