An oft heard complaint from practitioners of the new, cool, environmentally responsible, GMO free antisemitism is that participants in the great Zionist conspiracy use their influence in the media to stifle criticism of Israel. This leads them to make much use of such phrases as “speaking out”, “refusing to be silenced” and suchlike.

The readiness of these people to resort to legal threats or actually go to law to suppress criticism directed at them might, therefore, be charitably described as somewhat paradoxical. Just a day after Harry’s Place got back on line after the failure of attempts to shut it up for making entirely reasonable and justified criticisms of people who are either antimsemites or very stupid, I come across this article in World Politics Review about the attempt by Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, a woman who styles herself as “an independent critic of Jewish and Israeli human rights violations” to stop Henryk Broder, a political columnist, from calling her an “anti-Semitic anti-Zionist”.

She’s prone to saying things like this,

What’s happening there [in the Middle East] can only end in an absolute catastrophe [ein absolutes Unglück], because you cannot oppress a people eternally and really — I have to venture these comparisons — we have ourselves experienced what happened in the Second World War and what is happening today. That can’t simply be talked away. And one has to draw certain comparisons. Unfortunately, one has to say so, even if this is not politically correct in Germany.

and,

Everywhere — I must say this unfortunately and Tony Judt has also noted it — where that Jewish-Israeli lobby and its networks are at work, and today that covers the whole world and thanks to America the power [of the “lobby”] has become so great, that as European Jews for a just peace we are a minority.

I wonder what her strategy in court is going to be? Perhaps she’ll say that just because she says that the Jews are behaving like Nazis and control the whole world’s media, that doesn’t make her antisemitic - she is only trying to help them and, after all, is one herself.