Johnson, also the co-majority leader of the House, continued speaking on for a minute, apparently not noticing that he had made the remark. When someone off-camera interrupted him and pointed it out, Johnson replied, "Did I?" He then jokingly added, to laughter from the room: "I apologize to the Jews. They're good small businessmen as well."

The Tulsa World reports that a spokesman for speaker of the House T.W. Shannon, also a Republican, said Johnson “is not the first person to make a comment they regret. The chamber accepted his apology and has moved on.”

Watch:

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The Nation has published in full Butler's prepared remarks for the event, in which she reasserts her well-made point about the harm done by equating political criticism of Israeli government policy and anti-Semitism. A number of highlights are worth pulling out.

Butler condemns attempts to censor the Brooklyn College event with typical clarity, parsing out the flawed, contradictory logic used by those who tried to shut the event down:

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The background to the current controversy is this: A student group at CUNY's Brooklyn College, Students for Justice in Palestine, is this week hosting two speakers who will discuss their views on the BDS movement, which calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel in protest of the government's oppressive policies toward the Palestinian people. The speakers are Palestinian BDS advocate Omar Barghouti and University of California Berkeley philosopher and BDS supporter Judith Butler. The event is being co-sponsored by numerous student and community groups, as well as Brooklyn College's political science department.

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The blog Totem and Taboo aggregates photos taken at the Berlin memorial to the Holocaust, with its iconic, haunting gray slabs, and posted to Grindr -- a smartphone application used by gay men, that alerts users to the prowling presence of other men in their vicinity.  Totem and Taboo captures a peculiar trend of saucy men using the slabs as backdrops to lean against, climb upon and provide ironic context for their  come hither looks and shirtless poses.

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Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., which owns the Sunday Times, was swift in attempts to repair the damage. On Sunday, he tweeted, "Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon." Meanwhile, Sunday Times acting editor Martin Ivens publicly stated, "The paper has been written strongly in defense of Israel and its security concerns, as I have I as a columnist. We are, however, reminded of the sensitivities in this area by the reaction to the cartoon and I will of course bear them very carefully in mind in future."

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Galliano has a kept a low profile since his March 2011 fall from grace. For his return engagement, he will be assisting in de la Renta's New York offices over the next few weeks, helping the house prepare for Fashion Week. It's an apprentice-like comedown from his days as a top dog designer, but a major step toward a career reboot. "He has worked long and hard on his recovery," says de la Renta, "and I am happy to give him the opportunity to reimmerse himself in the world of fashion and reacclimate in an environment where he has been so creative."

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"On a practical and political level, it does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in U.S. counter-terrorism policy and practices," Bigelow writes, in response to critiques that the movie overemphasizes the role of torture, that the creators of this work of "reported film" have been spun by the CIA. The disclaimer attached to the film, “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events," hasn't mollified critics.

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The White House on Tuesday condemned Morsi's description of Israelis as "bloodsuckers, war mongers, and descendants of pigs and apes."

He made the remarks came during Israel's three-week offensive in Gaza that began in December 2009.

Morsi said on Wednesday that the comments had been taken out of context.

"The president stressed they were taken from comments on the Israeli aggression against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and stressed the need to put the remarks in the right context," he said in a statement issued after he met with US Senator John McCain.

In other footage aired on Friday in Egypt, Morsi declares his support for Hamas and goes on to say “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews," The New York Times reported.

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In many stories, the author, like a magician, tries to hide his or her hand. But Bakhtin's ideas prove especially helpful in talking about stories where the author's presence comes through strong – like the movies of Quentin Tarantino.

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Israel Keyes, 34, now linked to at least eight murders throughout the United States in the past 11 years, was a childhood friend and neighbor in Stevens County, Wash., of terrorists Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe — two racist brothers now serving lengthy prison sentences for murder and attempted murder.

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Public outcry led Gyöngyösi to issue a tepid apology in which he claimed he never asked for a list of Jews, but “citizens with dual Israeli-Hungarian citizenship.”

Reuters noted that between 500,000 and 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, according to the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest. According to some accounts, one in three Jews killed in Auschwitz were Hungarian nationals.

Like other far-right parties gaining ground in economically flailing Europe, Jobbik registered as a political party in 2003 and has gained increasing influence while vilifying Jews and Hungary's 700,000-strong Roma population.

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Late Saturday, Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to complain about the U.S. media's treatment of the ongoing Gaza crisis. Displaying his typically staunch pro-Israel stance, Murdoch also managed to play on an anti-Semitic trope with this tweet:

[embedtweet id="269973016753102849"]

As the HuffPo noted, reaction on Twitter was swift, shocked and angry.

