Adventures of the Anti-Semitism Czar

Actually, Hannah Rosenthal is the Anti-Anti-Semitism Czar, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, who finds himself squabbling with Atlantic Monthly colleague Andrew Sullivan:

Why is an American diplomat criticizing a foreign ambassador for his choice of speaking engagements in America? I asked three people who currently work in the State Department if they could recall an instance in which an official of their department ever criticized a foreign ambassador for such a thing -- or for anything -- and they said no. In fact, the State Department is fairly upset at Rosenthal for speaking at all about the alleged political proclivities of a foreign ambassador, not about her specific criticism.

What this is about: Barely a month after being appointed to a State Department post, Rosenthal slammed Israeli ambassador Michael Oren for turning down an invitation to speak to the liberal Jewish group J Street.

Why Sully stuck his nose into this argument: ?????

My suggestion to Jeffrey Goldberg: Ignore Sully. It's a lot easier than you may think.

UPDATE: Sammy at Yid With Lid has background on the Rosenthal dust-up. Anybody surprised to learn that J Street got its start with funding from . . . George Soros?

Armageddon alert? Israelis convene meeting of diplomatic corps

Readers of Middle East tea leaves will want to pay close attention to Kenny Solomon's post at Red State:

Nothing like this has ever happened before with Israel . . . Sure, they called home an ambassador or two for odd expense accounting, a chief of mission for offending some peace-lover via a newspaper quote and maybe even had real problems with a few of the folks they thought were on the side of their own homeland . . . They even had all European ambassadors back a few times for conferences on the Lisbon thing. Every nation holds "home field" events with their foreign staff members.
But nothing like this meeting that started today . . .

He's talking about a conference now in progress where "Israel's ambassadors and consuls general serving throughout the world will discuss broad diplomatic and strategic issues." Every top Israeli diplomat -- all of them.

That which is unprecedented is never routine and seldom insignificant. If the current unrest in Iran doesn't overthrow the Ahmadinejad regime . . . Well, put it this way: If you're the night watchman at an Iranian nuclear facility, make sure you don't miss a payment on your insurance premiums.

The possibility of an IDF strike in the near future? Perhaps more real than we imagine. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but when you see something like this, however, the line between paranoid and realistic becomes blurred.

Thanks to my good friend Nathan Cossey for the heads-up.

2009 Malkin Awards: I'm a FINALIST!

Andrew Sullivan has nominated me four times for the prestigious "Malkin Award" and now I see that I am a finalist for the 2009 Malkin. The competition is tough -- I'm up against Erick Erickson, Michael Goldfarb and Glenn Beck, among other worthies -- but let's be honest: None of them can compete with the Greatest Hypothetical Evah!

"Swear to God, if they ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be 'forward march' and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order 'about face' would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast."

Sully later made that hypothetical hyperbole the basis of accusing me of advocating genocide(!?!), which of course I was not. Peaceful by nature, I grew up a few miles from the ruins of New Manchester Mill -- burned by Stoneman's cavalry in 1864 -- and therefore have always had a keen understanding of what war really means (cf., Hiroshima).

Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah recognize only one definition of "peace": Dead Jews. So when they start blowing up buses and firing rockets at civilians, these terrorist monsters are sending out an invitation to war, and they can't complain about getting an RSVP from the IDF.

Notice that this perspective doesn't require playing moral referee between Jews and Palestinians, or settling the historical grievances between them. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the reality that more than 60 years after Israel declared its independence, her terrorist enemies don't even recognize Israel's right to existence, and endlessly foment hatred against Jews. Ergo, Sonny Corleone in Gaza.

However, you don't have to share my idiosyncratic view of geopolitics to vote for me in the Malkin Awards competition. Any accusation of bloodthirsty warmongering based on that particular quote is invalid under that widely recognized codicil of the Blog Ethics Code known as the Glenn Greenwald Rule:

Anything said while ridiculing Glenn Greenwald is OK, because he always deserves it.

Hurry up and vote for me in the Malkin Awards, and be sure to hit my tip jar, because you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Genesis 12:3.

Is Andrew Sullivan an anti-Semite?

I certainly don't think so, and consider it terribly unfortunate that Sullivan has exposed himself to this damaging accusation through his reflexive enthusiasm for all things Obama -- just as he once was denounced as a "neocon" because of his reflexive enthusiasm for all things Bush.

Sullivan got over his unrequited Dubya man-crush, and maybe his current see-no-evil attitude toward Israel's enemies will fade if Sullivan discovers that his new presidential idol also has feet of clay. So while I have called Sullivan a menace to society and advocated his deportation, he's probably not a Holocaust denier or a peddler of blood libel.

My friend Dan Riehl called attention to this accusation against Sullivan, by way of firing a shot at Conor Friedersdorf. I've fired my share of shots at Conor, but I certainly would never accuse him of Jew-hating. The extremely toxic nature of the "anti-Semite" label is such that I am extremely hesitant to apply it.

