For a glimpse of the savvy that is propelling Newt Gingrich to the front of the Republican pack, feature the speed with which he called for the resignation of President Obama’s ambassador to Belgium. The envoy, one Howard Gutman, told a conference hosted by the European Jewish Union that, as his remarks were characterized by the Weekly Standard, Israel is to blame for the fact that anti-Semitism is growing among Muslims.

What the ambassador said, according to the report in the Standard, is that a “distinction should be made” between “traditional” anti-Semitism, “which should be condemned,” and “Muslim hatred for Jews,” which “stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians” and which, presumably, the ambassador thinks should not be condemned. It has got to be one of the dumbest demarches we’ve ever heard from an American envoy, and the former speaker was out front in condemning it.

“Pres Obama should fire his ambassador to Brussels for being so wrong about anti-Semitism,” Mr. Gingrich tweeted on Saturday. Mitt Romney put out a statement to the same effect on Sunday. They’re both right. We would add only that it is important to comprehend the nature of the Ambassador Gutman’s blunder, which is his supposition that anti-Semitism is about Jewish behavior. Anti-Semitism is not a hatred of Jewish behavior but a hatred of Jews, a point we made in the first issue of The New York Sun, in an editorial called “The War Against the Jews.”

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Ordinarily a dumb remark by an ambassador would not an editorial make. But it seems to reflect an underlying misapprehension of the hostility being directed at the Jewish state that is reflected elsewhere in the administration. Witness the catastrophe of Secretary of Defense Panetta’s remarks at the Saban Forum in Washington, where he blamed Israel for its diplomatic isolation and hectored the Jewish state to “get to the damn table,” as if it were Israel that is refusing to sit down. What history has taught is that the hostility to Israel is not about its behavior. It is about hostility to the Jews themselves. The candidate in the race who grasps that point the most clearly seems to be the candidate who is a himself a historian.