The Democratic Party is driven by viciously anti-Semitic activists and dominated by celebrated anti-Semitic veterans. Its foreign policy elites are institutionally biased against Israel and its domestic elites are either anti-Semitic themselves or breathtakingly untroubled by open anti-Semitism in their colleagues.

John Edwards is not a stupid guy. He's also almost certainly not anti-Semitic. How then could he find himself saying something so blisteringly stupid:

Now this article points out how unfair it is for pro-Israel activists to try to shut down attacks against Israel. We've dealt with this before - if there's a Jewish conspiracy to hush up criticism of Israel, they are doing the worst job that anyone in the history of the human race has done about anything. Read this slowly: John Edwards, like Jimmy Carter and Wes Clarke, isn't being criticized for saying something mean about Israel or Jews. He's being criticized for saying something mean about Israel or Jews that also happens to be mindbogglingly wrong.

The question is not why he would criticize Israel, although we do think that hysterical human rights activists who choose to criticize Israel out of all the countries in the world are a little suspicious. The question is how someone could come to believe what you have to believe to make such a stupid statement. Anti-Semites believe what they do because they have a bigoted reason to ignore all evidence to the contrary. For a rational, basically good guy like Edwards the answer is a little more complicated. It has to do with his day to day life, the things that he reads and the people he talks to.

This is kind of like when Howard Dean called on the US to be "even-handed" in the Middle East. He just didn't know that "even-handed" is a charged, anti-Israel codeword in the loaded language of diplomatic activism. Dean said what he said because everything he'd read - from liberal college pamphlets to the Nation to the New York Times - made him think that reasonable people talk like that. He didn't know that "even-handed" is a Thing for the people he was talking to.

Edwards is a man who has been tested and shaped by the crucible of a national Presidential election. He knows very well how to sidestep questions about the Middle East that he thinks might end with controversial answers. Despite this - he said what he said because it sounded reasonable to him. He just didn't know how it sounds to other people - people outside his cocoon - when someone says that the Jewish State is the locus of global instability. The people he surrounds himself with have effectively made him tone-deaf to slanders against Israel, because those slanders pass for respectable opinion.

It's also a is a problem for the Jews who still laughingly insist that they need to stay in the Democratic party to move it back to something approaching reasonability. You don't have the ear of last run's Vice Presidential candidate, and where you aren't totally shut out you'seem hopelessly outnumbered. At the risk of getting a little technical, you have no ideological appeal or rhetorical tactic that you can use to make these people listen to you. There's nothing you can say to persuade people who are that far gone.

To get where they are today, activists had to pick and choose facts so selectively that their anti-Israel filters are automatic: "both sides are equally to blame", "there's a pro-Israel media bias", "this is Jewish lobby propaganda". We don't think that Edwards necessarily believes these things - but he's so totally surrounded by people who do that he can't tell the difference between what's reasonable any more. Democratic Jews should salvage some self-respect and leave those people to their own delusions.

Or maybe Edwards knew he was out of line. Maybe he just wanted to appeal to a Democratic base that would celebrate him as a martyr who spoke Truth to the Power of those Hollywood Jews. Which means that he thinks that he needs to appeal to a Democratic base that... and so on.

What are you Democratic Jews doing helping to put these people in power?

You don't have to become a Republican. But as long as you vote for Democrats, you're empowering people who - in the very, very, very best case - believe against all evidence that Israel is at fault for the Middle East crises. Maybe they've hystericaly maintained this counter-intuitive position for reasons other than latent to open anti-Semitism But honestly, can you think of what that reason might be?

References:
* The Democratic Party and American Jews: The Divorce Is Going To Be Ugly [MR]
* Is Jimmy Carter Just An Old-Fashioned Christian Fundamentalist, Anti-Semitic Bigot? [MR]
* The Denial of the Obvious By Reference to the Irrelevant: Center-Left Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics [MR]
* MR Has A Question For Democratic Jews: Are You Fucking Retarded? [MR]
* The real Hollywood politics
* Dean's Not Credible [MR]

Previously:
* Video: Carter Backpeddles Unsuccessfully, MR Helpfully Lists Why
* Did Jimmy Carter Really Just Accuse An Honored Rabbi Of Money Grubbing? Of Course He Did.
* "Carter Is An Anti-Semite" Meme Officially Jumps The Shark

[Cross-posted to The Astute Bloggers]