by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, October 20, 2003 3:29 P.M. EDT

The Easterbrook Kerfuffle
Nature abhors a vacuum, so last week, with the Valerie Plame and Rush Limbaugh kerfuffles having died out, a new controversy erupted to take their place. It began last Monday, when Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic, posted an unedited essay on TNR's Web site panning "Kill Bill," the new Quentin Tarantino film, for excessive violence. Easterbrook concludes as follows:

Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

Blogress Meryl Yourish was outraged (emphasis in original):

Did he just blame Jews for being greedy, money-grubbing Hollywood executives partly responsible for today's real-life violence? Did he just say that because of the Holocaust, Jews should know better than to allow films that depict mindless violence to be made on their watch? And is he actually implying in that last sentence that Jewish film executives are partly responsible for Muslim terrorism?

Other bloggers, notably including Hollywood-based Roger Simon, weighed in with denunciations. By Friday the New York Times was on the case, as was the Anti-Defamation League. Saturday's Los Angeles Times carried an opinion piece by media writer Tim Rutten, titled "If It Sounds Like Anti-Semitism, Maybe It Is."

Over the weekend, ESPN fired Easterbrook as a football commentator. No, we're not mixing him up with Rush Limbaugh. Easterbrook had been writing an idiosyncratic and highly amusing column for ESPN.com called "Tuesday Morning Quarterback." ESPN not only sacked him but purged him from history in a manner reminiscent of the Ministry of Information in "1984." Go to the ESPN homepage and try searching the site for "Easterbrook." It won't even let you do the search; it just takes you back to the homepage. (Easterbrook's pre-ESPN work is still available at Slate.)

Even Easterbrook's critics, Yourish and Simon among them, say his firing--unlike Limbaugh's, for comments not made on ESPN--was excessive. Anyway, it appears to have been motivated not by political correctness but by sheer pettiness: Disney, whose CEO Easterbrook criticized, owns ESPN.

ESPN's defenestration of Easterbrook, as well as the denunciations from the ADL and the L.A. Times, came after he posted an apology:

Nothing's worse, as a writer, than so mangling your own use of words that you are heard to have said something radically different than what you wished to express. Of mangling words, I am guilty. . . . I'm ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? . . . Looking back I did a terrible job through poor wording. It was terrible that I implied that the Jewishness of studio executives has anything whatsoever to do with awful movies like Kill Bill. . . . What I wrote here was simply wrong, and for being wrong, I apologize.

The ADL's Abraham Foxman deemed Easterbrook's mea culpa "insufficient": "Instead of making a clear apology and a rejection of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Mr. Easterbrook says he 'wrote poorly' and was misunderstood. Mr. Easterbrook's remarks reflect either absolute ignorance or total bigotry." Foxman's beef against Easterbrook may be personal too; on Oct. 7, Easterbrook defended "The Passion," Mel Gibson's forthcoming movie about the life of Jesus Christ, which has raised ADL hackles, and he wrote: "The ADL has a financial self-interest in accusing Gibson of anti-Semitism, as the organization raises money using this charge."

Those who've commented on the Easterbrook kerfuffle fall, roughly, into two camps: those, like Foxman, who believe his original posting was an expression of classic anti-Semitism, and those who don't know what to make of it. An example of the latter is blogger Josh Marshall: "What Easterbrook said was weird and something a hair's breadth short of ugly. . . . Try as I might to explain to myself how Easterbrook could have unwittingly walked into such an unfortunate formulation, I still find it a bit difficult. What was he thinking? I go back and forth. I'm not sure."

Well, allow us to explain. Easterbrook's essay was an expression not of anti-Semitism but of a lesser, though still insidious, form of prejudice. Call it liberal condescension. This sentence from his apology reveals all: "How, I wondered, could anyone Jewish--members of a group who suffered the worst act of violence in all history, and who suffer today, in Israel, intolerable violence--seek profit from a movie that glamorizes violence as cool fun?"

"Members of a group": This is the language of liberal identity politics. And note that this is a philo-Semitic prejudice, not an anti-Semitic one. Easterbrook's premise is that the suffering of the Jewish people ennobles Jewish individuals--or should--even if those individuals have not themselves suffered. Thus he presumes to hold Jews to a higher moral standard by virtue of their Jewishness--though in fact all he's doing is asking them to agree with his highly debatable opinion (does it really make any sense to liken stylized Hollywood violence to the Holocaust?).

Ideologically, Easterbrook's earnest criticism of Jewish studio executives is of a piece with Maureen Dowd's racist rant against Clarence Thomas. Because Thomas is black, Dowd, like other liberals, expects him to conform to liberal orthodoxy and thus treats his conservatism as a far greater offense than that of, say, Antonin Scalia. This kind of prejudice may not lead to pogroms and lynchings, but it's divisive and often ugly all the same.

