Prince of Darkness is the title of a new book about Richard Perle by a journalist named Alan Weisman. It has a chapter entitled “Perle and the Jews,” which begins with a discussion of how two scholars, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, have raised a topic, the influence of American Jews on American politics, that has “long been out of bounds in American political discussion.” For their pains, writes Weisman, the two academics have been branded as “anti-Semites” and their work labeled as “a modern equivalent of Mein Kampf.”
Despite being tarred in this way by their critics, the debate Walt and Mearsheimer have opened up helps to explain the fact that while “Jews make up only 2 percent of the American electorate, . . . Israel takes in by far more U.S. aid than any other country in the world.” Given that the Israel lobby focuses so heavily on the Middle East, its conduct inevitably raises “questions about true allegiances and loyalties, . . . [and] suspicions of darker activity such as espionage.”
All this is relevant for a discussion of Perle, writes Weisman, “because he is a Jew, albeit nominally, and because he is clearly a man of influence.” Indeed, Perle’s background has made him a symbol to many “of unchecked and unwarranted Jewish meddling in U.S. foreign policy.”
Among other things, Perle signed his name to a report about Israeli strategy, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm, which “was a blueprint for Israeli dominance in the [Middle East], a paean to Zionist aspirations, and biblical claims of divinely ordained destiny.” The appearance of this document in 1996 was “a Jew-hater’s delight, a gift that kept on giving, and lit up like a menorah on the radar screen of the millions who believe Israelis and American Jews run the world, economically, politically, and militarily.”
Connecting the Dots has some questions about Weisman’s take on these issues:
1. Who has compared Walt and Mearsheimer’s work to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as Weisman asserts?
A search of Nexis and Google draws a blank.
2. Is Richard Perle really “a symbol of unchecked and unwarranted Jewish meddling in U.S. foreign policy”?
Undoubtedly there are some people who believe this about Perle. Weisman does not say whether he is among them. But he puts forward “evidence” that it is true. Perle’s signature on the 1996 report is his smoking gun.
3. Does anything in this report support Weisman’s characterization of it as “a blueprint for Israeli dominance in the region, a paean to Zionist aspirations, and biblical claims of divinely ordained destiny”?
4. Is there anything in this report that makes it “a Jew-hater’s delight, a gift that kept on giving . . . [one that] lit up like a menorah on the radar screen of the millions who believe Israelis and American Jews run the world, economically, politically, and militarily”?
Connecting the Dots has provided links to the report; readers can draw their own conclusions.
5. Is Richard Perle truly a Jewish “prince of darkness” and a “hidden hand guiding D.C. power players”? Or is Alan Weisman, the author of all these characterizations, trading in time-honored anti-Semitic tropes?
6. Weisman’s book was reviewed by James Traub in the New York Times. Traub’s judgment of the book and its author is: “Weisman, no ideologue himself, gives Perle his due.” What does it say about Traub and the Sunday Times Book Review that Weisman’s take on Perle as a Jewish “Prince of Darkness” goes completely undiscussed?
Why are they antisemitic, again? What does antisemitism have to do with this? Am I, a Jew and supporter of Israel, to be called antisemitic for noting that the attack will save perhaps 5 Israeli lives over the next year? 5 Israeli lives are worth 500 civilian Palestinian lives? Really?
Ari, according to the 2004 working definition of anti-semitism (http://eumc.europa.eu/eumc/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf) adopted by the European Union Monitoring Center, the body in charge of monitoring acts of intolerance, racial hatred, xenophobia etc in Europe, ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ qualifies as anti-Semitism. This definition was endorsed in 2007 by the US State Department, whose special envoy on anti-Semitism defined the EUMC text as a ‘starting point in the fight against anti-Semitism.’ (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/56589.htm). So, given that the 60-something ‘of Jewish origin’ compare Israel’s actions in Gaza to the way Nazis handled the Warsaw Ghetto, it should not take Aristotle to realize that yours is a silly question.
The funny thing is that now Hamas also knows his names and when Hamas and similar organizations start killing Jews in Britain, this sh-t will be first on their list if for no other reason than because Islamists who proclaim their goal of killing all Jews will know their names and their “Jewish origin”.
