Actually, he doesn’t so much exonerate himself of it as offer himself as a candidate for recognition as being righteous among the gentiles:

But my own diligence against anti-Semitism, in all its forms, in my own church in particular, is well-documented and has gone back decades.

I will not be intimidated from examining and criticizing both the actions of the Israeli government and the lobby that does so much to enable it, against what I believe are the long-term interests of the US and the West. Neither, I suspect, will the others now routinely targeted with these lies and smears.

I’m  happy to hear this and I’m sure you are too,  there certainly is  a lot of work to be done in ridding the Roman Catholic church of antisemitism.  Good luck on that, Andrew.

Just  a couple of points though: Andrew says that he and his chums are not going to be intimidated. Note that word. It’s a way of saying “I am my friends are brave, braver than you, in any case. There is a price to be paid for speaking out against uppity and organized Jews when what they are doing is wrong and we are willing to pay it.” In fact, they are not so much willing to pay it as yearning to, even though no one can say what that price might be or point to an example  of anyone having had to pay it.

Furthermore, why is Andrew only willing to risk all when it comes to fighting the Jewish lobby, whenever it, in his view,  threatens the long-term  interests of the West? Could it be that only the Jewish lobby does this and that the actions of  other lobbies never do? If that’s the case, isn’t it a little odd,  given the tiny size of Israel and the relative handful of Jews in the world? I  mean, he thinks that their actions sometimes threaten the entire West as well as the USA; that’s really something, but by no means antisemitic, of course. Just remember that Andrew thinks that the actions of AIPAC may sometimes threaten the interests of New Zealand, Chile and Jamaica.

Note also how he uses the word, “long-term”, it greases up any argument very nicely. When  someone points to the lack of any element of evidence  supporting his argument he can go “Ah, but I was talking about the long-term,  you oaf”. So, given the fact that humans are really bad at predicting the future, especially the distant future, he can say whatever he likes without having to offer much in the way of rigor or evidence in his argument.

Finally, if one were to draw up a league table of American allies  with the number of American  lives that were  being put directly at risk to protect them, where would Israel come? Well behind the Republic of Korea, that’s for sure, where thousands of American soldiers have been stationed for many decades as a sort of human trip wire, as a way of saying to the nightmare Chosun-Stalinist dynasty that runs the DPRK, “Look, attacking the south will inevitably involve killing loads of Americans and though you’ll start out winning big we all know where  things will end,  don’t we?” And there are substantial US forces based in Japan too. I haven’t read  everything Andrew has ever written, life being the length it is, but I can’t recall him objecting to young Americans being used as potential human sacrifices in these countries.

Israel, on the other hand, as Fabián Glagovsky has recently reminded us, doesn’t require young Americans to come and defend it, it takes care of the fighting and dying itself and it’s difficult to conceive of circumstances in which this might be otherwise. Ah, but perhaps my thinking is insufficiently long-term….