Alix Christie

Then the panicked e-mails start flooding in. Today, less than two weeks before the tightest presidential race in memory, untold thousands of overseas voters still have not received their ballots — and clearly won’t be able to get them back in time. Late primaries and legal challenges to Ralph Nader’s appearance on the ballot delayed mailings from half the battleground states. In swing states, including Florida, Ohio and New Mexico, different versions of the ballot have gone out, sowing wild confusion. In Pennsylvania alone, at least three versions were mailed overseas, in successive, chaotic waves — with Nader and without him, plus a blank one-size-fits-all ballot with no names at all.

Activists now fear that huge numbers of Americans overseas — both military and civilian — may be as disenfranchised as they were in 2000, when anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of overseas ballots, depending on the county, just plain never showed up. But, far from helping civilians, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, has dragged its feet. A small liaison office based in the Pentagon, the FVAP provides voting materials to the departments of Defense and State for soldiers and civilians abroad and preaches overseas election law to thousands of local election officials back home.

The Government Accountability Office excoriated the agency for losing thousands of overseas votes in 2000, but the FVAP insists it has corrected its problems this year. Frustrated civilian advocates, however, say the FVAP remains biased and ineffective. Despite reforms, they attest, it still has not shaken its Pentagon roots: It spends the bulk of its energy getting out a heavily Republican vote among a half-million service people — but has failed the far greater numbers of civilians (an estimated 4 million, by most counts) who tend to vote a different way.

The tsunami of overseas civilian voters this year has only made the inequity more glaring. The agency was overwhelmed by a flood that has clogged its fax lines, telephones and e-mail. It has blocked access to its Web site to civilian voters abroad, given military voters access to electronic ballot-request systems that civilians cannot use, and subcontracted sensitive election work to a company with strong Republican ties. For months, it failed to heed requests from the State Department to post an emergency substitute ballot on its Web site that will mainly help civilians living far from consulates and military bases. Finally, on Oct. 21, with only 12 days till the election, it will post a downloadable version of the federal write-in absentee ballot, known as FWAB: a last-ditch device intended for the precise situation in which thousands of overseas voters now find themselves.

Those who’ve busted their guts to get out the overseas civilian vote on both sides are relieved but still angry. “Considering 2000 and the fact everybody knew this was going to be a close race, they should have seen it coming,” says Joan Hills, co-chair of Republicans Abroad. “The obstacles that have been thrown up are incredible,” says Jim Brenner, executive director of AOK (Americans Overseas for Kerry), an arm of the Democratic National Committee. Samuel F. Wright, director of the Military Voting Rights Project of the National Defense Committee, and a Navy Reserve officer who has spent 25 years observing the FVAP, says “Frankly, I’m not impressed with them. They’re sort of going through the motions. I’ve been pinging on DoD for four years that this is the perfect situation for the emergency ballot.”

Voters who have requested but not received their ballot by now can dispatch the FWAB in its place. (If the real ballot subsequently arrives, election officials are required to discard the FWAB and count the regular ballot.) A million hard copies of the FWAB have been sent to military bases in Germany and Asia and to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — two for every member of the military, Wright says — who surely deserve them. But on the civilian side, the record is spottier. The State Department, charged with helping civilians overseas, ordered its consulates and embassies to stockpile the form. But Democrats Abroad reports that many have been caught short-handed and that direct voter requests to the FVAP have gone unfulfilled. In one pathetic twist, employees of DaimlerChrysler in Stuttgart had to beg forms from the military at the gate of the base last week, a voting officer said.

Because so much hangs on key states, and on the possibly widespread use of an untested, little-known ballot, the potential for disaster is enormous. “If this election is close, 2000 is going to look like a cakewalk,” says Margo Miller, a London-based lawyer for AOK. “It’s going to be so messy in so many places, the fact that the FWAB hasn’t been easier to get is inexcusable.”

The Pentagon responds that the two major parties began asking for the online FWAB only in late September and that it has moved “mountains of bureaucracy” to get the form online. Starting now, the tiny bureau of 14 civil servants in suburban Virginia will get the word out to election officials in 3,142 American counties that the downloaded version of the write-in ballot is good to go.

But the program’s record does not inspire much confidence. Indeed, voters contacting officials to ask about the ballot have been shocked at the ignorance they’ve encountered. In Nepal, one embassy worker said the ballot could be mailed from the United States, which it cannot; in Chester County, Pa., an election supervisor had no idea what it was. Says Wright of the Military Voting Rights Project: “Nobody has ever heard of it. The FVAP does show up at meetings and presentations, but I bet a lot of the 5,000 election officials don’t go to those meetings, judging from the very basic questions we get back.”

While waiting for the FVAP to act, both parties gyrated over the Internet. AOK put up its own version online with the disclaimer that no one knew if such ballots would be accepted; Democrats Abroad and the two main registration Web sites did not. Republicans Abroad then snitched the AOK form, without the disclaimer, and put it on its site, only to shamefacedly pull it off when told that, until the FVAP formally approved it, nobody could use the darn thing. AOK finally sent out 25,000 hard copies at its own expense to voters from swing states who’d signed up on the Overseas Vote 2004 Web site.