Yes,5 Jewish lives are more important when dealing with terrorists and a Palestinian population which hates Jews.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123154826952369919.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
israel is committing war crimes
Lester,you would not know a war crime if the saw one.
6. you are probably right. luckily thee wall stret journal does
Do you need the Guardian to tell you Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky don’t have the best wishes of the Jewish people and Israel at heart?
Ari, we are not talking only about 10 or more Jews dead from rockets and hundreds injured. We are talking about million leaving in constant terror. I do not know where you live, but try to move to Sderot for a couple of months. And yes, for me 5 dead Jewish kids whose parents did not send rockets to Gaza are more important than 50 Arab kids who were used as human shields by their parents while those parents were killing Jewish kids indiscriminately bombing Jewish cities.
No supporter of Israel, Jewish or otherwise, can talk about 20% of population of Israel under rockets and dismiss it as nothing, because not enough Jewish kids died for his taste.
So can you please concentrate in genocide in Sudan? After all hundred times more kids are being killed there, than in Gaza. Do you ignore them because they are Black or because they are killed by Arabs?
Ari, whether you’re a Jew is beside the point. I’m a Christian, and that, too, is beside the point.
I concur wholeheartedly with The Times of London (January 10, 2009):
“Israel is an expression of outrage at the Holocaust and defiance of those who would turn a blind eye to history. It is also a country that in 60 years has justified its statehood by defending itself against those who deny its right to exist, preserving its democracy even when this has led it into diplomatic isolation, and building an economy that is the envy of the Middle East…The bitter lesson of this war is that Hamas cannot be allowed to win.”
Do you concur? If so, why? If not, why?
There’s a difference, though. The behaviors listed on the first page are called “[e]xamples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context”. They are not defined as antisemitic behaviors (i.e., a severely misguided individual could state any one of them without being antisemitic), nor do I think being “reminded” of the siege of the Warsaw ghetto qualifies as a Nazi comparison.
“Yes,5 Jewish lives are more important when dealing with terrorists and a Palestinian population which hates Jews.”
Mmm. And this is prosemitism? Terrorists’ lives are indeed far less valuable than innocent Israeli lives, but the lives of children, women? Even the lives of those men who are sympathetic to Hamas? This sentence is far, far worse than the Guardian letter.
“And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” Don’t tell me that only applies to Jews.
Why wouldn’t I publish it? It makes you look like a fool.
Question: Since when does Israel care what the EU says about anti-semitism? If we accept the EU’s view of anti-semitism, can we also accept their view on Israel’s war crimes?
Finally, maybe you missed this salient part of the document you cited:
“Criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
You see, the criticism is not leveled at Israel because it is Israel. Indeed any country that commits war crimes gets the criticism, like Serbia.
Israel is hated as no country has ever been hated. Feminists are insensitive to the honor murders committed by Palestinians and the sharia law that Hamas has adopted. They are totally unaware that Golda Meir was the first woman in history to be a head of government who was not the daughter or the wife of a previous head of government. Gay-rights activists are unaware that Israel has drafted openly gay men and women into its army since its founding moment and are blind to the hangings of homosexuals in Iran and to the fact that gay men have fled from the West Bank and elsewhere to seek political asylum in Israel.
In a world where everybody hates everybody else, anti-Semitism nevertheless stands out for being particularly widespread and persistent. Anti-Zionism is the child of anti-Semitism and is a force so strong that it has led Marxists and leftists, who agree with Islam on no issues whatsover, to support Islamic states and Islamic terrorists.
“And yes, for me 5 dead Jewish kids whose parents did not send rockets to Gaza are more important than 50 Arab kids who were used as human shields by their parents while those parents were killing Jewish kids indiscriminately bombing Jewish cities.”
This is where we differ. I think killing 50 children for 5 children is simple immorality.
“Do you concur? If so, why? If not, why?”
