Last month, Town Hall Seattle ran a program called ‘Three Lives,’  originally touted as eulogies of three public figures — Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-Il, and Vaclav Havel — linked by the sole fact that they’d happened to die within four days of each other in December.  I was asked to speak about Hitchens.  “No way,” I said.  “Not unless you’re ready for an anti-eulogy.”

They were.

Here’s the video, in which I start at about the 4.45 time mark, running to 23.10.

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But if you want to see a really great presentation, go back to the video and start at the 57.35 mark, where ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie and actors Bob Wright and Tom Carrato deliver a stunning tribute to Vaclav Havel, inspiring me to go out and buy a copy of ‘Disturbing the Peace’ the next day, when I also read this moving assessment by his long-time translator, Paul Wilson.  I’m only sorry Havel had to die for me to pay closer attention.  But then that’s kind of Wilson’s point.

This poster has reportedly been plastered all over San Francisco today:

Not that anyone’s to blame for the massacre in Tucson, mind you.  Least of all Sarah Palin.  It was just one of those things.  A random nutcase.  No connection to words or to hysterical rhetoric.  To images of crosshairs in a rifle sight.  To the absence of any meaningful gun laws.

So on this day when the victims are being mourned, Sarah makes it all about herself again.  She’s the victim, not the dead and wounded.  The victim of a blood libel, no less.

She has no idea what medieval blood libel actually is, of course.  No idea that it was directed at Jews, accused of slaughtering Christian children to bake their blood into matzos, and that it directly inspired pogroms.  No idea that using the term might even be considered just a tad in bad taste given that Gabrielle Giffords is Jewish.  No, Sarah is all innocence.

Put your hand over the poster so that you only see her face from the black maw of her mouth up.  You see it now?  Those dead eyes.  That snarl.   Almost as terrifying as the sight of a Glock 19 pointed in your direction.  Now put your hand over the top of her face, just beneath her nose, and you’ll see she’s enjoying herself — the perfect demagogue.

Be afraid of this pretty woman.  Be very afraid.  The righteousness;  the ignorance;  the absolute conviction;  the total absence of shame — yes, this is indeed the face of American terrorism.

When Hollywood goes righteous, it’s a particularly smarmy sight.  What could be more obviously and easily righteous than a stand against anti-Semitism, especially for a town that’s managed to reduce the shattering enormity of the Holocaust to the rah-rah beat-the-Nazis level so brilliantly parodied by Quentin Tarantino in last year’s Inglourious Basterds?  (Please don’t ask why it’s spelled that way – I have no idea, and no idea whether Tarantino has any idea either).

Hollywood ‘s newest bout of righteousness is over the decision to award an honorary Oscar – aka a “governors’ award” —  to legendary French nouvelle vague director Jean-Luc Godard.

To say that this is about time is to be madly anachronistic, since Godard has been working his cinematic brilliance since 1960 — fifty years in which not a single one of his movies has been Oscar-nominated even as best foreign picture.  That in itself is an eloquent condemnation of the essential shallowness of the Oscars.   While Godard was making classics like A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders), Hollywood was delivering its best-picture laurels to  fluffy romances like Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960) and  George Cukor’s film adaptation of “My Fair Lady” (1964).

But while the decision to finally honor Godard reveals an interestingly new awareness of Oscarite limitations,  it’s by no means incidental that the honor is to be bestowed not in the orgy of sentimentality telecast as the Awards Ceremony in February, but well away from all the red-carpet brouhaha, in the Hollywood equivalent of privacy:  a black-tie banquet on November 13.

Godard has already said he won’t be there.   It’s hardly surprising that he has no great regard for Hollywood.    And no surprise either that as a French intellectual, he’s outspokenly anti-Zionist and an advocate of Palestinian independence.   The issue is that infamous overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

In a 1985 newspaper interview, for example, Godard spoke of Hollywood in terms echoing the old anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as usurers:  “What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt.  The real producer is the image of the Central European Jew.  They’re the ones who invented the cinema, they brought it to Hollywood…   Making a film is visibly producing debts.”

Hmm.   Overlookable, perhaps, except that four years earlier, on French television, he’d made what at first seemed an amusingly quirky remark:  “Moses is my principal enemy…  Moses, when he received the commandments, he saw images and translated them.   Then when he brought the texts, he didn’t show what he had seen.”   I’m not quite sure what this meant, but it could have been funny – the man of images railing against the man of words – until the man of images added the kicker:  “That’s why the Jewish people are accursed.”

Yup, anti-Semitic for sure.   The same old stale stereotypes dating back to the Middle Ages.  But does that mean I should view Godard’s work differently?

One of my favorite poets – a man whose work I go back to again and again for reflection, consolation, sheer beauty, and complexity –  was also an anti-Semite.   I can’t imagine living without T.S. Eliot on my bookshelf – The Four Quartets above all – even though I wince when I come across lines like “the Jew squats on the windowsill” in “Gerontion” (the squatting Jew being a rapacious landlord),  or “The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot” from “Burbank with a Baedeker.”    Or statements like this, in a lecture:  “Reasons of race and religion make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

So as one of a large number of free-thinking Jews, should I be boycotting T.S. Eliot?