The overarching problem is the scant resources allotted civilian voters, who outnumber the military overseas by at least 8 to 1. While all applaud the goal of making sure men and women fighting for our country can exercise their right to vote, civilians point out that they are Americans, too. And the FVAP has a history of favoring the military, not least because the Department of Defense has a captive, easily identified audience and far more money and muscle than the State Department. Citizens abroad are far harder to find than soldiers: Embassies have direct contact only with a small minority of those who have registered to be alerted and evacuated in case of a disaster — though one might call mass disenfranchisement a disaster of another degree.

Highly publicized missteps this year have hardly restored faith in the FVAP. Civilian voters still have trouble getting through to the agency and are barred from the e-mail ballot-request and delivery Web site that is available to soldiers from ten states. More worryingly, a pilot e-mail voting system signed on to by Missouri, Utah and North Dakota, in which soldiers can e-mail ballots to a contractor that then faxes those ballots to local jurisdictions, is being operated by Omega Technologies, headed by a former Republican Party donor, according to the New York Times.

The Times also reports that earlier this week two Democratic members of Congress, Henry Waxman of California and Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the FVAP. Among their concerns is that the agency’s online ballot-retrieval system is not open to most civilians abroad.

Miller, the AOK lawyer, says the FVAP, which moved only two years ago from the Pentagon department that buys soap and toilet paper into the personnel department, “is basically focused on the military and doesn’t care.” A Department of Defense insider involved in getting out the vote overseas puts it more harshly: “The senior military leadership will only admit they have a responsibility to help civilians get involved in elections if you force it down their throat. They’re only interested in the soldiers.”

The Pentagon denies these charges. As each misstep has occurred, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Charles Abell has defended the FVAP, saying it is making a heroic effort to reach all citizens overseas through voting workshops and toll-free telephone numbers. Indeed, all observers agree that the FVAP has gone to extraordinary lengths this year to get out the military vote. Still, Democrats suspect that in the case of the online ballot, it’s no accident that the agency did not move faster: The measure mainly benefits civilians, many more of whom will support John Kerry than their counterparts in the military. Dzieduszycka-Suinat frets darkly that “higher up, someone is saying, ‘Make sure there are problems.’” From the perspective of Wright, from the Military Voting Rights Project, political pressure is a given. “When Clinton was in charge, they tried to suppress the military vote for that very reason,” he says. “I would not disagree,” he says, that politics this year, too, plays a role.

Faced with a voting program that at best is ineffective, and at worst partisan, ordinary citizens have been forced to pick up the slack. Wright’s organization, for instance, blitzed the country’s election offices with faxed alerts telling them how to process the write-in ballot. And it is thanks mainly to the efforts of two smart groups of expatriates that tens of thousands of new voters made it through the registration process at all. The FVAP distributed millions of registration postcards, but without help, the complex rules daunted many civilians. The State Department, stretched thin by new visa regulations imposed after 9/11, has nowhere near the resources in its consulates to help citizens that the Department of Defense has deployed for its soldiers abroad, a high-ranking official said. Though it has done its best to walk civilians through the 369-page “Black Book” of state-by-state election rules, “we literally don’t have the staff to be able to do this,” the official said. The upshot: There is a military voting assistance officer for every 30 to 50 soldiers, but the onus is on the civilian to fill out the form alone.

Democrats Abroad thus began the campaign season camped at card tables on foreign street corners and screenings of English-language movies, walking voters one by one through the Byzantine process. In late May, Dzieduszycka-Suinat and Mitch Wolfson, head of AOK Germany, looked at each other and said, in the words of Wolfson: “There has to be a better way.” In July, they took the federal registration form, simplified it, and lobbed it into cyberspace. Beyond the 140,000 mostly Democrats who registered online, another 170,000 physically registered through Democrats Abroad, according to John McQueen, the group’s international campaign chair. Thousands more signed up through another clever Web site, the Amsterdam-based Tell an American to Vote.

What infuriates AOK more than anything else, though, is the vast disparity in money and energy between the military and civilian efforts. Overseas civilians, who turn out at half the rate of the military, arguably need more help, they say. While FVAP spent its $5.5 million budget mainly to reach half a million soldiers — a ratio that works out to $11 per vote — the Democratic National Committee spent $50,000 on a Web site that worked out to less than 75 cents a vote.

Republicans eschewed pavement-pounding and bought dozens of ads in the military Stars & Stripes, International Herald Tribune and English-language papers in key countries like Mexico, Canada and Israel, which together host some 1.5 million eligible American voters, says Hills of Republicans Abroad. Registrations are up fourfold over 2000. The Bush campaign is focused on large communities of American retirees overseas and counting on its traditional bases among businesspeople abroad and the military, where, Hills says, “we’re very confident we’re going to get a strong majority.”