'He Is Such a Jew'
Sen. Joseph Lieberman put in a campaign appearance in Dearborn, Mich., over the weekend, at a conference sponsored by the Arab American Institute. It was, to say the least, a hostile crowd, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

"Go home to Tel Aviv," one woman called in disgust as Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, cast Israelis as victims of Palestinian terrorism. . . .

"He makes me so mad," said Hanan Rasheed, a Palestinian activist from Danville, Calif. During Lieberman's speech, she derided him under her breath, at one point muttering: "He is such a Jew." Later, she said: "He's running for the wrong office. He should be running for the prime minister of Israel." . . .

"Lieberman? I hated him," said Tawfiq Barqawi, president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Greater Philadelphia.

The New York Sun has more:

[The conference] saw a former Jesse Jackson aide, Robert Borosage, appear on a panel and say, "one of the reasons that we have been unable to talk sense about the Middle East is that we had a very organized Jewish community that made it known to legislators that if you stray, we are going to punish you." . . .

"When Joe Lieberman got up, my blood was boiling," said a Republican from California, Michael Farah, who is chairman of the American Lebanese Chamber of Commerce of North America. "The Israelis, if they want to build a wall, let them build it on their own damn land."

Mr. Farah referred to "the Israeli PAC, which is extremely powerful."

He wasn't the only one in attendance who seemed to have trouble differentiating between American Jews and Israelis. Samear Zaitoon of Baton Rouge, La., a civilian translator of Arabic for the Department of Defense who just returned from six months of service in the Middle East, sat next to this reporter Friday night at a dinner addressed by [Dick] Gephardt and by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee,Terry McAuliffe.

"You don't know about Americans of the Jewish faith having two passports?" Mr. Zaitoon asked. By way of explaining the Israeli-Arab conflict, he said, "Our problem is a civil war inside Judaism between Orthodox and Reform, and it's spilling over." A quick check of the Internet turns up a letter to the editor from a Samear Zaitoon of Baton Rouge, La., asserting that "the Zionists--Jewish and their misguided so-called 'Protestant Christian' supporters (who are really Jews in church pews)--have succeeded in hijacking not only Palestine but also America. . . . Jewish Zionist terrorists have hijacked two whole countries!"

These sentiments were not universal; the Times quotes some conference-goers who had positive things to say about Lieberman. But it does seem fair to observe that the Democratic presidential candidates (John Kerry and Howard Dean also addressed the group, and Wesley Clark called in sick) are trying to appeal to a constituency within which there is a strong and troubling current of anti-Semitism.

Is it unreasonable to worry that anti-Semitism may find a place in the Democratic Party? Far from it. Indeed, it already has. The Democrats, notably including Lieberman, treat Al Sharpton with all the respect a serious presidential candidate is due, despite Sharpton's history of anti-Jewish incitement, which Fred Siegel described in a February 2000 article, pegged to a Democratic presidential debate at Harlem's Apollo Theater:

It would have taken no great effort for the reporters covering the Apollo debate to have walked across 125th Street from the theater to visit Freddy's Fashion Mart, where in 1995 eight people died in a murderous rampage inspired by Mr. Sharpton. . . .

He turned a landlord-tenant dispute between the Jewish owner of Freddy's and a black subtenant into a theater of hatred. Picketers from Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, sometimes joined by "the Rev." himself, marched daily outside the store, screaming about "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards" and threatening to burn the building down.

After weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, took Mr. Sharpton's words about ousting the "white interloper" to heart. He ran into the store shouting, "It's on!" He shot and wounded three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew. Then he set the fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one African-American--a security guard whom protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover." Smith then fatally shot himself.

Eight people died, and so evidently did the conscience of liberal Democrats. It was Al Sharpton who had the honor of asking the first question at last week's debate, held within hailing distance of the Freddy's massacre.

There is also a strong anti-Semitic presence on the campus left, which groups like the David Project and CampusTruth.org have made it their mission to combat. While professors and college activists are a numerically insignificant constituency, they do have an influence in setting the limits of debate.

Those who worry about anti-Semitism should also be concerned with the current mood of the Democratic Party. Reuters reports that Howard Dean, who is no anti-Semite, received a standing ovation at the Arab-American confab when he delivered a stock harangue attacking the patriotism of various (non-Jewish) conservative figures. Not everyone on the Angry Left is anti-Semitic--indeed, some of the Angriest Leftists are Jewish--but a party that stands for nothing other than rage may find it difficult to enforce distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate targets of that rage.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League is fighting to stamp out anti-Semitism at The New Republic.

