Hatred Unveiled

Governor Blagojevich is attempting to mend fences with the Jewish community "Strained ties linger for Jews, governor" over his hypocritical "Hate Crime Commission", without doing anything substantive to remedy the situation. Sun Times:

"I think it's working well,'' Blagojevich said. "It's been sort of below the radar screen, and I think, frankly, that's probably the right way to do it, as some of the wounds from what happened before heal."

The gov would like this issue to stay below the radar, but it's an election year and the governor is taking the Jewish community for granted:

Blagojevich also said he is not worried that his decision to stick by her may create lasting damage with Jewish voters, an important Democratic constituency.

"Those things don't enter my mind," he said.

Really.

But with our governor, it's always a possibility.

He has yet to call for the resignation of commission member Claudette Marie Muhammad, a top aide to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Sister Muhammed refused to repudiate anti-Semitic remarks made by Farrakhan. Earlier posts here and here.

And now we have evidence of the real-world implications of such a see-no-evil attitude. A recent paper co-written by a University of Chicago professor has created a firestorm, charging there is a Jewish conspiracy conducting our foreign policy. It reminds me of bigoted anti-Catholic remarks made during JFK's run for the presidency, about taking marching orders from the pope. Perhaps this paper will be quoted in bin Laden or Zarqawi's next media releases, which already echo Democrat talking points. Here is Scott at Powerline with an update on this issue, quoting Columbia University professor Samuel Freedman:

In my take on the paper, I observed that unlike the fictitious conspiracy portrayed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the "Israel Lobby" conspiracy depicted by Mearsheimer and Walt has done serious damage to the United States. Professor Freedman makes a shrewder point:

You have to wonder why the professors would have thought it necessary to protect themselves against such a comparison. In fact, the Protocols doesn't even offer the right parallel, though for reasons Walt and Mearsheimer cannot or choose not to grasp.

The best analog to their paper on the Israel Lobby is a 1991 publication by the Nation of Islam entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. Like the professors' paper, the Black Muslim tract is not a forgery or fabrication akin to the Protocols. It is, rather, an adroit exercise in cherry-picking, a document that takes painstaking care to employ Jewish sources in prosecuting a case of Jewish skullduggery.

The Secret Relationship draws on Jewish scholarship on such topics as Jewish prominence in Hollywood, Jewish involvement in slave-trading, and Jewish business stakes in black slums. Taken individually, the citations from such respected figures as Neal Gabler and Jacob Rader Marcus appear to be accurately quoted or paraphrased. The bigoted fiction comes in weaving together these strands into a whole cloth of irremediable, almost primordial Jewish hatred of blacks.

Walt and Mearsheimer, as I first realized pondering my own footnote, have done very much the same thing...

And perhaps Walt and Mearsheimer's paper is what passes for scholarship in the liberal-dominated bubble of academia, but in the real world we can recognize anti-Semitism when we see it.

At least most of us can.