The bash-Israel business is booming again. I give you the former CIA operative Michael Scheuer:

My long-held position in opposition to foreign aid, in general, and to Israel, in particular, is no different to Scheuer’s. The same goes for my position in opposition to war with Iran.

I’m aligned ideologically with this man’s non-interventionism. Having said that, Scheuer hates Israel. As I said in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” he believes “poor, little America has been ‘Jewed’ into its foreign-policy follies.”

Scheuer’s hatred for “Israel” and AIPAC (The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) has led him to erroneously conflate the existential realities that confront regular Israelis with the mission of AIPAC (whatever that may be). That’s unforgivable. Most Israelis (and most American Jews) have never heard of AIPAC and the neocons. They just want to live out their lives without being pelted with Qassam rockets from Gaza (where many of them once grew export-quality flowers and vegetables. Gaza now hothouses Jihadis, oops, freedom fighters).

Damn: the stupid Jews are always building things. Why can’t they throw stones like the Egyptians on the studio screen flickering behind Mr. Scheuer. (His host ought to have juxtaposed images of Tel Aviv and Cairo for better effect.) Scheuer, naturally, has never bemoaned the Muslim lobby and the billions we throw at countries who return us the favor with bombs.

“Lobby,” writes a Times Literary Supplement reader in a letter-to-the-editor, “is attached, these days, in a derogatory way, almost exclusively to Jews and their characteristic, so some like to think, habit of seeking/buying/cajoling favors—such as not being murdered—by dubious tricks.” (TLS January 14, 2011)

UPDATE: My own writing is passionately patriotic, but never partisan. I’m pro-Israel, if highly critical of that country. I opposed Israel’s latest attempt to level Lebanon with the same logic and loyalty to principle with which I fought the American war against the Iraqis (starting on Sept 19, 2002). In certain rightist circles, however, a robotic anti-Israel stance is de rigueur.

Thus, over the years—and in the course of writing distinctly patriotic columns such as my latest—I have been both subtly and openly assailed for being a fifth columnist; a person with dual loyalties, a “binational.” I’ve realized that the people who levy such scurrilous accusations against me of all people will never see my work or my words and the flak I’ve taken for unpopular position, which where in the interest of my countrymen, but not its pols and pundits. All they see is a Jew and the attendant stereotypes that attach. For example, in the fact that I’ve lived on three continents, such individuals see a confirmation of the stereotype of a shiftless Jew.

F-ck ’em.

The fulminating Scheuer later went up against Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. During this particular Fox Business segment, Scheuer referred to Shmuley with contempt as “that fellow.” It’s fair to say that the rabbi, with whom I vehemently disagreed, came out on top. Why? Because the rabbi treated his interlocutor with respect. As George Will once wrote, “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

In anti-Semitic circles, Freud has very sinister connotations. Certainly not much store should be put on his theories about human nature. However, I’ve read Freud’s original works, and see him as an immensely creative and imaginative writer. When Freud was once quizzed about his incessant cigar smoking, he humorously chose to sidestep what was, according to the very theory he invented, a manifestation of his own oral fixation. He replied: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

And sometimes, anti-Semitism is just anti-Semitism.