Israel is the cynical postwar creation of the Allies ... who were half-hearted colleagues during WWII, and full-time imperialists for a long while thereafter. Accustomed to imposing themselves on "lesser sorts," the Allies were only too glad to eventually acquiesce in the Jewish project of CREATING AN EVEN BIGGER AND MORE DANGEROUS GHETTO FOR JEWS than the Pale of Settlement had ever been.

Of course America and Israel are fast friends: both countries were and are vengeful and truculent; both share a delusional belief that they comprise a "chosen people" (and that this preferment excuses the basest and vilest crimes against humanity, from American mass murder in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to multiple, death-dealing invasions of Lebanon and Gaza); both are today sham democracies possessed by a brutish fascination with infernal killing devices ... in short, both these countries not only resemble each other, THEY RICHLY DESERVE EACH OTHER.

If maniacally ethnocentric Israel succeeds in convincing the world that history should be rewound 2000 years to a time before the Diaspora, then in that same spirit, it behooves North Americans to return their real estate to its rightful owners, viz., descendants of the First Americans, whose ancient material and spiritual claims to North America are AT LEAST as compelling as those of the European invaders and their insufferably smug, all-exculpating and meretricious Judeo-Christianity.

Sorry Ms Wheeler, but the term 'anti-Semite' (and its variants like 'antisemite') were in fact invented, for their own convenience, by self-described anti-Semites: for them Jews were the target, not other Semites. Too bad: the usage isn't logical. So much for asking haters to be logical.

And yes, Jews too can be anti-Semitic. Some are - just as some blacks are Uncle Toms and just as some Americans, without heed to relevant facts, knee-jerk condemn USA society or industry as inevitably the world's worst.

Yes, the noted examples might not always be 'anti-Semitic' behavior - but in some contexts they could be. A judgment depends on what exactly should qualify as 'anti-Semitic' behavior.

It seems reasonable to take as 'anti-Semitic' any behavior where the Jewish people or its members or institutions - including Israel - are habitually (and even obsessively) singled out for and subjected to a double standard whereby they are deemed or treated worse than are others who are at least as guilty of whatever faults are alleged.

One anti-Semitic obsession is boycott of Israeli goods - goods made in the Mideast's only consistently democratic country - in absence of similar boycotts of goods from places like repressive China, not to mention from less repressive places which however are still beset by serious economic or racial inequality and discrimination problems - like the USA. Another obsession is creation of a never-before-existent Palestine state west of the Jordan (in addition to Jordan, the effectively Palestinian state east of the Jordan). It’s truly an obsession to focus on creation of such a state - whose prospective leaders continue to declare would exist primarily for the purpose of more effectively fighting Israel and (immediately or by stages) driving Jews out of the Mideast - but meanwhile giving no priority or even heed to restoration of peaceful Tibetan independence or even autonomy, or creation of a state for the Mideast’s much more numerous and dispersed Kurds.

Anti-Semitic tactics include continuing systematic abuse of certain terms so as to falsify or grossly misrepresent. Such terms now include (1) 'illegal' and (2) 'occupation'.

(1) Almost all Jewish settlements in the West Bank are not on Arab-owned land there, and are not 'illegal'. They are arguably far LESS 'illegal' than all European-origin settlements in the New World, including Long Beach, CA (pop. 500,000) from which I write. Jewish settlement in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) goes back over 3000 years, more than 1600 years before the first notable Arab influx and settlement there.

(2) Israel's military occupation of all main Palestinian population centers ended in the mid 1990s - pursuant to the Oslo accords - and in the mid-2000s Israel also pulled out of the Gaza area entirely. Despite UN authorization in 1947, Arab Palestinians did not set up a Palestine state then or even years later, so as a result Israel's successful defense in 1967 resulted in her taking land - West Bank - that had never been part of an independent Palestine but instead had been Jordanian-occupied (and has since been renounced by Jordan). Israel's residual military occupation there is for basic security reasons: Israel is tiny (50 miles across even including the West Bank) and has unrelenting hostile neighbors - comprising at least 40 times her population and 400 times her area. We are speaking of a country of about the size and shape of LA+Orange+San Diego counties in coastal southern California, in a hostile neighborhood larger than the USA .

Do you know about (or do you remember) the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley (1964-1965) . Initially, the issue was on-campus discussion of civil rights issues. It mushroomed into a fight over academic freedom, with obvious implications for the First Amendment right to free speech. The students won the day -- discussion and pamphleteering were allowed on campus.

Ronald Reagan was subsequently elected governor by promising to "clean up that mess in Berkeley". The moral of this story? I'm scared to say what I think out loud.

The California Assembly has only 80 members, not 88.

The largest Protestant denomination in Canada, the United Church of Canada, just voted at its national Conference to divest from any business interests involved in settlements in occupied Palestine, and to encourage boycotts of any such businesses. I can't find the exact wording of the resolution, but as it's not binding, This kind of broad-brushed accusation as anti-semitism of any criticism or discussion, even, of Israeli military action is only to be found in America.