A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Behold two of the latest stories that put the lie to that claim. Here's one:

Surveillance video recovered by Montreal police shows a masked man throwing a firebomb at the door of an orthodox Jewish school in an attack early Saturday.

Police said a neighbour heard what sounded like a window breaking just after midnight and looked out to see the main entrance of the Taldos Yakov Yosef school in Outremont in flames.

In the video, the man takes a few steps toward the entrance, then steps back to throw a lighted Molotov cocktail. He removes his mask as he steps out of the video frame, but his face is not visible.

Although officials of Jewish groups disagree, police have been unwilling to declare the attack a hate crime. In the absence of graffiti or other other evidence, it is being treated as an unexplained case of arson.

Even so, it has stirred memories of a firebomb attack that destroyed the library of Montreal's United Talmud Torah school in 2004.

And here's another:

A string of anti-Semitic rants about Sen. Joe Lieberman have popped up on the liberal MoveOn.org's open forum Web site, drawing criticism from the Anti-Defamation League.
It's the latest flap in the contentious race between Lieberman, who is running as an independent to keep his seat in Connecticut, and upstart Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee.

"We recognize that Action Forum is an open forum intended to foster the free flow of ideas," ADL head Abraham Foxman said in a letter dated Aug. 31 to MoveOn, which supported Lamont in the Democratic primary against Lieberman.

"Nevertheless, since such profoundly offensive content is appearing on a board clearly linked to MoveOn.org, we believe you should assume some responsibility to respond to this hateful content," Foxman wrote in the letter, which was forwarded by Lieberman's campaign.

Foxman cited examples from the site's Action Forum, including "media owning Jewish pigs," "Zionazis," a reference to the senator as "Jew Lieberman" and the question, "Why are the Jews so Jew-y?"

Charming, as always. It seems we are not fully civilized just yet.

UPDATE: More from Marshall Wittmann. While we should certainly be careful not to overgeneralize regarding where on the political spectrum anti-Semitism can be found, Wittmann certainly makes excellent points.