The first claim you list isn't weird or false, it's called not being racist. If Sullivan had written about how there were good blacks and bad blacks, like he did with Jews, he wouldn't have had any defenders. That people defend his reductive, offensive racialism is only because he was being critical of Israel at the time. At least, I hope they wouldn't defend such noxious and open racism under circumstances that weren't as conducive to intellectual laziness and political convenience.
The second claim is true using an archaic definition of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism has come to mean something broader, which I think Wieseltier knows, which makes his claim stupidly pointless nitpicking.

Actually I retract the first half of my prior reply: first, because Sullivan's incredible reply convinced me that he doesn't generally analyze "American Jewry" as if it were a political bloc, and two, because in it he makes clear that I was wrong to think he's being any more critical of Israel then Wieseltier. Wieseltier really was just, as his thesis implied, pissed because he thought Sullivan was calling the TNR readers a bunch of Jews.
Now, I'm not sure what this means for those commentators who desperately wanted this to be a case of anti-Semitism accusations being used to silence criticism of Israel. Perhaps they'll start considering that Jews - I mean, Zionists - can hold motivations in their hearts beyond a desire to control the media. Jews can form relationships like real people, and have falling-outs like real people, and can even publicly air petty vendettas like real people. They aren't just interchangeable cogs in a faceless, monolithic Lobby.

Sullivan adds to his recent blog - ""I guess I should add that my impression of the Walt-Mearesheimer book - I did read the original article - is that it's shoddy enough to merit Jewish defensiveness and anger. Sigh."" So Andrew appears to be sucking up to the mighty again. How pathetic.

It is sad that the Wieseltier assused Sullivan of antisemitism - Israel has recently created a lot of hatred all over the world and they can only try to neutralize this by accusing every one who criticizes them of antisemitism - it is not working however, and is only making millions more critical of Israel. Israel is actually making people become very anti-Israel but to accuse those people of being antisemitic only makes them more angry and more anti-Israel.

Wieseltier seems to be demented - this is normal - this is my clinical impression - many people go this way as they get older - let's be tolerant and respectful - I think that Jews feel that the only intelligent and competent people are other Jews - therefore, given the choice, Jews seem to select other Jews - therefore we have many Jews in the media - this will eventually have a very negative effect when the Americans figure it out - If you criticize the Israeli government the Jews say that you are anti-Semitic - this is rubbish - I was just watching the Olympics - Michaels was leading the telecast - a Jew - then I turned to the golf - it was Jim Nantz - another Jew - then I turned to CNN - it was Larry King - when I watch TV there are so many Jews moulding my opinions - is it healthy ? No !!!
It is nothing less than bizarre - If I say this, people accuse me of being anti-Semitic - I don't know what to think of all this - I know that most Jews are very sympathetic to Israel - this is very confusing - I am not anti-Semitic but I am really confused - we have 15% of our Senators who are Jews and many other Jews thinking of running ? I am not anti-Semitic but Jews will say that I am, because I am pointing out these facts - I am not making this up !!! It is reality ! When I say these things to my colleagues they tell me to be quiet - someone might hear, they say ! It is very frustrating - I suspect that the Palestinians are being ill-treated and abused by the Israelis. The news reports in the Israeli newspapers seem to confirm this.

Popular words used by people who think like you, such as canard, shoddy, or anti-Semite have little or no meaning in the world of today - you think that they are loaded with emotion and charged with harsh retribution - they are not - they are a silly joke with no real impact - your ritual abuse of these words has reduced them to background noise. People should ignore such words and look for real facts - in the above screed there is no scholarship, only emotion and name-calling. You should be ashamed - I find your reference to the Irish - my race - to be reprehensible and detestable - much worse than what you call anti-Semitic - your comments are totally without facts or logic and in fact lend support to people who would skeptical of "the national aspirations of the Jewish people" as you have written - people like you are adding to the considerable problem of how Israel can survive in an ever more hostile Middle Eastern environment, in a prospective Jewish State where more than half of the populations are not Jewish. The work of Walt and Sullivan in pointing out the dysfunctional activities of AIPAC and their supporters, is to be admired and has actually led to important changes in the US landscape such as the formation of JStreet.

