The anti-Semitism card
By Max J. Castro
So now it is Maureen Down’s turn. Who would have imagined it, the New York Times columnist best known for her signature style – call it biting bitchiness – rather than for spewing racial or ethnic venom is the latest target of the “Israel is always right by definition” thought police who in this country keep a tight lid on any kind of reasonable debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through smearing those who veer from their approved line with the vile charge of anti-Semitism.
The feisty Irish-American columnist’s sin was to criticize GOP Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s recent speech at the Values Voters Conference in which he blamed Obama for: “the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria; mobs storming American embassies and consulates; Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon; and Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration.”
It’s a wonder Ryan didn’t accuse Obama of being in bed with Osama Bin Laden.
But it’s what Dowd wrote next that really got the usual vigilantes, like Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic among many others, to play the anti-Semitism card:
“Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.
“A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption – it’s all ominously familiar. “
Senor happens to be Jewish, something Dowd doesn’t mention in her column. More relevant is the fact that Senor was the mouthpiece for Ambassador Paul Bremer’s disastrous misrule in the early days of the Iraq war. It was painful to watch Senor so obviously dissembling, day after day, about progress in Iraq as the country disintegrated. More recently, Senor is widely believed to have conveyed to Israeli officials that Romney would readily approve an Israeli attack on Iran. It is Senor’s views and the role he played in the Bush administration and now in Romney’s campaign and not his Jewish heritage that Dowd assails. But that doesn’t matter.
Dowd is in good company. She is preceded by Jimmy Carter – who as president provided Israel a huge security blanket by effectively neutralizing Egypt, Israel’s most potent enemy – who was lambasted for suggesting that the Israeli policy toward the occupied Palestinian territories was heading toward a Middle East version of apartheid.
Before Carter, there were a couple of Harvard Kennedy School academics who got slapped with the odious label for writing about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. A powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States? Who knew?
I myself have felt the wrath and the sting of those who resort to slander in their zeal to attack anyone who they feel opposes the interests of Israel as they define them. It happened this way. I wrote a column that appeared in the Miami Herald at the time of the Israeli siege of the Palestinian town of Jenin. My main point was that Bush’s early policy of allegedly not getting involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a fraud and a failure.
The United States gives Israel about $3 billion a year. Since 1948, the United States has given more aid to what is often described as “tiny Israel,” than it has given to all the poor nations of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa combined. Given Israel’s small population, on a per capita basis the disparity is that much more breathtaking.
These inconvenient facts belied Bush’s espoused “hands off” policy and only encouraged violence on both sides. I concluded by saying that as strongly as we condemn suicide terrorism we should tell then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that you don’t bring peace by crushing an entire people.
The first reaction was positive. Early on the morning the piece appeared I ran into my boss at the University of Miami’s defunded and defunct North-South Center. He told me had read the column and “agreed with every word.”
Unbeknownst to me, the reaction of many at the highest levels of the University as well as among some colleagues was fast and furious. I later learned that the Provost, the second highest university official, wanted the Center’s director to fire me, alleging anti-Semitism. The Director refused, saying he had read the column several times without finding a shadow of anti-Semitism.
The only immediate punishment was that that my university email address would no longer be allowed to appear at the end of my columns. I suspect other punihments followed, unacknowledged. In any case, I received more vitriolic emails from that one column than from any I had written criticizing Cuban American politics much more harshly.
Those who use the charge of anti-Semitism falsely to preempt a robust debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East believe they are doing Israel a favor. They aren’t.
Unless Israel changes its policies it will face a demographic time bomb that spells disaster. Faced with that kind of prospect, true friends don’t enable a politics of denial by keeping silent.
