The presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Brown, conspicuously absent from the original list of signatories, have since posted assurances that they join the almost 300 American college and university presidents who signed a statement earlier this month protesting the vote of Britain’s University and College Union to impose a boycott against Israeli academic institutions. “Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!” read the American counter-declaration, composed by Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger. “[We] do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish.”

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This morning my cleaning lady E., expecting an affirmative response, asked me whether I was pleased by the appointment of a woman to the presidency of Harvard University (where I am a professor). A year ago her English was not good enough for such a question. College-educated in São Paolo, with what I believe was a major in government, she tells me a female president will be able to smooth over the troubles of the previous administration. Evidently, she perceives the ascendancy of Drew Gilpin Faust as a boost for her own chances of advancement in America. Apparently, Brazilian women gained fully equal legal rights only in 1988.

Just a day earlier I was reading Heather Mac Donald’s post at City Journal’s Eye on the News, in which she remarks that “The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent.” Her warning struck a nerve. When the Women’s Lib movement started up in America in the 1960’s, I predicted it would do as much damage here as Bolshevism had done in Russia. I felt almost vindicated in my fears when I watched the feminist culture of grievance at Harvard help to topple President Lawrence Summers (a controversy I wrote about in the pages of COMMENTARY)—who tried to pacify the aggrieved women by appointing none other than Drew Faust to head a Task Force on Women Faculty. That Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard. In the past, the call for such “diversity” has been a code name for greater ideological conformism, since those appointed through it are expected to share the ideological premise that brought them the job.

My Portuguese is not up to E.’s English, so I cannot explain to her the difference between a woman and a Women’s Libber. She is still fighting the original feminist battle for equal rights and opportunity; I oppose the demand for preferential group advancement. But E. is keen, and she sees from my hesitation that I am not quite as inspired as she is by this appointment. We will watch events unfold at Harvard with unequal expectations.

The New York Times took notice yesterday of a pamphlet-sized essay posted on the website of the American Jewish Committee. Written by Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University and titled “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” the essay describes the mounting assault on Israel by Jews on the Left. Rosenfeld cites, among others, the two Tonys—Kushner and Judt—and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, each of whom was in turn duly quoted in the Times story as protesting Rosenfeld’s characterization of them. The paper’s reporter, Patricia Cohen, seems to side with them in this dispute, slyly suggesting that the AJC has overstated the problem of anti-Semitism on the Jewish Left. Thereby, she neutralizes or buries the very problem the AJC was trying to expose.

No surprise there. In this matter, as it happens, the Times has long been not merely a reporting agency but a major player. For the past sixty years the newspaper has denied the Arab war against the Jewish state, just as in World War II it denied the German war against the Jewish people. Rather than telling its readers about Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism and describing how it shapes the societies in which it flourishes, rather than documenting the growing infiltration of Europe and America by this same poison, it speaks of anti-Semitism as if it were merely a figment, an occasion for fratricidal conflict among Jews themselves with no objective correlative in the real world. In this internal slugfest of accusation and counter-accusation, the offense itself disappears, and with it any serious discussion of its source, its gravity, or its spread.

Even more than those cited by Alvin Rosenfeld, it is the newspaper of record that has long displaced onto Israel’s moral ledger the misery that Arabs cause themselves. This morning’s edition carries a three-column story about a former Israeli government minister convicted of French-kissing a female soldier. This is evidently what the Times considers news. Not news, evidently, are the dozens of mutual kidnappings and murders committed by Fatah and Hamas. Dead Palestinians appear to interest the Times only insofar as their deaths can be laid at the feet of Israel.

Similarly, real existing anti-Semitism seems to interest the Times far less than does the drama of Jew-against-Jew in which the Times gets to name aggressors and victims. In this offhand, underhanded manner the paper’s editors and reporters abet the anti-Semitic lie that the existence of Israel “explains” the misery and rage of the people yelling for its destruction and for the destruction of all Jews everywhere.

Poor Jimmy Carter! “This is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist. This is hurting me.”

This plaint, issuing from a podium at Brandeis University (where else?) and from a man who won election to the presidency of the United States and oversaw the Iran hostage crisis, seems somewhat disingenuous. The “first time?” But you have to attend to the middle term, “anti-Semite,” inserted so casually among the others. Lying, bigotry, cowardice, and plagiarism speak to the deeds and character of the accused. Casting oneself as the victim of charges of anti-Semitism involves a third party, and can be a way of reinforcing the original attack against them.

Good people weep for the hardships of troubled populations. It was noble—and Christian—to feel sorry for the starving children in Europe in the 1930’s, and no less so to sympathize with the Palestinians today.

But there are those who, through “lying and bigotry and cowardice,” turn those sympathies into blaming Jews for failing to alleviate hardships that Jews did not cause in the first place and are powerless to prevent.

It was not Jimmy Carter who formed the Arab League to prevent the emergence of Israel and who then dedicated the work of the League to Israel’s destruction. It was not Jimmy Carter who refused partition and insisted on maintaining generations of Palestinians as refugees. Neither was it Carter who instituted the economic boycott of Israel, introduced the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, or sponsored terrorism as an “unsponsored” weapon against Israel. Carter did not translate, disseminate, and dramatize the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for audiences in the multi-millions. He did not generate the anti-Semitism that sweeps and informs the Arab world. He is not an active anti-Semite. But he became its apologist, he echoes its accusations, using its terminology and advancing its cause.

Let us then make the distinction between anti-Semites who generate anti-Semitism and those who sustain it. And let him whom the shoe fits wear it.