Did anyone see the “Stand With Israel” rally in New York City yesterday? I did not, as I am just now hearing about it. The wondrously dim Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has photos up and gushes it was overwhelming. “Tens of thousands,” she says.

As Tbogg observes, “Next thing you know Boston will be overrun by the Irish next March 17th.”

Listen, folks, if you throw a pro-Israel rally in New York City and only tens of thousands show up, we’re not talking “overwhelming.” We’re talking “Where is everybody?” In New York City you can get tens of thousands by handing out free bagels. I’ve been to three anti-war and anti-Bush events in New York City that drew hundreds of thousands, easy.

What was overwhelming yesterday was the heat, however, which possibly discouraged many people from joining the rally. But I wasn’t there. Eyewitness accounts from lefties are welcome.

Most of the time, righties don’t like New York. They loved New York immediately after September 11, but that didn’t last long. You might remember when John McCain was dissed at the New School commencement this past May. The entire Right Blogosphere went on a “we hate New York” rampage.

Today, the righties love New York City again, because New York City rallied for Israel. But last week, Eric Alterman wrote,

I’d like to see some attention paid to the exploitation of right-wing American anti-Semitism that underlies the Bush campaign against The New York Times and the rest of what Republican Rep. Peter King called its “arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda.” As Jon Carrol observed, “The New York Times contains the word ‘New York.’ Many members of the president’s base consider ‘New York’ to be a nifty code word for ‘Jewish.’” This anti-Times campaign reminds me of the conservative campaign to slander George Soros, which was also a sometimes explicit, usually implicit exploitation of traditional Jewish stereotypes. Remember Tony Blankley calling Soros a “robber baron” and “pirate capitalist,” and “a man who, when he was plundering the world’s currencies, in England in ’92, he caused the Southeast Asian financial crisis in ’97. He said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions…. He is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust.” (Blankley later wrote me that his comments were “both incomplete and pregnant with a malicious implication I did not intend.” It’s all here.) Anyway, there it is.

Jon Carrol’s full remarks are here:

Also, the name of the New York Times contains the word “New York.” Many members of the president’s base consider “New York” to be a nifty code word for “Jewish.” It is very nice for the president to be able to campaign against the Jews without (a) actually saying the word “Jew” and (b) without irritating the Israelis. A number of prominent Zionist groups think the New York Times is insufficiently anti-Palestinian, so they think the New York Times isn’t Jewish enough.

More on Tony Blankley’s infamous antisemitic smear of George Soros here. As Kevin Drum encapsulates,

Translation: he’s a Jew-hating Jew, he’s a greedy Jew, he’s a conniving and heartless Jew, he’s an atheistic Jew, and he’s a Jew who must have been (if you get my drift, wink wink) a Nazi collaborator. Anyone who’s not a child knows perfectly well what Blankley was saying here.

Of course, if you want to find examples of someone spewing antisemitism while accusing others of antisemitism, you can’t beat Ann Coulter.

In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats’ other big idea – too nuanced for a bumper sticker – is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There’s Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew – along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering. …

… The Democrats’ urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children. Their humble-origins claptrap is designed to disguise the fact that liberals think ordinary people are racist scum.

Dave Neiwert commented,

How exactly is Lieberman’s Jewishness a form of “pandering” anyway? Should he stop being Jewish just so Democrats can’t be accused of sucking up to the Jews? And should Howard Dean get a divorce so that no one will think he’s pandering?

But most noticeable is this undercurrent: Coulter seems to believe that the only reason Jews would vote for Democrats is that because they’re too stupid to recognize pandering for its own sake. Kind of the same reason blacks vote Democratic, right?

This is, throughout, a column reptilian in its nastiness. Its core thesis is that Democrats try to score political points by exhibiting compassion. What she clearly misses is that Republicans fail to do likewise not out of principle, but because, frankly, they rarely bother to exhibit much in the way of compassion themselves, unless it is for environmental polluters, Enronesque corporate outlaws and drug-addicted right-wing talk-show hosts.

Dave, a very wise man, also writes,

As I noted quite awhile back, projection from the right has become such a common phenomenon that it’s now a very useful gauge in guessing where the right is taking us next:

Indeed, one of the lessons I’ve gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.

Whether it’s sexual improprieties, slander, treason, or unhinged behavior, it doesn’t matter: if the right is jumping up and down accusing the left of it, you can bet they’re busy engaging in it themselves by an exponential factor of a hundred.

Bigotry is a multi-faceted thing. Growing up in a small, all-white, all-Christian Bible Belt town taught me that. I have no doubt there are folks back home cheering for Israel who would be less, um, enthusiastic if a Hasidic family moved next door. This is not going to happen, since it’s probably an hour’s drive to the nearest synagogue, but I can well imagine the uproar. Bible Belt children are taught to admire Moses, David, Solomon, and Daniel in Sunday School, but in Sunday School literature Moses, David, Solomon, and Daniel aren’t portrayed wearing fedoras and sidelocks. There had been some Jewish residents in my little town early in the 20th century, but by the time I came along their descendants had either moved away or converted. I don’t know details. It’s only been in recent years that a few black families moved in, and I understand they’ve been given a very hard time.

