Phil is reporting on the latest hysteria by Jamie Kirchick, the bright young thing who Marty Peretz found to say all the things his other young disciples had too much self respect to say.  TAC readers will remember him well for his smearing of Ron Paul, and indeed the most imaginative neoconologist could not have invented this guy.

Kirchick apparently has his panties in a bunch about the creepy Stalinoid antiwar-group ANSWER raining on his gay pride parade in D.C.  Kirchick and ANSWER deserve each other, it would only be a slight exaggeration to describe them as equally totalitarian.  But naturally, Kirchick’s beef seems to be all about Israel, and the current bizarre propaganda effort to garner sympathy for Israel on account of its thriving gay culture.

ANSWER/Workers World is not what it once was, indeed it may have even been a victim of its own success in taking over and thereby suffocating the antiwar movement of earlier in the decade.  The radical and sectarian left is doing so much organizing around Palestine now mostly just because it gives them something to do at a time they desperately need it.

That said, Kirchick’s piece denouncing them is utterly hysterical, even if its entirely factual.  Reading his piece you would think it was 1946 and the Communist Party was about to take over the CIO, for God’s sake its been almost two generations since even the days of antiwar protesters waving North Vietnamese flags.  Like ANSWER, Kirchick is living in a fantasy for the purpose of grandstanding for cheap applause.

A couple larger points are also in order.  I’ve criticized Phil in the past for amplifying the voices of the far left pro-Palestinian scene, though I’m certainly not in favor of treating them as non-persons either.  However I do find something unseemly about the whole “Queers for Palestine” motif, not at all for the same reason as Kirchick, on the contrary we should celebrate their willingness to oppose a fundamentally illiberal society which indulges sexual libertinism.

So indeed, I have not lost sight of the bottom line, which is the deep sickness of a country using the “gay” appeal to bolster its image abroad.  Brendan O’Neill had a fine article in TAC some time back about how so much of the right was projecting Israel as the front line of defending the enlightenment.  But I have to wonder, a country which universally conscripts both sexes while its largest city has a sexual underground which makes San Francisco look like Salt Lake City seems more to me like the front line defending Brave New World.