Sorry to see you so unhinged, RBRADL!

Your comment is wrong in almost every respect.

You say, "popular words used by people who think like you, such as canard, shoddy, or anti-Semite have little or no meaning in the world of today - you think that they are loaded with emotion and charged with harsh retribution - they are not - they are a silly joke with no real impact..."

I never suggested that they are loaded with emotion or "charged with "harsh retribution" (whatever that means). My guess is that some people are horrified at the prospect of being "outed" as an anti-Semite and some people couldn't care less. It must have provoked quite an emotional reaction in Andrew Sullivan; after all shortly after Wieseltier published his accusations, Sullivan penned a detailed, heart-felt, if dimwitted response to why Wieseltier had to say. My guess that other people shrug off the charge of anti-Semitism in much the manner you suggest. My guess is that Professor Walt is in that category. He's been accused of it so many times that at this point it probably rolls of his shoulders. In a sense, it's too late for Walt. He's so embittered by all the criticism that he's taken that when it comes to Israel he can no longer think straight. His opinions on the subject are so over the top that they are now viewed as ranting by all but a marginalized and largely ignored base of kooks.

Referring to accusations of anti-Semitism you say, “your ritual abuse of these words has reduced them to background noise."

There's no "ritual abuse." Like many others, you assume that to accuse someone of anti-Semitism is to accuse someone of being like Hitler. But that's ridiculous. Some anti-Semites do support Hitler's aims; some are fascists. A significant portion of Arab fundamentalists fit into this category; but surely not Andrew Sullivan or Professor Walt. Their anti-Semitism, while unpleasant, is simply a mild form of bigotry that despite their best intentions they are unable to control. They get along fine with individual Jews; they enjoy attending Bar Mitzvahs and Passover Seders. It's just the national aspirations of the Jewish people that they cannot abide. As I said, they are garden variety anti-Semites.

Finally RBRADL, you say, "you should be ashamed - I find your reference to the Irish - my race - to be reprehensible and detestable - much worse than what you call anti-Semitic."

You need to learn how to read, I didn't refer to the Irish or to your race. It was Andrew Sullivan who did that. I was providing a verbatim quote from his response to Leon Wieseltier. If you find the comments about the Irish objectionable, it is his comments that you are objecting to, not mine.

Geez, just when you've reached the point of essentially saying—as I did recently, as expressed in another thread here—that of course given the phantasmagoric nature of the Holocaust many jews are going to be hyper-sensitive to anti-semitism and so this ought to be given lots of slack but also politely not be allowed to distract from the real issues of our Mideast policies, along comes Wigwag with this hyper-articulate piece just begging to be responded to.

In that other thread and in his usual erudite way Jacob Blues keenly cited a well-made point made by Mike Kinsley where Kinsley talked about jews' sensitivity to comments or etc. that have some "historic association with some of the classic themes of anti-Semitism." And, again, I think this is not only understandable, but that it's only right and just that non-jews of goodwill and good faith grant them the absolute right to that.

But the problem it seems to me is when that sensitivity does turn to hyper-sensitivity because it is then that, to me at least, it turns so quickly incoherent, and indeed can come to resemble nothing so much as the desire on the part of the hyper-sensitive not to look for friends, but, perversely, to only make enemies. And I can hardly think of any better or clearer examples of how this hypersensitivity goes wrong than in both Wigwag's piece and Leon Wieseltier's too.

In Wieseltier's piece, for instance, with what does he slam Sullivan the hardest in terms of coming closest to saying he is an anti-semite? Well, it's his gross, but true-enough characterization of Sullivan's perception of there being "good jews" and "bad jews." (With Sullivan's "bad" ones of course being the ones pushing ME policies he doesn't like.)

So what's wrong with this as per Wieseltier? Well, there's no better way to put it than that he sees this as having "an historic association with [one of] the classic themes of anti-Semitism": Thus, Wieseltier says darkly, this distinction is "a practice with a sordid history."

But of course this is just ... nuts. Hypersensitivity run amok—to the point of seeing the precise opposite of what is there—because, after all, what is anti-semitism but the idea that there *are* no good jews and bad jews but only bad jews? That ... there are no important moral distinctions that can be made between them; that they *all* share some common negative moral vice or characteristic. Gross stereotyping, aggregating, etc. and etc. I.e., classic racism.

