Edward Alexander

Recent books on the resurgence of anti-Semitism center on the Muslim world and on Europe (which, partly for demographic reasons, is itself becoming more and more Islamicized). In both Epicenters of Jew-hatred, the memory of Hitler's war against the Jews plays a key role. The Muslims (especially their Arab branch) envy the "settlement" of the Jewish question that Hitler achieved; but the Europeans feel that the Holocaust had, so to speak, given traditional anti-Semitism a bad name and have tried to reshape it to meet present exigencies. As the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld put it: "there is something very deep in European civilization: the need to demonize us. Because to this day, Europe has not given itself a full reckoning of what happened between 1939 and 1945....Because they haven't made a confession, the Europeans feel the need to say of the Jews that they are no better than them. On the contrary--they are worse."

And what of America? Will its famous "exceptionalism" protect it from the spreading anti-Semitic virus? Werner Sombart once called America "the promised land of capitalism," where "on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie socialist Utopias...are sent to their doom." Will anti-Semitism, "the socialism of fools," meet the same fate?

In America too, Arab/Islamic anti-Semitic propaganda has made inroads, and Islamic schools which teach that the Day of Judgment cannot arrive until "Muslims start attacking Jews" have found students eager to practice what their teachers preach. Nevertheless, as Gabriel Schoenfeld argues in The Return of Anti-Semitism here the main conquests of the anti-Semitic invasion have been in culture (including the "mainline" churches) and education rather than politics. We have the divestment campaign at the universities, the verbal and physical violence that pro-Israel speakers and students routinely experience on the more "progressive" campuses like UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, and the receptivity of English departments--most notably Harvard and Columbia--to scribblers of anti-Semitic doggerel like Tom Paulin. We have also witnessed a growing tendency to assign responsibility for the Iraq war to three mid-level Jewish officials in the government who (according to Maureen Dowd, Michael Lind, Georgie Anne Geyer, and the late Edward Said) conspired to intimidate those shrinking violets named George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell to the point where they formulated foreign policy enentirely on behalf of Israel.
On this matter right and left polemicists use identical language; and it is the language of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the late nineteenth century Czarist police forgery that has fueled anti-Semitic violence for nearly a century. Since 1990, Patrick Buchanan has alleged that Capitol Hill is "Israeli-occupied territory," and on February 5 of this year Thomas Friedman aped Buchanan by asserting that Ariel Sharon "[has] had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval office." Writers in Tikkun, the leftist Jewish journal whose motto seems to be "Nothing anti-Semitic is alien to us," warn of Jewish "conspirators" who run the U.S. government on behalf of "Jewish interests" and--as if this were not explicit enough--refer to "the industrial sized grain of truth" in the Protocols.
The U.S. has also produced a bumper-crop of anti-Semitism deniers, a group parallel in its way to Holocaust deniers. No matter the outrage--boycotts, beatings, torched synagogues, apologias for suicide bombings, calls for Israel's immediate reduction to sandy wastes--such worthies as Tony Judt, Amitai Etzioni, and Judith Butler can be counted on to say "no, it's not anti-Semitic, it's criticism of Israeli policy." Or else--the line taken by journalist Paul Krugman and Professor Martin Jay--the anti-Semitism is justified.
Such scribblers abound, especially among the learned classes. The pressing question of the moment is whether anti-Semitism will find sponsors in the world of organized politics as well. The question is not entirely a new one. In December of 1991 Buchanan challenged President George Bush for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination. Within days William Buckley, in the National Review (31 December), sounded the alarm about Buchanan's anti-Semitic fulminations. He said that Buchanan was a menace to the body politic and should be treated as such by the Republican Party. As late as 1996, Buchanan managed a pretty good roll of the dice as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, but eventually Buckley's view prevailed and by 2000 Buchanan had to shift his presidential aspirations to the Reform Party.

