Mere Rhetoric: Pro-Israel Leftists Losing Ability To Rationalize the Sickening Viciousness and Hypocrisy Of the Rest Of the Left

When you're a member of an organization that ranges from the counterproductive to the hateful, you have two choices: try to reform it or conclude that the mob is too big, rabid, or dedicated - and cut off your ties with them. For years, Jewish members of the American (and international) left have been insisting that the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping their movements is a reason for them to stay involved and fight harder. The center-right - and we flatter ourselves that we can still make a claim to that designation - has been insisting with equal vehemence that the contemporary left has too much invested in the tangled web of anti-Americanism, anti-globalism, anti-militarism, and latent anti-Semitism to be reformed. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding:

It certainly should come as no great surprise that anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments are nothing rare at the ultra-liberal website Daily Kos. It is nonetheless fascinating to read the views of an Israeli member and contributor who has asked for his membership to be canceled due to “plain old Israel Bashing“ and the fact that people there are “advancing ideology that leads directly to Israel being destroyed as a Jewish and democratic [sic], and me dying.”... Rosenberg then wonderfully identified the hypocrisy that exists not only at ultra-liberal websites like Daily Kos, but is also prevalent throughout the media and much of the Democrat Party: Not a word on the hundreds of thousand of jews expelled from the Arab countries and rehabilitated in Israel. Easier to blame Israel for not commiting suicide by letting the Palestinian refugees back in, not blaming the Arab world for keeping them poor and desperate.

You want some confirmation of Rosenberg's intuition that the activist left is too defensively myopic to entertain criticism - or be amenable to reform? Go check out the comments on his post. We'd make some random selections (there's certainly enough viciousness to make that easy) - but we don't want to be accused of cherry-picking. It's typical "stop trying to use accusations of anti-Semitism to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel" - except as always (a) no one is doing that and (b) it's been a long time since any criticism of Israel in any form was "stifled".

Because you know that this kind of stuff - including the designations as top post and the comment from Kos himself - are just some peripheral bad apples: