Tony Greenstein on Comment is "free"

Tony Greenstein has an article in the Guardian's comment is free space today. At a glance it seems that the article is about attempts by antisemites to infiltrate the Palestine solidarity movement. First up Tony explains how it is zionists themselves that have made life easier for antisemites by crying "wolf"

Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of "anti-semitism" has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.

So absurd has the situation become that the allegation of anti-semitism is even made when Jews disagree among themselves. That is why the suggestion by Alvin Rosenfield that "anti-Zionism is the form that much of today's anti-semitism takes" needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One of the consequences of this abuse of the term "anti-semitism" is to devalue the currency. It renders it almost meaningless because people assume that allegations of anti-semitism are merely the last-ditch resort of those who are incapable of defending the Apartheid Wall that separates the people of the West Bank from their land, the bulldozing of civilian houses, the wanton destruction of olive groves and crops, to say nothing of the theft of their land.

Anti-semitism today is not a mainstream form of racism. It is asylum seekers, Muslims and black people who face stop-and-search, control orders and racial profiling, not Jewish people.

Already, Gilad Atzmon's nazi-type trolls are spamming the comments with links back to their favourite blog. Also I notice a zionist commentor called "Shachtman." The post I saw was clearly off topic but it seems to have been allowed. It seems to have been written in the style of a sock puppet called Alf Green.