Philosemitism (n) - the practice of obsessively and often only semi-sincerely praising the Jewish people in the abstract, often used as a crutch for anti-Semites unable to express their internal discomfort and unwilling to learn to accept Jews as human. Philosemitism is a common element of Christian-Reconstruction religion, was a major force in British support for Zionism, and is generally only slightly better than anti-Semitism; a refusal by European intellectuals to move beyond anti/philo discourse on the Jewish people and address the Jews as human beings - rather than hooked-nosed cardboard cutouts or a faceless aggregate of mighty social and religious forces - is probably the largest single factor in the Holocaust.

‘Rapture Ready’ is an excellent and extremely spooky portrayal of AIPAC & co working to foster support among people fixated on ‘the Jewish race’ as a bit player in their apocalypse. A group presumes Blumenthal is Jewish on the basis of his name (and, implicitly, his appearance), then harangues him about not believing in Christ, at a fundraiser for Israel.

Classic line: “We’ve been praying for the whole Jewish race for a long time.”

There’s a proverb in English about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. The “Israel lobby” in general and AIPAC in specific has been trying to actively court the lunatic bigots who think the Jewish race have to kill Haji so the Christ who is Lord can return and forgive them for killing him and also all those Christian babies, &c. Norman Podhoretz, a major member of what I’d call the Likud First neocon circuit - that is, the neocons who reflexively respond to queries about what is in our best interest with the party line from Likud - has actually specifically denied that a supporter of him and Israel who was also a hideous anti-Jewish bigot was an anti-Semite, because all that matters is supporting the state of Israel. Just so we’re clear: Pat Robertson - certainly good for those Christ-killers in Israel.

I think there’s a major failure of the Left to internalize two major things, and these are far and away the most relevant critiques against the Likud fifth-column in America. To wit:

The interests of Israel are no more served by their neoconservatives than the interests of America are served by ours. The Israeli hard-right has been trying to agitate the Arab leadership into a no-quarter-asked-or-given race war - and the repressive neighbors of Israel, as repressive states in need of a scapegoat are wont to do, have generally decided to play ball. Likud and similar scum seriously believe that the Jewish state, founded to escape the depredations of European anti-Semitism and originally intended to peacefully coexist with its neighbors instead of violently expelling them, is best served by genocide in self-defense. If what little you know of Israel’s history has given you the idea that this is somehow a confusing contradiction, bear in mind that some of the ancestors of Likud (spiritual and literal) actually attempted to form an alliance with Hitler.
These people are horrible assholes, and I think a lot of people on the American and generalized Western left are guilty of conflating what Likud (which has been entrenched in power in Israeli policy-making bodies as neocons are here (they rule the think tanks and force any non-Likud-lead government hard to the right with mass-media viciousness and political manipulation)) wants for what Israel wants, and what Likud says Israel needs for what Israel needs. The best thing anyone could do for the people of Israel is to hang every deputy of Likud and every think-tanker from Likud and that asshole Russian who doesn’t speak a word of Hebrew and yet gets to control most of the Goddamned news media and crush every other party’s balls - hang ‘em all high, from the nearest lampposts and trees. They’re the enemy here. ‘Israel’ isn’t, and accepting that they represent Israel is pretty much giving them exactly what they want. (The same mistake is frequently made in the Arab world - again, at the provocation of those oppressive leaders. They don’t want a non-Likud government in power, because they’d actually treat their Arab neighbors tolerably and the leadership wouldn’t have anything to blame the poverty of the majority of the population as the wealthy elite swim in massive pools and drive big American cars - and we can’t have that.)

Allowing ‘anti-Semite’ to be used for anything except doing injustice to people for the crime of Jewishness — and trying to dehumanize the Jewish people — cheapens it in a profound and potentially lethal way. Bill O’Reilly gets away with a lot of hooded anti-Semitic bullshit, screaming and hemming and hawing about a massive BANK of Brooklyn-Hollywood secret communist ACLU media elites BANKrolled by George Soros, an investor, currency trader, and frequent user of BANKS. This is the sort of shit that used to get you blackballed in America, because it’s actively repugnant to our basic sensibilities. You’re not allowed to hold an ethnic or racial minority down and piss on them, you’re not allowed to throw around racial stereotypes and pretend you’re a serious tough-talking thinker. This sort of shit makes you a pathetic bigot. And yet the Anti-Defamation League refuses to condemn him, or any right-winger making obvious (although they’re usually trying to be covert) anti-Semitic remarks, because they’re backers of the Likud lobby.

Jews in America are typically Democrats, and an increasing number of American Jews are annoyed with the increasing viciousness, aimlessness, and aggressiveness of Israel’s warfare with its neighbors; few Jewish youths, compared to baby-boomers or even Gen-Xers, feel a personal connection to Israel; hell, that same dynamic plays out (although in larger numbers) in the number of Jews surveyed who would feel personally affected if Israel were destroyed. Evidently, when you take a group with a long history of being abused by reactionary bigots and turn the country that’s supposed to represent them into a platform for violently reactionary bigotry, they get hostile. Who’da thunk it.

The scary thing is this: on right-wing vectors like Fox News, it’s more or less acceptable to use ‘anti-Semitism’ to connote exclusively ‘opposition to Israeli neocon policy’. If Joe Lieberman (supposing that the blood finally started reaching his brain again) were to vote against a resolution demanding that all of the opponents of Israel must be cleansed from the earth by nuclear fire, so help us God, the right-wing noise machine would be calling him a gefilte-smelling hook-nosed penny-spurting anti-Semite, and would Photoshop him with a big ol’ schnozz painted in pan-Arab colors and swastika forelocks. This is the general trend of American corporate media, precisely because the Likud lobby (calling them ‘the Israel lobby’, as we seem to like doing, seems somewhat disingenuous considering how ruthlessly loyal they are to one political organization) has been so very good at manipulating the news, feeding the bitchy nonsense the media love nowadays to the right people, and funding the worst assholes in government and civil society to act as mouthpieces for barbarism. Someday that’ll be more or less standard for the news-media. And guess who they’ll try and blame.

An avowed ‘Hitler admirer’ in the Klan could run on the platform of the forcible expelling of all Jews, all filthy media-running school-infiltrating Bolshevik Jews, to Israel - and opposing him would be referred to as ‘anti-Semitic’, because of course that’d be “good for Israel”. (To have a string of endless wars, you of course need a long procession of warm bodies - ideally, bodies that speak the language of the political masters too poorly to protest.) The right-wingers have been quietly but forcefully organizing an architecture for anti-Semitism in modern America; you need to look no further than the dark mutterings about the ACLU and their war on Christmas to wonder what things might be like if you were to give them twenty more years - and make those twenty years really bad ones, with a shitty economy and an endless war of occupation in a bloodsoaked desert and capitalist rape of the common man. And let the Jewish people be a convenient scapegoat for everything going wrong - like, say, if a political party you liked had suffered a major electoral defeat and their opponents received funding from an ethnically Jewish financier.

History doesn’t repeat itself - but it rhymes. From the perspective of 1972, you’d never have guessed that we could get this bad. Then again, a German in 1905, told that six million Jews were going to die in the next four decades, would probably be horrified and suspect the French to have done it. Who’s to say what another twenty years might do to us? We might even get as bad as our BFFs in New Europe.