Smearsheimer-Walt Dizzy:
"I find it dismaying that a volume produced by a serious author and a leading publisher would be treated by a book reviewer as somehow lacking rationality."
-Stephen Schwartz/Haaretz 05.Feb.07
Regarding evidence, it is, for me, simple and obvious:
1. After September 11, 2001, outrageous and scurrilous garbage was put forward in America claiming Israeli foreknowledge of the attacks and a deliberate refusal by Israelis to warn the American authorities. This dreadful claim should have been met exceedingly forcefully. Most Jewish leaders preferred to ignore it.
2. The Iraq war produced a new and vicious form of Jew-baiting in America. Where in the past it was alleged by a minority within the mainstream that a Jewish interest along with others (e.g. the British in the second world war) influenced U.S. foreign policy, an unchallenged argument emerged in mainstream American media that a Zionist "cabal" - an illegitimate, Jew-baiting term in itself - had seized control of the Defense Department and invaded Iraq to support Israel. This represented a new and deeply shocking development. The established Jewish leadership made no effort whatever to counter these claims, mainly because said leadership were and are mainly Democrats, and the neoconservative victims of this smear were Republicans. This represented an extraordinary abdication by the Jewish leadership.
3. I have already mentioned the AIPAC proceeding.
4. The Smearsheimer-Walt Dizzy pamphlet, reminiscent of German academic "anti-Semitismus" of the 19th century, is scheduled for publication by a mainstream New York house with a "Jewish history" - Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. This is appalling to an extreme.
5. The unspeakable book by Jimmy Carter (Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid [sic]) in which Israel, by the very title of the screed, is equated by a former U.S. president with the former South African regime, should be a major cause for concern by Jewish leaders. Carter's swill was also retailed by a publisher with a Jewish history - Simon and Schuster. That a man like Carter ever occupied the White House now looks shocking, to say the least.
Others have commented on the new willingness of Jewish lumpen intellectuals like Tony Judt to enable the Jew-baiting crusade.
And here is empirical evidence: Last week an American tourist I encountered in Europe, knowing nothing about me at all, and seeming to be a normal, "good American," told me that Wolfowitz had started the Iraq war to help Israel and that with the Carter tome, "the cat is out of the bag" about Israel and American politics.
All of which is, to me, evidence enough that Jew-hatred in America has reached a new and critical level. The failure of the American Jewish leadership to respond appropriately to these issues also seems to me self-evident.
Stephen Schwartz/ibid.
