BRENDAN O’NEILL has looked at the various anti-Israel petitions and has some interesting insight into what’s driving the anti-Israel movement today:

In the past, people tended to define themselves as anti-Israel as part of a broader anti-imperialism – in opposition to US and Western intervention abroad, whatever form intervention happened to take.

What could Western academics, anti-capitalists and Islamicists possibly have in common, to make them all so vocal about Israel? Could it possibly be a loathing – or a self-loathing on the part of some academics – for Western values? Could it be, not so much an anti-imperialist stance against foreign intervention, but a reaction against aggression that is just too unapologetic and unabashed in an era where intervention abroad has to be dressed in the language of humanitarianism and human rights?

Whatever it is, there is something about today’s ‘anti-Israel’ stance that makes even me – who always sympathised with the Palestinian cause in the past – feel distinctly uncomfortable.

Yes, and I think that this is what makes so many of us (particularly Americans)who aren’t Jewish or evangelical Christians feel more than “uncomfortable.” This is really a movement inspired by rejection of the Enlightenment, of reason, and of modernity. Which is why I view it with such deep contempt.

UPDATE: David Carr refers to it as the “great convergence of the world’s idiots,” and has some firsthand observations.