The trouble is, if I did, I’d have to boycott most of the canon of English literature, including Shakespeare.  In fact if I were to apply the litmus test of anti-Semitism, I’d be so poorly read I’d have a mind the size of a walnut and a soul the size of a shriveled dried pea.

The same goes for the idea of using feminism as a litmus test.  Or any “ism.”   I can live with the fact that those whose work I admire are flawed, even prejudiced – all of us are, one way or another.   But to toss out the brilliance with the bathwater?  That’s plain stupid.  Or perhaps just smarmily righteous.

So I’m a rapacious, accursed rat?  Bite me.

If the headline read “Pat Buchanan:  Not Enough Muslims on the Supreme Court,” that’d be something.   Instead, what we get is the utterly predictable:  “Pat Buchanan:  Too Many Jews on the Supreme Court.”

Surprise surprise, Pat’s been Jew-counting.  Those damn Jews are taking over our most sacred institutions.  When all else fails — and the lesbian “smear” campaign against Elena Kagan is clearly faltering (amazing that it’s 2010 and we still talk of “accusations” of lesbianism) — there’s always good old antisemitism to fall back on.   As Jean-Paul Sartre put it:  “If Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would have had to invent them.”

Count ’em, says Buchanan from his current perch as a commentator on MSNBC.  Three of ’em if Kagan gets the nod!  Out of nine.  It’s a calamity for Christian America — a separate little cabal there on the bench, out to corrupt the purity of Christian values.  What do you mean, Judeo-Christian?  Nobody pays any attention to that Judeo bit.  That’s just another sop to the Jews, adulterating Christianity.  We have to put a stop to them.  We have to stand up to this canker in our society.  Who the hell do they think they are?

None of the three are religious?  Ha, you don’t believe that, do you?  It’s in their blood — the stain, as Philip Roth put it, the fatal flaw, as bad as being black.  And hey, if they’re not religious, that makes it even worse.  What do they believe in?  Abortion?  Gay marriage?  Civil rights?  The Antichrist?

Thank God (as it were) we have no less an authority than Richard Nixon’s assurance that Buchanan is neither an antisemite nor a Jew-hater (the precise distinction clear only to Nixon), but “a good patriotic American.”  The Nixon seal of approval is always reassuring.

Is it worth pointing out that only four Jews have sat on the Supreme Court before?  That a third of all justices have been Episcopalians, who are 1.7% of all Americans?   That the Constitution upheld by the court forbids discrimination on the basis of religion?   No — that’s only stooping to the level of Buchanan demagogery.

Come on, Obama:   rock Buchanan’s world and  nominate a Muslim next time.

Or even — gasp! — an atheist.

A bonfire of vanities is breaking out in the American political punditry about one single Muslim.   Not a terrorist, but a European intellectual — scholar and activist Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford professor who argues that Islam has a positive, ethical contribution to make to Western culture, and who was named one of the top innovators of the 21st century on the impeccably non-radical Time.com.

Fresh fuel for the fire comes from The Flight of the Intellectuals, a new book accusing American and European intellectuals of pandering to Islam, specifically to Ramadan, while ignoring signs of his extremism.

It will appear to be a splendidly principled debate, with everyone taking impassioned positions in defense of liberte, egalite, and if not fraternite, certainly sororite.   Women in Islam, that is.   As usual, male Western intellectuals get most worked up about “the question of women” in Islamic societies, thus presenting themselves as comfortably situated white knights in shining armor, armchair warriors protecting the innocent from barbarism.

It will also be a peculiarly sophomoric debate, essentially asking “who’s our Muslim intellectual?”  Is it Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose book Infidel rejected Islam outright and led to her flight for safety to the US, where she’s now at the American Enterprise Institute?  Or is it Tariq Ramadan, who has consistently argued for a “third way” blending traditional Islamic values with western democratic ones?

In books like What I Believe, Ramadan advocates greater democratic political involvement by western Muslims.  This may seem reasonable enough, but reason, for his critics, is just a mask.   His hidden agenda is an extremist one, they say;  see how he refuses to outright condemn punishing women for adultery (he only says he opposes it)  or antisemitism (oops, strike that one, he did).

In fact the language used about Ramadan has a distinctly antisemitic tint.   He’s shifty, they say;  he’s two-faced;  he hides his true loyalties — all the sort of things said about Jews in 1930s Germany.   They point to Ramadan’s “connections” (his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, so obviously the grandson is carrying out the grandfather’s program).   So what if Ramadan is a charming and sophisticated European intellectual?  That very charm and sophistication make him suspicious.   (There’s a strong tint here of “who does he think he is?  he’s just a Muslim putting on airs”).  He has to be a fifth columnist in the ranks of naive post-Enlightenment scholars who have no idea of the treacherous and devious depths of Islamic thinking.

The ultimate insult for such critics seems to be that Ramadan is a religious man.   A pious Muslim, as they see it, cannot possibly be a liberal intellectual;  his whole argument that Islam and social democracy are not necessarily opposed can thus, ipso facto, only be false.

What they’re really saying is that the only kind of Muslim intellectual who’s acceptable is one who’s absolutely kosher.  One who, like Hirsi Ali, has renounced all ties with the demon Islam.  One who has repented, seen the error of his/her ways, and accepted the superiority of the secular.

Perhaps that’s why the bonfire:  the language, attitudes, and assumptions behind this debate all seem to me to bear the distinctly pious fervor of  Inquisition.