By Philip Weiss, Apr 13, 2012, Mondoweiss
A noble statement, Peter Beinart to Chemi Shalev in Haaretz a few weeks back (emphasis Mondoweiss):
“I want people, non-Jewish Americans, to have opinions about this like they have opinions about anything else. They may be wrong, they may be stupid, they may be ignorant. Let them have their opinions. And don’t call them anti-Semites unless they have a history of animus toward the Jewish people.
“The problem is that we have a Jewish organizational world whose business model is anti-Semitism, and there’s not enough of it in the United States. So they have to keep looking for it in the Israel debate, when what’s going on is not anti-Semitism. And it upsets me a great deal that American Jewish leaders never have to pay the price. Nobody ever loses their job for getting up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, reading an op-ed they don’t like, and then saying that that person is an anti-Semite. And you should lose your job for that. There should be consequences for that. The pain of being called an anti-Semite in this post-Holocaust world, when you’re not, is just agonizing to watch, frankly.”