Sheldon Adelson: An Anti-Semite’s Dream

Eric Alterman writes in The Nation that the casino magnate who has propped up Newt Gingrich’s campaign is the ultimate caricature of “the anti-Semitic clichés that have dogged the Jewish people throughout history.” And yet no one seems to have noticed.

Adelson takes a hard line in advocating what he considers to be Israel’s best interests and has made no secret of his desire to bend U.S. foreign policy to his will, which plays into the paranoid anti-Semitic claptrap about a secret cabal of wealthy Jews pulling the strings of world leaders. As Alterman writes: “How can it be that the self-proclaimed ‘richest Jew in the world’ can buy the foreign policy of a major party’s potential presidential candidate on behalf of a vision of endless Israeli aggression—up to and including US support for yet another potentially disastrous pre-emptive attack—and the historically abused entity of ‘the Jews’ has somehow escaped the blame?”

The columnist takes it as a sign of “the near-complete disappearance of this once wholly respectable American prejudice” and argues that anti-Semitism has now been distorted by neoconservatives and their allies to mean anti-Israel, as opposed to anti-Jew. — PZS