'Wrong and Divisive'
At least one of America's political parties takes a firm stand against anti-Semitism. The Associated Press reports from Bangkok, Thailand:

"President Bush on Monday personally condemned the Malaysian prime minister for his statement that Jews rule the world, pulling Mahathir Mohamad aside at an international economic meeting to tell him the remarks were 'wrong and divisive,' Bush's spokesman said.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan quoted Bush as telling the Malaysian leader, "It stands squarely against what I believe in."

You've gotta love Reuters. It headlines the story "Bush Tells Mahathir His Jew Remarks Are Wrong." His "Jew remarks"?

More Mush From the Wimp
Yawn, al-Jazeera has another tape ostensibly from Osama bin Laden. Excerpts:

You elect the evil from among you, the greatest liars and the least decent and you are enslaved by your richest and the most influential among you. . . . And the war on Iraq, which has nothing to do with you, is proof of that.

Bush and his gang, with their heavy sticks and hard hearts, are an evil to all humankind. They have stabbed into the truth, until they have killed it altogether in the eyes of the world. With this behaviour they have encouraged hypocrisy, and spread vice and political bribes shamelessly at the level of heads of state.

This gang and their leader enjoy lying, war and looting to serve their own ambitions. The blood of the children of Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq is still dripping from their teeth. They have fooled you and deceived you into invading Iraq a second time. And they have lied to you and the whole world. . . .

Bush has sent your sons into the lion's den, to slaughter and be slaughtered, claiming that this act was in defense of international peace and America's security, thus concealing the facts.

Hey, has anyone else noticed that you never see Osama bin Laden and Ted Kennedy in the same place at once?

See You in the Funny Papers
The Middle East Media Research Institute translates a report from Al-Yawm Al-Aakher, an independent weekly newspaper in Iraq (thanks to America, there are such things now), on Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda. Two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the an Iraqi officer identified only as L, "about 100 trainees arrived" at the Iraqi military's special forces school:

They were a mixture of Arabs, Arabs from the Peninsula [Saudi Arabia], Muslim Afghans, and other Muslims from various parts of the world. They were divided into two groups, the first one went to Al-Nahrawan and the second to Salman Pak, and this was the group that was trained to hijack airplanes. The training was under the direct supervision of major general (M. DH. L) [only identified by initials] who now serves as a police commander in one of the provinces. Upon the completion of the training most of them left Iraq, while the others stayed in the country through the last battle in Baghdad against the coalition forces.

L tells the paper that during Iraq's liberation, al Qaeda members "participated immediately in extremely fierce battles that astonished the Iraqis and the Americans":

On April 5, 2003 orders were issued to send these individuals to the battle front immediately. About 100 of them were sent to the 11th company division in Nasiriya. And for the sake of history I will say that this division's endurance was due to some formidable fighters, the commanding officer and members of Al-Qa'ida who fought with intensity and brutality that are seldom matched, while they were praising Allah.

Meanwhile, Garry Trudeau devoted his Doonesbury strip yesterday to a drawing of a guy yelling "THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF A LINK BETWEEN SADDAM HUSSEIN AND 9/11! NONE!" It's nice to see such nonsense on the funny pages where it belongs.

Along similar lines, the Science Fiction Book Club-- logo: "50 years of great science fiction and fantasy"--is offering for sale Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."

Kerry to Soldiers: Drop Dead
Sen. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam, loves to talk about how he served in Vietnam. As a senator, though, he seems more interested in appealing to his party's antiwar wacko left than in the well-being of those who serve in uniform today. Last October Kerry voted to send American troops into war, but on Friday he voted to defund the effort. Kerry was among only a dozen senators--11 Democrats and independent Jim Jeffords--to vote against appropriating $87 billion for military and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here's a complete list of "no" voters:

• Barbara Boxer (Calif.)
• Robert Byrd (W.Va.)
• John Edwards (N.C.)
• Bob Graham (Fla.)
• Tom Harkin (Iowa)
• Fritz Hollings (S.C.)
• Jim Jeffords (Vt.)
• Ted Kennedy (Mass.)
• John Kerry (Mass.)
• Frank Lautenberg (N.J.)
• Pat Leahy (Vt.)
• Paul Sarbanes (Md.)

Of these 12, four deserve particular scorn: Kerry, Edwards (who also fancies himself a presidential candidate), Harkin and Hollings. They voted in favor of liberating Iraq but now wish to cut and run.

Good News Watch
One of the warnings we kept hearing about Iraq was that with Saddam Hussein gone, the country would be consumed by ethnic and religious warfare, à la Yugoslavia. But Reuters reports northern Iraq is seeing more tourism than terrorism:

Saddam effectively sealed off the North to most ordinary Iraqis after the Kurds who dominate it rebelled against him in 1991. The Kurds established their own autonomous zone, with the help of Western powers whose warplanes watched over it.