Consider the case of Taki Theodoracopulos, for example. Taki has been called an anti-Semite so often that some people accept the accusation at face value. But when National Review published David Frum's "Unpatriotic Conservatives" -- one of many ill-advised editorial decisions in the erratic career of Rich Lowry -- Taki responded in memorable fashion:

If this bum Frum thinks he's the only one who cannot see a belt without hitting below it, he's got another thing coming. . . . He is a cheap Canadian careerist who jumped on the neocon bandwagon and is now using anti-Semitism as a stick to beat us with. Mind you, to be called "unpatriotic" and an "anti-Semite" by this shameless publicity hound has to be a compliment.

Because Taki is independently wealthy, he has no need to fear that his career will be damaged by these accusations, and so he seldom even bothers to notice the charges and only rarely responds to them. This has, unfortunately, resulted in Taki's name being used -- as my own name has sometimes been used -- as a sort of Rosetta Stone that allows liberal mind-readers to decrypt the otherwise Secret Code Of Hate that allegedly unites the Right.

This business of liberals trying to tell conservatives who is "acceptable" has bothered me for years, and I don't like it any better when conservatives play the same game. Despite Frum's misguided centrist tendencies, for example, I have risked my populist street-cred by continuing to be his friend (unlike David Brooks, who is the Living Embodiment Of All Things Unholy.) If I can be Frum's friend, shall I allow him to say that Taki is "unacceptable"?

My own indirect connection with Taki has horrified some of my friends, though the explanation is innocent enough. A couple years ago, I was invited to speak about media bias in a panel discussion of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, where Duke graduate student Richard Spencer was one of my fellow panelists. Spencer subsequently became editor of Taki's Magazine.

When I got an itch to write about "Melissa Beech," who boasted in a Daily Beast column about being a rich man's mistress, it seemed a good time to accept Spencer's longstanding invitation to publish at Taki's (whose proprietor is reputed to have had many mistresses). That first article led to my writing a series a columns about love, sex and marriage at Taki's, a series I hope to continue now that election season is over.

Did I fear the accusation that, by publishing at Taki's Magazine, I was thereby endorsing the alleged anti-Semitism of Taki or some of his magazine's other contributors? Of course not. My philo-Semitic bona fides are so impregnable that I rather suspect Taki and Spencer have caught more grief than I have: "How dare you publish that Jew-loving Zionist fanatic?"

My Zionist fanaticism -- Netanyahu is a pacifist squish by comparison -- once led me to advance a bit of strategic military advice for the IDF, a war-game scenario contingent upon the hypothetical event of my becoming the first Gentile prime minister of Israel.

You might suppose that a thought-experiment so farfetched would be immune to misinterpretation -- as fools often misinterpret hypotheticals -- as wishful thinking, but you would be wrong. Andrew Sullivan gave me a Malkin Award nomination (my third such honor, though I may have lost count) and Sully has subsequently accused me of advocating genocide of the Palestinians.

"Peace Through Genocide" might be profitably marketed as the title of a comic novel by Chris Buckley, or as one of those ironic T-shirt slogans beloved by clever university students, but it clearly has shortcomings as a serious policy proposal.

It should therefore be unnecessary for me to deny that I am advocate of Palestinian genocide but, alas, there is the problem of the irony-impaired Andrew Sullivan, who has spent 15 months fomenting bizarre speculations about Sarah Palin's uterus. To be accused of genocidal hatred by such a notorious fool is an accusation that requires no denial.

Having been slimed by Sully for the indulgence of a far-fetched hypothetical, let me take another wild risk:

If Conor Friedersdorf were a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, so that he could speak his mind without fear of career repercussion, what would he say about Jews?

Nothing bad, I hope, and so I gladly stipulate that Conor Friedersdorf is no more a Jew-hater than Taki.

Or Pat Buchanan. Or Joe Sobran. Or Paul Gottfried. IYKWIMAITYD. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

UPDATE: Ann Altstein Altberg Althouse calls Sully a liar. Sarah Palin's Uterus agrees. Yehuda reveals that Palin's uterus is . . . the Mossad!

Reaganite Republican suspects the Learned Elders of Sullivanism have fomented this blog-war.

Is Obama bungling the Middle East?

Sammy Benoit thinks so:

President Obama's Middle East policy is in ruins. While the U.S. continues to press Israel for a settlement freeze (and a freeze on Jerusalem), Obama's strategy is falling apart piece by piece. He has turned the Israeli populace against him and strengthened the hand of Prime Minister Netanyahu. At the same time, he has eroded his own support among American Jews and other U.S. friends of Israel. This is why he has pressured political hacks such as Congressman Steve Israel to lend their names to the anti-Israel group known as J Street. . . .

You should read the whole thing. It seems Obama is repeating the errors of the Clinton administration, trying to make peace with people who don't actually want peace -- unless you define "peace" as the liquidation of Israel, which is the ultimate objective of Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Sammy blogs at Yid With Lid.