CHRIS SUELLENTROP has an “Assessment” piece on Cynthia McKinney in Slate. Opening sentences: “All of us have voices in our heads, whispering insanities. Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s problem is that she lets hers speak.”

WHY NATALIE PORTMAN IS SMARTER THAN ANTON RIVIERA, and the rest of the racist left:

On Wednesday, the Jerusalem-born actress objected tartly in the Harvard Crimson to law student Faisal Chaudhry’s April 11 essay on U.S. policy concerning Israel and the Palestinians. Chaudhry framed the Arab-Israeli violence as “Israel’s racist colonial occupation” in which “white Israeli soldiers destroy refugee camps of the brown people they have dispossessed for decades.”

Portman, who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1988 and lived briefly in Washington, wrote to the student newspaper that Chaudhry’s racial rhetoric “is a distortion of the fact that most Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable physically. The Israeli government itself is comprised of a great number of Sephardic Jews, many of whom originate from Arab countries. The chief of staff of the army, the minister of defense, the minister of finance . . . and the president of Israel are all ‘brown.’ One might have an idea of the physical likeness between Arabs and Israelis by examining this week’s Newsweek cover on which an 18-year-old female Palestinian suicide bomber and her 17-year-old female Israeli victim could pass for twins.”

Portman continued: “Outrageous and untrue finger-pointing is a childish tactic that disregards the responsibility of all parties involved.”

For too many on the Left, “racist” has simply become a synonym for anything they don’t like — the same role that the word “fascist” played for a long time, until the Left began sucking up to the genuinely fascist regimes of Arafat, Saddam, and Qaddafi for lack of any other anti-American regimes to adhere to. It is thus impossible for them to imagine a war that they disapprove of that isn’t, somehow, racist. Of course, Portman’s letter drew this logical and factual response: “Yesterday the 25-year-old Chaudhry speculated that the Crimson published the letter only because Portman is a movie star.”

I don’t think it’s good that the antiwar left is morally and intellectually bankrupt. I think it’s bad. But I think it needs to be pointed out, so as to facilitate change and growth.

STILL MORE ON NIGHTLINE: Reader Laura Hodes weighs in:

I saw the show, and agree with both Bernstein and Jarvik: parts of it were anti-Semitic. It tried to be too balanced in its portrayal of attacks in France, suggesting that Jews also committed acts against Arabs. It allowed Hitchens more air time than Foxman or Wiesel, and cut off Foxman and Wiesel at key moment, whereas allowed Hitchens to go on and on, and mentioned that he has a Jewish mother and wife as if that justified his pro-Palestinian opinions. And Hitchen’s point was how hard it is for him because he has to be careful what he says b/c people will call him an Anti-Semite–poor baby. His whole emphasis was on him, and how hard he has it. Also, at one point Donovan says to him: “so you’re saying the debate is more muffled in the U.S. than in Europe”? The word “muffled” is coded, meaning that Hitchen must have said (it was cut) that in the U.S. pro-Palestinian sentiment by pundits is quieted. Why? As Hitchens said (my notes are at home), there is a “very strong Jewish lobby in D.C”. I found that statement, and the whole emphasis, and the way Nightline allowed Hitchens to say this wiithout any questioning by Donovan, to be anti-Semitic.

MORE ON NIGHTLINE from reader David Bernstein:

The Elie Wiesel interview wasn’t weak. I don’t think the program was anti-Semitic, but it didn’t do a good job at all at establishing the two relevant points: (1) Some supporters of Israel abuse the term “anti-Semitic” by hurling it at anyone who disagrees with the supporters’ views on Israel; and (2) that shouldn’t obscure the fact that some critics of Israel are in fact motivated by anti-Semitism.

