What Were You Thinking, Mitt Romney?

Feb. 14, 2007— -- Why would an American presidential candidate choose to announce his candidacy at a museum dedicated to the memory of America's most notorious and influential anti-Semite?

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a friend to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel, opened his campaign in front of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

This demands explanation, particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is spreading around the world.

Ford was the American patron saint of this oldest of bigotries. His anti-Semitism was not a matter of degree, nor was it disguised by anti-Zionism. It was out and out Jew-hatred.

He published an anti-Semitic screed called the Dearborn Independent, which became the model for the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer. Ford's newspaper reprinted the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Semitic propaganda.

Ford also wrote an anti-Semitic treatise called The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, which was circulated widely throughout America, admired by Hitler and distributed and sold in translation in Nazi Germany. Among the things Ford said about Jews in its pages were the following:

"The Jews are propagandists. … Few of their leaders even claim a spiritual mission. But the mission idea is still with them in a degenerate form; it represents the grossest materialism of the day; it has become a means of sordid acquisition instead of a channel of service."

"Jews have actually invaded, in person and in program, hundreds of American churches, with their subversive and impossible social ideals, and at last became so cocksure of their domination of the situation that they were met with the inevitable check."

"The Jew glories in religious persecution as the American glories in patriotism."

"The Jews conceal their strength because Jewish influence at the Capitol has been strong enough to win on all matters affecting Jewish interests, at all times."

"Jewish nature is autocratic. Democracy is all right for the rest of the world, but the Jew wherever he is found forms an aristocracy of one sort or another. Democracy is merely a tool of a word which Jewish agitators use to raise themselves to the ordinary level in places where they are oppressed below it. …"

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard University. He is the author of, most recently, "Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways."