Bad Manners in the Post Anti Semitism Age
...a must see article.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/11/wolff200611?currentPage=2

Mel Gibson's meltdown, Günter Grass's past, and Joe Lieberman's primary loss all have reminded the world of a centuries-old hatred. But right now, the author argues, given Israel's controversial influence in Washington and recent invasion of Lebanon, people might be a little too eager to cry anti-Semitism.

"But no matter. Indeed, it may be exactly that goyishness, that reasonable assumption of latent anti-Semitism—what The New York Times characterized in recent coverage of the mock-anti-Semitic comic Sacha Baron Cohen as "that most risky of social toxins"—that helps create the leverage we're talking about. Walt, Mearsheimer, and Massing argue that because of the great effectiveness of an ad hoc group of determined Jews and their organizations, sometimes called the Israel lobby, or what my father—once president of the Jewish Federation of North Jersey—called "professional Jews" (that is, people who made their living off of being Jewish), the correlation of anti-Semitism with even the slightest qualms about Israel has become, year by year, ever more rigid. (Walt and Mearsheimer's own experience on the receiving end of great opprobrium for their article would certainly seem to demonstrate this point: nobody who ventures into this debate gets out in one piece.) The result is that every politician and media figure defaults to fixed sentiments about Israel. Everybody uses the same stamp-of-approval language. If you doubt Israel, you're suspect. You're practically Mel."

"On the other hand, if there is really no anti-Semitism, if it is as dead as … what? Communism … then a different sort of debate inevitably begins. If there is no anti-Semitism, then you can't so easily use the anti-Semitic card as a line of polemical defense. You can't be soft on an issue if there is no issue. If it becomes less than credible to accuse people of anti-Semitism, then there are aspects of the Israel situation—for instance, the disproportionate amount of U.S. aid to Israel, cited in Walt and Mearsheimer's article ($3 billion a year, one-fifth of the foreign-aid budget), or, more recently, the whole Lebanon-invasion thing—that reasonably intelligent people might want to consider at some greater length. So, in that respect, the very absence of anti-Semitism—if that's what we've achieved—becomes, practically speaking, anti-Semitic."