Wesley Clark, the retired general and once - and no doubt future -
presidential candidate, says the United States is going to attack Iran. How
does he know? Well, it's obvious, he told Arianna Huffington, "You just have
to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but
there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to
the office seekers."
Clark's comments, predictably, earned him denunciations from Jewish groups.
After all, the notion that rich, secretive Jews living in places such as New
York are pulling strings to visit war and misery on the masses is a
time-honored anti-Semitic cliche heard from Charles Lindbergh, Ignatius
Donnelly and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Of course, groups like the Anti-Defamation League are not hard to offend.
When the United Nations group tasked with proposing names for hurricanes
suggested "Israel" for one storm a few years ago, the league's national
director, Abraham Foxman, went into overdrive denouncing the bigotry of such
meteorological nomenclature. So it's not like Foxman and friends could give
a pass to an even bigger blowhard - Clark.
In response, the American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias, who is Jewish, led
the liberal rescue party, denouncing some of Clark's conservative critics as
"moronic" and "hacks" and defending Hurricane Wes on two fronts. First,
Yglesias argued, "everything" Clark said "is true," and "everybody knows
it's true," so it can't be anti-Semitic. Second, given that Israel's
defenders will call any criticism anti-Semitic, there's no point in getting
worked up about it.
The first is a rich and fascinating claim. Truth is a defense against
slander, but is it a defense against bigotry? Liberals rarely agree when it
comes to defending honored members of the coalition of the oppressed. Just
ask former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who questioned whether innate
ability explained why few women succeed in math and science and who was
defenestrated from Harvard as a sexist for his troubles. And let us not run
through the list of people called bigots for pointing to inconvenient facts
about blacks, Latinos or gays.
Liberals might respond that facts aren't bigoted but the insensitivity with
which they are deployed can be. For instance, when Pat Buchanan infamously
wrote that Virginia would have an easier time absorbing a million Englishmen
than a million Zulus, few disputed the accuracy of the statement. But the
way it was offered grated on sensitive ears (as does Buchanan's predictable
embrace of Clark and Yglesias as truth-tellers against Israel's "agents of
influence").