Which way these hordes of new voters go is, in fact, the big overseas question — assuming they get to vote. Democrats and Republicans alike see gold in both the civilian and military camps. What’s undisputed is that the Bush administration has galvanized overseas voters as never before. “The entire world is against Bush, and we reflect that view that America has lost all its credibility abroad,” says McQueen of Democrats Abroad. “I was tired of cringing in the supermarket whenever I spoke English to my kids, knowing how much we as Americans were hated,” says Dzieduszycka-Suinat. Hills, for her part, reports that many Republicans, angered at what they see as unjust attacks, are coming out in equal droves to support the president. On both sides, stories abound of older Americans, and dual citizens who’ve kept their American passports, emerging like Rip Van Winkle to vote for the first time in 30 or 40 years.

In reality, the political affiliation of these voters is unknown. Both sides claim a 60 percent edge: Democrats, based on a Zogby study, say that Americans with passports tend to vote liberal. Republicans, meanwhile, cite international business and the conservatism of Pentagon civilian employees and soldiers. Yet both estimates are what military people call SWAG — scientific wild-ass guesses — about a woolly and ever-growing overseas population of civil servants, diplomats, employees of global businesses, students, journalists, artists, academics and, yes, soldiers on the battlefield.

Since January, when the Pentagon decreed “100 percent contact,” every officer and enlisted man or woman has had a registration application pressed into his or her hands. Soldiers have been exhorted to vote at daily formation and while watching ballgames on Armed Forces TV, and they are reminded that “It’s Your Future — Vote for It” on the bottom on their paychecks. After the “horror story” of 2000, the military is “extremely vigilant” this time around, says Capt. Christina Maxwell-Borges, a voting assistance officer at the U.S. Army Installation Management Agency in Stuttgart.

At U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Heidelberg, voting activists and Americans who’ve worked for the Army for decades say ordinary soldiers are more motivated than they’ve ever seen. Even with the massive deployment of voting officers, a nonpartisan citizens group like the NAACP, which conducted registration drives on base, was swamped. “Often we couldn’t keep up with the demand,” says Billee Manigault, an NAACP volunteer. “There’s a definite interest in participating,” echoes Charles Keene of Democrats Abroad and the NAACP. “From almost everyone you heard, it was, ‘You better believe I’m going to vote.’”

Despite several recent polls showing staunch support for President Bush among high-ranking officers, soldiers on base and Pentagon civilians active in Democratic politics say the mood in the military is far more mixed. The controversial mission in Iraq has brought a sea change in political attitudes on base, these observers report. McQueen, a retired military civil servant, says, “You’re not seeing the kind of pressure to vote Republican you always had in the past.”

The strong pro-Republican culture that emerged in the military in the wake of Vietnam has begun to splinter, many observers say. A report in the Washington Monthly last year described rank-and-file soldiers, who are disproportionately nonwhite, working-class and female, as increasingly diverging from an ideologically conservative officer corps. “For a long time here, Democrats were in the closet,” concurs Trenton Browne, a military security contractor who works on bases from Heidelberg to Kaiserslautern. “Now in the lower ranks you hear people speaking openly about their dissent.”

Gauging the overseas vote thus becomes a numbers game. Military turnout at home and abroad is high. More than 60 percent of soldiers overseas voted in 2000, double the record of expatriates, who turned out at a rate of 37 percent, according to the FVAP (though in both groups, the number of uncounted votes dropped those figures by at least 15 percent). Many expect even higher overseas military turnout this year. How many of those 500,000 active duty servicepeople will vote for Kerry, or Bush, is the question.

A survey of 4,000 servicepeople released last week by the Military Times, revealed strong loyalty to the president: 72 percent of those on active duty would vote for him, and 17 percent would vote for Kerry. In the view of military analyst Peter Feaver of Duke University, the early traction Kerry had with the troops has been lost by his recent hammering at the war as a “colossal mistake.” Being a decorated Vietnam veteran doesn’t improve Kerry’s stock with the “career military” people polled by the Military Times, either; in fact, two-thirds hold the senator’s long-ago antiwar activism against him.

The survey, however, concentrated on higher-ranking servicepeople, and is not representative of the rank and file. Along Heidelberg’s main street, off-duty soldiers, some fresh from combat in Iraq, divided evenly between rejecting Kerry because “he doesn’t support the troops” and supporting him “because a lot of us feel jerked around.” “People think the military is totally Republican, and that’s definitely not true,” says one strolling soldier, a burly 30-year-old from Florida. “There’s a lot of different views within the ranks.” Capt. Maxwell-Borges, the Stuttgart voting officer, agrees. “Surprisingly, it’s been really mixed,” she says. “A lot of people support Kerry because he’s a veteran and says he’s going to increase military spending, and others are the more traditional pro-Republicans. But I’ve been on bases in the past three elections and I have to say that this time [political views] seem a lot more varied.”

No one expects the soldier vote to swing to Kerry, but a softening of Bush’s overseas military support could be significant. “Even 100 percent military turnout overseas only equals 160,000 additional votes,” points out Brett Rierson, co-founder of the Democratic Hong Kong Web site. With activists guesstimating that the overseas civilian haul could be as high as 2 million, a strong showing for Kerry among enlisted troops could neutralize the Republican advantage.