And what of Wigwag's piece above? Essentially, in my view at least, it's Wigwag also veering into the same hypersensitivity. (Albeit not as unthinkingly or crudely as Wieseltier.) Because what does he do but charge that despite Walt and Sullivan both not just supporting the right of Israel to exist but indeed doing so as continually, loudly, prominently, expressly, and repeatedly for as long as can be remembered, their central anti-semitic fault is ... Wigwag's perception that they have a problem with "the national aspirations of the Jewish people"!

Using this metric, one is moved to ask Wigwag, just what exactly can *anyone* do to escape being seen as an anti-semite by you? Join the IDF?

Again I think such hypersensitivity is only somewhat understandable and Wigwag clearly seems a good guy with his heart in the right place. And he's obviously not just knee-jerk slandering given his citing of his logic that what shows Walt and Sullivans' true colors is that they don't pay nearly or any as much attention to any *other* groups' "national aspirations."

But of course there's a simply stupifyingly obvious and complete answer to that, which is that no other groups' "national aspirations" are *anywhere* near to being as relevant/important/consequential to the U.S. right now as are those of many jewish folks and their aspirations for Israel. So of *course* Walt and Sullivan and many others are talking alot about Israel and its partisans in the U.S.; the national aspirations of the South Ossetians to secede from Georgia just ain't got the same degree of importance to the U.S.

Yet, despite what strikes me as the obviousness of this, that hypersensitivity of Wigwag's has clouded even that from him. A testament to the power of even the most legitimately held emotion to affect our thinking.

As I said, this to me has led to what seems nothing less than a passion for perceiving (and, via so branding to some extent, also making) enemies. Again, Walt and Sullivan both are vociferous supporters not just of Israel's right to exist, but staunch advocates that the U.S. should guarantee that existence even. Nevermind though, Walt, Sullivan, Tutu, Mandela, Judt, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, Richard Goldstone, the Norwegians, the Turks ... all anti-semites, and the list goes on and on and grows daily. And in reaction to all this kind of perceived anti-semitism Israel has descended into almost pure reactionism: Against the settlements? Anti-semitism! So the settlements are there in such numbers and sizes now that even prominent Israeli leaders acknowledge the validity of talking about a bi-national state which means the end of Israel proper even as a jewish state.

Forget self-inflicted wounding, this has come to resemble nothing so much as a suicide.

This is way too long already for which I apologize, but I also can't help but adding that while I think everyone ought to deeply think about the utterly understandable nature of why we see the kind of hypersensitivity I see, there is also something I think the hypersensitive themselves ought to be a little *more* sensitive too as well. And that is that it can at the very least seem more than just a little ... graceless to present oneself as so supremely concerned with the slightest hint of racism in the form of anti-semitism given what might gently be called the racial issues that not only exist in Israel today vis a vis anti-arabism, but indeed the racial issues that lies at the very heart of Israel's existence.

It is, after all, a state whose very raison d'etre is that it exists for one ethno-religious group and one such group only, and the number of that group who say that maybe it's time that this is changed so that Israel is no longer a "jewish state" are so few as to be laughable. Good reasons in my view, I'm a zionist too, but clearly there are some racial-type issues at work here so rendering that gracelessness to see Israeli partisans talk as if zionists are the most pluralistic people in the world. And this of course doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the issues of racism raised in the founding of Israel with the Nakba, nor the racism behind the ethnic cleansing ideas of popular Avigdor Lieberman, nor the gross daily discrimination against arabs practiced every day by Israel, and on and on. Those "issues" after all might be said to be grinding Palestinians even to death every day. And yet we are supposed to fall down and die at some vague perceived scent of anti-semitism of Steve Walt or Andrew Sullivan which matters not a whit compared to the former?

Can't be hyper-sensitive and yet deny everyone else's right to be sensitive to other things too....

Sin Nombre asks,

"Using this metric, one is moved to ask Wigwag, just what exactly can *anyone* do to escape being seen as an anti-semite by you? Join the IDF?"

