The situation may be symbolized by Malmö, Sweden. In a survey by the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Jewish attitudes was lowest in Sweden of all European countries—a mere 4 percent.12 But Malmö is today heavily Muslim, and its tiny Jewish population, comprising a single congregation maintained by an American rabbi from the global Chabad movement, has suffered harassment and abuse. Its members confessed to Goldberg that they live in fear. “Teenagers . . . told me that wearing a Star of David necklace can incite a beating,” he reported. Yet Goldberg saw nary a policeman when he attended Sabbath services together with eighteen other worshippers and accompanied them as they rushed through the streets anxiously afterward. In a similar spirit of indifference, municipal officials of The Hague rejected appeals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to block a rally in support of ISIS at which participants, some with faces masked ominously, chanted “death to the Jews.”13
If a mixture of Israel hatred and anti-Semitism is most widespread among Muslims, it is not uniquely their own. Alas, far from it, although among Westerners who want to remain respectable, such sentiments are invariably accompanied by insistence that the speaker is no anti-Semite. Perhaps the first in recent decades to execute this rhetorical maneuver was Patrick J. Buchanan, who ignited a controversy following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 by declaring that, “there are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” This drew sharp rebukes to which Buchanan in turn replied that anti-Semitism is “a grave sin . . . a variant of racism,” of which he was completely innocent. But he then he went on to sprinkle his columns with barbs against Jews and to defend Nazi war criminals, including some who professed innocence and others who confessed guilt. Bizarrely, he went so far as to embrace the claim of Holocaust-deniers that the exhaust from diesel fuel (used by the Nazis in some gas chambers) is in fact nonlethal (a theory he conspicuously made no attempt to vindicate by testing it on himself).
It is hard to say whether Buchanan’s initial sallies against Israel were motivated by an underlying antipathy to Jews that he had kept under wraps or whether his dislike of Israel was the starting point from which he developed a broader hostility. It is a question that applies equally to others—for example, John Mearsheimer. He and Stephen Walt declared in their initial paper on “the Lobby” (that grew into their famous book) that far from being anti-Semitic they were “philo-Semites.” But a couple of years later, Mearsheimer proposed the thesis that Jews fall into two categories: “righteous Jews,” meaning those who hate Israel or at least blame it for the conflict with the Arabs, and all the rest, whom he labeled “Afrikaners.” This shed little light on Jews but a lot on how Mearsheimer felt toward them. Then he provided a cover blurb for The Wondering Who by the Israeli-born anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon, who argues that “Jewishness is an ethno-centric ideology driven by exclusiveness, exceptionalism, [and] racial supremacy.” Atzmon topped this off by writing “65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask. . . . Why were the Jews hated?”14—suggesting they got what they deserved in the Holocaust. Mearsheimer glossed all this with the encomium: “a fascinating and provocative book [that] should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.”15
Atzmon boldly proclaims himself a “self-hating Jew,” but Mearsheimer and Buchanan insist they are not anti-Semites. Buchanan complains that “anti-Semitism” is “a word . . . used to frighten, intimidate, censor, and silence; to cut off debate; to . . . smear men’s reputations.” And Mearsheimer writes that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti-Semite.”16 Others have said much the same. Given that virtually every editorial of the New York Times and every column by its foreign affairs commentator Thomas Friedman that deals with the Middle East criticizes Israel, at least in part, and that this is also true for most of the major print and electronic media, except the Wall Street Journal and Fox TV; given that much the same can be said for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and most of the other intellectual and foreign policy magazines and that the New Republic, the Atlantic, and such Jewish outlets as Tablet and the Forward routinely include sharp critical asides even in articles that defend Israel; and given, too, that the Middle East Studies Association, the dominant professional organization of academics who teach in this field is fiercely critical of Israel, to put it mildly, and one might cite much more in this vein—given all that, Mearsheimer’s claim is preposterous. It would be more accurate to turn his charge around and say that anyone who claims that “anyone who criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-Semite” is probably an anti-Semite seeking to preempt criticism.
A similar example is the blogger Andrew Sullivan who has spent half a decade or more pouring vitriol on Israel and its supporters, all the while complaining that “criticizing AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is something forbidden for non-Jews—for fear of being labeled an anti-Semite.” How forbidden is it? I counted forty-five blog posts on Sullivan’s site with “AIPAC” in the title, all in attack mode and without scruple for accuracy. (This was in addition to two hundred–plus titles about Israel—all in a similar spirit.) AIPAC and seemingly all other supporters of Israel are routinely referred to by Sullivan as “the Greater Israel lobby,” “Greater Israel” being an allusion to that small faction in Israel that opposes trading land for peace, a position rejected by the overwhelming majority of Israelis and almost all of Israel’s supporters in the United States.
These diatribes prompted Sullivan’s former colleague at the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, to offer this indictment: “the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy . . . that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group . . . has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”17 Jonathan Chait, a former colleague of both men, entered the fray, agreeing with Wieseltier’s characterization of Sullivan’s viewpoint but objecting to Wieseltier’s imputation of anti-Semitic motive: “just because an idea has a revolting provenance, it does not follow that everybody who subscribes to any version of it has the same motive.”18 And the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg seconded Chait on this point, although noting that Sullivan “disseminate[s] calumnies that can cause hatred of Jews” and adds that the role of AIPAC should be discussed “without prejudice; without the axiomatic assumption that American Jews who love Israel are disloyal to America; and without the Judeocentrism of the neo-Lindbergh set.”19 In other words, Chait and Goldberg agree that Sullivan indulges in fantastic and defamatory accusations against Jews, but they do not believe he hates Jews in his heart. Much the same was said about Buchanan in 1990 by people who had worked with him. It may all be true, but it strikes me as a distinction without a difference.
The British MP George Galloway is another who waxes indignant when accused of anti-Semitism. He calls Israel “a very ugly society”20 and says he “wish[es] for the destruction of that political state,”21 which he refers to as “this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel.”22 Galloway embraced Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1994, declaring “we are with you . . . until victory, until Jerusalem.”23 He also declared himself to have been so “enthralled” by Atzmon’s anti-Jewish book that he “read [his wife] a chapter . . . every night.”24 Yet, when a reporter for the Guardian tweeted that Galloway was an anti-Semite, he sued her under Britain’s notoriously vague libel laws in which even the truth of a statement is not an absolute defense.
Roger Waters (perhaps a friend of Atzmon’s since the latter, a professional musician, has sometimes played with Waters’s band, Pink Floyd)