Today’s Fake Controversy

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd caused quite a stir today with her new column “Neocons Slither Back.” Critics argue that Dowd employs anti-Semitic imagery to make her point, which is that neoconservatives — specifically Romney adviser and “puppet master” Dan Senor — are attempting to regain political clout with a would-be Romney administration.

Politico rounded up those offended by the “slither” imagery:

“Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote.

“[A]mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK,” Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, tweeted.

On the right, The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper called it “outrageous,” while Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin described it as “particularly creepy.”

So did Dowd peddle anti-Semitic imagery to ring in 5773? I don’t think so.

Neoconservatives exist. It’s not just some amorphous political ideology absent from the foreign policy conversation. Not too long ago, a group of neoconservatives launched the Iraq War. And guess what? Mitt Romney’s new “foreign policy team” is chock-full of some of those same neoconservatives: John Bolton, Cofer Black, Max Boot, Dan Senor, Eric Edelman. These guys are longtime hawks with a history of advocating for war with Iran and a shaky stance on torture.

The fact that many neoconservatives are also Jewish does not somehow make analyzing the neoconservative agenda anti-Semitic. As Gawker’s Taylor Berman points out, this fake controversy seems more akin to when Matt Taibbi called Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” (turns out Nazi propagandists once used a literal vampire squid to characterize the Jewish agenda). Awkward word choice given the history (I doubt Taibbi is an expert on Nazi propaganda), but it’s not anti-Semitic.

There are plenty of words and references that should raise eyebrows, but terms like “slither” and “puppet master” — which are pretty innocuous words considering Dowd is talking about politics and not religion — really isn’t the same as when, say, Sarah Palin used “blood libel” (a term that has historically only meant one very anti-Semitic thing).