He's crazy

Sickening. More evidence today of the troubling trend that I pointed to last week of the movement of radical right wing ideology toward violence.

TNC and Jeffrey Goldberg get to the point. First, Ta-Nehisi:

Perhaps this means nothing but I feel that I should acknowledge that a black man was killed on guard duty at the Holocaust museum. That may mean nothing. But I think it should be said.

And Goldberg's response:

No, it means something. More than something, in fact. The great tragedy of the rift between blacks and Jews is that while we waste time arguing with each other, our common enemy -- racialist fascism -- goes unfought. Add Stephen Tyrone Johns to the group that includes Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. All were victims of the same sick ideology.

Sadly - and I fully acknowledge that it may not be the right time to discuss this, particularly on the day a man was killed defending the Holocaust Museum - but our people are not immune from their participation in the fomenting of the radical right, in this case in response to this despicable act. This isn't any twisted attempt at false equivalence, or a diminution of the (state-sponsored or stateless) terror and anti-Semitism from various quarters in the Islamic world, which is real and dangerous where it is real. But it's illegitimate to use the tragedy of this act as cause to ignore the bizarre response of reactionary loon Debbie Schlussel, who uses an act of violent hatred to invoke her own breed of hatred:

The rash of anti-Semitic attacks in America, with a frequency unheard of in previous contemporary U.S. history--on synagogues all over the country, a Jewish community center in Seattle, and now this Holocaust museum--have all happened since 9/11 and our new tolerance for Islam and all of its intolerant extremism. This is no coincidence. It is a correlation.

And trust me, they're cheering him on, on the streets of Lahore and Riyadh and Damascus, but bummed out that he only got some poor working class guard, instead of . . . . the JOOOOOS.

Make no mistake. Muslims created this atmosphere where hatred of the Jews is okay and must be "tolerated" as a legitimate point of view. The shooting today is just yet another manifestation emanating from that viewpoint--another manifestation of the welcome mat that Muslims rolled out for fellow anti-Semites of all stripes to no longer be afraid to come out of the closet.

The rest of the piece isn't any less disgusting. This desperate and dishonest attempt to link the actions of a racist neo-Nazi to radical Islam (Schlussel would probably label me a "tolerator" of Muslim hatred of Jews, and a self-hating Jew, too) relies on the disconnected-from-reality allegation that somehow Christian anti-Semites have been afraid to expose themselves but-for a somehow-now-legitimized Muslim hatred of Jews. Because, as we know, if 9/11 did anything, it made narrow-minded right-wingers accept the arguments of al Qaeda. And there were obviously no Gentile anti-Semites before there were Muslim anti-Semites, either, and the copies of Mein Kampf that Schlussel envisions "the Muslims" brandishing about were, I guess, ghost written by Yasser Arafat. And it's all because of the liberals. I say we kill the Beast! Ten points for Gaston!

The mendacity here is, as I said, desperate, hollow, and serves only to highlight her inanity. Nevertheless, there's an audience for these screeds.

As Max Blumenthal highlighted a few days ago in this video of bile-filled spoiled American youths on parent-sponsored Jerusalem boondoggles, Schlussel is not alone. Great job, Dr. Dad, teaching your kids a love for Israel.

Of course, the Schlussels of the world will employ their failed logic to charge that, by criticizing her brand of sociopathic hatred, I am somehow creating false equivalence, legitimizing the actions of James von Brunn, that von Brunn is in fact a product of left-wing support for a Middle East peace process and a belief that only a two state solution can save Israel, that legitimate criticism of failed Israeli policy is somehow an invitation to murder Jews and those associated with them. They would have you believe that by electing Barack Obama, a secret-Muslim fake-American, as President, we have told left-wing anti-Semites to go to war against Jews.

Which is, in a mirror universe kind of way, part true. The election of Barack Obama has, it seems, set loose the radicals, yet not for the reason that they claim, and it has done so across the appalling spectrum that defines the coalition of the right. Remember that this is the coalition that is home to both Pat Buchanan and Doug Feith, to Bill Donohue and Bill Kristol. It welcomes both the racist and anti-Semitic far right and the "new" Neocon right.

That form of big-tent Republicanism began with the party's evangelical wing and the growing subset of Christian Zionists, whether for fulfillment of prophesy or a passion for bringing about the expulsion of Islam from the Holy Land, with Jewish sovereignty a temporary facility to bring about their apocalyptic vision for rapture and the second coming. Building on that foundation, the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Limbaugh conservative movement manipulated the "War on Terror," conflating the U.S. need to defend against al Qaeda with Israel's struggles to maintain its existence in a hostile Middle East, calculated to capture a portion of the Jewish vote. And a portion of the Jewish population (a small but vocal portion) has been all too content to play along - and to ignore the ever-present tug of the racialists in their party and then, in some cases (Schlossel, Mark Steyn, and others), to join their ranks - for their own part using the conservative movement as a platform for conflating Israel's ongoing legitimate existential struggle with putting down the Palestinian's own legitimate desire for sovereignty and respect for their territory (which is not to say that there are not considerable - and considerably evil - forces on the Palestinian side for whom sovereignty means drowning Israelis in the Mediterranean, which sometimes explains but does not justify much of the counter-reaction). That, and tort reform.

But the cynical co-optation of the Zionist vision by the conservative movement doesn't change that movement's soul.

As we're now seeing, some on the radical right feel trapped and marginalized as America moves away from their brand of hatred and narrow-mindedness, and they are lashing out, against those that threaten their place in their world, shaped in their Fair-and-Balanced self-image. From the disturbing hatred expressed in lines waiting for their hero Sarah Palin to take the stage before last year's Presidential election, to the tea parties of early 2009, to the thinly-veiled hatred toward Sonia Sotomayor, to the escalation into gradual armed warfare on the enemies of the traditional right wing that we are seeing right now, these forces of the Right keep ratcheting up the fear and are blossoming into full-blown rebellion. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. That's the Right's soul, exposed.

None of which should take away from the fact that this shooting was a sick act by a desperate, evil man, a tragedy for America, and a personal tragedy for the Johns family. Politics and posturing and personal agendas should not diminish that. Ta-Nehisi and Goldberg were right that it matters that a black man was killed guarding the Holocaust Museum - we, black and Jew, have common cause here, and, whether we realize it or not, have common cause on most issues. But more than that, it matters that a man - a person, an individual, a human being - was killed guarding the Holocaust Museum, because we all have that common cause, to ensure that Never Again is more than just words, and whether or not everyone realizes it, or cares to.

UPDATE: Apparently, Max Blumenthal's video has been pulled from YouTube and Vimeo. That's absurd, and simply allows those who hold the Zionist movement hostage to pretend that type of thinking doesn't exist. But they're troubled by the censorship coming from Iran. Wow.