In any event, it’s unlikely anyone will know until well after Nov. 2. Several states, in a scramble to accommodate overseas voters’ late ballots, have extended their deadlines. As it now stands, Florida, Washington, Iowa, Colorado and Illinois allow ballots to be received late, in some cases up to 10 days after Election Day. The Justice Department, at the prompting of the FVAP, has sued Pennsylvania to extend its deadline by two weeks as well.

Nor will Americans find out how effectively the overseas vote has been handled until “after the horses have left the barn,” says Joe Smallhoover, legal counsel for Democrats Abroad. Voting reform passed by Congress in 2002 requires states to track overseas ballots, at long last. But more to the point, Smallhoover says, “we have to do more than reform the FVAP; we have to reform the whole system.” Wright, the military voting expert, agrees. He advocates placing the whole overseas voting operation in the hands of the new Election Assistance Commission, a far better-funded agency created by the 2002 Help America Vote act that is supposed to help states improve their equipment and procedures.

All this, however, lies in the future. In the meantime, Democrats Abroad has formed a “rapid response” team to unsnarl problems voters abroad have encountered with their county election officials. Thousands of lawyers on both sides are renting office space in battleground states, ready to pounce on illegalities in stateside balloting and absentee votes. For now, overseas voters groping their empty mailboxes can only download the write-in ballot, send it in — in the faith that local election officials will accept it — and pray.

By the following spring, when America invaded Iraq, the European left had mobilized the largest antiwar protests in memory. In Paris, Berlin, London and elsewhere, millions marched in a massive rejection of the Bush administration’s policy. There were unionists and socialists, communists and peaceniks and greens — and in their ranks, like little unexploded mines, neo-Nazis in Palestinian kaffiyehs and radical Muslims who chanted “Death to Jews” and decked their kids out as suicide bombers. Some marches ended in fisticuffs: In Strasbourg, France, extremists trying to attack a synagogue were forcibly restrained. But at others, demonstrators reacted to the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric belatedly, if at all.

It is spring once again, and the European left is being called to account. When ministers from the 55 members of the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe met in Berlin this week to craft a response to an ugly outbreak of anti-Semitic violence, they did not just ask for a better monitoring of, and harsher sanctions against, expressions of neo-Nazi and radical Islamic hate. They also demanded that the loose and ungainly coalition of anti-globalization, pro-Palestinian and antiwar activists, chief among them the international group ATTAC, look long and hard in the mirror.

Since last fall, the critiques have multiplied — and not just from the right. Some of the loudest denunciations have come from within the left’s own ranks, primarily mainstream greens and trade unionists. The accusation is clear and harsh: A rising tide of anti-Jewish bigotry is sweeping Europe, for which the extreme left — with its drumbeat of vilification of the Jewish state — is at least partly to blame. ATTAC particularly, and its affiliated groups, which denounce Israeli policy in Palestine and reject the American occupation of Iraq, are accused of inciting a “new” anti-Semitism that updates and exploits classic anti-Semitic clichés. In one noteworthy outpouring of vitriol from the Hoover Institute, an author went so far as to depict violent Muslim youth torching French synagogues as the “‘shock troops’ for their more privileged comrades au centre ville.”

Werner Bergmann of Berlin’s Technical University, a leading researcher on anti-Semitism, summarized the issue more soberly in a widely circulated but unpublished report for the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. He discussed “anti-Semitic tendencies in certain left-wing groups, particularly in anti-globalization milieus, which cross the line between legitimate critique of Israeli politics to instrumentalization of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the fight against an ‘imperialistic, capitalistic occupier.’”

At a conference this January that examined the question whether anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitism, Germany’s Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, publicly took his erstwhile comrades to task. “I can smell it,” said Fischer, a one-time pro-Palestinian radical turned establishment politician. “It’s a very particular way of referring to America, and to Israel.”

The issue has driven a deep wedge between those on the European — and American — lefts who see anti-Zionism as veiled anti-Semitism and those who most emphatically do not. In Germany, the issue has divided not just the mainstream and far left but the far left itself. Here, it is a small but vocal, ardently pro-Israel splinter group known as the “anti-Germans” that leads the charge against the pro-Palestinians in ATTAC.

ATTACs leaders acknowledge that the militant base has at times crossed the line of acceptable discourse. But they vehemently deny inciting racial violence and defend their right to sharply criticize an Israeli government seen increasingly in Europe as trampling democratic principles in putting down the Palestinian resistance. In Germany, especially, ATTAC has mounted a spirited defense against these critics, whom they see as using the potent cudgel of the Holocaust in an effort to silence their movement.

Peter Wahl, a veteran lefty on the ATTAC board in Germany, has led a thorough reexamination of the organization’s principles and activities in response to the accusations. In an interview at the east Berlin offices of WEED (World Economy, Ecology and Development), a nongovernmental organization he founded in the early 1990s that formed the early backbone of ATTAC Deutschland, he is unequivocal that “anti-Semitism has no place in ATTAC.” Says Wahl, a 50-something former member of the Communist and Green parties whose father was interned in a concentration camp: “If criticism of Israeli foreign policy is anti-Semitic, we have 200 million anti-Semites in Europe” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to a controversial poll in which 59 percent of Europeans identified Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.