On the other hand, I didn’t grow up hearing expressions of anti-semitism. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that the nearest synagogue was an hour’s drive away. The religious divisions I remember from childhood were not between Christians and Jews, but between “mainline” Protestant Christians and born-again Christians — or, put another way, between the sprinkled and the dunked. The few Catholics in the community learned to keep their heads down and their rosaries hidden. Jews seemed long ago and far away, so anti-semitism was a back-burner bigotry. I guess if you can’t be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you’re with.

Back to Tbogg:

Basically it is impossible in America to criticize Israel, or speak in defense of the Palestinian people, without being called an “anti-semite” which is why I believe that so many blogs on the left have been so quiet about the attack on Lebanon and what is benignly referred to as Israel’s “overreaction”. In fact, I hesitated to even write this post remembering how Juan Cole was smeared and denied an appointment at Yale. It is a very rare occurrence when I hesitate to write what is on my mind; but you know us liberals and how we hate to be called a “bigot” or to be accused of being “intolerant” by people who are bigots and are intolerant. Well, as my grandmother used to say: “fuck that noise”. Also, I’m not staying up late waiting for a call from Yale.

I know that many on the right (and this would include those on the right who have kind of forgiven the jews, if only for the moment, for killing their savior) are cheering on Israel as our proxy in the fight against Islamowhateverism, because the right loonisphere constantly demands that someone must fluff their hate hard-on, particularly at a time when the commies, homos, negroes, and Mexicans (temporarily at least) lie dormant.

Many righties dismiss criticism of Israeli actions and policies as anti-semitism. But the opposite of bigotry is not an equal and opposing bigotry. It’s objectivity. Bigots don’t comprehend objectivity. They assume that if you don’t share their prejudices you must have equal and opposing prejudices. Thus, if someone criticizes Israel for its indiscriminate punishment of the Lebanese, that person (a bigot assumes) must hate Israel. They can’t wrap their heads around the fact that non-bigoted people who criticize Israeli government policies can sincerely support Israel’s right to exist and want Israelis to live in safety and peace.

Last week the Vatican issued a statement condemning Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. The righties were appalled. And the only possible reason the Vatican does not solidly support Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, this rightie says, is that Israelis are Jews. But there is a substantial number of Lebanese Catholics, and their lives are endangered by the Israeli assault. Is the Vatican supposed to ignore that?

In the real world, my dears, people can’t always be sorted neatly into two opposing camps — good/bad, right/wrong, us/them — and if you do sort people that way you may have to do a lot of re-sorting. Last year the Lebanese were good because they rallied for democracy; now they’re bad because they couldn’t evict Hezbollah and Israel has to bomb them. Last year the Catholic Church was good because it is “pro-life”; now it is bad because it doesn’t want Lebanese Catholics to be killed by Israeli bombs. (See also James Wolcott.)

And the righties swing from jeering at New York City one day to praising it the next. Yet it’s the same place this week that it was last week. And the opposite of dispassion is zealotry.

Update: Glenn Greenwald notes:

During the protests several months ago against proposed anti-immigration legislation, there were all sorts of angry denunciations over the protestors’ waving of Mexican flags. As I noted at the time, there are numerous self-identified ethnic or nationalistic groups within the U.S. who routinely wave the flags of other countries at events, parades and protests — including Israel, Ireland, Italy — and yet that does not invoke the same objections. To the contrary, many of the same individuals who condemn the waving of Mexican flags praise and celebrate the waving of these other flags.

Yesterday, in the middle of New York City, protestors clogged the streets of Manhattan for a large rally called the “Stand with Israel” rally. As the photographs taken by one of the attendees reflect, there seem to have been many Israeli flags but, at least in these photographs, no American flags. Despite that, one of the most vocal commentators who lambasted the waving of Mexican flags on U.S. soil lauded the pro-Israeli protest.

With the immigration protests, some criticized the waving of Mexican flags on strategic grounds — isn’t it dumb of the protestors, they argued, to signal that their allegiance is to Mexico rather than to the U.S. Shouldn’t they therefore be waiving U.S. flags? As Mickey Kaus put it (emphasis in original): “flaunting allegiance to a neighboring country was not a good way to make most Americans want to let in more people who share your attachment!”

Shouldn’t the same thing be said about the pro-Israeli protestors yesterday? If Americans are going to be persuaded to join this war, it ought to be because doing so is in the interests of the United States, not of Israel. Wouldn’t it make more sense, then, to wave American flags in order to illustrate the point that intervention is in America’s interests, rather than waving the flag of another country in order to persuade Americans to enter a war on its behalf? And what, exactly, is the difference — moral or etiquette-based or otherwise — between the heinous act of waving Mexican flags and the inspiring act of waving Israelis flags, both on U.S. soil?

I agree with what Glenn says in the same post about Juan Cole, too. Righties think balance is a form of moral depravity, and righties hate him not because he’s too biased, but because he isn’t biased enough.