If Israel’s goal were to topple Hamas and replace it with Fatah (or anything else; I would see a mission to reconquer the strip entirely much more positively), then I would support the Israeli mission, because its outcome would ultimately be “good enough”; the “collateral damage” would surely be outweighed by peace and stability. But Operation Cast Lead seems designed to do two things:
1. To stop the rocket attacks.
2. To punish Hamas.
I support both goals without reserve. I do not, however, think that they should be pursued when so many lives are at stake. The long-term benefits are too unclear (or too weak) to justify the number of deaths that we’ve seen. Again, if there were a “3″ (to topple Hamas and rebuild the Gaza strip), then I’d probably be supporting this strike. For the Palestinians, this attack only results in more death and destruction, while the relief that the Israelis receive is comparatively less (I am not in any way marginalizing the suffer of the families in Sderot).
Scholar in Training – Thanks for your reply. The answer to your (presumably) rhetorical question is that not only does Israel care about what the EU says about anti-semitism, but in the framework of their bilateral relation there is a working group addressing the issue, experts from both sides meet regularly on the subject and conduct biannual seminars. But mine was not the posting of the Israeli government responding to a EU statement. I am not Israel (you can look them up in your phone book for an official reply) and the Guardian, last time I checked, did not speak for the EU, nor had it applied for membership. They still only take in sovereign states…
As to the most salient bit of the document – I am afraid you are the one who misses the point. All it means is that criticism of Israel should be the same that other countries would earn for their own behaviour – nothing less and nothing more. It follows that you cannot impose a double standard on Israel, and that criticism that singles Israel out or expects a conduct of Israel that is not demanded of other countries is antisemitic. Keep training.
No, you’re just someone who has an inordinate confidence in his own ability to predict the future, a weakness for treating casualties of war as entries on a moral accountant’s ledger, and a related willingness to stand up for ignorant and foul obscenities like the comparison of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Hamas isn’t striving to kill a handful of Israelis over the course of the next year. Hamas is striving to destroy Israel over the course of generations. On the other side, a country that cannot protect its population from chronic terror – due to a lack of will, not a lack of means – is a doomed country: That’s the message, and not just the message but the point, of the Hamas attacks. The message, and not just the message but the point, of Operation Cast Lead isn’t to save “5 lives/year,” it’s to re-assert Israel’s will and therefore its right to exist and its prospects of continuing to exist – and to prevent 5 l/y from turning eventuall into a second Holocaust. Got it? I fear not.
Why are we talking about “truce” or ceasefire? Hamas is a terrorist Organization, worse than Nazis. It has a declared goal of killing all Jews in the world. We should talk only about unconditional surrender of Hamas. The blood of the German kids bombed in Dresden for example are on the hands of Nazis. The blood of Arab kid from Gaza is on the hands of Hamas.
This always happens when Israel makes unwise concessions and then must
wreak destruction to undo them, which could have been avoided if the
concessions had not been made in the first place. And it’s usually a left-leaning
government that does both, the first to appease its core constituency, the
second to mollify the rest of the electorate. Israel has never had a right wing
government capable of persevering under political stress. So of course her
foreign policy is caught in an endless loop. Even if Ari gets his wish and
Operation Cast Lead results in Fatah control of Gaza, that will doubtless be
supplemented by Fatah sovereignty over the rest of the territories… followed by an
even bigger bloodbath down the line. Will no one rid the Jews of these
grotesque compulsions ?
I support both goals without reserve.except for the following reservations: I do not, however, think that they should be pursued when so many lives are at stake. The long-term benefits are too unclear (or too weak) to justify the number of deaths that we’ve seen. In other words, Israel must embrace measures that ensure clear and strong outcomes at little or no cost or risk. I’m sure they’ve got some real smart guys working on that one. Again, if there were a “3″ (to topple Hamas and rebuild the Gaza strip), then I’d probably be supporting this strike.What if “3″ required multiple operations over the course of years? What if not every operation was certain to acheive that goal all by itself? What if the measures necessary to achieve that goal put many lives at risk? What if no political or military operation in the real world is ever certain to achieve its goals? For the Palestinians, this attack only results in more death and destruction, while the relief that the Israelis receive is comparatively less (I am not in any way marginalizing the suffer of the families in Sderot).Good job putting the responsibility for the situation entirely on the shoulders of the Israelis! Even better job marginalizing the suffer[ing] of the southern Israelis and minimizing the stakes for Israelis and Palestinians.
