Here's a man who, picking up on Oliver Stone's remarks to the Sunday Times two weeks ago and his subsequent apology, comes to Stone's defence. How persuasive you will find the defence overall I leave to you. But on one point at least, I'll express my own negative view of it. Oliver Stone's defender writes:
Stone said a whole lot more that you could call stupid, sloppy and even anti-American, but that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Feel free to agree or disagree, but don't toss around the term "anti-Semitic" unless the person actually hates Jews, otherwise the term loses its credibility and a very important taboo collapses.
If he were right in what he says, then anti-Semitism would be an absolutely singular form of racist prejudice, in that for every other type of racism it is commonly recognized that the phenomenon is composed not only of attitudes of hatred but also of pejorative modes of verbal expression, the dissemination of false beliefs damaging to the interests of the particular racial or ethnic group, ideological stereotypes that diminish it in some way, discriminatory practices and policies, and at the limit acts of violence and murder directed at members of the said group (acts which, though often accompanied by attitudes of hatred, are not invariably so accompanied, and are in any case distinct from the attitudes, and certainly racist). That such a reductive view of anti-Semitism is abroad today isn't any longer a matter for surprise, since there are people who, keen to deny the scope of the problem of anti-Semitism, want to limit it to overtly anti-Jewish hostility of mind. 'Since I don't have the hostility,' they will confidently assure their audience, 'how can anything I say or do be anti-Semitic?' Such people fail to explain why the assumption behind their rhetorical question doesn't apply to other forms of racism; or why they temporarily forget the insight which elsewhere they recognize quite freely - as Howard Jacobson has lately expressed it, that 'language has a mind of its own'.
What is more surprising is that this low-level defence of Stone's remarks should have appeared in the pages of The Jewish Daily Forward, in a column by J.J. Goldberg. Goldberg it was, however, who also took the view recently that Israel's supporters shouldn't kvetch if the country is judged unfairly or according to double standards. He must be a very understanding sort of a guy.