Recently I encountered a revelation in the New York Post that may startle my readers as much it did me. I discovered in a featured story “U.S. Jew Haters,” that a poll recently commissioned and carried out under the auspices of the Anti-Defamation League reveals that our country is awash in anti-Jewish bigotry. As much as 15% of those polled between October 6 and October 19—or “nearly 35 million Americans”—believes that Jews “have too much power in the U.S.” Moreover (and this data seem to be the most troubling for ADL Director Abe Foxman, of Heritage Foundation fame), 35% of the goyim polled believe that American Jews “are more loyal to Israel than the U.S.” This last discovery seems to bother Foxman even more than the discovery that 27% of the American people apparently think that Jews “killed Jesus Christ.” The 35% of those polled who believe that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the U.S. “has never budged” in the forty years that the poll has been conducted. Foxman states his concern that “this is very sinister. It is a classic anti-Semitic canard. They used it on Dreyfus in France, and Hitler used it. It is very serious.” The neoconservative New York Post also found these poll results to be quite scary, and so the editors decided to treat it as an important story with lots of bold type and prominently featured statistics.

Let me count the ways that this supposedly shocking information is pure nonsense. The quotation from Foxman about Hitler, Dreyfus, and the “classic anti-Semitic canard” makes no sense whatever, since neither Hitler nor Dreyfus’s military superiors accused the Jews in their countries of being more loyal to Israel than the country in which they resided. Israel did not even exist as a country until 1948. Nor are those unidentified Americans who agreed to respond to this poll necessarily expressing anti-Jewish sentiments. They were simply registering a perception that many Jews have in relation to other Jews—and which Zionist fundraisers consciously appeal to. In every synagogue I have ever entered in the last sixty years, an Israeli flag can be seen on one side of the ark and an American flag on the other. When politicians campaign in Jewish neighborhoods, does Mr. Foxman have any idea what they talk about, when they’re not beating up on “anti-Semitic” Christian Fundamentalists? I won’t even bring up the statement made last year by “conservative” journalist and supposed American patriot Jonah Goldberg on NRO (March 13, 2003), explaining that Israel has better claims to its territory than Americans do to their land. Apparently our treatment of the Indians was far more unjust than what the Israeli army did to Palestinians in 1948. Although I have never hidden my own sympathy for the Israeli side, I can’t imagine how even the most brain-dead gentile could fail to notice such Israeli nationalism among Americans. Apparently, daring to register this fact is, for Foxman and his neoconservative pals, a peculiarly anti-Semitic tic. For me it is entirely understandable that those who observe how Jews talk about politics here and in Europe should arrive at the conclusion that offends Foxman and the New York Post. I am only surprised that the figure in the poll is as low as 35%. Many gentiles may be even duller than I thought.

As for the conclusion that 27% of American Christians blame Jews for killing Jesus, this too seems a bit muddy. Beside the fact that there is no evidence offered in the detailed news story that suggests that enough people were interviewed to justify the inference about the beliefs of tens of millions of Americans, it is never made clear what believing the “Jews killed Jesus” really means. Are the respondents condemning today’s American Jews as complicit in deicide (which is the implication of the article presented)? Or does the finding suggest something far less dramatic, namely that on the basis of what these respondents heard about the Bible, or may have read from it selectively, it would seem that Jews in the first century were among those who were calling for the death of Jesus? Although I wouldn’t stake my own life on the truth of the second case, it is impossible to grasp in what sense the respondents were speaking. Add to this that the ADL lives by exploiting Jewish fear of anti-Semitic outbursts among the gentiles, and more especially among devout Christians, I don’t think its staff would have any interest in presenting conclusions that run counter to its yearly announcement that “anti-Semitism is on the rise in the U.S.”

Nor can I understand how the fact that 15% of the respondents think that Jews “have too much power in the U.S.” indicates that America, as the New York Post maintains, is full of “Jew haters.” To what extent does the polling reflect general American opinion? And who exactly were polled? If one went into some black district or into certain Third World immigrant neighborhoods, one would likely find far more dislike of Jews and their influence than I have perceived living among white-bread WASPs. Since Jews ally themselves politically with groups that are most hostile to them as opposed to those who wouldn’t hurt a hair on their heads, the poll may have more to tell us than Foxman would suggest. Unfortunately it is not made clear from whence the 15% was drawn. And even more importantly, we are never told why the “Jew haters” hold the unexplained opinion that Foxman and the New York Post are playing up with fear and trembling.

Somehow I suspect it is not because white Christian respondents, among whom this figure has been plummeting for the last forty years, are jealous that Jews earn money or have advanced themselves professionally. In fact I would not be surprised if these “Jew haters” were noticing what any minimally perceptive American might be picking up on—the will to power that AIPAC and its neocon allies have been exercising for some time past. (It is, of course, enabled by the widespread white, gentile fear of sounding politically incorrect.) The most revealing part of the Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s expose of AIPAC and its effects is its laying out of how many public figures have been dragged down for criticizing the subjects of this book. Indeed by now it has become impossible for a small-government, old-fashioned Republican like Ron Paul to mention that neocons had a lot to do with the Iraqi quagmire without having an English leftist in The New Statesman as well as the collective “conservative movement” denounce him for anti-Semitism. As someone who took a hit from the same group for not being “reliable on Israel,” although at the time of the hit I actually supported the Likud coalition in Israel, I’ve no idea how anyone but cognitively-challenged gentiles would fail a problem with neocons and other hyper-Zionists in American politics. Although black and Hispanic race-hustlers can get away with equally obnoxious behavior, their groups have not been as successful socio-economically as Jews, and therefore the victim card that the ADL, AIPAC, and often the neocons play has come to be increasingly devalued relative to the claims made by certain other minorities. Perhaps eventually Foxman and his partisans may come to notice this self-evident fact.