The low point was the Hitchens interview, both the gratuitous information that his mother was Jewish and his wife is Jewish, and his insistence that it’s equally bad to compare the Israelis to Nazis and Yasser Arafat to Hitler. Excuse me, but the Palestinians have been sympathetic to Nazi views of the Jews at least since the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem allied himself and the Palestinian cause with Hitler during WWII. The Arab media routinely publishes political cartoons that could have come straight out of Der Sturmer. Anyone who read the chilling interview with Hamas leaders in Gaza (who are now officially alllied with the PA in the West Bank and Gaza) in the Times a couple of weeks ago could see the genocidal intent. The PA media incites hatred against Jews, denies Jewish historical connections to the land of Israel, even the Temple Mount, and Arafat himself has never distinguished between the killing of Jewish civilians and the rest of his “liberation struggle.” The Nazi analogy may be an exaggeration, but it is not inapt.

READER LAURENCE JARVIK, who also puts out The Idler, shares his impressions of last night’s Nightline:

To my eye, it was overtly anti-Semitic. Strangely Koppel only narrated the final portion, a weak interview with Elie Wiesel where he accused him of falsely equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, which Wiesel denied–translation: it is OK to trash Israel.

Report from Paris apparently justified attacks on Jews as result of Arab rage, talked about conflicts between Jews and Arabs, not making clear that every case is one of Jewish victimization and Arab attacks.

Reporter John Donvan repeated anti-Semitic canards and permitted Hitchens to rail against the Israeli lobby apparently qualified because he is Jewish and his wife is Jewish — hardly making him an expert on Anti-Semitism (Hitchens was reportedly raised non-Jewish and ‘discovered’ his Jewishness later in life, so may have some psychological conflicts that Donvan declined to mention). He grilled Foxman and got him to say it was OK to call Sharon a ‘murderer.’

To my eye Donvan looked guilty, wanted permission from Foxman to bash Jews as Jews. Perhaps you should find a transcript, it seemed like the lowest point of the series in history. Maybe Disney was right to want to cancel the show.

Cheers,
Larry

PS I only watched it because you mentioned it in Instapundit. Curious about other blogosphere reactions…

So am I. I didn’t see it; we get up at the crack of dawn around here, so watching Nightline is more than a sacrifice than I cared to make. Reader John Kluge adds:

Of course, criticizing Isreal alone does not make you an anti-semite anymore than critcizing Jesse Jackson or Cynthia McKinney makes you a racist. However, isn’t it interesting that the very people on the left who have been charging everyone who disagrees with them on racial issues racists for years, now whine that they are being tagged for being anti-semitic for criticizing
Isreal? I don’t think that its true that they are being called anti-semitic merely for criticizing Isreal. You are dead on the mark when you write “Sure, you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. But when you criticize Israel for things you ignore in others, it raises certain doubts” However even if they are right and they are being unfairly accused of anti-semitism, who are they to complain after spending the last 40 years calling anyone who disagreed with them on racial issues racist?

It is hard to imagine Nightline running a show whose main theme is that people who criticize black political leaders, even all black political leaders, aren’t racist, isn’t it?

Actually, it gets easier to imagine all the time. I think that the growth of antisemitism in Europe prefigures a broader resurgence of racism and general nastiness, which is one reason I’ve been calling attention to it. (I don’t think it will spread to the U.S., with the exception of those limited segments of society who look to Europe for their lead in all things). It’s too bad Nightline is contributing to the problem by making excuses. Of course, maybe this characterization is unfair. I didn’t see the show, and though I find Laurence Jarvik’s impressions generally reliable, I might have disagreed with him in this instance. I’ll be interested in seeing what other people say.

MAGNUS BERNHARDSEN has more on Norwegian trade unionists who don’t like Israel.

HOG FARMS: More dangerous than Osama bin Laden! No, really, that’s what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is saying, making clear that he’s uninterested in, or at least unfit for, political office in the future. Fortunately, hog farmers seem familiar with what Kennedy’s producing:

Luke Kollasch, an Algona hog producer, said it is irresponsible to compare the pork industry to the man blamed for the largest terrorist attack against the United States. Kollasch and three other people walked out during Kennedy’s speech. “You have to be a complete wandering idiot to make that statement,” said Kollasch, whose family owns several hog farms and feed and construction companies in northwest Iowa.

“To compare pork producers with a regime that kills and terrorizes Americans, that blew my mind,” said Craig Christensen, a producer who farms with his father and uncle near Ogden.

