The dissection of Andrew Sullivan I did a few years ago for the “Jerusalem Post” needs an update. Here is the most recent example of the vicious anti-Israel rant that has been characteristic of Andrew Sullivan for about 10 years. Defenders of Israel are guilty of distracting: “from the fact that Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens which was the casus belli for the latest Israeli swoop through the West Bank; that Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings, while concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured; and that Israeli public hysteria, tapping into the Gilad-like trauma of captivity, then began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality. . . . nihilist and futile war crime is all that Hamas has really got left. Yes, they conceal armaments and rockets and weapons in civilian areas – and that undoubtedly increases civilian deaths. But what alternative do they have exactly, if they wish to have any military capacity at all? Should they build clearly demarcated camps and barracks and munitions stores, where the IDF could just destroy them at will? As for the argument that no democratic society could tolerate terrorist attacks without responding with this kind of disproportionate force, what about the country I grew up in, where pubs and department stores in the mainland were blown up, where the prime minister and her entire cabinet were bombed and some killed in a hotel? I don’t recall aerial bombing of Catholic areas in Belfast, do you?” Translated: We should even-handedly admit that Hitler invaded Poland because it was the most convenient country for him to attack in 1939 when the Poles also called for “generalized revenge” against Germans (of course, they didn’t any more than Netanyahu has against Palestinians). What other choice did Hitler have? Hamas’ leaders may be responsible for the deaths of their own people—but now that they are bereft they deserve our empathy! As to Sullivan’s argument that the Brits would not have bombed Belfast—if Belfast were controlled by a terrorist regime launching missiles at London—you can bet your butt, they would have. Who is Andrew Sullivan—and how did he become such an Israel hater while simultaneously conducting what the late Christopher Hitchens (a friend of Sullivan’s) called “a bromance with Barack Obama”? Hitchens’ gest was made some years ago—before Sullivan entered into what amounts to a suicide pact with the Obama Administration—justifying whatever it does, no matter how self-defeating. Andrew Sullivan—America’s premier, pioneering blogger—has long marketed himself as “a maverick” in gay politics. With Irish Catholic antecedents and a reputation as a formidable Oxford debater, he came to the U.S. at the beginning of the 1990s to emerge as “the house conservative” among the liberal editorial staff of the “New Republic” magazine. He raised eyebrows by such high-profile positions as his support of Republican Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election while at the same time raising hackles among leftist gays for criticizing their alleged lack of political moderation and realism. In one respect, however, he toed the line of his NR mentor, Martin Peretz, by being predictably pro-Israel. Sullivan continued this stance after entering the fray on this own as a political blogger, supporting George W. Bush in 2000 as well as the war against Islamic terrorism from the 9/11 attacks through the early stages of the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. His pro-Israel views also continued with his support of Israel’s fence-building in the wake of the Second Intifadah. Then, almost overnight, a metamorphosis worthy of Kafka occurred in Sullivan’s politics. Sullivan claims it was overreach of the U.S. in Iraq which led to him to support Democrat John Kerry in 2004 as well as launch his own private jihad against the Bush Administration for making America “a torture nation.” By 2008, he still claimed to be “a conservative” yet wrote a manifesto, “The Conservative Soul,” indicting all but the most liberal precincts of American religion for what he called “Christianist” right-wing extremism and supporting Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy on the theory that Obama was not really a liberal, but was instead a closet conservative. Sullivan also became increasingly critical of Israel, combining “pacifist” demands that the U.S. withdraw immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan with bellicose drum beating for U.S or NATO troops unilaterally entering the West Bank to protect Palestinians from what he critiqued as Israel’s increasingly virulent right-wing “extremism.” Sullivan’s own critics claim that his real motivation was not his revulsion with the Bush Administration’s foreign policy or Israel’s conduct that flipped Sullivan’s politics, but his recoil against the hardening opposition to gay marriage—Sullivan’s long-time political holy grail—by conservative Christians as well as those Jews whom Sullivan increasingly vilified as “neocons”—a term he applied indiscriminately not only to Jewish conservatives but to any Jew or Israeli who still supports the Jewish state’s struggle for survival. Sullivan in recent years has stooped to posting jokes making fun of Republican Congressman Eric Cantor for his big (Jewish) nose. Yet he still claims, with less and less conviction, that he “loves Israel” and is no anti-Semite, despite the fact that many of the links he favorably posts are not only anti-Israel but ant-Semitic. Sullivan has attracted some critics—including on occasion his mentor, Marty Peretz—but current political correctness in the U.S. is such that it’s more acceptable “to out” an individual’s sex life than to label accurately what Sullivan has become: a virulent enemy of Israel with anti-Semitic tendencies. The novelist D. H. Lawrence believed that the seat of human consciousness was the solar plexus. Sullivan, it’s impossible to avoid concluding, believes it’s located south around the scrotum. Way back when he was a fan of former Vice President Dick Cheney (whom he now obsessively indicts as a “war criminal”), Sullivan loved to speculate on the ample manly endowment of “Big Daddy” Dick’s package. This this what passes for sophisticated political banter in the twenty-first century. Sullivan is a post-modern repackaging of eighteenth-century London’s Grub Street journalists, who often also specialized in anti-Jewish slurs. In terms of more recent referents, Sullivan reminds me as an historian of a flamboyant figure of a century ago who’s now mostly forgotten but once enjoyed a sensational status on both sides of the Atlantic as what we what we would call a pioneering “gay” activist—Alfred Lord Douglas. Which is not to say that gay activists typically share a tendency toward instability and extremism. Douglas emerged from Oxford’s self-proclaimed “aesthete” and “decadent” literary circles into political prominence as the lover who precipitated the lawsuit for libel against Douglas’ father, the Marquis of Queensbury, that resulted in Wilde’s own conviction and imprisonment for indecent behavior as well as Wilde’s untimely death in 1900. At first, Douglas also announced himself a great friend of the Jews, appealing to the international defenders of jailed Captain Alfred Dreyfus to make common cause with him and Wilde. But after his highly publicized break with the jailed Wilde—who no longer wanted to associate with the flamboyantly gay English aristocrat—Douglas himself veered to the right. In addition to marrying and converting to Catholicism, he became a political conservative. Emerging during and after World War I as a virulent anti-Semite, he helped popularize the English translation of the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” throughout the Anglo-American world. The second personal and political downfall of Douglas (who died in obscurity in 1945) occurred during the early 1920s when he made the mistake of publicly accusing Winston Churchill of being a political pawn of “international Jews” responsible for Russia’s Bolshevik revolution as well as the “Zionist” Balfour Declaration. Earlier, the Marquis of Queensbury humiliated his son, Douglas, by winning a defamation suit brought against him by Oscar Wilde. Douglas was again humiliated when Churchill sued him for defamation and won, resulting in a six-month jail sentence for libel. Douglas’ career—his chronic defiance of the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules!—had the flavor of “anti-papa” politics: can the same be said for Sullivan’s simmering rebellion against the pro-Israeli stance of his surrogate Jewish father, Marty Peretz?