Sometime before this election is over it would be nice to see the candidates confront the drift in the rhetoric of our national debate in respect of Israel and the Jews. Yesterday, Senator Kerry said: “The Israelis know more about terrorism than anyone else because they have suffered more from it than anyone else – which is one reason we must always stand by their side.” In making that assertion, Mr. Kerry was breaking with the American liberal religious, educational, and journalistic elite who overwhelmingly support his candidacy for president and who hate President Bush in part because of his support for Israel.

Just this week, a delegation from the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., fetched up in Damascus. En route, the churchmen stopped at Southern Lebanon, where they met with a leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and America and to the death of Jews, wherever they might be. One delegate, Ronald Stone, who was described by a Presbyterian church spokesman as a professor of Christian ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, was quoted as saying after the Hezbollah meeting, “As an elder of our church, I’d like to say that according to my recent experience, relations, and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.” He went on to say, “We treasure the precious words of Hezbollah and your expression of goodwill towards the American people.” The Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., has voted to divest from companies that do business with Israel.

Meanwhile, earlier this year at the University of California at Irvine, a speaker invited by the Muslim Student Union told students there that Zionists have “Congress, the media, and the FBI in their back pocket.” A Jewish student was confronted by Arab students there with a cry of “slaughter the Jews.” We garner these facts from the Zionist Organization of America, which has filed a complaint about U.C. Irvine with the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Over the weekend at Duke University, students gathered at an anti-Israel conference chanted “divest from apartheid Israel” and were presented with a map that described Israel’s founding as the “largest planned ethnic cleansing in modern history.”

Here in New York, the New York Times weighed in Monday with an editorial calling on Washington to “affirm American evenhandedness” in the battle between Israel and its enemies, as if America should be evenhanded in any other contest between a free and peaceful democracy and terrorist enemies funded by religious bigots and tyrants. At Columbia University, meanwhile, a frisson is going through the campus this week as early viewings are seen of an underground documentary film about hostility to Jews on campus.

All this is kind of a slow hum – background noise – in the background against which this political campaign is being carried out. The hard line against this kind of thing is coming, sadly, only from the conservative side of the spectrum.