Anti-Judaism
by William Kristol, The Weekly Standard
“How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews.” Thus the British journalist (and communist) William Norman Ewer, in the early part of the last century. The reply came from Cecil Browne: “But not so odd / As those who choose / A Jewish God / But spurn the Jews.”
Browne’s riposte may have won the poetic exchange. But Ewer’s anti-Judaism prevailed in the next decades in Europe. Buried there after World War II, hatred of the Jews flourished for the rest of the 20th century in the Middle East. Is anti-Judaism now enjoying a broader revival? It would seem so.
University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer came to Washington late last month along with his sidekick, Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Speaking to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, they attacked the “Israel lobby” (of which they claim I am a part) for its pernicious deeds, and singled out several Jews who served or serve in the Bush administration. These Jews, they explained, have special “attachments” in the Middle East. Their attachment? Their religious belief–Judaism. Bigotry now has an academic cachet.