I missed this story when it appeared, but found it via the Political Hobbyist site. Here’s a Walter Olson column on this subject, too.

And is it just me, or is real life getting more and more like The Onion?

THE SPACE SETTLEMENT INITIATIVE: Here’s a website devoted to promoting human settlement of outer space — one that pays attention to important issues like seeing that it’s profitable. Yeah, I know this is usually Rand Simberg’s turf, but I’m allowed to poach on it, occasionally.

YOUR MEDIA-WATCHING ASSIGNMENT FOR THE WEEKEND: The antiglobo protesters are coming to Washington. There won’t be any more of them than were at the pro-Israel rally. They will, for the most part, be unwashed slackers with incoherent and contradictory positions rather than respectable citizens coalesced around a single cause. So politically they’re less significant by any reasonable measure.

Your assignment: see if their protests get more attention than the pro-Israel rallies in spite of their lack of significance. See, for example, if they get full-length segments on ABC, NBC and CBS — something the Israel rally didn’t get.

And if they do, is the lesson to the pro-Israel protesters that they should set stuff on fire next time? Or is the lesson something worse than that?

UPDATE: Also compare how this likely-much-smaller rally by CAIR gets covered. (UPDATE to the update: Reader Edward Baer writes: “I wonder if they planned it for Hitler’s birthday on purpose?”)

THE CAIR AFFAIR is discussed in The Washington Times today.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU says terrorism comes from tyranny, not desperation:

Indeed, the root cause of terrorism is totalitarianism. Only a totalitarian regime, by systemically brainwashing its subjects, can indoctrinate hordes of killers to suspend all moral constraints for the sake of a twisted cause.

That is why from its inception totalitarianism has always been wedded to terrorism–from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to the ayatollahs to Saddam Hussein, right down to Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat.

It is not merely that the goals of terrorists do not justify the means they choose, it is that the means they choose tell us what their true goals are. Osama bin Laden is not seeking to defend the rights of Muslims but to murder as many Americans as possible, and ultimately to destroy America. Saddam Hussein is not seeking to defend his people but to subjugate his neighbors. Arafat is not seeking to build a state but to destroy a state; the many massacres of Jews he sponsors tells us what he would do to all the Jews of Israel if he had enough power.

Yes. And as Dave Kopel writes over at The Corner: “Why don’t all the people who are supposedly so concerned about the oppression of Arabs demand that the people of every Arab nation be given the same property rights, right to vote, and freedom of speech that Arabs who live in Israel have?” Why, indeed?

READER ANTON RIVIERA WRITES, rather hostilely:

Why weren’t the people who are now supposedly so concerned about undemocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Syria making their voices heard, say, a decade ago? Might it be for the same reason that they were silent for so many years over the situation in Afghanistan? That they don’t actually give a shit about democracy and freedom for brown people in faraway countries as long as life is cosy in the god-be-praised USA? Or perhaps for a lightly different reason: that those Arab tyrannies were fine and dandy while they were placing their orders for US military hardware and keeping their repression to themselves.

Why indeed?

After all, the only people addressing the injustices that arrived with the Taliban in 1996, or across Saudi Arabia over the past handful of decades, have been the international human rights organisations, and the left. Of course, it’s those organisations that are now being demonised by you and your pack of dittoheads for identifying in the occupied territories the same patterns of abuse that they’ve complained about, consistently, for decades, to silence from the mainstream and condemnation from the right.

You fucking hypocrite.

Hmm. I must have forgotten my many pro-dictatorship, pro-Taliban posts on InstaPundit back in the early 1990s, huh?

Here’s another question: if all these groups were so good about opposing the Taliban, why did they suddenly switch sides the minute it looked as if someone might actually do something about the Taliban? And why aren’t we getting the daily press releases about Saudi gender apartheid that we’re getting about the IDF?

And what’s this “little brown people” crap? One only hears that sort of thing from the “progressive” Left these days. The racism in this statement is made more obvious by the fact that neither Arabs nor Afghans are particularly little, or brown. But today’s Leftism is all about shouldering The White Man’s Burden, isn’t it? Which means, of course, that you have to call as many people little and brown as possible, to enlarge your own importance.

