That's what I wondered when I read about a disgusting children's event in Berkeley, in an article titled "Middle School Brainwashing: Would MLK Approve of Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism?" The event features a notoriously anti-Semitic rapper named Lowkey, and one of the most viciously anti-Israel activists in the world -- a man named Norman Finkelstein who condemns what he calls "the Holocaust Industry" as propaganda by powerful Jewish groups to somehow "immunize Israel from criticism."

My worry is that the reason he gets away with promoting such hatred is simply because he happens to be Jewish. At the very least, this makes his complaint that the Holocaust Industry seeks to immunize Israel from criticism disingenuous.

Then there's the Israel hating "Middle East Children's Alliance":

The event sponsor, MECA, has a twenty-year history of supporting anti-Israel activities. A lowlight on its long list of unsavory behavior: last year MECA was among several humanitarian organizations that participated in a Viva Palestina convoy bound for the Gaza Strip. The convoy handed over one million dollars in cash and other supplies to ... Hamas.

I contacted Martin Luther King Middle School for more information, and I was told that free tickets have been provided to all of the school's students. The school will not be providing any supervision.

Allowing such a venomously anti-Israel rap artist and a notorious Holocaust denier to perform in front of impressionable students -- at a taxpayer-funded school! -- is a dangerous precedent that should distress any freedom-loving American and Israel supporter. We are aware of the brainwashing folks like Finkelstein spread at the university level. Now the leftists are trying to poison your much younger children.

She has repeatedly been to Baghdad and visited Saddam Hussein at various times during the Iraq War, and I think she hates Jews. But because she is Jewish, that's impossible, right? And of course, because I am not Jewish, according to the Rules of Identity Politics, I have no right to discuss this concern!

Of course, in Lubin's case it might just come down to basic psychology. Something perhaps as simple as hating her parents:

In October, Lubin flew through the no-fly zone from the Baghdad airport, which had just been bombed by American fighters, to the Basra airport, which was bombed shortly after she landed. "There was no problem with air traffic control," Lubin says with a laugh. "We were the only civilians flying in the no-fly zone."

In more ways than one, Lubin has journeyed a long way from the home of her parents. "I grew up in a right-wing Zionist home in Philadelphia," she recounts. "When someone asked for the salt to be passed at the dinner table, inevitably, someone would say, 'Is it good for Israel?' We gave money to Israel so that we would have a place to go when 'they' came for us."

Anyway, I don't like to get into arguments with shrill activists, so I wasn't going to write a post about this at all. But when I emailed M. Simon and mentioned my concerns about identity politics, he replied,

Discuss it. The hell with PC.

I think it's especially disgusting that this "anti-Zionist" hate-fest would be held at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, especially because of what Martin Luther King said shortly before his assassination:

When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.

I don't see why. Any more than Barbara Lubin or Jane Fonda should be immune from being criticized as traitors to the United States because they happen to be Americans.