No, Professor Walt doesn't have to join the IDF. Even if he were inclined, based on that photograph of him on the USS Harry S. Truman that he posted on February 1st, he doesn't look like he's in shape for it.

The answer to your question Sin Nombre, is that Professor Walt needs to stop obsessing about Israel and Jews. Try an exercise; go back and count the number of posts on Professor Walt's blog in the last month and then count the number pertinent to Israel or to American Jews who support Israel. Like the classic anti-Semite, Walt just can't seem to get Jews or their national aspirations out of his mind. Reading Walt's comments remind me of the days of my youth in New York City when I used to go down to 42nd Street to eat in the Horn and Hardart Automat. Frequently you could find some disheveled old coot, standing in the corner bemoaning how the Jews were taking over the world. Walt's posts on Israel and Americans who support Israel are just about as perspicacious as the drivel coming out of that old man's mouth.

It's fine for Walt to be critical of Israel; there's alot to be critical about. But when an otherwise intelligent Harvard Professor who should know better caricatures everything that Israel and its supporters do while virtually ignoring the behavior of the other side of the conflict (except to bitterly decry how terribly they have it and how defenseless they are) it doesn't take much to figure out what his motivations are. By the way, there are many severe critics of Israel. Steve Clemons, at the Washington Note is one of them; there are many others. Yet they're not anti-Semites; they express severe criticism of Israel without crossing the line that Professor Walt crosses all the time.

Let me respond to a few other comments that you made in your response to me:

You say,

"But of course there's a simply stupefying obvious and complete answer to that, which is that no other groups' "national aspirations" are *anywhere* near to being as relevant/important/consequential to the U.S. right now as are those of many Jewish folks and their aspirations for Israel. So of *course* Walt and Sullivan and many others are talking alot about Israel and its partisans in the U.S."

No one doubts that what's happening between Israelis and Palestinians impacts American interests; but do you really believe that no other groups have national aspirations that are anywhere near as important?

What about the aspirations of the Kurds in Iraq (or the Shia and Sunni for that matter); do you think their aspirations might have a profound impact on American interests? What about the multitude of separate ethnic, religious and linguistic groups in Pakistan, many of whom have independence movements? Do you think their national aspirations and the implications those aspirations have for the viability of Pakistan might impact the United States?

The point is not that Walt gives disproportionate attention to Israel and its American Jewish supporters it's that his attention to that subject to the exclusion of the others is truly obsessive. Like it or not, that is revealing.

Your overall theme that Jews may be hypersensitive to the appearance of anti-Semitism is not without some merit. After all there are tens of millions of Jews and non-Jews who are still alive today who were living when the holocaust in Europe took place and still remember it. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in Arab lands under the worst type of oppression are still alive and remember that bitter experience. Many white Americans complain bitterly that African-American seem overly attached to the idea that racism still exists in the United States more than 175 years after the end of slavery. Those white Americans think African Americans are over-sensitive and should, at long last, get over their obsession with the "legacy of slavery." Your complaint about Jewish hypersensitivity is very similar to that complaint about the racial sensitivities of African Americans.

Finally, you suggest that Jewish complaints or "hypersensitivity" about anti-Semitism is counterproductive because it does little but make more enemies for Jews and for Israelis. I think you're incorrect about that. Israel has never had more friends in the world than it does now. 95 percent of the American Congress is on the side of Israel and the American President understands that it is politically unviable to challenge Israel too directly. Most Americans don't care about Israel or Palestine one way or the other, but of those that do, support for Israel is dramatically higher than support for Palestinians.

In Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Poland the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic States have the most pro-Israel governments that they have ever had. The future superpowers of the world, China and India, have problems with Muslim insurgents that make them far more sympathetic to Israel than they ever were before. Don't believe the hype; any objective analysis suggests that internationally, Israel's position has never been stronger.

Besides, while in the past Jews may have had to rely on the charity of other nations to support them in their time of need, now thanks to the IDF, Israel is more than capable enough of defending its interests and the interests of Jews around the world.

That's why the petty bigotry of people like Andrew Sullivan and Steve Walt is no longer nearly as consequential as it once was.

