NYT's Latest Anti-Israel Smear: "Zionism Is Antisemitism"

Well, I suppose it makes a change from that "Zionism is racism" trope. And you know that only someone who's really smart--like philosophy prof Omri Boehm--could come up with something this stupid:

The alliance that’s beginning to form between Zionist leadership and politicians with anti-Semitic tendencies has the power to transform Jewish-American consciousness for years to come. In the last few decades, many of America’s Jewish communities have grown accustomed to living in a political contradiction. On one hand, a large majority of these communities could rightly take pride in a powerful liberal tradition, stretching back to such models as Louis Brandeis — a defender of social justice and the first Jew to become a Supreme Court justice — or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched in Selma alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other hand, the same communities have often identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics… by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right. The idea that Israel is the Jews’ own ethnic state implies that Jews living outside of it — say, in America or in Europe — enjoy a merely diasporic existence. That is another way of saying that they inhabit a country that is not genuinely their own. Given this logic, it is natural for Zionist and anti-Semitic politicians to find common ideas and interests. Every American who has been on a Birthright Israel tour should know that left-leaning Israelis can agree with America’s alt-right that, ideally, “Jews should live in their own country.”

I take it back. It isn't stupid. It's deranged.

Here's blogger Elder of Ziyon on the subject:

What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on problematic anecdotes about a single member of that group?

You would call him a bigot.

You would certainly not call him liberal.

Boehm doesn't compare Israel's liberalism against that of Western Europe. He doesn't mention the undeniably liberal social policies in Israel. He doesn't mention that Israel, even while being the Jewish state, cannot discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens by law. He doesn't mention that in many ways, the "indecent" Zionist state is more liberal than the US.

Because Boehm is not a liberal. He is a bigot who is using the language of liberalism to attack and insult a specific group of people he finds distasteful, and he justifies his hate after the fact by cherry-picking examples that do not represent the group at all. And his agenda is to shame American Jews into hating the only liberal state in the Middle East and sympathize with Israel's very, very illiberal enemies.

An agenda he shares with the New York Times and other moribund publications.