I keep an eye on meretricious charges of anti-Semitism, because the smear is a very harmful one and it is often used to protect Israel. Here are two recent-ish examples, hurled by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and Shmuley Boteach, the right wing rabbi and “love prophet on loan to Israel,” as he has described himself.

Foxman first. Mark Landler had a piece in the Times last week about American Jews being anxious about the Jonathan Pollard case because it suggests that they might have dual loyalty. Foxman told Landler that he had rejected the idea that the prosecution was anti-Semitic:

At the time of Mr. Pollard’s arrest, American Jews were uniformly appalled by his crimes, Mr. Foxman said, and worried that it might have major repercussions. He recalled rejecting a request that the Anti-Defamation League declare Mr. Pollard’s treatment anti-Semitic.

The Times did Foxman a service by presenting him as so balanced.

In fact, in an ADL press release just this January, Foxman said that Pollard’s continued imprisonment after 27 years represented a “vendetta” against Jews aimed at intimidating them– and indicated that he had changed his mind about the prosecution not being anti-Semitic to begin with:

If it were only a vendetta against one individual it would be bad enough. But it has now become one against the American Jewish community…. In effect, the continuing imprisonment of this person long after he should have been paroled on humanitarian grounds can only be read as an effort to intimidate American Jews. And, it is an intimidation that can only be based on an anti-Semitic stereotype about the Jewish community, one that we have seen confirmed in our public opinion polls over the years, the belief that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, the United States. In other words, the underlying concept which fuels the ongoing Pollard incarceration is the notion that he is only the tip of the iceberg in the community. So Pollard stays in prison as a message to American Jews: don’t even think about doing what he did. I come to this conclusion with much sorrow and, as noted, as someone who resisted efforts early on to connect the Pollard affair to anti-Semitism. It is harder and harder to do so any longer.

I think this claim is nuts; Pollard gave a container full of documents to the Israelis, doing a lot of damage, how much we still don’t know; the late Caspar Weinberger wanted to give him the death penalty. But Foxman got to sanitize this “vendetta” position in the Times.

Now here is the love prophet. Shmuley Boteach wrote last December in the New York Observer that Emma Thompson was anti-Semitic because in 2012 she and others in the business had called on the Globe Theatre to withdraw an invitation to the Israeli national theater, Habima:

We ask the Globe to withdraw the invitation so that the festival is not complicit with human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land.

Boteach saw Thompson’s letter as evidence of hatred of Jews. He wrote last December that Walt Disney was anti-Semitic and:

Emma Thompson, who plays the role of author P. L. Travers in the new film [Saving Mr. Banks, about Disney and Mary Poppins], seems aligned with Disney and his ambivalence toward the Jewish people. Since she signed a libelous protest of an Israeli theater group’s participation in last year’s Shakespeare festival in England, I don’t know if her reputation will ever be the same…. It seems that the irony of an Israeli theater performing The Merchant of Venice was lost on Ms. Thompson, who appears to have taken Shakespeare’s caricature of Jews a little too literally…. China was allowed to participate in the Shakespeare festival without Ms. Thompson demanding a pound of flesh. Here lies the troubling prejudice of Israel’s enemies who hold utterly hypocritical standards when it comes to the Jewish state. For Jews, the standards are superhuman and often impossible to satisfy.

Both these statements strike me as desperate. Boteach and Foxman are going in for smashmouth politics, raising the worst accusations against people’s motivation out of a desire to protect Israel.