Liberal anti-semites and their friends

This is old in internet years, an internet year being defined as approximately 12 hours, but it's good. Slate has a quiz to determine whether you are a liberal anti-semite. Take it. (hat tip: A.)

Personally, I scored a big fat zero, but I would, being a neanderthal wingnut and all.

These guys, on the other hand, would probably score off the charts:

Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”

The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

(hat tip: Number One Son)

There's much to love in that short article, but I'd be remiss if I left this out. "Imam Fatih Alev, a board member of the Islamic-Christian Study Center in Copenhagen, has not read Mr. Bawer’s book," but he managed to say exactly the right thing to liberal ears:

“In many senses it is a constructed idea that there is this very severe difference between Western values and Muslim values,” he continued.

What's a little difference of values on beheadings, after all?