Now, however, it is the Democratic Party that seems to lay out the welcome mat for politicians who have a record of anti-Semitic speech and activity.
During the Democratic campaign for the presidential nomination, one noticed curious innovations in the appeals made by the candidates, appeals not anti-Semitic in themselves but indicative of a powerful desire to conciliate a newly powerful bloc of voters: Arab-Americans, especially Muslims. In Seattle, for example, Dennis Kucinich's campaign managers gene for their little candidate two front-page photos in the Seattle Times: one showed him at the Islamic School (once upon a time home of the Seattle Hebrew Academy) in the south end of town, the other at the mosque in the north end of the city. Howard Dean pranced about at various places in an Arab head-scarf. John Kerry was greeted in Nevada by placards proclaiming: "Nevada Muslims for Kerry." Barack Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention, went out of his way to appeal to "Arab-American families" supposedly persecuted by the Bush administration.

And there was worse. Among the candidates for the Democratic nomination, treated with unfailing deference, not to say oily sycophancy, by his competitors was the Rev. Al Sharpton. One might have supposed that Sharpton's role in the Tawana Brawley affair as well as his record of blatantly anti-Semitic incitement of the most incendiary (and murderous) kind--in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in 1991 and in Harlem in 1995--would have made him persona non grata to a respectable American political party; but it did not. (Perhaps the party's leadership was grateful for the fact that at least one of the contenders for its nomination was intellectually and verbally nimble.)

In the past the party has been in thrall to Jesse Jackson, the world-class ambulance chaser and shakedown artist. Neither Jackson's description of New York City as "Hymietown" nor his complaint about being "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust" nor his embrace of Israel's most genocidally inclined enemies cost him support from the party's rank and file or its leadership. Among the victors in the July 20 Democratic Party in Georgia was Cynthia McKinney, who served five terms in Congress before being defeated in the Democratic primary of 2002 by Denise Majette. The stridently anti-Semitic character of her 2002 campaign, in which "Jews" were repeatedly blamed for her decline in the polls and eventual defeat, did not deter House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, then Democratic whip, from backing her unreservedly. She remains in good standing in the party.

At the recent Democratic nominating convention Sharpton was a featured and indeed rapturously adored speaker. In the aftermath of Kerry's acceptance speech he was as fixed a presence at the nominee's side as St. Teresa Kerry or John Edwards. And while Kerry and Sharpton were fawning on each other Jimmy Carter seemed to have found somebody whom he liked even more than Fidel Castro: Michael Moore, who sat with Carter and wife. Moore, let us recall, is not just somebody who lies as naturally as other people breathe; he is also a ferocious hater of Israel who has identified it as one of the three epicenters of evil in the world: "It's all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton." Moore has also dedicated his book "Dude, Where's My Country?" to Rachel Corrie, the young woman who gave her life to enable Arab terrorists to murder Jewish children with impunity. And Moore is beloved not just by Jimmy Carter but by the rank and file of the party. In Washington State, for example, Deborah Senn, the (Jewish) candidate for Attorney General, arranged special showings of Moore's latest propaganda film and even sold tickets for it at $25 each.

One may then reasonably conclude that anti-Semitic and fiercely anti-Israel sentiments are no obstacle to influence and success in the Democratic Party. This does not, of course, mean that the party has become anti-Semitic, but that it has given an opening to anti-Semites and shown that espousal of modernity's most successfully lethal ideology--lethal not to Jews alone--does not hurt and may actually help one to rise in the party.

And then there is--once again--the third party candidate, Ralph Nader. This darling of environmentalists, "friends of the earth," "friends of the species," lovers of virtue whose only uncertainty about Nader is whether voting for him might again cost Democrats the presidency, has allied himself with--Patrick Buchanan. The glue of the alliance is their shared anti-Semitism. Just before the Reform Party announced its endorsement of Nader in the impending presidential election, he gave an interview in Buchanan's American Conservative magazine. In it, he returned to a theme on which he had already speechified as follows: "What has been happening over the years is a predictable routine of foreign visitation from the head of the Israeli government. The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with the puppet in the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue, and meets with the puppets in Congress. And then takes back billions of taxpayer dollars..."

This was meat and drink to Buchanan, who eagerly elicited a repeat performance from Nader: "The subservience of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military policy has been consistent." With just a tiny bit of prodding, Buchanan also got Nader specifically to include John Kerry among the obedient puppets of the nefarious Jews.

Anti-Semitism is far from having made the inroads into the American political system that it has achieved in Europe, but certainly there is cause for worry even here--and perhaps for action as well, though that will require the casting off of Jewish political habits fossilized since the Roosevelt era.

Prof. Alexander's most recent book is Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (Transaction).