A tempest has been brewing for the past week in the teapot known as Solomonia.com that ought to be noted by all people of good will who are concerned for the future of the Jewish people.

Said tempest involves accusations by a person who for a time occasionally attended the synagogue to which I belong, Congregation Kehillath Israel in Brookline. He asserts that we have hired a junior rabbi who misuses Scripture to support extreme left-wing opinions and who is "set upon the destruction of the state of Israel."

Twenty-odd posts on one of the innumerable Middle East-focused blogs that crowd the Internet surely amounts to no more than a small tempest, and some people I know who were aware of the Solomonia discussion advised that it should not be recognized in this column. Better to keep quiet and let it die out, they said.

I thought hard about that, and in the end disagreed for these reasons:

First, I was present when the sermon that formed the basis of the accusations was delivered, and found the charges about its content at wild variance with what the rabbi who delivered the sermon actually said.

Second, the accusations were posted around the same time news broke that Justice Richard Goldstone was being prevented from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah by threats that the ceremony would be disrupted by South African "Zionists" if he attended.

Third, shortly thereafter, the organization Im Tirtzu - which styles itself a centrist movement aimed at strengthening Zionism and Israeli society - began distributing in Israel an altered version of the Yizkor memorial prayer for Yom Hazikaron.

This is the guts of the proposed addition:

"Let the people of Israel remember those from within it, flesh from their flesh, who participated in claims against its officers and soldiers. Those who during the time of the battle to defend Israel stood at protests and called their soldiers war criminals. Remember those [who] in deep darkness befriended the worst enemies of Israel in order to harm the holy ones [who] delivered their souls for the sake of the nation."

What's going on, at local, national and international levels, is an attempt to redefine the hard Right as the Center and everyone else as heretical haters and traitors.

By hard Right, I mean those who believe that there is no one to talk to on the other side, that Palestinians are Jew-haters and always will be, and that because the sacrifice of the IDF is holy (which I believe) everything the troops do is pure (which I do not). In this view, the goal of Zionism is one state between the River and the Sea, in which Arabs, if any choose to remain, accept second-class-citizen status, and preferably live in segregated circumstances.

There is no place on earth better to see where all this is coming from and going to than Hebron, which was the subject of the accused sermon.

According to the self-appointed mashgiachs of the would-be New Center, the residents of Hebron are innocent lambs constantly preyed upon by vicious Palestinians. I saw something different there.

I saw Jewish mothers screaming abuse at Palestinians whose family homes had the misfortune to lie beneath the balconies of the Jews. I saw garbage thrown from Jewish homes dripping onto the awning, storefronts and streets of Palestinian neighborhoods. I saw film of Jewish settlers swaggering down the street shooting holes in solar hot water tanks on Palestinian rooftops. I saw the children of Kiryat Arba worshipping the memory of the settler who in 1994 massacred 29 unarmed Muslim men and boys at prayer at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I saw settlers sending their pre-bar mitzvah children to stone strangers in the neighborhood - including me - because children that age were immune to prosecution.

I challenge anyone to say that this comes from one who is anti-Israel, or self-hating, or any of the other typical slurs. I was the first reporter to debunk claims that Israelis massacred Palestinians at Jenin. Look it up - it was recognized by CAMERA and others. I have contributed extensively to the documentation of Palestinian sins and sentiments against Jews.

Plenty of bloody outrages have been committed by Palestinian residents of Hebron and vicinity. That does not make outrages committed by Jews disappear.

Plenty of horrors have been perpetrated by Palestinian residents of Gaza. That does not make questioning what we did and how we did it when we counterattacked anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, no more than questioning what we did in Vietnam or Iraq makes us anti- American.

I have many problems with the Goldstone report. So does Moshe Halbertal, the IDF ethics advisor who so ably critiqued this report in The New Republic. So does US Rep. Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East, who last week condemned the effort to keep Goldstone away from his grandson's bar mitzvah.

Notwithstanding these problems, what we know is that to make Goldstone out to be an anti-Semite and anti-Israel and thereby to justify his virtual excommunication is wrong, disgraceful and thoroughly un-Jewish. Not everyone who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic and not everyone who criticizes Goldstone is a right-wing ideologue.

So back to the tempest in our local teapot.

The reason to write about these charges against the young rabbi's sermon on Hebron is not that this controversy is so big. The point is that it is wrong, in a deep and moral sense, to make politically charged accusations based on second hand accounts (the accuser of the young assistant rabbi acknowledged to me that he did not hear the sermon or attempt to read it before making his charges), wrong to glibly classify as anti-Israel or anti- Semitic people with whom we simply disagree.

It is wrong to let libel stand whether Right is attacking Left or vice versa. It just happens that the Right is ascendant at the moment.

I hope they'll let me into shul next Shabbat.