“The A.D.L., for all its myriad activities, is a one-man Sanhedrin doling out opprobrium or absolution for those who speak ill of Israel or the Jews.”

Who said that? Pat Buchanan? Joe Sobran? David Duke? No, James Traub in yesterday’s Times.

On so many levels, “Does Abe Foxman have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?” is essential reading for anyone interested in this question. Its author notes that

One of the really remarkable features of post-9/11 political life was that in the first months and years after the attacks, scarcely anyone called for America to abandon Israel, though it is hardly difficult to argue that our support for the Jewish state has cost us dearly in the Islamic world.

Mr. Traub goes on, however, to position favorably in his readers’ minds the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, citing the Cooper Union debate (describing it oddly, though, as “widely publicized”)

The Flogger appreciates that this thesis is entertained more effectively in the Times than here. As Foxman laments:

Where is it being debated? In the universities, on the airwaves. Advanced by whom? Harvard, the University of Chicago. With Pat Buchanan, it wasn’t legitimate. Who cares about David Duke? It is now a legitimate debate.

Highlighting another episode in this great adventure, one which we have noted here, Traub writes:

Foxman was accused [last October] of intimidating the Polish consul general in New York into canceling a talk to be given by Tony Judt, a highly regarded professor of European history at New York University and a supporter of the “Israel lobby” view — which seemed to confirm Judt’s thesis. . . . Foxman says he will not be intimidated; people all across the Islamic world already believe every kind of pernicious fantasy about the Jews and about Israel. And now here come credentialed American — even Jewish! — scholars saying, as he put it, “The Jews control the media, control the government, control Congress.”

And the more Jewish scholars are saying it, the less credible is the claim that anti-Jewish (i.e., “anti-Semitic”) animus drives it. Anyway, Traub clarifies that the “hanging judge of anti-Semitism” (his caption for Foxman) had only made an "inquiry" into Judt’s appearance, and had not called for its cancellation. It was the kind of thing Foxman was famous for doing, but not something he actually did in this instance.

Traub rightly notes that “Even if the authors didn’t believe that Israel has legitimate moral claims, the American people do, and it was this widespread support, more than any unholy machinations, that explained the continuing support of Israel even in the face of the terrorist threat.”

Of course, just how “the American people” came to form such a consensus, arguably against interest, is a nice question. Who believes that a political consensus is simply due to greater intelligence and moral sensitivity on the part of those who form it?

Again, this article is a sturdy bridge capable of bearing a reader who may be barely, if at all, cognizant of this question over to a state of greater awareness and even keen interest.