Letter to the Editor of the Woodstock Times 12/13/12 For Laurie Kirby to defend Fred Nagel against the charge that he is anti-Semitic is absurd. Nagel is so anti-Israel, so anti-Semitic, that he might even deserve the label “neo-Nazi.” Kirby should have read all the other poisonous, obsessive, unbalanced letters Nagel has written for months and months instead of just one. Nagel recently referred to the Liberty tragedy of 1967, where Israelis accidentally bombed a U.S. ship. His implication: Jews everywhere are the same. Those who bombed the ship 45 years ago are the same as those of today. It was a confession: “I hate all Jews.” Then Kirby shows how conventionally paranoid he is, referring to the so-called power of the Israeli lobby. The Israeli lobby has become the modern equivalent of the Elders of Zion, authors of the fraudulent Protocols. He tipped his hand. What about all the other powerful lobbies? Actually, Jews are a wonderfully divided group. On the one side, for example, is Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire who gave so much money to defeat Obama; then there are the 70% of Jews who cast their ballots for Obama (including me). What an absurd letter Kirby writes! The anti-Semites have muffled their voices? They write lots of letters to newspapers…they sail to Israel to challenge the blockade aimed at keeping missiles out of Gaza…they get front-page articles in the Woodstock Times. Letter after letter from unbalanced people like Nagel encourage all the Jew-haters around here to publicly express their latent anti-Semitism. Yet it should be clear to everyone that almost all Israelis sincerely want peace….and their enemies in the Mideast, like the terrorists who run Hamas, proudly confess that they want not peace but Israel’s destruction. No wonder the majority of Americans still side with Israel. When is someone who is anti-Israel actually anti-Semitic? Abraham Foxman, who runs the Anti-Defamation League, has said: “Can you be critical of Israel and not be an anti-Semite? Absolutely. But can you be anti-Zionist and not be an anti-Semite? My answer there is, probably not — unless you are opposed to nationalism. You can be opposed to Zionism if you’re also opposed to Palestinian nationalism, French nationalism, American nationalism. But if the only nationalism that you find offensive or racist is Jewish nationalism, that’s anti-Semitism.” “… If you find an individual who detests nationalisms, he’s entitled to be anti-Zionist. But most of them only don’t like Zionism, and that’s a cover for anti-Semitism.”