More on anti-Semitism and the Left

I posted yesterday about the pact with the devil that Spain made when it scurried from bombings into the Socialists’ waiting arms. I got one comment (polite, I might add), saying that I didn’t show that Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain was anti-Semitic, because I showed was that he criticized Israel. This reader probably missed Zapatero’s comment about “understanding” the Nazis.

However, I also got another comment from Diana Muir quoting her article about the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. It’s such a good article, it doesn’t deserve to be hidden in a comment. Herewith some quotations, and you should definitely read the rest.

Two Connecticut professors got curious about the constant denials that extremely harsh critics of Israel were anti-Semitic. Edward H. Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences, and Charles A. Small, Director of Urban Studies, Southern Connecticut State University, decided to examine the issue in formal way. Their paper, “Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe,” appears in the August issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution. [Footnote omitted.]

Kaplan and Small ask whether individuals expressing strong anti-Israel sentiments, such as the statement by Ted Honderich, Emeritus Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, that “those Palestinians who have resorted to necessary killing have been right to try to free their people, and those who have killed themselves in the cause of their people have indeed sanctified themselves,” are more likely than the general population to also support in such old-style anti-Semitic slurs as “Jews have too much power in our country today.”

The correlation was almost perfect. In a survey of 5,000 Europeans in ten countries, people who believed that the Israeli soldiers “intentionally target Palestinian civilians,” and that “Palestinian suicide bombers who target Israeli civilians” are justified, also believed that “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,” “Jews have a lot of irritating faults,” and “Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.”