It’s 1984 all over again with the latest right-wing rendition of NewSpeak.  The hyperventilators now call minorities “racists” and liberals “fascists,” boosting their Nielsen ratings with Orwellian twists of terminology.

Newt Gingrich tossed the R-word at Sonia Sotomayor—but apologized. Fox News cable-babbler Glen Beck not only used the word about Barack Obama, but went on to explain how the president has this big problem and really hates white people.

Rush Limbaugh topped them all with a rant about how every “liberal” Obama program came from Hitler. Among his unique “facts” was that Nazis were vehemently against pollution, which, you know, the liberals are too.

Ann Coulter is living proof that the more outrageous your rhetoric the more media you get, the more books you sell and more speeches get booked.

Beyond the cash value of McCarthyist name-calling, there’s a larger political goal: The R-word becomes an acceptable stand-in for the N-word, particularly in the assault on affirmative action. It also helps to call some black guy a racist before he says you’re one.

“Fascist” or “Nazi” are NewSpeak replacements for the shopworn “communist” or “socialist” in the war on health care and on liberalism in general.

Slimy epithets are not just limited to white-on-black discourse: How about a little Jew-on-Jew?

The Israeli newspaper Ha’Aretz reports that Benjamin Netanyahu called Obama advisors David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel “self-hating Jews.” That’s because Obama asked Netanyahu to stop expanding the so-called “settlements” (really towns and villages) in the West Bank as a step toward peace in the Middle East.

Who will he next brand self-hating Jews? Perhaps the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing 2,000 reform rabbis, which applauded Obama’s position on the settlement freeze as being in “the best interests” of the U.S., Israel and world peace.

Netanyahu’s flacks now deny he said it, but the term has long been used to stifle those pesky Jews who dare oppose any aspect of Israeli policy, from the self-destructive war in Lebanon to the occupation of Palestinian territories itself.  The corollary is to call any criticism by non-Jews “anti-Semitism.”

There is plenty of anti-Semitism in this world, and attacking Israel is often a cover for it. But there is also a genuine distinction. Millions of Jews throughout the world, including Israel, are appalled by many practices of Israel’s government.

They are also appalled by Arab suicide bombers and Hamas raining rockets on innocent Israeli civilians; they support the existence of Israel and oppose those who would destroy it. But the penalty for expressing dissent on issues such as the settlements or the brutality of the occupation is to be diminished as “self-hating.” Just as supporting affirmative action makes you a racist—not just a “reverse racist.”

Now we have an amazing new thought-crime: belief that the state of Israel was created by the United Nations after World War II largely because of the Holocaust.

Aluf Benn, an editor of Ha’Aretz, writes in the New York Times:

“Here we are taught that Zionist determination and struggle — not guilt over the Holocaust — brought Jews a homeland. Mr. Obama’s [Cairo] speech, which linked Israel’s existence to the Jewish tragedy, infuriated many Israelis who sensed its closeness to the narrative of enemies like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.”

Paging Dr. Orwell!

I was around and moderately cognizant back in 1948, years before Ahmedinejad was whelped. I recollect that proponents of a Jewish state consistently invoked the Holocaust as a pivotal argument for carving what we now know as Israel out of what we then called Palestine. Israel’s own Declaration of Independence powerfully cites it:
“The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Israel the Jewish State….”

So now Obama and others with that historic perspective are fellow-travelers of Ahmedinejad?
What’s really happening is that Netanyahu and his ilk do not want a two-state solution. Their mix of political and religious zealotry says they are entitled to dominate the West Bank because millennia ago it was part of biblical Israel—lands called Judea and Samaria. To hell with the borders that world powers ordained and Zionist pioneers agreed to in 1948—you are an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew and Ahmedinejad ally if you think otherwise.

All of which delights the right because it’s aimed at weakening Obama’s overwhelming Jewish support.

I hate myself for even mentioning that.

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Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer