Hi George,
If you want you can post this below as response, with my name. I think some corners on the left are getting a bit naïve about where the lines to anti-Jewish vilification may actually lie. Good to stir up a bit of discussion. My views on Israel are not anti-Jewish, David Duke’s are. Yet at times we seem nebbich to be saying the same thing. adelante Bill

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It strikes me ever more that critique of the ‘Jewish-Zionist lobby’ in the states treads at points on very thin ice, coming close to the arguments of white supremacists like David Duke. The Walt and Mearsheimer paper that has caused a stir (largely because of the mainstream ‘stature’ of its authors) does not really come to grips with this very openly anti-Semitic attack from the far right stateside on Israeli ethnocracy and geopolitics, and the ‘Jewish’ control of the U.S. media and just about everything else. An attack which Duke typifies. Duke himself has claimed that Walt/Mearsheimer ‘vindicates’ his diatribes against the Jewish lobby in Washington and across the U.S. power elites. That led to an article in the NY SUN this week: www.nysun.com/article/29380

I don’t agree with much of that SUN article, but it also raises the question of how close some arguments in Walt/Mearsheimer come to the ‘world-conspiracy-of-the-Jews’ thinking on the right — in part a very religious right with which Duke is directly associated. Read this new article by Duke: www.davidduke.com/?p=502 “Jewish Extremists Circle Their Wagons in Hate Campaign Against Harvard Dean,” written in part in response to the SUN piece.

I know that that article by Duke has been circulated on some listservs purporting to be ‘left’. Take a look at Duke’s new book: Jewish Supremacism, the preface on ‘Jewish control of the American media’ is on his website.

I don’t think we can simply ‘ignore’ such vicious hate-mongering that at key points intersects like a Venn diagram with some of our own critique. My own sense of this at the moment is to perhaps include a statement in a paper I’m writing for a major journal (on the sacralization of genocide in Deuteronomy and the Book of Joshua, and in American Puritan and Israeli right appropriations of that narrative) openly distancing myself from these anti-Semitic tirades by anti-Semitic white supremacists in the states against anything Jewish, and most especially Israel. I may find Duke soon praising me nebbich for analyzing ‘racism in the Old Testament.’ We can’t ignore the growing presence of all this, esp. in cyberspace. I read discourse again and again, some on the left, where ‘Zionist’ seems to be a code word for ‘Jewish’ and almost anything is fair game. ‘Zionist’ influence here, ‘Zionist control of the US anti-war movement’ there. At the least, our analyses of neo-con politics and the influence of lobbies have to be razor-sharp. More rigorous science than we tend to muster. Bill