UPDATE: Reader John Downing writes:

While I agree with Anton Riviera that the left is usually out front in drawing our attention to human rights injustices throughout the world, particularly American human rights violations, I think Mr. Riviera illuminates a bigger point. At the end of the Gulf war, the left was “out front” calling on the US not to topple Saddam but to humbly follow the UN mandate only to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. If there were any calls for toppling Saddam back then, they were
not from the left but from the right. But, again, I do agree with Mr. Riviera that they were muted. Which brings us to the broader point Mr. Riviera may be trying to make–in the past decade conservatives moved from hostility to interventionist policies to open advocacy of international intervention. Nation-building is no longer a bad word; as it was just 2 years ago in the 2000 presidential campaign. There are 2 reasons for this shift. First, conservatives/republicans take pride in America and its history more than the elite left. This love is best expressed by Lincoln’s statement that America is “The last best hope of Earth.” As an avid reader of the conservative press, I’ve noticed this quote resurfacing in publications from the National Review, to The Wall Street Journal, to the Weekly Standard, to InstaPundit.com. Second, conservatives now believe that military action can facilitate the “hope” Lincoln talked about. The dramatic success of the Gulf War and our actions in Afghanistan have debunked the quagmire argument attached to American interventionism since Vietnam. This triumph of American values coupled with the recent triumphs of the American military may frighten Mr. Riviera and other members of the humanitarian left. After all, aren’t many of these human rights groups founded on the premise that they are Earth’s “last best hope”? Personally, I
find it quite frightening when evidence mounts that I am not what I thought I was.

Indeed.

MICKEY KAUS defends the New York Sun against the “snippy Zabarsism” of the New York Times’ Clyde Haberman.

REID STOTT has unflattering things to say about Cynthia McKinney, and sensible things to say about the silliness of labelling warbloggers, peacebloggers, etc.

MEDIA BIAS: Edward Boyd does a numerical analysis and comes up with far different results than Geoffrey Nunberg got.

INSTAPUNDIT’S PARIS CORRESPONDENT IS NOW OUR LISBON CORRESPONDENT, because that’s where Nelson Ascher is emailing from today. He writes that there may be some changes in attitude going on in Europe. I hope he’s right:

Hello. It seems that the killing of at least 15 German tourists in the bombing of Jerbah’s synagogue in Tunisia may be begining to turn the pro-Islamic tide in France. Below I send you today’s Le Monde’s (not exactly a pro-American or pro-Israeli paper) editorial. And I’ve just seen on France 5 TV a discussion or talkshow with with sociologists or scholars (two of them being French-Arab Muslims) analysing and condemning in very strong words what they called the Islamist totalitarian international, even comparing it to nazism. Among the details discussed was that of the geo-strategic importance of the Islamic/Islamist conquest of part of the Balkans because of its proximity to Southern Italy and, as a consequence, the strenghtening of ties between Bosnian/Albanian mafias on one side, and the Ndrangheta, Camorra and the Sicilian mafia on the other, the effect of which, among other things, is to facilitate the smuggling of arms, money-laundering etc. One of the panelists referred to the way the islamists see Europe: as the weak link of the West. Another said that electoralism and populism have driven local politicians to opportunist and short-sighted alliances with the islamists because they can both deliver the votes and keep social peace in the banlieus. One thing I can tell you for sure: independently of the sides they take, Europeans have a much deeper (maybe even cynical) knowledge of the problem than one would think by merely reading the British press. After all, they do live with millions of Muslims and they really colonized their lands. Some Europeans may not have learned much lately, but neither have many others forgotten what they already knew.

Yes, I suppose that there are quite a few people with a clue, outside the chattering classes. Now that the idiocy of the chattering classes — and just as important, their impotence to affect events — has been demonstrated, perhaps the clueful will begin to exercise some sway.

A RHETORICAL SUGGESTION: Since “homicide bomber” has caught on, regardless of whether people like the term, here’s another one the Administration should start: Talk about “Arabia” rather than “Saudi Arabia” whenever you’re talking about the country. Talk about “the House of Saud” or “the Sauds” when you’re talking about the government. Never use the two words together, as “Saudi Arabia,” anymore — and do your best, without ever actually saying it, to give the vague impression that you regard the Sauds as temporary and not very distinguished rulers of Arabia, but no more.