You know I hear your words, Wigwag, but like watching some bits of flotsam in a whirlpool they all still circle down to what seems to me the same incoherent focal point: It's anti-semitic to believe all jews share some common negative characteristic, it's anti-semetic to believe all jews share the same views, and it's anti-semitic now for anyone such as Sullivan to believe that only some jews share the same views. It's anti-semetic to deny jews the right of their national aspirations, but it's also anti-semitic now for anyone such as Sullivan or Walt to support such an aspiration even if they also support their own country going to war to guarantee that jewish aspiration.

Step back a hair I say and look at the result of this kind of hypersensitivity when applied to something as formless and protean as "the classic themes of anti-Semitism." Is there anything at all that *can't* be called "anti-semitic" when you apply that level of scrutiny to that level of generality?

And in stepping back look too at the bigger context this is taking place in: The rest of the world sees Israelis implacably displacing Palestinian homes and villages, painting the plains of Northern Lebanon where children play with over a million anti-personnel bomblets, sees the picture of the burnt and severed head of that little Palestinian girl after the Gaza operation, sees an obviously careful (and jewish!) jurist say there is credible evidence that Israel not only committed war crimes but crimes against humanity in Gaza, and what kind of message is going to be received by many?

Just one: That really the only kind or racism that jews or Israeli partisans really care about is anti-semitism. That ... it's okay to scatter anti-personnel bomblets amongst those little arab rug-rats and use white phosphorus over the heads of them too, but my God the horror if, using some incredibly extended (and not to say convoluted and rococo) arguments someone can say they detect a molecule resembling anti-semitism in anyone's thought processes.

Okay though, you say that this isn't really doing Israel much harm and you do point to some not insignificant evidence that that's true. That, essentially, Israel has never had more friends. (And I think you might also have noted in this regard that it can seem that never has anti-semitism ever been more at bay in the world too.)

But things change, and as I noted before even many prominent, thoughtful Israelis like Olmert and Barak—who are appalled at the idea—note that Israel's future can be looking distinctly apartheid-like, and that isn't sustainable and Israel's very existence as a jewish state is being drawn into question now. So in this respect I think you're arguing not just with me, but with them.

Beyond that also there is the question of simple fairness: No matter how legitimately felt, false, insidious accusations against people are wrong, and while it's not right, most people are not going to sympathize with those who make them when they in turn are made the target of others spouting their own insidious ones back.

Whether emtirely true or only partially so, there is nothing new regarding the blatant anti-Semitism of Stephen Walt and Andrew Sullivan. Like so many others, this is the way "them two" are trying to make a living. Not a very honest living but one that puts food on their table. Together with other anti-Semites, they snif around the Jewish people trying to discover what makes them such extraordinarily creative people. A fistful of 12 million are facing across the killing fields of history 1600 million Christians and 1400 million Muslims. In other words, 12 against 3000.
After 1700 years of being subject to unbelievable Racial Terrorism, first at the hands of Christian bigots and then Muslim jihaddists, I believe that Jews are ready for whatever might come their way, including World Armagedon.
With the end of the "Palestinian" state chimera, plus the liquidation of Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, etc. and etc., the Arabs residing in Cis-Jordan will be re-located among their brethren in Saudi Arabia or other venue that will guarantee the free exercise of their religion and all other rights specified in the Koran and the Sharia. They will thus be able to take care of their lives without outside interference, especially not from Jews or even Christians - their primary target.
End of a sordid story that is getting on everybody's nerves - especially after 9/11, 7/7, etc., etc. It is enough to see what is happening at any airport around the world to truly understand that the entire world is sick of Islamists and their allies, the anti-Semites.

Calling people out as individuals doesn't mean you're an anti-Semite. Calling out Jews as a group does. Giving them a chance to seek redemption and become 'one of the good ones' - either by atoning for killing Christ, or disavowing Zionism, or whatever the particular beef is - doesn't change that.

If you think rapists should be punished then publicly criticize rapists, but don't start complaining about 'a wing of the US male community'. If you're a tough-on-crime type and you start going off on rants about about the criminal wing of the American black community then you're going to look like, and be called, and probably are, a racist. If you have problems with over-zealous Israel supporters, then complain about over-zealous Israel supporters, *not* 'a wing of American Jewry'.

