HOW HE SEES IT Anti-Semitism is red herring, but bias is real

By SIDNEY ZION
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
News item: Brandeis University to bestow honorary doctorate on playwright Tony Kushner.
So what? So this: Kushner has said, "It would have been better if Israel never happened," condemns it for "ethnic cleansing" and denounces American Jews for "failing to denounce Israel."
Brandeis is named for the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the leading American Zionist in pre-state Israel. The first Jew on the court, appointed by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, he answered charges of dual loyalty by answering thus: "Yes. I'm loyal to my mother and to my wife."
Just imagine
For this university to honor Tony Kushner, a Jew, is akin to Howard University delivering a Thurgood Marshall doctorate to a black man who argues that Brown v. Board of Education was a "mistake," the word Kushner used to describe the creation of Israel.
Of course, such an event could never happen, and if it did happen, it would be met by front-page condemnation, here and around the world.
But unless you receive e-mail from the Zionist Organization of America, of which Louis Brandeis was president, it's likely you're reading this for the first time.
Because for the mainstream media, unless you're an anti-Semite, it's kosher to be anti-Israel. Tony Kushner is a Jew, ergo he can't be an anti-Semite.
This doesn't necessarily follow. Plenty of Jews are and have been anti-Semitic, like the German Jews who thought they were "different" until the showers at Auschwitz.
But I don't include Kushner in that category. He's no anti-Semite.
It's a distraction
So what, I say? If you're anti-Israel, you're an enemy of the Jewish people. All this debate over anti-Semitism is nothing but a detour and, for that matter, a roundabout way to excuse anti-Israel propaganda.
Recently, a couple of academics from Harvard and the University of Chicago produced a long piece accusing the Israeli lobby of dictating American policy to the harm of the United States -- even leading to 9/11.
This was without question an anti-Israeli attack. If believed, it would leave Israel alone against the Arab world, bereft of American help, in the name of "realism."
The defense comes this way: they are not anti-Semites.
As if that makes it legit.
X Sidney Zion is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.