This isn’t a religion blog, but anti-Semitism has an ugly racial and political aspect that places it squarely in the IWF bailiwick. And so I’m linking to our own Cathy Seipp’s column for National Review Online noting that the left is All Outraged when anti-Semitism comes from the mouth of three-sheets-to-the-wind Mel Gibson, a religious and political conservative–but freely engages in anti-Semitism of its own when the subject happens to be either Israel or neocons.
Cathy writes:
Reading Arianna Huffington’s latest high-horse commentary about Mel Gibson’s ‘odious racism’ — that is, Gibson’s nutty ravings about ‘the Jews’ when stopped by a traffic cop in Malibu — reminded me of the last time I noticed nutty ravings in the media about ‘the Jews.’
And where was that? Why, right in Arianna’s own “Huffington Post” blog. And the time was just a few months ago, in March, when one of Arianna’s commentators sprang to her defense in the contretemps over her gluing together some old remarks by George Clooney and calling it a blog post. Here’s what Arianna’s defender wrote (and it?s still up on the Internet!):
The only common thread I can see in the misery and death of the American people over the last 40 years is the control of our government by Texans and Jews.
Now that’s OK, as far as our liberal elites are concerned. But it’s not OK when someone on the right like Mel says it.
As Cathy notes:
Actually, as anyone who’s paid attention to the political shift these last 30 years can’t help but notice, knee-jerk anti-Semitism is now far more commonly found on the Left than on the Right. To me, it’s also more disheartening, because unlike Gibson — who at least has had the grace to be repeatedly and publicly mortified about his drunken remarks once he sobered up — those on the Left never display the least embarrassment about it.