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The conservative media, now relying on the new anti-Occupy Wall Street smear campaign created by William Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel, keeps pointing to this bigoted asshole with his “Zionists control Wall St.” sign as evidence that OWS is a purely antisemitic movement.

Yet they’re conveniently editing out the people standing around him at all times with signs saying he’s an asshole and unrepresentative of OWS. People have been trying to chase him from the park since day one, but the NYPD says that if the protesters have a right to freedom of assembly, so does he. As such, they are protecting him and, as one cop told me yesterday, “his constitutional right to be here.”

They also keep pointing to the video of Danny Cline, a performance artist and seemingly troubled individual, yelling at an Orthodox Jew to go back to Israel. Abhorrent as his words and deeds may have been, Cline, who was raised in a Jewish home, says he loves Jewish people and was just messing with the guy.

OWS’ detractors also keep pointing to Adbusters’ history of anti-Zionist and antisemitic writing (for which I myself canceled my friend-of-the-foundation subscription) as evidence that the organizers of OWS are themselves antisemitic. The problem here is that Adbusters isn’t actually involved in OWS in any meaningful capacity beyond having promoted it. As Mother Jones reports:

The group often credited with sparking Occupy Wall Street is Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine that, in July, issued a call to flood lower Manhattan with 90,000 protesters. “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” the magazine asked. But that’s not how Occupy Wall Street sprang to life. Without that worldly group that met at 16 Beaver and later created the New York City General Assembly, there might not have been an Occupy Wall Street as we know it today.

In every instance, the evidence of antisemitism used to malign the OWS protesters is shoddy at best. 

The fact is that antisemitism is real and something we should genuinely be concerned with, particularly during a time of economic outrage, as the current uprising shares many contours with movements of the past that have vilified Jewish people for their role in finance.

However, when we lie and overstate the presence of antisemitism — when we malign hundreds and thousands of people for the presence of one or two assholes among them and cast the charge of antisemitism about so nonchalantly — we dilute the meaning and efficacy of the term, undermining our ability to effectively combat and prevent the proliferation of actual antisemitism.

Antisemitism should be actively challenged and opposed wherever it rears its ugly head. But we should never tolerate the cynical employment and abuse of the term to support a narrow political agenda.

Update: The Anti-Defamation League has issued a statement calling on Occupy Wall Street to be vigilant against antisemitism while noting, “We believe that these expressions are not representative of the larger views of the OWS movement” and “There is no evidence that these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are representative of the larger movement or that they are gaining traction with other participants.”