American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have died and been seriously injured because a false, antisemitic accusation that an Army engineer was spying for Israel led to the cancellation of a mid-1990s project to improve the armor on Humvees. David Tenenbaum is an Orthodox Jew from Southfield, Michigan, who, the Pentagon now admits, was wrongly accused of spying for Israel because he was a Jew.
And, you don't have to be Jewish to be the victim of an antisemitic attack. Consider Dr. Philip M. Zack, a Catholic thought by some to be Jewish and therefore accused, apparently wrongly, of being the anthrax mailer.
A front page report in the Detroit Free Press quotes from a 62-page report by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense (pdf), released three weeks ago "with little fanfare"
"We believe that Mr. Tenenbaum was subjected to unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith and ethnic background, a practice that would undoubtedly fit a definition of discrimination."
"It was well known that Mr. Tenenbaum was Jewish, lived his religious beliefs and by his actions appeared to have a close affinity for Israel," the report said.
Examples of documents seized by the FBI in a 1997 search of Tenenbaum's home include drawings by his then five-year-old daughter and The Shlomo Carlebach Songbook. The FBI searched Tenenbaum's home on a Saturday, the Jewish sabbath.
The Detroit Free Press reports:
Tenenbaum's lawyer, Mayer Morganroth of Southfield, said the bogus investigation prompted the Army to scrap Tenenbaum's 1995 project to improve the armor on Humvees, a decision that proved fatal to American troops who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in woefully inadequate fighting vehicles.
Tenenbaum looked and acted different. He was an Orthodox Jew who was fluent in Hebrew. He must have been spying for Israel:
The report said Tenenbaum wore a yarmulke and adhered to strict Jewish dietary rules, prompting him to bring kosher food to work rather than joining coworkers for lunch at restaurants. Colleagues questioned why he was allowed to leave work early on Fridays to prepare for the Jewish Sabbath, the report said.
The FBI looked into the complaints but found no evidence of wrongdoing.
The report said he lost his security clearance but eventually got it back and upgraded, a result that "suggests that Mr. Tenenbaum did not improperly disclose classified material."
Of course, some people were ready to use the (now-disproven) accusations against Tenenbaum, highlighting his Jewishness. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs for July/August 1998, began its account, by then news editor Shawn Ting, by emphasizing that Tenenbaum is a Jew:
An American Jewish engineer who admitted giving classified U.S. technical data "inadvertently" to Israeli officials for 10 years is back at work at a U.S. Army tank and armor maintenance and research facility
The reference to Tenenbaum's supposed admission, we learn from the OIG Report and the Detroit Free Press, stems from a polygraph examiner who reportedly told Tenenbaum:
"I've done other Jews before, and I've gotten them to confess, too"
The Office of the Inspector General was unable to get to the bottom of this charge -- at least implicitly refuted by the subsequent upgrading of Tenenbaum's security clearance -- because the session wasn't tape-recorded and the examiner destroyed his notes."
Ting's successor as news editor of The Washington Report, Delinda Curtiss Hanley, also found Philip Zack's (supposed) Jewishness newsworthy, describing him as "The Jewish scientist." Hanley's lengthy story in The Washington Report, While Media Spotlights One Anthrax Suspect, Another Is Too Hot to Touch, never explains the relevance of Zack's (supposed) Jewishness, except to ask:
Did journalists fear being labeled anti-Semitic for casting suspicions on a Jewish scientist?
This Washington Report story also more than hints at an Israeli connection to the destruction of the World Trade Center.
An apparently careful investigation of the Zack allegations by Ed Lake shows why it is highly improbable that Zack had anything to do with the anthrax mailings. Lake also reports that Zack almost certainly is Catholic, not Jewish. Among the evidence Lake presents is a photocopy of the Zanesville, Ohio, Times Recorder's account of Dr. Zack's church wedding. The wedding was in the Calvary United Methodist Church. A Catholic priest co-officiated with a minister. Dr. Zack is identified as "a member of St. Nicholas Church." Mr. Lake writes:
A little research finds that the Dr. Philip M. Zack in Colorado is both a PhD and a DVM. DVM = Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, which fits with the newspaper article. The idea that there could be two veterinarians named Philip M. Zack who are also of the right age to get married in 1974 is not totally impossible, but it is enough to make it a certainty beyond any "reasonable doubt" that the Dr. Zack mentioned in the wedding announcement is the same Dr. Zack who left USAMRIID [United States Army Medical Research Institute for infectious diseases] in 1991.
With good reason the Daily Kos FAQ cautions against indulging in conspiracy theories and prescribes:
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The more extreme the claim, the higher the burden of proof that commenters will demand. If you can't provide evidence to back up your claim, it is best not to post
I write this to encourage diarists and commenters to refrain from unsupported claims of conspiracies, cabals, treason, espionage, and the like. Also, unless you explain the relevance of someone's religious or ethnic identification, the prudent course would be not to mention it.
A concluding note on "antisemitism"
Some people, perhaps jumping to conclusions from the more common spelling "anti-semitism," don't understand that "antisemitism" is just a made up word for (what in the 19th century was) a new kind of Jew-hatred, one based on ostensibly scientific theories about "blood" and "race." Antisemitism, coined by a German-speaking antisemite to describe this new kind of antisemitism, is no more against "semitism," whatever that may be, then a pineapple is a kind of apple or a grapefruit has anything to do with grapes.