ANTI-SEMERICANISM?. Because of his actions in the 70s and 80s, I must consider Natan Sharansky a true hero. Unfortunately, the Sharon government he now serves seems to have demoted him to the less exalted role of propagandist.

Though the subtitle of Sharansky's recent Opinion Journal piece, "The inextricable link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism," was probably not written by him, neither is it at variance with the text -- to say the least:

Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different--a nonconforming--idea of the good, and refuses to abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth... [astonished italics mine]

There are many mad presumptions at play here. For starters, Sharansky really seems to think that having the same set of opponents is grounds for spiritual brotherhood (which would have been news to Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt).

One might also vigorously question the notion that there can be no reason to oppose the actions of either the U.S. or Israeli governments outside the ancient tribal enmity of anti-Semitism. (Sharansky throughout conflates opposition to Israeli policy with anti-Semitism -- "hatred that takes as its focus the state of Israel" -- but these days this non-sequitir is so pro forma it hardly needs comment.)

Worst of all, it seems never to have entered Sharansky's thoughts that either the U.S. or the Israeli government could be capable of acting against its own moral interests. Is it really anti-Semitism (or whatever the weird hybrid proposed by Sharanksy should be called -- anti-Semericanism? anti-Ameritism?) to oppose Bush's feckless war or Sharon's Palestine-As-Prison Project? Are these not offenses to the ideals of Jefferson and Herzl, and do they not mock the very idealistic catchphrases ("light unto the nations" and "shining city on a hill") that Sharansky cites?

One can see the purpose of this shthick: to more strongly yoke, at a time of some tension between Israel and the U.S., the fortunes of one to the other in the court of public opinion. Sharansky even closes by making much of the disparity between America's might and Israel's ("...the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea..."), evidentally to more strongly suggest that, as the two universally-hated kids on the block, we should stick together -- meaning that the stronger party will physically defend the weaker, and the weaker will say flattering things about the moral superiority of the stronger.

Who knows how well it will work, but whatever merits it has as spin, it is worthless as analysis.