Some American Jewish leaders may indeed see things this way. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League released a new poll in Berlin on Monday, ahead of the OSCE conference, which showed that a third of Europeans harbor “some traditional anti-Jewish views.” What’s more, said Abraham Foxman, the ADL national director, who is a leading proponent of the idea of anti-Zionism as a “new anti-Semitism,” 44 percent think European Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they reside. Americans, by contrast, are thought to be far less susceptible to the anti-Semitic “virus.” Yet the differences are not so marked: ADL’s own surveys consistently show one in three Americans doubts the loyalty of Jews, while in a poll conducted in 2002, more Americans than Europeans agreed that “Jews are more willing to use shady practices to get what they want.”

The finger-pointing gets even more dicey when it comes to distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from classic anti-Semitism. Foxman described the polls “bad news” as the fact that European attitudes toward Israel “have gotten progressively worse,” citing poll results which showed that Europeans believe, by a two-to-one margin, that Israel is primarily at fault in the Middle East conflict. Yet the April 2004 figures also show a marked decline in anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe, compared with the traumatic spring of 2002. When asked whether this did not in fact suggest a delinkage of anti-Israeli opinion and anti-Semitism, Foxmans answer was far from convincing. “When you treat Israel as being undemocratic, contrary to civility — and it is the only Jewish state in the world — it does impact the level of anti-Semitism,” he asserted. “I think there is a clear link.”

What is undisputed is that, in a dramatic fashion, the Middle East conflict has taken bitter root in European soil. Nowhere are feelings running higher than in France and Germany, home to the continent’s largest concentrations of Muslims (4.5 and 3.2 million, respectively) and Jews (600,000 and 100,000). If it is hard for Americans to appreciate how traumatic the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become for Judeo-Christian Europe and the poorly integrated Muslim immigrants in its midst, consider that in both the French and German languages it is referred to not as the “Middle” but the “Near” East. For all that, and the continuing anti-Jewish violence in a number of European states, Europeans still view the conflict with a certain balance.

Although the European media are more willing than the U.S. media to criticize Israel (a phenomenon described as “pro-Palestinian bias” by the American Jewish Committee, which commissioned a scientific analysis of German reporting on the Mideast in 2002), nearly half of Europeans have not chosen sides. The ADL poll also shows that while Europeans feel more sympathy for the Palestinians than for the Israelis, even greater numbers feel sympathy for neither. The sharp spike in anti-Semitic acts and speech in 2002 and 2003 has by now been fairly conclusively laid to two causes: First, a minority of angry, poorly integrated Muslim immigrants, especially in France, are lashing out at the nearest Jewish targets they can find; and second, classic extremist right-wingers, are capitalizing on a gradual loosening of post-Holocaust taboos on anti-Jewish hate speech, nearly 60 years after World War II.

This is not to minimize the severity of the outbreak: Even today, the Conseil Répresentatif des Institutions Juives de France, the Jewish umbrella organization, tracks attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools and individuals daily on its Web site, as the NAACP once hung black flags outside its office each time an African-American was lynched. There has been “a real explosion of anti-Semitic hate” in France, which continues to be strong to this day, French parliamentarian Pierre Lellouche told OSCE ministers. Simone Weil, a Bergen-Belsen survivor and revered former French minister, said, “It is becoming more and more difficult to be Jewish in France, to have a Jewish name, or even wear a pendant with a Jewish symbol.”

Sharp increases in anti-Semitic acts have also been recorded in Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain in the past two years, according to the EU Monitoring Centre’s revised report published in late March. Political cartoons in both Europe and the United States have frequently compared Israeli occupation to Nazi genocide, using what researchers call “classic” anti-Semitic imagery similar to that used by the Third Reich. In Germany, where neo-Nazis have a history of criminal acts against Jewish sites, resurgent anti-Semitism has appeared mainly as a tide of threatening letters, not attacks on property (although the number of extremely violent personal attacks has also risen). This relative calm is due to many factors, including a secular tradition among Turks — Germany’s largest immigrant group — anti-fascist youth leagues, and a political “immune system” that continues to reject even the slightest public anti-Semitic utterance. Even so, an upsurge in German anti-Semitic attitudes is “detectable,” for the first time in 50 years, says Bergmann, the anti-Semitism researcher. Still, he insists, the problem is, for the moment “not significant.”

It is striking that many Europeans are quick to caution against easy parallels between Nazi Germany and what is happening today. Many, including Weil, say that to do so is to grievously insult the memory of Jews who perished in the Holocaust. European leaders, anxious not to stigmatize the entire Muslim community, have urged the American Jewish community not to panic, but this cautious approach has led the ADL and American Jewish Committee, among others, to accuse Europe of “denial” or “official indifference.” As recently as January, a host of seasoned researchers in the field convened by the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, a German Green Party think tank, took the view that such anti-Semitic outbreaks are cyclical and thus, while deplorable, no cause for undue alarm. Most researchers concur that anti-Semitism is a constant phenomenon over time, manifesting in 15 to 20 percent of most populations.