Mother Jones' Adam Serwer tweeted:

[embedtweet id="269973708603535360"]

While the New Yorker political reporter Ryan Lizza opted for:

[embedtweet id="269973517892718592"]

UPDATE: Murdoch issued a Twitter non-apology Sunday for his "Jewish owned" comment. He clarifies that he was not talking about Jewish reporters -- as if this had been the main problem with his original tweet:

[embedtweet id="270209388478857218"]

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Dowd's main point is difficult to argue with: It is highly distressing to see the same policy advisers who ran George W. Bush's foreign policy shop occupy influential positions in the Romney campaign. But did she go too far in her choice of adjectives?

Dowd fairly observed that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan are experts in the field of foreign policy, but asserted their strategy was orchestrated by a "neocon puppet master" who was leading the neocon effort to "slither back" into power....

... "Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews," Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote.

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Romney's association with Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin sparked outrage from Muslim leaders, who noted that the retired general has made a second career out of agitating against Islam, which he says "should not be protected under the First Amendment.”

But as the Jewish Daily Forward points out, “Boykin hasn’t just made inflammatory statements about Muslims. He has had a lot to say about Jews as well.” In a May speech captured by the liberal blog Right Wing Watch, Boykin said American Jews vote Democratic because they don’t understand Hitler. “[O]ne of the most disgusting things I hear is for people to call Hitler the extreme Right. The absolute opposite was true. It was the National Socialist Party. He was an extraordinarily off-the-scale leftist. But many Jews in America, for example, can’t identify with the Republican Party because they’re called the party of the Right, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth,” Boykin explained. He has also claimed that the Affordable Care Act laid the groundwork for President Obama’s “brownshirt” army.

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But she’s worried about a recent development that has generated headlines around the world, along with consternation among the country’s leaders: last month, a court in her home city of Cologne in the west of the country ruled circumcision to be a crime.

Getting her children, including two circumcised boys, ready for school on a sunny morning, Lipis said she’s disturbed by what she believes to be the state’s interference in religious practices, in this case one that is followed by Muslims as well as Jews.

“I think it reflects Islamophobia,” she said.

Leo agreed. “Some judge made a very legalistic ruling based on a very narrow set of facts,” he said, “and he didn’t stop to think about the political consequences of that.”

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Two think tanks he's associated with -- the Progressive Policy Institute and the Truman National Security Project -- were apparently rattled by the incident:

PPI head Will Marshall privately told Block that the think tank would sever ties with Block if he didn’t retract the charges detailed in Salon, according to a source familiar with the discussions. Block subsequently offered Politico a statement on the charges, claiming he had never accused people at CAP in particular of anti-Semitism, but not walking back or apologizing for the gist of what was reported in the Salon piece. It’s still unclear how PPI — which declined to comment — will proceed at this point.

Meanwhile, at Truman, top officials privately debated via email whether to cut ties with Block after the Salon story broke, a source says. They had already been unhappy with Block’s attacks on critics of Israel, and the Salon piece exacerbated tensions, I’m told.

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I’ve obtained an email sent by Josh Block to a private listserv called the Freedom Community, in which he throws around accusations of anti-Semitism against liberal bloggers and calls on other list members to “echo” and “amplify” his assault and “use the below [research] to attack the bad guys.”

The Freedom Community list includes many neoconservative journalists, according to a person familiar with the matter. As of last night, the icon for the listserv was Margaret Thatcher:

***

I sent an inquiry to Block late Wednesday night. By Thursday morning, the listserv had been scrubbed:

(The phrase “the freedom community” has also appeared in a post by Weekly Standard editor Daniel Halper hailing a neoconservative speech by the president of Mongolia. And Ben Smith reported last year on a similar sounding endeavor called "Freedom Mail.")

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The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, is facing an intense campaign by hard-line pro-Israel voices in the U.S. who want him fired over remarks he made about anti-Semitism late last month.

Gutman, an Obama fundraiser turned ambassador, as well as a Jew and child of a Holocaust survivor, was addressing a Brussels conference devoted to combating anti-Semitism in Europe last month when he launched into a discussion of the relationship between the Israel-Palestine conflict and tensions between Muslims and Jews.

The first thing to note about the Gutman affair – which has now prompted Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, as well as pundits at Commentary and elsewhere to call for his firing – is that the initial reaction was based on a woefully inaccurate account of his remarks.

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To review: the Emergency Committee for Israel (which, it turns out, is funded by Wall Street) released an ad last week claiming that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism, and demanding that Democrats condemn the protests. That attack has now been picked up by various pundits and GOP officials. The Republican National Committee started using the line against Democrats Wednesday. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin inevitably piled on. Fox News is all over the story.

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