So let me see if I’ve gotten this straight: The stakes are too high, but not high enough. The Israeli operation and its goals are too ambitious, but not ambitious enough. The situation of the Israeli populace subjected to rocket terror is not to be marginalized, except to the extent that it’s of marginal importance. Most important, supporters of Israel can be identified by their certainty that the whole mess is Israel’s fault.
Have I missed anything?
What everyone always fails to mention in these number exercises is that it only takes one good hit by one of these rockets to up the number of dead Israelis by many magnitude. It is perhaps only luck, defensive measures and, perhaps, some divine intervention that the number is not higher. Furthermore, if Hamas and their supply of weapons are not beaten back, Hamas’ capabilities will reach a tipping point where it will not be a Jew here, a Jew there that is killed but hundreds – thousands. And at that point, when possible victory or lack of danger to themselves is seen, you may get Hezbollah and other salivating terrorists (and Arab countries) to join the kill. I wonder if the Israeli-bashers will be so despondent when the pictures on their televisions are thousands of dead Jews.
CK – awesome post. Clarity.
And what if no Israeli citizens had been killed or injured in these attacks? Would any other nation possibly tolerate it? Could any nation survive if it did? Is “merely” subjecting large portions of a nations population to daily terror from rocket and mortar attacks and disrupting its national life worth preventing? Do we place the moral onus of war’s horrors on the nation that is defending itself or the terrorist regime that committed and recommitted the acts of war? Is asking Israel to act as no other nation would possibly act and to condemn it for not doing so legitimate criticism or something else?
On the main topic, certainly knee jerk accusations of antisemitism are wrong. But so too is the similarly knee jerk preemptive attempt to reduce every such discussion to a canard or a smear.
It must be nice, at times, to be a Bund True Believer, knowing that non-Jewish critics of Israel are antisemites, and that Jewish critics of Israel are self-hating Jews. Such a hermetically sealed view of the world. Why, it reminds me of …
#5,WSJ Online Opinion:
OPINION JANUARY 10, 2009 Israel Is Committing War Crimes
Hamas’s violations are no justification for Israel’s actions.Article
By GEORGE E. BISHARAT
Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123154826952369919.html
rcar:
We had an old saying in college debate: given time I can find an “authority” who says black is white, and I can quote him. But all that proves is that there are two idiots in the world.
RCAR, don’t you realize that the Wall Street Journal is antisemitic?
#26,
Sorry for reading other opinions on these issues,but I’m not inclined to accept your opinion as factual at face value. I read six articles today in Real Clear World on the war,three were pro Israel,three were anti. The one that made the most sense to me was quoted in #24. I’m not debating. I live thousands of miles from the war,and I’m not involved in their politics in any way. I’m trying to make sense of this by looking at all the controversy. If that’s wrong, well then just feed me the TRUTH. I think you believe that you know what the TRUTH is in these circumstances. I never debate with individuals who have experienced the joy of revealed,transcendant revelation.
Hartland-It takes one to know one, so I guess you’re an expert.
CKM at #17 — you took the words right off my fingers (or something). Saved me the trouble of making your very excellent and well-made points. Which I expect you made more succinctly anyway!
To the question of Jewish anti-semitism: anti-semitism is a mode of Jew hatred. It is characterized by vulgar 19th century racism and pseudo-science, and was an attempt to replace the old Christian Jew-hatred with something “modern” and secular. It was a creature of the European Right. Permanently discredited by Hitler, it survived mostly in residual pockets within the West. It has been replaced by a kind of hostility to Jews, sometimes amounting to hatred, that lives, in the West, on the Left and that engages in a weird kind of political tango with the combination of hatreds, Islamic, anti-semitic and “progressive,” that characterizes much of the Middle East’s attitude towards Jews. Then there is a special strain of the hostility of the Jews from the Left, namely that of the Jewish Left. These are folks who, typically, have, with Marx and his followers, accepted the bet that if Jews give up anything particular about themselves, especially any particular identification with each other as a people, then the world will arrive more swiftly at what they think will be paradise of complete human homogeneity. That, they think, will mean universal acceptance, openness and something like what Marx called “species being.” This is folly, but it is a faith so intense that it leads its Chomskys and Finkelsteins among others to an intense rage at the Jews who won’t cooperate in bringing about their longed-for solution to the human problem. They are not anti-semites, and they are not even Jew-haters in the way of non-Jews of Left or Right. But they are capable of being quite as angry, unjust and unreasonable about Israel or the Jewish people as the non-Jewish Jew-haters. So, no, Ari, I don’t think it is reasonable to describe you as an anti-semite. I wouldn’t even describe you as a Jew-hater, simply. But you do look like someone who is so irritated or embarrassed by Jews who haven’t accepted your universalist project that you are irrationally hostile to them. And of course folks like the egregrious crew in the Guardian letters column are the very best instruments of polemical warfare the real Jew-haters have.
