Odds & ends on anti-semitism

Dr Mohammad’s speech has 4223 words and 59 paragraphs. Out of these, his direct or indirect references to the Jewish people, the Palestinian problem, Israel, Zionism and Western policies only make up 373 words. And these 373 words include the line: “Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing”. This sentence alone should make clear to anyone accusing Dr Mohammad of anti-Semitism of the absurdity of the charge since he makes a clear distinction between the Jewish people and the state of Israel…. We fail to see why anyone in the West should quibble with what Dr Mohammad has said. Clearly, what has caused the uproar are his remarks about the Jewish ‘control of the world’. And pray, how is he wrong on that count? Is it any secret that there is a very powerful Jewish lobby in the United States that all but controls that country’s political system? Is it a secret that without the unstinting support of the United States, Israel could not have survived and gone from strength to strength? Is it any secret that the Nixon administration resorted to the biggest airlift in Oct 1973 since the crisis over Berlin after the then Israeli premier Golda Meir rushed to Washington in the face of advancing Egyptian armour? Is it any secret that the United States has killed (or compelled members to water down) every single resolution the United Nations Security Council has tried to bring against Israel? Is it any secret that the United States has multiple joint weapons development programmes with Israel? Is it any secret that scores of American politicians have seen their political careers come to an end at the hands of the Jewish lobby and Jewish money? Is it any secret that a sizeable number of Washington’s neo-cons are Jews? Is it also any secret that they pushed the United States into a war with Iraq and the reshaping of the Middle East, an enterprise for which they had prepared a blueprint back in 1995, much before the events of September 11, 2001?

Thanks to DanielDrezner.com’s trusted South Asian correspondent A.A. for the link.

“I never thought the Europeans would be against me,” the New Sunday Times quoted him as saying. “I can’t understand them. I’m glad that Chirac at least understands. I would like to thank him publicly.”

Solomonia points out that this thank-you has unnerved Chirac to the point of being more explicit in his condemnation. He links to this Haaretz story reporting that Cirac has sent a personal letter to Mahathir that contains the following paragraph:

“Your remarks on the rule of Jews gave rise to very strong disapproval in France and in the world… these remarks can only be condemned by all who preserve the memory of the Holocaust.”

William Blackstone, the English legal theorist closely read by the Framers, argued that the essence of free speech was forbidding prior restraint: Anyone should be able to say anything, but then must live with the aftermath. A citizen should possess “an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public,” Blackstone wrote in his “Commentaries”–which James Madison consulted often while working on drafts of the First Amendment wording–but “must take the consequences” for any reaction. The reaction to free speech, Madison thought, would be part of the mechanism by which society sifted out beliefs. Protected by Madison’s amendment, the Ku Klux Klan can spew whatever repugnant drivel its wishes. Society, in turn, shuns KKK members for the repugnant people their free speech exposes them to be. No one expects the KKK to speak without a price; its price is ostracism… [W]hen the novelist Barbara Kingsolver says “the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder,” or the novelist Arundhati Roy says George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are “interchangeable,” these statements are safeguarded. But readers may fairly respond by declining to buy Ms. Kingsolver’s and Ms. Roy’s books, and bookstores may fairly respond by declining to stock them. That these authors have a right to their views does not mean publishers and bookstores must promote them. It is censorship if books are seized and burned; it is not censorship if books are tossed into the trash because their authors mock the liberty that made the books possible. Indeed, expressing revulsion at the sight of a Kingsolver book is itself a form of protected speech…. Speech must be free, but cannot be without cost.

Maybe the cost of Easterbrook’s speech in this incident was excessive. But to extend his analogy, if a bookstore has the right to not promote a book, then ESPN has the right to not promote Easterbrook.

I’m questioning Professor Drezner’s implied assertion that anonymous bloggers have some special duty to, say, the Gregg Easterbrooks of the world to defend them from being punished by their employers.

I wasn’t trying to imply that at all. I was trying to imply that the kind of schadenfreude Atrios takes from Easterbrook’s current plight strikes me as hypocritical.