In 2000, France's Socialist PM Lionel Jospin was leading in all the presidential polls UNTIL he made ACCURATE comments about jihadoterrorism and Hizballah during a trip to Lebanon (in February 2000).

He simply called Hizballah's attacks on Israel "terrorist attacks."

IMMEDIATELY the hard-left of his base began attacking him.

This is exactly when he began a 2 year downward spiral in the polls which ended on election day (when these hard-Left parties ran AGAINST Jospin instead of endorsing him) - AND JOSPIN FINISHED IN THIRD PLACE - BEHIND CHIRAC AND LE PEN!

In France, Israel is the third rail of politics on the Left; if you support Israel "too much" then you are personna non grata to the Left, which - (like their jihadist/baathist political allies and their post-modernist/culturally relativist academic comrades) - sees Israel as an "apartheid" outpost of "Western Colonialism."

Like Jospin, Summers supported Israel too much (he opposed divestment of Israeli assets in Harvard's HUGE asset funds) and this pissed off the hard-Left of Harvard's faculty. Then, when he raised accurate but "politically incorrect" questions about gender-based bifurcation in a few academic fields, it was his death knell; the Leftist faculty agitated until they finally forced him to resign this week. THE NY SUN AGREES:

"Mr. Summers has shown flashes of brilliance since taking over in July 2001 as president of America's oldest, richest, and most famous university. We were among those who cheered his willingness to confront political anti-Semitism on campus; his speech in Memorial Church, where he said the signers of a petition to get the university to divest from Israel were anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent, is one of the most important ever given by a Harvard president. When Mr. Summers came under attack for remarks on gender differences, we observed - in an editorial called "The Soul of Harvard" - that Mr. Summers's travail could not be separated from his defense of Israel."

This sad news about Summers reinforces my firm belief that today's Left - (the Left of Sheehan and Moore and Belafonte and Chavez, to name just a few who have made frequent and blatant anti-Semitic comments) - is utterly reactionary and the true home of anti-Semitism. SCRATCH A LEFTIST AND YOU FIND AN ANTI-SEMITE.

Summers - you may recall - was an 8 year veteran of the Clinton Adminstration and the Treasury Secretary after Rubin. He is hardly a right-winger. But Leftists simply don't tolerate digression from the "party line." They never have. If you diverge from the "party line" on abortion or the GWOT or taxes or gun owenrship rights then you have wandered off the reservation and you risk EXPULSION FROM THE PARTY. Well, they finally succeeded in "expelling" Summers.

Of course it didn't help that Summers is a Jew - and not of the self-hating Upper West Side atheistic type, either.
 

I wouldn't worry about Summers, who can take care of himself, but it would be appropriate to shed a tear for Harvard, which, like all the rest of the Ivy League schools, is now completely in the hands of coercive utopians who, if ever empowered in Washington, would usher us back to the gulag.