Deflecting Criticism with a Slur

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In Dowd's Sunday column, she questioned the sincerity of Paul Ryan's foreign policy positions, in which she asserted that neocon "puppet masters" were pushing the Romney/Ryan team further towards Zionism, and a fanatic support of Israel. Money quote:

Ryan bemoaned "the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration." American foreign policy, he said, "needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose."

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte."

This is something that, in the Washington media village, one is simply not allowed to say. To claim in any way that there is a neoconservative agenda at play, and that the fanatic proponents of Greater Israel have too much influence on the GOP's foreign policy positions is to invite fantastic claims of anti-semitism. One commentator branded Dowd's column "outrageous," quoting another columnist who made the strident and unfounded accusation that Dowd's use of the word 'slither' in her headline is some kind of a Nazi allusion. Jonathan Tobin called it creepy.

Jeffrey Goldberg, usually a reasonable person, was more moderate than the others. But he's tutting nonetheless:

Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews. (Later, Hounshell wrote, "(A)mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK.") This sinister stereotype became a major theme in the discussion of the Iraq war, when critics charged that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among other Jewish neoconservatives, were actually in charge of Bush Administration foreign policy. This charge relegated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley and the other Christians who actually set policy to the status of puppets.

But there's nothing remotely anti-semitic about Dowd's column, as Kevin Drum writes:

There's nothing anti-Semitic in Dowd's column. She just doesn't like neocons, and she doesn't like the fact that so many of the neocons responsible for the Iraq debacle are now advisors to Mitt Romney's campaign. Pretending that this makes her guilty of hate-mongering toward Jews is reprehensible.

This is a theme that has become all too common within discourse on Israel: anytime criticism of neoconservative Israel policies arises, some vague inference can be made and the author can be dismissed as someone with anti-semitic sentiments. My concern, in short, is that even legitimate criticism can be deflected using the charge of anti-semitism. That's all.

(Image via Andrew Sullivan)