The Guardian's "Theobald Jews"

According to the Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth in his The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich (1173), it was an apostate Jew, a certain Theobald, who, swore that Jews had killed twelve-year old William, a tanner’s apprentice, to fulfill their “Passover blood ritual” in the fateful year of 1144—the first recorded such episode in a long line of murderous defamations.
CiF Watch: Jewish Self-Hatred For Dummies

In The Guardian’s anti-Israel Jews, and a letter to my teenage nephew, Adam Levick writes about "Theobald Jews"--"among the most vociferous in expressing their contempt for Israel, and so willing to demonize the state’s Jewish supporters."

Here is his short list:

The CiF contributors I refer to include Naomi Klein, Neve Gordon, Richard Silverstein, Antony Lerman, Seth Freedman, Tony Greenstein, among others. These Jewish writers don’t merely critique Israeli policy, but routinely engage in hyperbole, vitriol, and gross distortions. Their rhetoric is often spewed with hate towards the Jewish state, all but ignoring the behavior of her enemies - the terrorist and reactionary movements who openly seek her annihilation. Such commentators often infer that the democratic Jewish state (the most progressive nation, by far, in the region) is almost always in the wrong, is usually motivated by a hideous malevolence, and represents a national movement which they, as Jews, are ashamed to be associated with.


Freedman, for instance, has suggested that Israel is a theocracy – one which is on moral par with Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Gordon has on several occasions accused Israel of ethnic cleansing - once advancing such an ugly calumny in the radical anti-Zionist magazine, Counterpunch. Tony Greenstein has ardently defended the ugly comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, typically advanced by extremists. Richard Silverstein has called the behavior of Israelis serving in the IDF “subhuman“, and has defended Hamas from “charges” that they are an extremist movement. Naomi Klein actually accused Israel of being so cruel and sadistic as to “bury children alive in their homes.”

These people have formed a somewhat symbiotic relationship with The Guardian: they make it possible for the newspaper to defend itself from charges of anti-Semitism, while they themselves acquire the "progressive and universalist credentials" which they seek.

But Levick goes beyond pointing fingers--he investigates the phenomenon itself and delineates 4 dynamics that indicate there is more here than just a simplistic case of self-hating Jews.

The four dyanmics are:

• Moral Vanity
• The Temptation of Innocence
• Jewish Fear: Assimilation and Altruism as an Inoculation from Harm
• The Adversarial Jew: Skepticism and relativism disguised as reasoned political thought

His discussion of these four elements forms the meat of Levick's article--go and read it for yourself.

Technorati Tag: The Guardian and Comment Is Free and Anti-Semitism and Theobald Jews.