TNR hosts a diverse range of opinions, including people who are from the Israeli far-left. If being part of the "Israel lobby" includes everything short of calling Israel the next Nazi Germany, then I'm really glad 90% of America is in the Israel Lobby.

I'm not going to get sucked into defining some shadowy group of Jews. There are lobby groups for Israel, AIPAC obviously, and now J-Street. There are also Jewish individuals who have pull with people in Washington that make decisions. The same could be said for any national-ethnic group, it is just that Jews as a group, for many and well-worn reasons, are highly visible.

TNR has loads of articles about Israel from across the spectrum - how is this propaganda? Yes, they and many other mainstream publications have lashed out at Prof. Walt's article and book. I'm sure Prof. Walt had to deal with the unpleasantness of seeing a lot of bad words directed toward him. But please explain to me how his career has suffered.

Commentary, however, is a beyond-the-pale right-wing rag that is so obsessed with the rightness of its politics that it recently published an article that heaped, without irony, the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes on American Jews that do not like Sarah Palin. Lumping TNR and Commentary together shows me that you do not understand that people who wish well for Israel are not some powerful McCarthyite monolith, ready to crush anyone in its way.

One other thing: smearing people as anti-Semites is bad. The whole brouhaha about AS as an anti-Semite is beyond absurd. Even LW has said so in his meta-reply. I do not deny that there is a hyper-sensitivity amongst many Jews; there is good reason, however, for Jewish folks to be hyper-sensitive given events of the past century. That said, I stand by my criterion for bigotry in general as expressed in my original post.

Obviously Wigwag while I don't agree with you about Sullivan being an anti-semite, and while I don't think he's as bad as many others, nevertheless I think you really hit the mark on the state of punditocracy these days.

It's really just ridiculous, although I think we ourselves are to blame as much for favoring the current situation as they are occupying it. But the reality just seems to be that what every ... editorialist today (meaning also alot of people who pretend they are just reporters) really really wants isn't seriously to become knowledgeable about this or that, or to even become a particularly sober and accurate analyst in general even. Instead it's ... celebrity-hood they're so clearly after:ddsddddddddf "Oh to be one of Chris Mathews, regulars!", one can just hear the sighs.

So how do they get there? By the long slow process of becoming very knowledgeable about this or that, or acquiring that sobriety and perspective? Hell no, by becoming essentially a totem of this or that little social segment. And then staying that way. So that now people don't talk so much about this or that article or opinion piece or etc., instead they are ... Paul Krugmanites, or William Kristolites, or etc., etc. And forget much discrimination after that in terms of ever expecting 'em to selectively and thoughtfully just accept this or that argument from one of these totems but not have any opinion on the rest: No, they are totem people; they just *love* "Paul" or "Bill" or "Andrew" or "Rush" or ... whomever almost completely unreservedly, and anticipatorily too. No matter what they say in the future, no matter how wrong they are, it doesn't matter: They are totems of what their particular constituency *desires* the truth to be, not of what the truth *is.* So don't matter how wrong they are, time after time, they aren't really being looked to provide the truth or some informed judgment, they are instead looked to so as to provide their constituencies *take* on what the past news is, and express it's future desire as to what it's *going* to be.

And so, of course, forget substance, and forget being right or wrong about same, no matter how extremely wrong you've been even and no matter how big an issue it was. All that is just absolutely besides the point.

To me at least the absolute apotheosis of this phenomenon can be seen with Maureen Dowd and her acolytes. Never once have I at least ever seen her even seem to care whether what she says is valid. (Much being genuinely insightful or etc.. Instead her entire oeuvre consists of nothing more than being a ... social signifier. A mere instructor in what's politically fashionable this week and what is not, and absolutely nothing more. And of course as can be expected given her raising modern punditry to this pure and exquisite level, it is she who seems to have the most committed and adoring followers, eagerly looking forward to each forthcoming MoDo column not to learn anything substantive whatsoever or even learn an opinion on the substantive validity of anything, but instead to merely learn how to *feel* about this or that, and what to sneer at and what or who the au currant enthusiasm of the week favors.

As you noted, it really is terrible.

I completely agree. Maureen Dowd is the worst of a terrible lot!