ANTISEMITISM AND THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: Andrew Sullivan agrees that it’s real, despite efforts to explain it away:

America’s anti-war movement, still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back and back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-Semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler’s, is now a cultural norm across much of the Arab Middle East and beyond. It’s the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis. They all hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed. And if you’re campaigning against a war against that axis, you’re bound to attract some people who share these prejudices. That is not to say that the large majority of anti-war campaigners are anti-Semitic. Of course they’re not. But it is to say that this strain of anti-Semitism, hovering around the edges of that movement, is a worrying and dangerous sign.

I think his explanation of why is on target, too:

What are these anti-Israel fanatics really obsessed about? Where are the divestment campaigns for China or Zimbabwe?

The answer, I think, lies in the nature of part of today’s left. It is fueled above all by resentment – resentment of the West’s success, resentment of the freedom to trade, resentment of any person or country, like Israel or Britain or the U.S., that has enriched itself by means of freedom and hard work.

I forget who described the motivation as an almost pathological hatred of effectualness, but you do see a lot of that. It’s what ties together anti-globalization, Luddism, and, yes, anti-Semitism on the left today.

That’s not the whole left, by any means, of course. But it’s the part we seem to hear from the most.

UPDATE: It was Diane E. who described it this way: “what animates the left is a generalized rancid, corrosive anger against any form of effectuality, and a hatred of anything constructive.” As I say, that’s not the whole left — but it’s a very identifiable, and loud, subset.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh writes that a lot of it is simply driven by a desire to look cool and contrarian. I think there’s a lot to that — as I wrote a while back:

Being contrary isn’t the same as being insightful: As I said, academics want to look original. Actually being original, however, is hard work. The second-raters, therefore, tend to look for ways of seeming original without doing the heavy lifting required to actually come up with something new. One way of doing this is to set yourself against whatever the popular view is in the hopes that others will mistake this for incisiveness. (This frequently works, since other people are often not willing to put in the necessary effort to tell the difference). But knee-jerk contrariness isn’t original — it’s just conformity in the opposite direction. After a while, this becomes obvious even to casual observers.

I think we’ve reached that point.