Given the fact we're basing the State Department's new office of Anti-Semitism commissars on events that occured in Petersburg and France and an inscrutable Easterner's ejaculation ... yeah, I guess you could say I think the wolf-crying is not only "widespread" but strangely institutionalized, thanks to Bush's initiative.
Curiouser and curiouser ... these "strict Constitutionalist" conservatives.
New Law Requires Report on Global Anti-Semitism
President Bush on October 16 signed into law the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 which establishes a State Department Office to monitor anti-Semitism around the world. The Act passed with strong backing from Congress, but opposition from the State Department itself, which objected to reports on different religions or ethnicities separate form the global human rights report and religious freedom reports that the Department prepares annually.
President Bush affirmed that, in the context of spreading democracy abroad, “extending freedom also means confronting the evil of anti-Semitism.” He pledged that the U.S. would “keep watch” and “make sure that the ancient impulse of anti-Semitism never finds a home in the modern world.”
The bill requires the State Department to document acts of physical violence against Jews, their property, cemeteries and places of worship abroad, as well as government responses to such acts.
Among the attacks that prompted passage of the bill, the sponsors mentioned the burning of a Jewish synagogue in Toulon, France, last March, the desecration of about 50 Jewish gravestones in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February, and the recent claim by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad that Jews "rule the world by proxy."
NCSJ President Joel Schindler praised the bill’s passage, saying that Congress "has now provided new avenues" for combating anti--Semitism around the world.
In September, more than 100 prominent Americans sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsing the measure. "The fight against anti-Semitism deserves specific, focused attention," said the letter signed by Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, former Republican Rep. Jack Kemp and others.
(Whaaa ? Jack Kemp is a "former Republican"? Didn't he run as Vice President last time they sent Bob "Down Boy" Dole up the flagpole to "send a message.")
"former Republican Rep."