I’ve touched slightly on the term ‘Israel-Firster’ – a shorthand that has an ugly neo-Nazi provenance, which is why I don’t use it…

As Justin Raimondo pointed out Monday, that etymology is false: the term was first used no later than 1953 by Alfred M. Lilienthal, a Jewish American. Not that that fact will change anything. I expect no correction from Sullivan, and I couldn’t care less about his source, Spencer Ackerman, whose views on intellectual honesty you can read for yourself.

But let’s assume that, for once, they weren’t bullshitting and the term was coined by an asshole. And? Does a sorry origin taint a word or phrase for all eternity, even if the term — as Sullivan effectively admits in the aforementioned post — is accurate and useful in certain cases?

Just for kicks, I searched Sullivan’s blog and Tablet magazine, where Ackerman acted out his latest “plate-glass window” fantasy, for “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow.” It won’t surprise you to learn that the searches turned up plenty of hits. It may surprise you to learn where those words come from:

“Highbrow,” first used in the 1880s to describe intellectual or aesthetic superiority, and “lowbrow,” first used shortly after 1900 to mean someone or something neither “highly intellectual” or “aesthetically refined,” were derived from the phrenological terms “highbrowed” and “lowbrowed,” which were prominently featured in the nineteenth-century practice of determining racial types and intelligence by measuring cranial shapes and capacities. A familiar illustration of the period depicted the distinctions between the lowbrowed ape and the increasingly higher brows of the “Human Idiot,” the “Bushman,” the “Uncultivated,” the “Improved,” the “Civilized,” the “Enlightened,” and, finally, the “Caucasian,” with the highest brow of all.

- Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)

Ugly, huh? You can find similar histories for several other commonly used terms (though “rule of thumb,” contrary to a popular myth, isn’t one of them). Will Sullivan and Tablet‘s writers ban the -brows? I doubt it, and really, why should they? If they found those adjectives useful before and had no intention of endorsing phrenology or “scientific racism,” then there’s no reason for us to presume evil motives now.

None of which is to say that some words aren’t overused or shouldn’t be used more carefully. But if “Israel-firster” is one of those terms, then “anti-Semite” is a thousand times more so. You have your work cut out for you, deputies.

When I arrived late at the town hall event in Meredith, he [Ron Paul] was prefacing an answer to a question about Israel by expressing admiration for Zionist principles of independence and self-reliance, going on to say, of course, that Israel shouldn’t get any US aid. (Paul, or someone on his staff, has clearly read this Jeffrey Goldberg post.)

Ah, so Paul cynically stole a talking point from Jeffrey Goldberg — who had, um, explained Paul’s position on Israel by quoting the congressman. It doesn’t get much sneakier than that.

Dave Weigel is a history buff:

[Newt Gingrich's] last full-on grapple with Romney came when the former governor attacked him, in a sort of more-in-sorrow-than-anger way, for saying that the Palestinians were an “invented people.” That, said Romney, was complicating things for Israelis.

“The Israelis are getting rocketed every day,” snorted Gingrich. “We’re not making life more difficult. The Obama administration is making life more difficult.” Plus, he was right on the facts. “Palestinian did not become a common term until after 1977.” That’s the sort of knowledge-bomb that Republicans dream of dropping on Obama—they feel like this is right, but here’s a candidate who can say so.

I suppose we could argue over the definition of “common term.” I did a very fast, very lazy search for “Palestinian” on EBSCOhost. Five seconds’ work turned up references to Palestinians — in the Oxford English Dictionary sense of “an Arab born or living in the area of the former mandated territory of Palestine; a descendant of such an Arab” — going back to 1922.

That earliest reference was in The Nation, which used the term fairly often in the Twenties. But maybe The Nation lacks the common touch. What about Time magazine? Is that common enough for Newt and Dave? The magazine recommended by four out of five dentists began using “Palestinian” in the relevant sense in 1951. For a while, Time used it only before “Arab,” if that makes any difference, but as early as November 1957 the Arab part seemed to be understood:

At one time Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser commended himself to the world as a strongman of reason, more concerned to put his impoverished country on its feet than to stir trouble in the Middle East. But Nasser has increasingly resorted to the incendiary propaganda of the totalitarian dictator, has persistently used his radio Voice of the Arabs to incite the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, who brood in bitter idleness over their lost lands across the border in Israel.

By November 1960, Time considered “Palestinian” a noun:

Last week Pakistan’s Moslem President Mohammed Ayub Khan arrived in Cairo and throwing away a diplomatically phrased set speech, delivered the sharpest criticisms of Moslems by a Moslem heard in many a year.

Ayub spoke plainly on his view of the long-festering problem of refugees along the Israeli border, where more than a million Palestinians—those who fled or were ejected by Israel, and the children born to them since—still inhabit squalid detention camps in Jordan, Syria and the Gaza Strip.

