So much for friends on the left; J Street’s twitter feed has put out a bizarrely-vicious thrust at Richard Silverstein, urging followers to read Adam Holland’s “excellent take of Richard Silverstein’s disgusting racist and crazy attacks on Holland & others.” The tweet links to Holland’s attack on Richard Silverstein, an honorable and independent journalist if ever there was one (and in the great American tradition, self-appointed). Holland accuses Silverstein of the use of racially offensive stereotypes, including the phrase, “rich, pro-Israel Jews.” What does Holland want to do to our political vocabulary? And there’s this kind of thing:
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, [Silverstein] bizarrely condemned Israel for sending portable hospital facilities to assist the victims, an act of charity that many people regarded as heroic. Silverstein called it “the Zionization of disaster relief” in a blog post that was subsequently reposted on neo-Nazi and other racist websites.
I don’t know what J Street means to achieve by going after non-Zionists. And as the late Tony Judt said, just because some bigots endorse what you say doesn’t make you a bigot. Thanks to Max Blumenthal.
