Principled Profit

When Richard Nixon’s secret list of “enemies” (very broadly defined) became public knowledge, I was much too young and unimportant to be included–and I confess I was a bit jealous of some of my older friends who made the list. And a few years later when I lived with a paid staffer for a leftist peace magazine, we were pretty sure our phone was tapped.

But I discovered today that I have made it onto at least one more recent enemies list, put out by a Jewish right-wing hate site. 7000 of us, in fact, described by these modern-day McCarthyists as self-hating Jews. The language they use is racist, homophobic, and “my way or the highway.” The list includes celebrities like Woody Allen, most of the famous progressive rabbis I’m aware of, and even the very pro-Israel pundit Christopher Hitchens. My wife, who’s written an award-winning book whose protagonist is a Jewish teen who flees the ghetto of World War II to go live in a forest camp with partisans, makes the list by being married to me.

I’m rather amazed. I get a whole paragraph about me, while my friend Stephen Zunes, who has published probably hundreds of articles opposing Israel, gets only his name. Stephen and I collaborated back in 1981 on a white paper outlining strategies for the US peace movement. It was never published, but I’m very glad to have gotten a chance to work with him.

My crime? Saying publicly that I don’t necessarily think the “security fence” Israel is building is such a good idea. Just for the record, this is accurate. I’ve also said that I don’t think much of the similar fence the US is trying to erect to close of Mexico.

If they’d dug a bit deeper, they might have found out that I spent much of my 20s writing and organizing around Middle East peace issues and have published articles about the Israeli peace movement, and that one of my websites contains several pro-peace articles.

Fortunately, these people don’t run the wonderfully pluralistic societies of either Israel or the U.S. I shudder to think of what they’d do if they were in power.

I thought about linking to their site, but I decided that I would not be benefiting the causes I support by giving them an undeserved link from a well-ranked site. Nor do I want Google’s computers to think that I endorse them in any way.

Speaking of endorsements and link love–I was amused to see that my wife’s mention was linked to the Amazon page for one of my books (I presume it’s an affiliate link)–so these people are not above making a few shekels off the people they despise, although the book they chose to link to is actually out of print.

I guess I’ll have to start blogging more on Middle East peace issues, in order to properly earn my place on the list (wink)