A sadly predictable article in Tablet claiming that some prominent online writers and bloggers are “using the Internet to make anti-Semitism respectable.”
Seriously, because a handful of comments on a website may be anti-Semitic – and depends who you ask when defining that troubled word – people like Glenn Greenwald and the Mondoweiss website are daring to articulate a view of the Middle East that doesn’t protect Israel from legitimate criticism:
If not quite as popular as adult-content sites, the anti-Israel blogosphere is a dirty little thrill that major U.S. media outfits have mainstreamed for the masses, the intellectual equivalent of the topless “Page Three” girls that British tabloids use to boost circulation. Among the dozens of blogs and websites obsessed with Israel and the machinations of the U.S. Israel lobby, Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss (a project of The Nation Institute), Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon, and Stephen Walt’s blog on ForeignPolicy.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) sit atop the junk-heap.
“Whenever one of these guys writes about me, I can tell without having looked at their blogs, because my inbox quickly fills with anti-Semitic invective,” says The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor and a frequent target of Weiss, Greenwald, and Walt. “Whenever I see a subject line with something like ”˜You fascist Zionazi,’ it’s pretty much assured the link in the email will lead back to a post from one of these guys.”*
Some of these bloggers, like Weiss and Sullivan, were widely published journalists prior to their careers as Jew-baiters. Walt is a different case: A tenured professor of international relations at Harvard, his reputation extended no further than academic circles until The Israel Lobby put him in the middle of the national debate over U.S. Middle East policy. “I wouldn’t consider it a Middle East blog,” Foreign Policy’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, says of Walt’s work for the site. “He writes about a lot of other things. It’s a regular foreign-policy blog.”