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Is criticism of Israel de facto anti-semitism?

So asks Alexander Cockburn in his latest column (by way of Dr. Mabuse):

There are plenty of sound arguments that from the Palestinian point of view Israel is indeed a terrorist state, and anyway, even if it wasn’t, the description would not per se be evidence of anti-Semitism.[…] The rhetorical trick is to conflate “Israel” or “the State of Israel” with “Jews,” and argue that they are synonymous. Ergo, to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic.
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Blogosphere mapped

A great java applet discovered tonight (via Mike Whybark) that maps out the “blogosphere” and connects the links so to speak between all the blogs out there (well, not all of the blogs, but a lot of them). The applet allows you to enter in various blogs and get a general sense of how many other blogs point to that one, and vice-versa, that is how many outgoing links a particular blog might have.

Off the top of my head I entered in andrewsullivan.com, and true to a recent posting at Tres Producers, there were a lot of links pointing towards Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, but no lines indicating any links out from said blog.

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Sullivan and Co. have more company

Glad to read that Eric Alterman, a left-leaning pundit I remember from long-ago McNeil-Lehrer NewsHours and other places — in fact I think it was Alterman who introduced me to the term pundit around the time his first “punditocracy” book came out — now has a blog on MSNBC.com called “Altercation”. Just a couple of days old at this moment but promises to be an interesting read. Not surpringly, yesterday’s first entry deals with blogging itself. I note that Alterman has an editor (or team of editors) for his blog, and is a bit embarrassed by that, and somewhat defensive about it too. Alterman is also apparrently a major Springsteen freak (he published a book on him last year). In his obligatory “links” section, which Alterman admits is still being worked on, the usual suspects (Cursor, Romenesko, Drudge, etc.) appear, and smack-dab in the middle of those is “Springsteen Archive“.

Naturally, while some are pleased at Alterman’s entry into blog land, others are predictably thumbing their noses.