What is new about the current outbreak is Israel. It is clear, says Brian Klug, a senior fellow at Oxford and a founding member of Britain’s Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, that “the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish attacks in France were animated by political outrage, not bigotry.” What is also new is that in the violent and deadlocked situation in the Middle East, and in their fury against Israeli government policy in the occupied territories, parts of the European left and the wider pro-Palestinian movement — from moderates to radical Islamists to the German neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), which has pledged fealty to Palestine — have momentarily found common cause.

But is it therefore fair to say that the left’s strident criticism of Israel necessarily leads to anti-Jewish violence? Or even, as France’s Jewish leader Roger Cukierman maintains, that the anti-globalization movement — in particular its revolutionary, Trotskyist elements — has entered an unholy alliance with radical Islam and ultra-nationalism, espousing anti-Jewish hate in a new coalition of the “red, green and brown”?

A close look at ATTAC largely refutes such guilt by association. It is a large, loose, extremely heterogeneous group, numbering at last count more than 100 constituent organizations. It’s a kind of meta-NGO, uniting under one lumpy roof environmentalists, antiwar activists, trade unionists, human rights workers, Trotskyists, communists and those in social justice movements. There is no prevailing ideology or creed; its members are also active in big NGOs like Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Physicians for Social Responsibility; member organizations include everything from the youth wings of Socialist and Green parties to church groups, the revolutionary Socialists, and Free Palestine movements. The group was founded in 1998 as a French protest movement against currency speculation, with the aim of instituting a tax on international capital flows (hence the acronym, from Action pour une Taxe Tobin d’Aide aux Citoyens). It found its organizational élan with the first World Trade Organization protests and became established as a major actor on the anti-globalization scene. ATTAC now has branches in 38 countries, unified behind a sweeping rejection of U.S.-led global capitalism.

There is a loud anti-imperialist component in ATTAC, too, made up of young Trotskyists and die-hard revolutionaries who cut their teeth on resistance to NATO militarization in the 1970s (think Pershing missiles in Germany and the Larzac antinuclear protests in France). Today’s resurgent anti-Zionism dovetails with a long tradition of Third World-ism in France (where ATTAC members are known as “altermondialists”) and with communist German backing, both east and west, for groups resisting U.S. hegemony from Cuba to Nicaragua to Guatemala. Over the past two years, the violence in the Middle East and Iraq has only crystallized the theme of weak against strong, reactivating old resentments against America and a deeply held attachment to the Palestinian cause. The more radical have evolved a new theoretical justification for anti-Zionism that sees the Jewish state as an inherently racist construct, a postcolonial historical aberration. The result, says Aurélie Filippetti, a Green municipal council member in Paris who has been one of the strongest internal critics of her party’s increasingly anti-Zionist stance: “Suddenly, for the European left, the Palestinian cause became the new Vietnam.”

For all the demonization, ATTAC members look remarkably like lefties anywhere else. Last month’s Berlin march to mark the anniversary of the Iraq invasion featured aging peaceniks, babies in strollers, African communists, solemn Palestinian elders, even a banner reading “Free Mumia.” Apart from a bloody Statue of Liberty brandished by ATTAC Berlin, and scattered chants of “George Bush, terrorist,” the scene could have been in Berkeley or New York. The same fissures, in fact, have troubled and in some cases split American progressives, with groups like the far-left ANSWER tarring peace marches with equally virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.

The vast mass of ATTAC members abhor racist speech of any kind, and swift action has been taken to curb excesses within the ranks. Since the charges became public, Wahl says, the group has scrutinized its codes and practices, and clamped down on hate speech or association with those who espouse it. ATTAC does not permit questioning of the right of the state of Israel to exist, supports a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict, and “absolutely rejects” suicide bombings. It is evident the group has engaged in a serious process of self-examination and scrupulously confronted those instances in which criticism of Israel has slipped across the line. Its offending poster of Uncle Sam is dead, the proposed Israeli boycott rejected to avoid any suggestion that it reprised Hitler’s “Kauf nicht beim Juden” (Do not buy from Jews) slogan. Instances in 2002 at which neo-Nazis infiltrated marches have been analyzed to avoid repeats.

Wahl says the problem is that within ATTAC, the Middle East issue has been taken up by a militant Trotskyite faction whose radically pro-Palestinian views “tend to take a fast-and-loose approach” with terms such as “fascist,” “Nazi” and the like. “They talk about massacres in refugee camps which resemble the [Nazi liquidation of the] Warsaw ghetto,” Wahl says. “It’s wrong, it’s false, I don’t like it — but its not anti-Semitism.” Similarly, Wahl argues that ATTAC’s condemnation of speculative, stateless capital is not a subliminal attack on world Jewry, even though the Nazis instrumentalized those same themes to distinguish between the “good capital” of the worker and the “evil capital” of the supposedly parasitic Jew.

