Podhoretz Defends Limbaugh from ADL Accusation
It’s an anti-Semitism round robin!
January 25, 2010
Norman Podhoretz.(Hudson Institute)
Rush Limbaugh has enlisted an ally from within the shtetl. Last week, Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Limbaugh of “borderline anti-Semitic” comments after the conservative talk-radio mega-star said (without, er, any basis in fact) that President Obama’s fulminations against Wall Street smacked of the whole bankers-as-Jews stereotype. Now, to Limbaugh’s defense comes Norman Podhoretz, the legendary neoconservative. Podhoretz argues:
Foxman has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past forty years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned. … Now Foxman has the chutzpah to denounce Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite and to demand an apology from him to boot. Well, if an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.
So, to recap:
Limbaugh to Obama: You’re an anti-Semite!
Foxman to Limbaugh: No, you’re the anti-Semite!
Podhoretz to Foxman: No, the anti-Semites are on the left! Besides, Limbaugh likes Israel, which means he cannot possibly be an anti-Semite!
This has been productive!
Related: Why Are Jews Liberals? A Symposium [Tablet Magazine]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