With Saddam gone, thousands of Iraqis from the mainly Arab center and South of the country spent the summer rediscovering what used to be a favorite vacation area, its cooler climate and mountains a welcome change from intense heat and flat desert.

The tourism revival has allowed many Iraqi Kurds and Arabs to get to know each other again after a decade of separation. Younger Iraqi Arabs have been able to see one of the most beautiful parts of their country for the first time.

The reacquainting has not been without problems. But in many cases it has been notably free of rancor despite the repression Saddam's security forces inflicted on the Kurdish population and in contrast to widespread pre-war predictions of ethnic strife.

The Washington Post reports from Baghdad that Iraq's first Burger King has opened, at Baghdad International Airport. "Part creature comfort, part therapy for homesick troops, its sales have reached the top 10 among all Burger King franchises on Earth in the five months since it opened," the Post reports.

The fries are better at Guantanamo, though.

Quagmire Alert
JessicasWell.com reprints an article from Life magazine complete with the familiar postwar laments:

The troops returning home are worried. "We've lost the peace," men tell you. "We can't make it stick." . . . Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. . . . Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. . . . Instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction we came in full of evasions and apologies. . . . A great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease. The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met.

Hey, wait a second. Didn't Life magazine go out of business a couple of years ago? Why yes. This article, by John Dos Passos (1896-1970), appeared in Life's Jan. 7, 1946 issue.

Metaphor Alert
From a Mother Jones article by Arlie Hochschild on "Nascar dads" and why they're too dumb (in her opinion) to vote Democrat:

Nixon came into power already saddled with an unpopular war. Bush has taken a single horrific set of attacks on September 11, 2001 and mobilized his supporters and their feelings around them. Unlike Nixon, Bush created his own war, declared it ongoing but triumphant, and fed it to his potential supporters. His policy--and this his political advisor Karl Rove has carefully calibrated--is something like the old bait-and-switch. He continues to take the steaks out of the blue-collar refrigerator and to declare instead, "let them eat war." He has been, in effect, strip-mining the emotional responses of blue-collar men to the problems his own administration is so intent on causing.

But there is a chance this won't work. For one thing, the war may turn out to have been a bad idea, Bush's equivalent of a runaway plant. For another thing, working men may smell a skunk. Many of them may resent those they think have emerged from the pack behind them and are now getting ahead, and they may fear for their future. But they may also come to question whether they've been offered Osama bin Laden as a stand-in for the many unfixed problems they face. They may wonder whether their own emotions aren't just one more natural resource the Republicans are exploiting for their profit. What we urgently need now, of course, is a presidential candidate who addresses the root causes of blue-collar anger and fear and who actually tackles the problems before us all, instead of pandering to the emotions bad times evoke.

What Was the First Clue?
"Bullets, Gun Linked in Slaying"--headline, Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, Oct. 16

Who Knew?
"Sex Appetites of Men, Women Differ, Study Says"--headline, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 20

WHO Knew?
"Maternal Death Rates High in Developing Countries: WHO"--headline, Xinhuanet (China), Oct. 20

No More Pencils, No More Books
Canada's National Post reports that the Toronto Globe and Mail has published a ranking of Canadian universities that "awarded top marks to medical and law schools that do not exist":

The Globe's University Report Card listed medical schools at York University and the University of Waterloo among Canada's Top 10, though neither has a faculty of medicine.

The University of Waterloo's law school placed ninth, yet the southern Ontario campus does not offer a law degree. In seventh place among law schools is the University of Quebec, which is not a single campus but a network of 10 schools located throughout the province, each with a different name.

"York did have some good results, but of course we don't have a medical school," said Nancy White, a spokeswoman for York University. She said the Toronto school was flattered in any case, but a bit peeved its famous law faculty, Osgoode Hall, did not make the top 10 in its category. "There is an issue with the overall reliability of the survey."

But there's an explanation. The survey turns out to be based on an online survey of students, and it's hardly surprising that they would favor nonexistent schools, where, for one thing, the homework load is a lot lighter.

Zero Tolerance Watch
"When Nick Ziegeweid signed up for a firearms safety course at Winona Middle School earlier this fall, he was told to bring his shotgun," the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. "But when the 12-year-old boy attended his first class Oct. 11, school administrators and instructors met him and about 40 other students outside the school to remind them they couldn't bring their guns inside." Turns out the schools zero-tolerance policy prohibits kids from bringing guns to class--even to gun-safety class.

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Gerald Amirault will finally go free--17 years too late.
• Robert Bartley: Time for a new look at the New Deal.
• Newt Gingrich: Did Wesley Clark bother to read his own book?
• Political Diary: Arnold's dubious endorsement; GOP candidates take no-tax pledge; Gephardt's a tired trade warrior; Congress stands up while Dem hopefuls duck and cover. Plus first lady food fights!