Carville and the J-Word

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Jewish defense organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the United States, and the Canadian Jewish Congress and the League for Human Rights here in Canada, are always on the alert for even the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. And rightly so.

To pick a somewhat minor example recently in the news, Congress wrote to the Kirkland Lake, Ontario, town council, inquiring as to why a street in the town was named Swastika Ave. It turns out this name dates back to 1911 and long predated Nazism -- the swastika was, after all, a Hindu symbol that Hitler appropriated as an “Aryan” emblem.

Frankly, I’d feel better were the street given some other name; after the Holocaust, the swastika, I’m afraid, can never lose its sinister connotations. Still, it turns out to have been an innocent misunderstanding.

We know that Jewish groups will sometimes censure people or groups for remarks that seem only tangentially to have anti-Jewish implications. So why has there been relative silence from American Jewish organizations when political operative and Hillary Clinton supporter James Carville called New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, once a member of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, a “Judas”?

Carville made the remark after Richardson endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the U.S. presidential race. Carville called it an “act of betrayal” that “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out (Jesus) for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.”

In much of western culture, Judas became the stereotype of the greedy, traitorous Jew, the man responsible for deicide. His very name and image has been used to incite violence against Jews over the centuries. How many of us have been murdered in pogroms due to this libel?

Hitler, among many others, certainly knew the power of the “J-word.”

No doubt Carville did not intend to malign Jews – but could he not have used a different example, one less offensive to Jewish ears? The traitor Benedict Arnold, the American general who switched sides and sold out to the British during the American Revolution, comes to mind.

Were an evangelical Protestant to have made a similar statement – say, while accusing some Republican of turning against John McCain – my guess is we’d have heard more of an outcry.

But most American Jews are fairly secular and a majority support the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton is a U.S. senator from New York state and has many Jewish supporters.

So is there a double standard at work here? Judge for yourself.