Foreign games
Meejit criticised US foreign policy towards Israel.
The B sample has yet to be tested, but there is a prima-facie case that I showed unacceptably high levels of testosterone in a Dublin radio studio. The shameful display was relatively private: it came after the red light went off on a NewsTalk debate about media coverage of Lebanon. I found myself shaking with rage, heaping aggressive verbal abuse on my opponent, Richard Waghorne, because on-air he had called part of my argument "anti-Semitic".
I had already mentioned, on-air, my siblings' Jewish spouses. I might have mentioned my childhood rabbi-next-door; the Jewish women I loved before Waghorne was born (he is very young); that lovely Passover seder in Brooklyn this year; the Jewish experts who influence my views – Chomsky, Finkelstein, Avnery, Brenner, LeVine, etc. It's a souped-up "some of my best friends" defence, and none of it would have mattered (though it might have explained my emotional reaction).
I should have laughed, because labels like "anti-Semitic" have little to do with the real world. Kevin Myers, for example, serially oozes disdain for US popular culture, including much glorious 20th-century music, yet he gets to call other people "anti-American".
Accusing people of anti-Semitism is popular among Israel's friends when that country is behaving especially badly. It's not an argument, it's an argument-stopper, a way of shouting, "You can't say that!" Our side does something similar when we roar, "Racism!" every time someone wonders out loud if immigration should be restricted.
Flak attack
Anyway, I earned the shocking epithet for saying the media in the US tilts towards Israel partly because pro-Israel Jews there exercise influence and generate unparalleled flak. Far from proposing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, I made a starter attempt at cool analysis of how a small minority – Waghorne put it at five per cent of the US population, but it's actually less than half that – holding diverse views ends up with such apparent political strength in one direction.
There is legitimate debate about the level of power wielded by what has come to be called "the Lobby", but to suggest that it is zero is logically absurd. The Lobby's mainstay, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), reckons it is decisive: in a letter to its funders on 30 July, 2006, AIPAC president Howard Friedman happily ascribed US support for Israel's attack on Lebanon to the work of "YOU [sic] and the rest of American Jewry". Sure, a lobbyist is hardly an objective source on the extent of his own influence. But is it really anti-Semitic if I say I agree with him?
I don't have any moral problem with the Lobby. However you gauge its power, it works because the US political and media systems, quaintly called "democratic", allow it to. Moreover, the idea that no American should be loyal to another state is an unsustainable attack on personal freedom. Nonetheless, revealing the complex workings of power is the job of journalists and other analysts; trying to block consideration of such work by calling it anti-Semitic is emotional censorship.
Passion plays
Labelling criticism of Israel or the Lobby "anti-Semitic" debases a still-useful term. Mel Gibson, for example, is anti-Semitic, not just in drunken rants, but in The Passion of the Christ, where he embellishes the gospel narratives with ugly stereotypes of Jewish officials drawn from post-biblical slurs. Similar anti-Semitism clearly exists elsewhere on Christian, Muslim and secular fringes.
But throwing the term around loosely will leave people wondering if "anti-Semitism" is so bad after all, if it just means you're against cluster-bombing civilians.
The pundits who use the term are more interested in advancing a neocon agenda than in bravely defending the most murderously oppressed group of, em, the early- to mid-20th century. The odd idiot who daubs swastikas on synagogues doesn't make real anti-Semitism more than a trivial evil in 2006. Even in Iran, allegedly led by genocidal anti-Semites, tens of thousands of Jews live in peace and religious (though not political) freedom.
On 15 August, a silly Irish Times op-ed by Rory Miller and Alan Shatter asked, pointedly, why Israel gets singled out for activists' opprobrium. Simple, lads: we're worried. Israel is a bellicose, nuclear-armed, Western planter-state and occupier, stitched into the US imperium in the Region Most Likely to Host Armageddon. In reality, the "anti-Semitic agenda" about which they're presumably hinting and which features regularly in Eoghan Harris's dark mutterings is, today, no agenda at all.