In a position paper developed to rebut the attacks, Wahl notes that there is no more potent weapon than the charge of anti-Semitism, especially in Germany. Being labeled anti-Semitic is offensive to many ATTAC members, from Wahl to Barbara Fuchs, an east German art historian who worked with survivors of the Ravensbruck camp to preserve their memories. The attempts by nationalists and racists to hijack a movement that resists global economic restructuring do not make the movement itself anti-Semitic, Wahl argues. Any form of communication can be misappropriated, he says, quoting the philosopher Theodor Adorno. On the other hand, “it cannot be that as a group we are barred from acting because of these reproaches,” Fuchs said. “We must always keep in mind that this fear is there, for Jews, and we respect it, but it can’t be an excuse for doing nothing, for not engaging in social justice for the Palestinians as we would for anyone else.”

Thus it is ultimately up to the board — largely older, more seasoned activists — to attempt to ensure that criticism of Israel does not overstep the bounds. It is not easy to identify that line, nor to maintain oversight over a welter of speech floating over the Web and the streets from hundreds of disparate groups. In recent weeks, ATTAC’s German “War and Globalization” e-mail list has begun censoring postings that question Israel’s right to exist, prompting angry exchanges over how much critique is permissible, and how willing the base is to be dictated to from above.

“I will be the one to decide what is Zionism and what is anti-Semitism,” one militant wrote. Responded another: “I have to say that this [individual's previous] posting is a tiresome hedge that can be read as easily as endorsing Hamas’ call to ‘Drive the Jews into the sea’ as demanding withdrawal from the occupied territories.” At a meeting of the Berlin chapter of the War and Globalization committee in early April, a report on the Palestinian situation and the Israeli “defensive” wall by a member of Linksruck (“Shift to the Left,” the German branch of the Trotskyist, revolutionary left) clearly revealed deep disgust at Israeli extrajudicial killings along with a tendency to toss about Nazi allusions while blaming Israel for the mess. Most voices urged common action with Israeli and Palestinian peace groups, the official ATTAC position, but others were less temperate. “It is not anti-Semitic to note the character of the Israeli state as a racist colonial state, like South Africa under Piet Botha,” one Linksruck member said. “Our problem is to assert that, in this form, this state can no longer stand — so long as it has this racist, colonial character, it must be destroyed.”

Such views are what alarm Foreign Minister Fischer and other prominent Greens and Socialists. The Holocaust left Germany with a special responsibility for and to Israel, and this can never be forgotten, Fischer has repeatedly said. Ralf Fücks, a former Green parliamentarian who now runs the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, knows whereof he speaks. Like Fischer, he said, “I was a young left radical militant and had a blind solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. We also saw the Palestinians as the victims of the original victims [the Jews].” What worries Fücks, he said, is “not just Israel being accused of oppressive acts, but the de-legitimization of Israel as a Jewish state.”

A furor erupted at the European Social Forum in Paris last fall when ATTAC France allowed Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic theologian, to participate after Ramadan had denounced a string of French intellectuals (not all of whom were Jewish) of purportedly abandoning “universalist ideals” in supporting the first Gulf War, allegedly out of solidarity for Israel. Ramadan was in turn denounced for putting this “Jewish blacklist” on the Internet. Filippetti, the Green city council member, was vilified by some in her own party when she proposed wearing both the Israeli and the Palestinian flags at a Paris demonstration, saying she was shocked by the rabid anti-Israeli slant of previous marches.

The heart of the problem lies in identifying all Jews with the policies of the current Israeli government, a phenomenon some leftists claim Israel and its supporters foster by denouncing harsh criticism as anti-Semitic. Says Klug, “Many Jewish community leaders, religious and secular, publicly reinforce this identification with the state.” Yet European Jewry finds itself in a delicate position. As Salomon Korn, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, noted in a recent interview in the weekly Der Spiegel, to many German Jews, Israel is still the last refuge, the one safe place they could flee to if they had to again. It is therefore hardly surprising, says Julius Schoeps, a noted German Jewish historian who sits on the board of the Berlin Jewish Community, that criticism of Israel by European Jews is muted. It should also be noted, however, that the “new anti-Semitism” is predominantly a theory espoused by American, not European, Jewish leaders.

“The mantra of the new anti-Semitism is a way for us to insulate ourselves from the pain caused by that hostility to Israel which has increased so dramatically in the media and worldwide,” observed prominent British Jewish leader Antony Lerman at the January forum in Berlin. “The motive of ‘Better safe than sorry’ is understandable, but does it help? I think not — it simply alienates our allies and fails to confront a very serious issue.”

Johannes Rau, Germany’s outgoing president, opened the OSCE conference by calling upon all Europeans to “exercise special care” in criticizing Israel, which since its founding has lived “in a state of existential siege.” But at the same time, he said, “this does not give us the right to discredit any criticism of an Israeli government. I know many friends of Israel who are deeply concerned about the situation, many Israelis who are sharply critical of their government, and not just in the opposition.”

