KRUGMAN'S PATTERN OF ANTI-SEMITISM

NYT columnist Paul Krugman is Jewish, but it's possible to be both a Jew and and anti-Semite (cf Marx, Karl). Krugman kicked up a dust storm last week when he essentially blamed Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's obvious and long-standing anti-Semitism on Bush policies. Mahathir has said and done anti-Semitic things as long as he's been on the scene--did Bush policy create a breach in the time-space continuum so that it could affect things decades before he even took office? Or maybe Wes Clark is making a cameo appearance? Surely not, but I digress.

So Krugman is a bit soft on the ornery old anti-Semite, and thinks it's Bush's fault that Mahathir has to preach anti-Semitism to the other 57 heads of Islamic states (who gave him a standing o, btw, and most of whom were anti-American and anti-Semites before it was the "in" thing at Oxford). Give him a pass, right--after all, he's attacking Bush and surely that should count for something. And he did call Mahathir's Juddenrant "inexcusable"--before going on to excuse it.

But what if Krugman himself is an anti-Semite, or a self-hating Jew? Would that change anyone's mind about him?

Probably not--those who dislike him will just dislike him a bit more; those who like him will probably give him a pass. But the evidence for anti-Semitism (or self-hate, take your pick) is intriguing. It's circumstantial, but better than the evidence that got Gregg Easterbrook canned from ESPN.

In 1998, Krugman wrote a column about--you guessed it--currency speculation. Ok, you probably didn't guess that. I wouldn't have. One of the lead figures in that column is the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad. Krugman sure likes to write about this guy. We pick up the action in the third graf:

In modern times, however, the evil speculator's hold on the popular imagination has waned. Put it down partly to free-market ideology. Also, after 15 years in which stock prices have almost always gone up, those who play games in the market are more likely to be seen as creators of value than as disreputable exploiters. Anyway, today's financial markets are so vast that it seems hard to believe that any individual or group could have the power to manipulate asset prices - surely any attempt to drive those prices far away from fair value would be frustrated by other investors, who would rush in to seize the resulting profit opportunity. When the occasional accusation of financial conspiracy is heard - when, for example, Malaysia's Prime Minster blames his country's problems on the machinations of Jewish speculators - the reaction of most observers is skepticism, even ridicule.

But even the paranoid have people out to get them. Little by little, over the past few years, the figure of the evil speculator has reemerged. George Soros played a definite role - though probably not a decisive one - in the forced devaluation of Britain's pound sterling in 1992.

Hold it right there. Krugman gets Mahathir's noxious quote about Jewish speculators in, kind of backhandedly dismisses it, but then his first example of an evil currency speculator is George Soros--a Jew. Not a very Jewish Jew, but a Jew nonetheless. Why, an inquiring mind should ask, would Krugman single Soros out as Exhibit A for the prosecution against currency speculation? Is Soros the only currency speculator Krugman could find? Well, no--he rants on about a Sumitomo exec (Japanese), but then runs off to tell us about a Hong Kong official who complained about a currency conspiracy against his city-state. The culprit? George Soros. Again.

Krugman is clearly building up a defense of Mahathir's "Jewish speculator" bile--a comment that plays on centuries of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Surely Krugman knew this when he wrote this column. So the question is, is Krugman himself a self-hating anti-Semite, or merely so enamoured of Mahathir that he doesn't know a racist when he sees one? I don't know, but neither answer is particularly palatable.

At the very least, Paul Krugman has some explaining to do.