Orson Scott Card takes on the new wave of anti-Semitism that’s becoming popular among academics in a devastating critique of Steve Berry’s The Alexandria Link, a book Card describes this way:

“…a book that systematically and continually makes false and damaging charges against Jews, Zionists, and Israel, while denying or ignoring the massive number of betrayals, lies, atrocities, and crimes against humanity committed by Israel’s enemies.”

But the best parts of his spot on criticism of a book that reads like it was written by JewWatch founder Frank Weltner are aimed at a literary and academic culture that increasingly embraces anti-Semitism:

“This book reflects what is going on among “intellectuals” in America. Steve Berry is a lawyer. In college he majored in political science. I imagine that he has respectable, “educated” friends who believe exactly the same things he does. In fact, anti-antisemitism is now becoming quite fashionable among American “intellectuals” — proving once again how easily people can talk themselves into moral obscenities as long as they only talk to other people who think exactly like them.

I bet that Berry and all his friends are quite convinced that they are the good guys. But they would be utterly wrong in that belief. They are the poster children for the ability of smart people to believe in stupid lies — just like the people who preached in favor of slavery or segregation because, for various specious reasons, black people “deserved” or “needed” to be “taken care of” by whites.

Berry and his ilk have chosen to support lies that justify the murder of Jews — no, wait, the bigots call them “Zionists” now, don’t they, the way segregationists said “nigra” so they didn’t use the actual N-word — but at the same time, in a moral contortion that deserves to be in a sideshow, they still claim the mantle of “tolerance” and consider their enemies to be the neanderthal bigots.

Guess what, kids: You’re in bed with Adolph Hitler and with the bombers of innocent people in Palestine.”

It’s good to see people take this sort of thinking to task, and Card’s point about the dangers of presenting anti-Semitic propaganda as “background” in novels and movies will be more and more relevant as “progressives” ally themselves with Fascist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and neo-Nazis like David Duke. It is happening on the fringe of the left now, and with the publication of Berry’s book, we can see this sort of hate making inroads into what was traditionally considered mainstream leftism.