THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2001 — Philip Weiss is a clever writer who pioneered the technique of injecting the first person into celebrity profiles (see his 1991 Esquire valentine to Ellen Barkin). He also has a regular column in the New York Observer, where he generally provides glib insights about New York City, Harvard, and himself. On one topic, however, Weiss's slick maneuvering grows shrill: American Jews. Don't get me wrong: Weiss isn’t some maniacal anti-Semite. No, he’s a self-obsessed, self-involved soul tortured by his Jewish parentage. And his latest column in the Observer bears that out.

Writing in the December 31 issue of the Observer under the headline JEWISH OPINION ON ISLAM GETS SHRILL AND NARROW, Weiss lays into the American Jewish establishment for its behavior since September 11. "Even as George Bush and his wife stand up for multiculturalism by holding a Ramadan dinner at the White House, the Jewish community has provided harbor for harsh views of Islam," he writes, citing the opinions of pundits ranging from Tom Friedman of the New York Times and Princeton professor Bernard Lewis to Emily Yoffe of Slate. All these voices, plus the American Jewish Congress and the Forward (a weekly Jewish newspaper for which I once worked), he contends, promote the argument that "Islam is to blame" for the September 11 terror attacks. "And it seems to me — an assimilating Jew who has never been to the Middle East — that the Jewish traditions of soulfulness and sensitivity are needed now more than ever," says Weiss. A more ridiculously wrong-headed conclusion has rarely been rendered.

It’s true that September 11 served as a wake-up call for many Americans, including American Jews. But here Weiss is either demonstrating a serious lack of knowledge or engaging in profound intellectual dishonesty. Weiss's targets don't argue that Islam is to blame, but rather, that militant Islamic terrorist fanatics are. The hijackers who crashed two planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were — were they not ? — members of Osama bin Laden’s insane crew.

But this straightforward, obvious, and widely shared analysis isn’t good enough for Weiss. Doing his best modern-day imitation of the Biblical prophets, Weiss, in effect, blames the Jewish state for the attacks: "But in the end this discussion comes back to Israel," he writes.

In his paroxysm of Jew-blaming, Weiss neglects the historical facts. Where in his analysis are the eight years Israel attempted to placate Palestinian rage by giving Yasser Arafat control of the West Bank, Gaza, and a heavily armed army? Where is the generous peace deal Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat at Camp David in 2000, a deal Arafat rejected out of hand? And he says nothing about the daily storm of suicide-bomb inducing rhetoric throughout the Islamic world — both in the religious schools of Pakistan and in the Palestinian Authority.

Weiss — accustomed to glitzy writing for New York glossies — fails to realize that the fancy rhetorical tricks that served him so well in journalism no longer work. Since September 11, the reality is that America, Israel, and other Western nations are all the targets of terror, no matter what is done. Weiss’s self-serving handwringing only serves to make everyone more vulnerable to violence — not less.