“Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 percent control. That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the U.S. (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.” – Noam Chomsky (leftist linguistics professor at MIT)
“I have no plan whatever for challenging ‘the Jews’ for what’s done in their name. At the same time, I understand the…unnaturally bloated Jewish influence in American cultural affairs and political life (particularly relating to the Middle East) ….” – Bradley Smith (Holocaust “revisionist”)
“Revisionists are not at all irrational hateful people but scholars who offer legitimate criticisms of the Holocaust story.” – David Duke
“Indeed, it is the charge of anti-Semitism itself that is toxic.” – Pat Buchanan
Their point is that if Jews really are the enemies of the state, one cannot be charged with anti-Semitism merely for pointing that truth out. This convenient argument expunges the record of anti-Semitism these forces have so justly earned. After all, one can’t be accused of holding to a venomous worldview that doesn’t exist. This frees them to pursue their anti-Jewish agendas.
Take the above-mentioned Juan Cole, who accuses Zionists of holding “romantic” notions of “eternal ‘peoples’ ” and “mystical” connections to a “land”:
Nineteenth century romantic nationalism of the Zionist sort posits eternal “peoples” through history, who have a blood relationship (i.e. are a “race”) and who have a mystical relationship with some particular territory…But there are no eternal nations through history…Since there are no eternal nations based in “blood,” they cannot have a mystical connection to the “land.” People get moved around.
Cole all but screams at Jews, “You were dispossessed. Get over it!” Yet in the same breath, he argues that Zionism is evil because it deprives Palestinian “peoples” of a “land” to which they’re apparently mystically connected:
Personally, I think that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the American academy…Usually the narrative blames the Palestinians for their having been kicked off their own land, then blames them again for not going quietly.
Such incoherent arguments show that Anti thinking is warped with an animus against a certain group of people. This allows Cole and all the others listed above to conclude that if the Jews have a home, they must have displaced others and are therefore oppressors; but if Jews are displaced, well, that’s life.
That the Antis are most fundamentally anti-Jewish can be summed up in a favorite and pregnant Anti word: neocons:
“Neo-conservatism…has unleashed a series of wars against foreign countries that posed no threat whatever to the U.S.” – Lew Rockwell Jr.
“We still tiptoe around putting a name to…the neoconservatives’ agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations…It’s time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify. Dual loyalties.” – Kathleen and Bill Christison (left-wing columnists for Counterpunch)
“Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.” – Pat Buchanan
“Jewish roots and currents…make the neocon movement nothing more than a Jewish supremacist apparatus.” – David Duke
Little wonder, then, that the far left is now ready to embrace the Buchananite right:
“Over the past few years I have been gaining much respect for one Patrick J. Buchanan…[America] has been hijacked by a neocon cabal that does not have their best interests, or this country’s best interests, at heart.” – Web column by Craig Colbert, “A Liberal’s Second Look at Pat Buchanan.”