The New Blood Libel

Since at least the Middle Ages, the approach of Easter has been marked by anti-Semites who make the false allegation that Jews slaughter gentile children and use their blood to bake unleavened bread for Passover. This alleged bloodthirst among the Jews is a classic anti-Semitic myth, known as the blood libel, that has been used over the years to justify the actual killing of many actual Jews.

This holiday season, a new blood libel is being bandied about, though those wielding it would be appalled to think they are dealing in the same hatreds. They are, after all, neither Cossacks nor rednecks marauding through the woods of Eastern Europe or the American South. We are not saying they are anti-Semites. They are a two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner and a billionaire philanthropist, writing in publications that appeal to an intellectual audience in America.

Here's the two-time Pulitzer-winner, Nicholas Kristof, in yesterday's New York Times: "B'Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights organization, reports that last year Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians (including one minor) and six Israeli soldiers. In the same period, B'Tselem said, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, triple the number killed in 2005. Of the Palestinians killed in 2006, half were not taking part in hostilities at the time they were killed, and 141 were minors."

Here is the billionaire philanthropist, George Soros, writing in the New York Review of Books of April 12: "The current policy of not seeking a political solution but pursuing military escalation — not just an eye for an eye but roughly speaking ten Palestinian lives for every Israeli one — has reached a particularly dangerous point."

Aside from the fact that Israel was being attacked by the Palestinians after withdrawing to the 1967 borders of the Gaza Strip, here's some context that Mr. Kristof left out. B'Tselem is funded by German church groups, the governments of Switzerland and the European Union, and the same Ford Foundation that underwrote the anti-Israel agitation that preceded the United Nations' Durban conference.

Moreover, the statistics Mr. Kristof cites don't include Israelis killed by other Arab terrorists working in league with the Palestinian Arabs and funded by the same Iranian terror master. In 2006, that included 43 Israeli civilians and 117 Israeli soldiers who were killed in the war with Lebanese-based Hezbollah. The B'Tselem statistics do include — but Mr. Kristof omits — the 55 Palestinian Arabs killed in 2006 by other Palestinian Arabs, a figure to which can be added another 84 killed in intramural violence in January and February of 2007.

For these deaths, it seems Mr. Kristof hasn't yet figured out how to blame the Israelis. Nor does Mr. Kristof's selective use of the B'Tselem statistics include the Americans and those from other countries who were killed by Palestinian Arab terrorists, such as Daniel Wultz, a 16-year-old from Florida who was slain in a 2006 suicide attack on the old central bus station in Tel Aviv.

More broadly, both Messrs. Soros and Kristof ignore an essential difference. The Israelis are out to minimize both their own casualties and those of the noncombatants behind whom their enemies hide. They build bomb shelters into every building and have established a culture where civil rights groups, independent commissions, and a Supreme Court investigate allegations of misconduct beyond the collateral damage that is an inevitable consequence of any war.

The Palestinian Arabs, in contrast, are out to maximize casualties, training their children as suicide bombers in hopes that they will become "martyrs," so that gullible Westerners who haven't thought the matter through will use their deaths to extract concessions from Israel. The Palestinian Arabs attack Israeli civilian targets such as pizza parlors, banquet halls, wedding parties, and buses as a matter of policy, while the Israeli army goes to great lengths to avoid targeting civilians.

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Given Mr. Soros' significance as the moneybags of the activist core of the Democratic Party, it is going to be illuminating to see how the party reacts to the billionaire's call for the party to "liberate itself from AIPAC's influence." In his New York Review of Books piece Mr. Soros comes awfully close to buying into the whole paranoia of Professors Mearsheimer and Walt.

Mr. Soros, who describes himself in the New York Review of Books as neither a Zionist nor "a practicing Jew," claims to have a great deal of sympathy "for my fellow Jews" plus "a deep concern for the survival of Israel." He says he is prepared to be subjected to "a campaign of personal vilification." We don't desire to vilify either Messrs. Soros or Kristof, nor do we draw any conclusions about their motives. At a certain point, though, people stop caring about what their motives are.

The fact is that they write at a time when a war against the Jews is underway. It is a war in which the American people have stood with Israel for three generations. The reason is the same that moved America to take the side it took in the war against the Nazis and communists, from whom Mr. Soros fled as a youth in Europe. The reason is that Americans are wise enough to understand which side in the war against the Jews shares our values — and to sort out the truth from the libels.