Since my colleagues and I at the American Task Force on Palestine have been consistently maligned as "collaborators" by fringe elements of the Arab-American community because we seek to end the Israeli occupation and promote the establishment of a Palestinian state to live alongside Israel, I was extremely interested to see that precisely the same word is used by extremist right-wing supporters of Israel to describe Jewish Americans who also favor peace. David Horowitz’s appalling blog frontpagemag.com today features what appears to be the second in a series of such outrageous denunciations, called "Collaborators in the War Against the Jews" and targeting Tikkun magazine publisher, Rabbi Michael Lerner. Lerner’s unforgivable sin is to be critical of the occupation and some Israeli policies, which for the fanatics at Horowitz’s shop amounts to treason. The first article in what Horowitz’s website shamelessly calls its "collaborators series" targeted Baylor University professor Marc Ellis.

Horowitz’s rationalization for this campaign of slander and intimidation is worth considering:
"Some of the individuals waging an all out war on American college campuses against Israrel and the Jews are themselves Jewish. Some have called them ‘non-Jewish’ or ‘self-hating’ Jews. What is undeniable is that in the role they have chosen, these individuals are collaborating, often openly and without apology, with groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah and states such as Ahmadinejad’s Iran that call for a new genocide. Over the next few weeks, Frontpage will profile some of these Jewish collaborators in the war against Israel and the Jews and show how they give and and comfort to the Islamist enemy."

Simple word substitutions immediately demonstrate how uncannily similar this overwrought rhetoric is to some of the more strident elements of Arab-American discourse. In both communities, there are those so extreme that they are prepared to excommunicate those who disagree with them, who deviate from an established and hegemonic ethnic narrative, and who insist on the right to think critically and independently and to try to understand and sympathize with the perspectives of the other side. Use of terms like "collaborator," "traitor," and similar implicitly violent rhetoric is not only a mark of desperation, it’s also a telltale sign of extremism and fanaticism. Sadly, there’s plenty of that to go around on both sides of this divide.