A highflown elegy for once-beloved Andrew Sullivan by Benjamin Kerstein at the New Ledger (never hoid of it):
Nearly a decade ago, Sullivan sent me an email in which he said that to him the defense of the Jewish people was the defense of humanity itself. A bit maudlin, perhaps, but an encouraging thing to hear in the midst of a very nasty terrorist war. Then, last year, Sullivan hit back at Jonah Goldberg for calling Barack Obama an elitist by saying that Goldberg’s own status as a member of a privileged, moneyed elite made him a hypocrite on the issue. It was an attack that was just vague enough, but I couldn’t help feeling it was Goldberg’s Judaism that Sullivan was talking about. We are taught from a young age to have little faith in the kindness of gentiles. This is often unfair, but over time one learns enough bitter lessons to admit that there is at least something to the idea. Unfortunately, I fear that for me this was one of them.
…In crossing the line between the sane and the mad you yourself once defended, you committed treason against all of us — left and right — who believe in that line, and try to defend it against those who, for the sake of their own fantasies of power and control, would erase it.
Note the dismissal of all goyim. I wonder what this Israeli-American Zionist’s evidence is for his bitter lessons. We are the most exalted ethnic group by any metric of wealth and access in the U.S. And good for us Jews, it’s the way the dial has turned in history. But I am sure that before long philosemitic Andrew Sullivan will join me in saying, These amazing times demand an interrogation of exceptionalist Jewish identity. Kerstein’s rap on the goyim is no different from the goyim rap on this blog last night. It is the Jewish belief that having suffered the greatest inhumanity in history (a superlative I don’t know that one should accept in light of Congo and Cambodia and the Roma), we are exempt from judgment by the goyim, who let that happen. So we set our own borders in historical Palestine, we ethnically cleanse, we demolish Palestinians’ houses, we deny their movements, we count on immunity delivered by the Israel lobby, (this is a spiritual cadence that comes from Yom Kippur prayers). This shows again what a taboo that Walt and Mearsheimer uncovered: they dared to criticize Jewish influence. And all the Jewish writers who said that there was no lobby? Well they were just lying to the goyim, which doesn’t count.