In fairness, I have yet to discover the first use of “Palestinian” in Highlights or the works of Michael Bay, so you can keep believing Newt Gingrich if you like.

Weigel link via Daniel Larison.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel, to his credit, has revised the article in question.

“Celebrate, Israel, with all the joyous gratitude that fills your hearts, as we all do along with you.

“Then round up [Shalit’s] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.”

Shalit was a bit more forgiving:

“I hope this deal helps achieve peace between both sides, Israel and the Palestinians. …

“I would be very happy if the [Palestinian prisoners] were all released so that they can go back to their families and their lands. I would be very happy if this happened.”

He [Mahmoud Abbas] could also still do what most expected him to try this week: Take his request for statehood to the UN General Assembly, where the U.S. has no veto. A two-thirds vote there would upgrade Palestine from “observer entity” to “observer state,” like the Vatican.

Winning in the General Assembly might be particularly effective after losing in the Security Council since it would give countries the chance to repudiate the U.S. veto. And an observer state can participate in UN bodies and commissions.

International Court Jurisdiction

More practically, recognition as an observer state might help the Palestinian Authority reach its goal of getting the International Criminal Court to pronounce on Israel’s behavior in the territories and perhaps even declare the building of settlements a war crime. While the Palestinian leadership has asked the tribunal to take jurisdiction as if Palestine were a state, the ICC has never said “yes” or “no.” If Palestine becomes an observer state at the UN, however, that might strengthen its case.

Israel would certainly argue that a UN observer still isn’t a real state in the sense meant by the ICC treaty. Israel would also point out that the ICC can’t act if a country that has jurisdiction over an alleged crime has adequately investigated it. Israel’s robust judicial system regularly examines claims of war crimes against its soldiers and government. The question is whether the court would buy those arguments — and whether leverage would be gained for the peace process as a result.

Consider me skeptical about the virtues of giving the International Criminal Court a bigger caseload. Brendan O’Neill and Rob Lyons have raised timely objections to that institution’s image as a guarantor of peace and justice. At best, ICC charges against Israeli officials will achieve nothing. At worst, they will make the Israeli government — and, therefore, the U.S. government — even more intransigent.

Before you start typing that furious comment, let me explain something. I don’t think or write about Israeli-Palestinian issues much anymore, for two main reasons. One, I have enough tedium, futility, and hopelessness in my life already without the “peace process,” thanks, and two, any mention of Israel attracts the sort of people (on both sides) who could make a sunnier person than I wish that an asteroid would wipe out our sorry species. All I care to say about the matter these days — and I know that it’s terribly uncosmopolitan — is that the U.S. government should completely withdraw from the dispute and let the people who actually live there resolve their differences. Or not resolve them. Withdrawal might not lead to the lion lying down with the lamb, but it would solve the only problem that the U.S. government is capable of solving: the blowback that comes from intervening in other people’s fights.

As for the Palestinian ploy at the United Nations, perhaps it will result in an entirely new framework for fruitless discussion. For instance: Are the Vatican and Palestine real states, magically endowed with moral prerogatives to kill and dispossess that individuals and voluntary associations don’t have? Stay tuned!

OOPS!

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops killed a 65-year-old Palestinian civilian named Amr Qawasme in a pre-dawn house raid earlier today in Hebron. Amr Qawasme’s wife Sopheye said the troops stormed into his bedroom while he was sleeping.

Sopheye Qawasme: "He wasn’t even awake. They just entered the door and shot him right away. I had gone to pray. When I came back, they told me. I have no idea how they just broke into the house and shot him. They came at me and put a rifle to my head, and they shot him again."

The Israeli military confirmed that Amr Qawasme was a civilian, but said the raid was justified because a member of Hamas was living in the building. –Israeli Troops Kill 65-Year-Old Man in Home Raid, Democracy NOW! Headlines, January 7, 2011

So you better know ALL your neighbors – - – AND their politics.

But don’t worry, it couldn’t happen here! At least not too often – - –

NOAM CHOMSKY: The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. …They show that Arab opinion …—holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that …it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. …
+
When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here, Clinton and the media, have drawn. There’s also a minor problem. That’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So there’s a filtering process. We don’t know how much it distorts the information. But there’s no question that what is a radical distortion is—or not even a distortion, a reflection of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population doesn’t matter, even if it’s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy. This shows up elsewhere…. –Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal “Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership”

Mr. Bolton set that deadline because he was concerned that destroying an operational plant would create a radiation hazard, but a strike that left the site radioactive would hinder Iranian attempts to get it back up and running.

Besides,

Civilian casualties would be minimal because the site is located nine miles downwind of the city of Bushehr, and potential [radioactive] fallout would drift over either the Gulf close to Iran or the immediate area, which is arid and sparsely populated.

Hat Tip, eXiled.