If the issue is raised, deny that you mean anything by it, but keep doing it.

THE SARGE is back! I knew he couldn’t stay away.

LIKE AN AWFUL LOT OF “SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE,” it turns out that chemical bullet-matching doesn’t work.

NIGHTLINE will be about antisemitism tonight. Here’s an excerpt from the promotional email:

We have been flooded with emails since the beginning of the current round of violence in the Middle East. A lot of them have been fairly nasty, which we expect. But a number of them have accused us of not only being biased, a common theme to all of them, but of also being anti-Semitic. A smaller number have compared us to the Nazis, a particularly ugly attack. Now in recent weeks there have been a growing number of anti-Semitic attacks, especially in Europe. Synagogues burned, cemeteries vandalized, even a Jewish soccer team attacked. Many of these incidents have happened in France, but there have been incidents all over. Correspondent Richard Gizbert will report on this rising level of violence.

But there is a more difficult issue here, and that’s why I referred to the emails. The charge of anti-Semitism is not one to be taken lightly. But can someone be critical of Israel, or its policies, without being anti-Semitic? Is it possible to separate the two? At the same time, the charge of anti-Semitism can be used to quash any criticism. It’s easy for everyone to condemn the blatant and violent anti-Semitism behind the incidents in Europe. But what of something that is much more subtle? It’s a difficult subject. John Donvan is going to explore that question in his
report tonight.

They’re going to have Elie Wiesel.

My short answer: Sure, you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. But when you criticize Israel for things you ignore in others, it raises certain doubts.

FLYOVER COUNTRY TODAY is a, well, it’s a NewsBlog, I guess. Check it out.

THIS STORY suggests that our brains may be hardwired in favor of religious experiences, which actually makes some evolutionary sense.

ANDREW SULLIVAN’S ARTICLE ON WEBLOGS IN WIRED is now online.

JONAH GOLDBERG poses this excellent question over at The Corner:

What do you think the reaction of, say, Mother Jones, Nation or the New York Times would be if Israel wasn’t a Jewish homeland, but a gay one. Gays have been persecuted for thousands of years. They’ve never had their own nation – though the quasi city-state of San Francisco is something of a gay Zion. Gays, like many Zionist Jews, feel a very strong need to prove they won’t be pushed around anymore. Homosexuals will never be safe from gay-bashing pogroms, they might argue, until they have a homeland of their own. Any takers?

I love questions like this. But then, I’m a law professor, and hence Socratic by nature.

IF YOU’RE WONDERING WHERE MY FOXNEWS COLUMN IS — and no doubt there are, uh, several people who are — it won’t appear until Monday. I got it to ’em on time, but there was some kind of production glitch and half of it disappeared, so I had to resend it.

Anyway, their loss is your gain, because this column by Jeffrey Snyder on concealed-weapons permits is running in its place, and it’s swell. Excerpt:

Eleven states, including California and New York, still have the older, discretionary licensing statutes. They permit the chief of police or a local judge to issue carry permits to persons of “good character” who have some “good reason” or “proper cause” to carry a gun. The language of these statutes is so vague that issuance of carry permits is completely discretionary, and generally these statutes are administered as near-total bans, especially in cities and suburbs.

In New York City, for example, the people who seem most often to have both “good moral character” and “proper cause” to carry (besides those whose work requires them to carry) are celebrities, such as Howard Stern, or persons who have wealth, political influence or connections. Meanwhile, cab drivers — who are murdered or shot more frequently than police officers and far more frequently than celebrities — fail time and again to have “proper cause.”

In this manner, discretionary licensing schemes reveal an ugly fact: the state that operates on the basis of such a law clearly believes that only certain of its citizens are important enough to warrant the right of self-protection; the rest can just take their chances.

Yes. There are rather dramatic racial disparities in who gets permits, too. Imagine that.

HOWARD KURTZ surveys the differing news accounts of the alleged massacre at Jenin.