A Committee To Investigate Anti-Semitism

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, during his recent visit to Washington, stated in widely reported remarks that the resurgence of anti-Semitic propaganda and associated violence around the world should not be minimized or explained away, but attacked head-on.

Blaming Israel Is An Easy Scapegoat

Unfortunately, during the past six years, agreement on what counts as anti-Semitism has not proved easy to achieve. Since Sept. 11, 2001, a large body of opinion in Europe and America -- mainly, but not exclusively, in the universities, the media and the arts -- has been talking as if the existence of Israel represented the sole cause of conflict between Islamists and the West.

Fellow Jews Rally To Sarkozy

Anti-Semitism, like any other form of prejudice, cannot breathe the air of truth. It thrives on luridly colored falsehood. That is where we need to begin the diagnosis for which President Sarkozy has issued such a timely call.

The Hoax Of A Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy

But furious denial is the usual response to any suggestion that there is anything anti-Semitic either about grotesquely hyperbolic defamation of Israel ("a Nazi state," "the apartheid wall"), or about attacks on the "Israel lobby" that patently revive and reanimate the hoary myth of Jewish conspiracy.

Denial is buttressed by the claim that these accusations of anti-Semitism are themselves evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to silence critics of Israel and close down debate on the Middle East. That charge, of course, reanimates another traditional anti-Semitic theme -- that of the Jew who whines about his sufferings less because he is really injured than because he hopes to draw some hidden advantage from complaining.