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called upon member nations to “send the clear message to extremists of the political right and the political left alike that all those who use hate as a rallying cry dishonor themselves and dishonor their cause in the process.” The conference’s closing “Berlin Declaration” tried to tread a middle path, condemning all forms of anti-Semitism and declaring “unambiguously that international developments or political issues, including those in Israel or elsewhere in the Middle East, never justify” it.

Certainly, the left must do more, and forcefully, to condemn anti-Jewish speech and violence within its ranks when it occurs. “We cannot just say, we have a new anti-Semitism and it’s Muslims and it excludes us — we have to accept that we too are involved,” says Marie-Luise Beck, the Green German minister for social integration. But she and many others point out that radical Islamic bigotry, combined with resilient ultra-nationalism, poses the greatest direct threat to Jews in Europe today. “Anti-Semitism is prevalent not just in the extreme right wing,” says German journalist Eberhard Seidel, who runs tolerance programs for immigrant youth in Berlin schools. “Among Muslim young people it is also a part of everyday life.”

Whether it lies in an Egyptian production of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” beamed by satellite into European living rooms, the suffering of ordinary Palestinians, incendiary prayers by radical Muslim clerics, the 20 percent of French voters who support xenophobic politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen, or the unlikely prospect of those two disaffected groups joining, “There is danger ahead,” says Schoeps.

Until very recently, these problems had not been named or addressed. But the rash of high-level conferences, and even the alarm bells pulled by American Jews, have made fighting anti-Semitism in Europe a priority and have been an enormous relief, said Weil, to French and Continental Jews. Still, in the end, the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire is the source of much hatred of Jews, and most Europeans believe it will not fade so long as that conflict goes unresolved.

A little research revealed that a dozen for-profit companies (Core Blood Registry is the largest) have persuaded at least 20,000 families to “bank” their baby’s cord blood in the past few years. This is hardly surprising given the potent emotional weapons these firms have at their disposal. While some have had the integrity to admit that the science involved is experimental, and that private cord banking is of dubious value to the vast majority of parents, all of them effectively exploit new parents, cashing in on our fear of the unknown, our quasi-mystical belief in the powers of science and our inexplicable belief that we can, if we do everything right, insulate our children from harm.

My first, albeit mistaken, impression was that these “stem cells” were fetal cells that might, in the year 2050, say, be used to generate a new kidney or lung out of a petri dish for our son. Such fetal stem cells do exist, and research in this area has provoked vigorous and ongoing ethical debate.

Cord blood, however, contains stem cells for the body’s blood and immune systems only. These cells are the building blocks for red and white blood cells and platelets and appear to have some promise in providing an alternative to bone marrow transplant.

What are the chances we would need this blood for our son or his older sister? According to the New England Journal of Medicine, virtually nil. The odds of a family with no history of blood disease needing such cells are one in 20,000 over 20 years. The only case in which it makes sense for a family to bank placental blood is when an older sibling already has a blood disease or there are strong genetic or environmental reasons to believe the family is at higher risk for one. In such high-risk groups, the match of the cord blood to a family member who may need the transplant is one in four and worth pursuing, doctors agree. (The few transplants conducted with cord blood to date all have involved families with histories of leukemia or other blood disease.)

Claims that our son’s cord blood could benefit him — presuming he eventually developed childhood leukemia — are simply specious. What would be the point of transplanting into your child the very same cells that gave rise to the disease in the first place?

But what if? What if our daughter contracted leukemia and we had not chosen to freeze her younger brother’s potentially lifesaving cord blood? Would we not hate ourselves? How far are we — how far are any reasonably prosperous and concerned parents today — willing to go to hedge against even the wildest eventuality?

How about as far as we would have other parents go? How about as far as using one of a handful of new public cord-blood banks, where donations are available to those who need them, not just to those who pay to keep them on ice.

Unfortunately, we live in an era when “the best for one’s child” is on its way to becoming the worst kind of alibi. Because we can afford it, we turn our backs on collective solutions to human needs — in education, in health — choosing instead private, for-profit solutions that guarantee a better outcome for our individual child. No one can blame a parent for such feelings, yet the trend is deeply troubling.

In the cord-blood debate, the battle lines between public and private are clear. Our obstetrician and pediatrician were obviously uncomfortable with the topic. Although one referred us to the hematology division of a local hospital, another admitted that there was discord among doctors over private cord-blood banking, which many view as an entrepreneurial (read: opportunistic) phenomenon.

The American Academy of Pediatricians is more direct. It calls private storage “unwise”; the resident ethicist at the New England Journal baldly calls private cord-blood banking one in an increasing number of “schemes to transform medical waste into profit.” Their unreserved advice: Donate your cord blood to one of the public cord-blood banks being established by the National Institutes of Health. There may not be one near you yet — there isn’t one near us. But one day there will be, giving everyone, including hard-to-match minority patients, not just yuppies with prenatal angst and disposable income, access to the blood cells they need to save a child’s life.