Senator Hollings, a Democrat of South Carolina, earlier this month wrote a newspaper column opining on “why we are in Iraq.” Wrote the senator,”With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush’s policy to secure Israel.”

The article goes on to blame three Jews: “Led by Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel’s security is to spread democracy in the area.”It says Mr. Bush “came to office imbued with one thought — re-election. Bush felt tax cuts would hold his crowd together and spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats.”

The column was originally published May 6 in the Charleston Post and Courier. It also appeared in the May 7 number of the State, a newspaper published at Columbia, S.C. It is posted on Mr. Hollings’s official Senate Web site, and it was entered into the Congressional Record.

We were alerted to it by the Anti-Defamation League, which on Friday urged Mr. Hollings to disavow his comments publicly. “This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government,” the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, said.

It’s not as if this is the first time Mr. Hollings has made comments offensive to one minority group or another. In 1981 he apologized after referring to a senator from Ohio, Howard Metzenbaum, who is Jewish, as the “senator from B’nai B’rith.” In 1983 he apologized for referring to supporters of a senator from California, Alan Cranston, as “wetbacks.” In 1993 he prompted a furor with what he said was a joke about cannibalism and African diplomats who liked to travel to Europe. “These potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva,” he said.

Mr. Hollings himself was one of the 77 senators who voted in October of 2002 to authorize American force in Iraq. In his comments at the time explaining his vote, he referred to an August 30, 2002, newspaper column. In that column, Mr. Hollings blamed a string of terrorist attacks on American support for Israel. “Frustration with the United States support of Israel is exemplified by attacks on the World Trade Towers in 1993, on our barracks in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the consulate now in Pakistan and martyrs willingly giving their lives to blow up the USS Cole, the Pentagon and again the World Trade Center,” Mr. Hollings wrote. His article continued, “Whining, ‘they hate us,’ we refuse to discuss or recognize the Palestinian cause. The cause must be confronted. ‘You can’t kill an idea with a sword.’ The Terrorism War won’t be won militarily. Our foreign policy must not be left to the extremes, Sharon and Arafat.”

That none of the newspapers that normally support the Democratic Party are answering Mr. Hollings — or for that matter, why Senator Kerry hasn’t confronted Mr. Hollings — is remarkable, particularly since similar views are voiced increasingly by other American political leaders and writers. The terrorists attacking America have many other grievances besides American support for Israel. They don’t like it, for instance, that women have rights in America and that America is not run according to Islamic law. But the Israel grievance is the only one that Mr. Hollings seems to want to negotiate on.

Many American foreign policy thinkers support and have supported exporting freedom and democracy abroad, both because it is morally right and because it will make the world safer for America and all its allies. It’s a strand of thought that includes or included President Reagan, Lane Kirkland of the AFLCIO, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, Prime Ministers Blair and Thatcher, Vice President Cheney — none of them Jews. Why Mr. Hollings chooses to name Messrs. Perle, Wolfowitz, and Krauthammer, and to focus on democracy’s effects on Israel instead of on America and the inhabitants of the Arab world, is a puzzlement.

So is Mr. Hollings’ accusation that Mr. Bush did this all for “the Jewish vote.” Most of the Jewish vote resides in states like New York and California that the Bush campaign has now written off for 2004.

Mr. Hollings may not be aware of it, but Israel’s supporters include a lot of non-Jewish voters. And there are plenty of voters out there who believe that freedom and democracy are inalienable rights of everyone, and that the world will be safer for Americans if freedom and democracy spread.

“Senator Hollings was out of the office on Friday, and has not yet seen the letter” from the Anti-Defamation League, the senator’s spokeswoman, Ilene Zeldin, told us yesterday.

It’ll be illuminating to see the senator’s response. If he stands by the views expressed in the May 6, 2004, and August 30, 2002, columns, then the responsibility for disavowing them will move to Mr. Hollings’s colleagues in the Democratic Party, starting with the two senators from New York. It’d be a pleasure to see them set Mr. Hollings straight on this one.