Anti-semitism in Vancouver...

And, this is part of Freedom to Read week?

British novelist Martin Amis recently confessed to being at a loss for words whenever he encounters the hysterical, "endocrinal state" that seems to befall certain people when the subject of Israel comes up in conversation.

"I just don't understand it," Amis said. "I know we're supposed to be grown up about it and not fling around accusations of anti-Semitism, but I don't see any other explanation."

And this got me to thinking. If it's not anti-Semitism, then what's the proper word for it?

What is the right word for a book like Greg Felton's The Host and the Parasite: How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America?

What is the right word for Felton's thesis, which is that a Zionist "junta" was at work on Sept. 11, 2001, and that al-Qaida is a mere concoction in a secret plan to subvert the American Constitution, demonize Muslims and commit mass murder?

What do you call it when the Vancouver Public Library decides to present Felton, an apologist for the book-banning, journalist-jailing Iranian theocracy, as the featured author on the evening of Feb. 25, and as the library's contribution to national Freedom to Read Week?

What are we allowed to call Felton, who traces his Zionist plot back to the 1940s, when these same Zionists made "common cause" with the Nazis to rid Europe of its Jews, and participated in the herding of Jews into Hitler's gas chambers?

What Felton calls himself is an award-winning investigative reporter and Middle East specialist. His last legitimate journalism job appears to have been with a Vancouver weekly newspaper in the late 1990s, when his brief career as a columnist came to a famously embarrassing end. The column that got Felton into such trouble was also about Zionists.

In that column, Felton traced Zionist swindles and trickery back through time and across Europe to a massive coverup of events that occurred in the Caucasus Mountains about 1,000 years ago.

Europe's Jews aren't Jews at all, Felton wrote. Almost all of them are "Khazars," a long-extinct Turkic tribe from somewhere north of the Caspian Sea.

Felton has been peddling this kind of thing ever since his departure from the weekly Vancouver Courier. He now writes for fringe Arab webzines and an online journal out of Tehran affiliated with the Iranian theocracy's Islamic Propagation Organization.