Emanuele
If I call you a moron, does that make me anti-semitic, or just a sagacious judge of human intelligence?
#31
Thanks for your analysis,but here’s a fact. When someone is critical of Israeli foreign policy,the chance of them being labeled an anti semite on Contentions is very high. My opinion is that the process of “Denounciation” is a part of the Neocon paradigm,and that traces back to when the Neocons were Communists.
Fred, you talk too much. Any non-Jew critical of Israeli is an antisemite, and any Jew critical of Israel is a self-hater. That’s what your posting boils down to, so why not cut to the chase?
Ignoring death if hundred thousands children in Sudan from the hands of Arabs, ignoring death of Arabs in “refugee camps” from the hands of Lebanese army, ignoring death of thousands children all over the world from war and terrorism, but concentrating on Israel killing civilians ( and even if we believe Hamas, proportion of civilian death to terrorists death is amazingly low for any war, leave alone so heavily populated area as Gaza where there are 10 kids for every adult) is antisemitism by itself.
I wonder if there is any statistics for wars in last half a century, that shows proportion of military death to civilian death and if it were ANY war, where proportionally less civilians were killed than in this defensive operation even if we do not take into account that Hamas is uding children as human shield.
35,
The best example would be Hiroshima,0 military deaths,100000 civilian deaths,not counting the deaths resulting from radiation sickness. Israel is doing much better than that.
What’s hilarious about this letter is that it proves the exact opposite of what the signatories seem to think it proves. Apparently, they could only find 70-odd (and I do mean, “odd”) British residents “of Jewish origin” to agree that Israel is treating Gaza too harshly. How many millions of Americans of British origin do you think would agree that Britain is treating Israel too harshly? And how many of them imagine that Britain cares one whit about their opinions, irrespective of either their numbers, their (no doubt impeccable) Anglo-Saxon pedigrees, or even their desire for America to put the screws to Britain?
Who is killing innocents in Gaza? Hamas is. Hamas deliberately provoked Israel to invade. It chose to hide its military forces in schools and densely populated areas. Hamas views the deaths of civilians as a triumph—and says so.
Emanuele, it strikes me as peculiar that you’re arguing Israel should be treated like all other countries, when it comes to criticism, yet when someone does precisely that they are labeled an anti-Semite. The question was not rhetorical; it was very much real. I am concerned with who is going to bring Israel up on war crimes for this offensive. Do you have an answer?
It also strikes me as peculiar that you would argue that Israel cares what the EU thinks. Perhaps it’s that cafeteria thing: they pick and choose what they’re going to find useful. Over-encompassing definitions of anti-semitism? Check. Criticism regarding a disproportionate response to Gaza? Nah.
Finally, you should take a class in logic, for reasons made clear above by Philosopher.
Does anyone know when Israel will be brought up on war crime charges?
Let’s take a concrete example. A few months back there was a discussion about Samantha Powers. Criticisms were expressed about her views. At no point was she accused of anti-semitism, only of being (fairly or not) wrongheaded. Yet her supposed defenders in the blogosphere immediately began assailing the alleged use of the “antisemitism card” despite the fact that no one had used it. If anything, the only card being played was the one where her critics were unfairly accused of engaging in smear tactics, the purpose of which was not to actually defend Powers against any actual accusations, but to stifle legitimate criticism and to smear her critics. So such a tactic does exist, and it is immediately employed whenever the issue of antisemitism is discussed, particularly on the Left. As people have noted, the Left has become increasingly accomodating to radical anti-Israel views over the past decades, views which can morph into antisemitism quite easily and often do. (The general level of vituperation against Israel on the Left tends to blur the border line). Now certainly the Right has also had its share of problems on this issue. But the reaction was different. There the mainstream, through people like Buckley, acted to marginalize antisemitic views. The Left, far from marginalizing the phenomenon, got hijacked by it. Faced with this instrinsic rot, the Left developed its now familar defense strategy: (1) that antisemitism equals a smear; (2) that so long as Israel is referenced, there cannot be antisemitism. How often do we hear the cliche that criticism of Israel’s policies is not antisemitism? Yet why Israel of all nations’s on earth is subject to such exacting examination (certain departments at the UN virtually exist for this sole purpose) is never explained. Is Israel truly so egregious that it demands a special level of scrutiny and condemnation? Or is its supposed egregiousness a preconception of the political mind? Is holding Israel to a different level of scrutiny and criticism antisemitism? Is the compulsive need to accuse it of war crimes or Nazi-style tactics almost a priori antisemitism as well? People are free to argue that there is a difference between legitimate criticism and antisemitism so long as they first admit that there is in fact a boundary that can be crossed. Yet that simple concession is rarely made, and then only grudgingly. For those who are conditioned to believe that every discussion of the issue is some sort of neocon or Likudnik ploy (or whatever fashionable epiphet they use to escape the drudgery of actually thinking), it never will be.
Lies about Jews and lies about Israel are both bad, whether their obvious interconnection is taken into account or not. International and domestic liars are all liars.
ian, save your breath. All criticism of Israel by non-Jews is antisemitic, and all criticism of Israel by Jews is evidence of self-hatred. Accusations of antisemitism is a neocon stock in trade, and increasingly the public sees through it. Find a new tactic.
#44-This from the genius who said that Monica Lewinsky was a Mossad agent. Sorry discussing the issue offends you. Wonder why that is? Anyway, I won’t be saving my breath on your account, although I’ll try not to waste it either. On the other hand, you have inspired me to troll on political websites whose viewpoints I find deeply disagreeable. Please list some of your favorites so I know where to start. Actually it could be interesting.
LogicMan, calling me a moron makes you neither an Anti-Semite nor a sagacious judge of human nature. It makes you rude. Insult is the last resort – sorry you got to the bottom of the barrel and had to scratch so quickly.
Which brings me to Scholar in Training. To answer your and many others’ observations, let’s engage in a thought exercise – we are not debating Israel but Zimbabwe. Can we use the N word to attack Robert Mugabe and its practices? No??? But that’s not racism you see, Mugabe is a criminal, he deserves to be criticized. Anyone attacking those who dare do so is engaged in a campaign to silence whistleblowers and truth seekers. Typical Smear tactics. I am allowed to criticize Mugabe and not be called a racist. So much for your logic class.
If you think the above is not grotesque then I concede.
In the real world nobody would think that racism is a relevant, appropriate, legitimate or even possible form of criticizing an African government. It is only when it comes to Israel that people find anti-semitic stereotypes an appropriate form of criticism against Israeli policies. The logic class will of course not offer you a way out of this little embarrassing matter – because there is no logic in the recourse to stereotype. It comes from the irrational. Israel’s actions become a pretext for anti-Semitism to be voiced without fear of retribution. There will always be some useful idiots to defend it as criticism and turn the tables on those who denounce it – by calling it a legitimate expression of outrage against Israeli actions.
If you think that certain criticism is beyond the pale – because it is irrelevant, because it is repugnant, because it is wrong – then you can see that anti-Semitism is the label some (by no means all) critics of Israel deserve. It has nothing to do with criticizing Israel. It has to do with the type, quality and texture of the criticism. Comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto or Auschwitz, and accusing Israelis of being Nazis is just that – a smear that has no place in the kind of criticism one is entitled to voice at Israel’s current action in Gaza. The letter in the Guardian deserved to be called to task not because all criticism is antisemitic, but because antisemitism should have no place among criticism of Israel. Your attempts to defend it are an indication that you do not find such prejudice so offensive after all.
John Hartland, in another thread you said that American conservatives would be angry if the population of Israel moved here, because we are so “obviously” anti-semites. Actually, I think we would be rather happy, seeing as how most of these immigrants would gravitate toward conservatism and vote Republican.