"Gentlemen's Agreement" was the name of Elia Kazan's 1947 film about anti-Semitism. The story, based on a novel by Laura Hobson, is about a newspaperman named Skylar Green, played by Gregory Peck, who pretends to be Jewish as he makes his way around his new hometown of New York. He uncovers a discrimination whose central feature is that it is not spoken of. It is free floating. Anyone accused of it would be embarrassed, but it proves all too pervasive in even the most refined parts of society. In American history, the term gentlemen's agreement also refrs to quiet, informal diplomatic pacts, such as the one Theodore Roosevelt struck with Tokyo in 1907 with the aim of restricting immigration from Japan. Lately, it has seemed that a new gentlemen's agreement is being struck. This time it is a dangerous mixture, one that combines classical anti-Semitism with international diplomacy. It is being played out in the effort now to isolate Israel during the prosecution of the war against a terrorism that has, as one of its goals, the isolation of Israel. The terrorists say their ultimate target is Jews the world over, for whose protection Israel was largely established.

Some have tried to draw a distinction between targeting Israel and targeting America. Everybody sees what's going on, but no one seems to want to call it what it is.

Or do they?

Lately there have been some spectacular examples of newspapermen turning the tables on those who traffic in anti-Semitic notions. I've already written about that wonderful confrontation on "Larry King Live," in which Judith Miller, a reporter from the New York Times, put Dana Suyyagh, a producer for Al-Jazeera, on the ropes after Ms. Suyyagh admitted that while her Qatar-based network calls those who attacked American "terrorists," it uses the word "martyrs" to describe the suicide bombers who target civilians in Israel.

Growing numbers of editors and reporters who are recognizing this kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility for what it is. In upstate New York, the publisher of the Oneida Daily Dispatch retracted an editorial that gave credence to the idea that Jews were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. The Associated Press quoted Jean Ryan, the Dispatch's former managing editor, as saying she was no longer working at the paper because of repercussions from allowing the Sept. 19 editorial to be published. "I am not anti-Semitic, and anyone who knows me knows that," Ms. Ryan asserts. I believe her. But it's encouraging that her employer reacted so strongly to distance itself from the notions of the errant editorial. It is one of the goals of the haters to get decent people simply to pass along hateful ideas.

Another example of the press standing up to purveyors of anti-Semitism occurred in Ohio, where, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack, Fawaz Damra, imam of the Cleveland Islamic Center, was presenting himself as a moderate. Then a television station broadcast a tape of him delivering a speech in Detroit in 1991. It was of the rawest kind of anti-Semitic ranting. According to a dispatch in the Washington Post this week, the imam, apologized many times for what he admits are the "deplorable" things he said in the past. But the Post asks: "What if peaceful and radical exist within the same community? Or within the same mosque? Or within the same person?" Skylar Green couldn't have put it more plainly.

The press is also starting to look into the Islamic Cultural Center in New York. Its erstwhile imam, Sheik Mohammad Al-Gamei'a, had been participating as a moderate in interfaith dialogue in the city. In the wake of Sept. 11, he decamped to Egypt, where, in an interview on an unofficial Web site of Al-Azhar University, he voiced the rankest sort of anti-Semitism, saying, among other things, that a Jewish conspiracy was behind the Sept. 11 atrocities. The latest expos? of his views is by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

A reporter of the Jewish Forward newspaper, Rachel Donadio, interviewed the new imam at the Manhattan mosque, Omar Saleem Abu-Namous. He distanced himself from some of his predecessor's ugliest comments, though he refused to take a position on the view that Jews were behind Sept. 11 attacks. And he, too, sought to justify the suicide attacks on Jews in Israel."I cannot condemn them because of this," the new, supposedly moderate Imam told Ms. Donadio, whose Q&A is posted here. "They have a good cause to fight for." In one widely reported case, John Rosove, senior rabbi of the relatively liberal Temple Israel of Hollywood, withdrew from the local interfaith dialogue after one of its participants, Salim Al-Marayati, suggested in a  radio interview that Israel should be put on the list of suspects behind Sept. 11. Mr. Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, tried to squirm out of his remarks by claiming he'd been misunderstood. The Forward reported that although he told the paper he regretted his choice of words, did not retract his statement, though he said that at this point he does not hold Israel responsible for the attacks. Then yesterday, the Washington Post unloaded an editorial called "Words From Egypt." The Post had earlier warned of Arab governments contributing to Islamic extremism and cited Egypt, where, the Post said, President Hosni Mubarak "props himself up with $2 billion a year in U.S. aid while allowing and even encouraging state-controlled clerics and the media to promote the anti-Western, anti-modern and anti-Jewish propaganda of the Islamic extremists."

It seems the Egyptians' response came via two government-controlled newspapers, Al Ahram and Al Akhbar, which railed against the Post in the usual fashion, with the editor of Al Akhbar, Galal Dewidar (a government employee, the Post points out), asserting that not only do "American media submit to the directives of the Jewish lobby," but their "identity is American in theory but Zionist in practice." The Post quotes him as adding: "We have begun to view these mouthpieces as a media apparatus in the pay of . . . the Zionist organizations and the apparatuses working clandestinely." The Post editorial was one of the roundest ripostes to the Egyptian anti-Semites in years.

Of course, it's early in the fight. The Bush administration, apparently seeking to hold together its coalition with the likes of Saudi Arabia and Syria, hasn't really weighed in. The State Department is still suggesting that there's a difference between, on the one hand, America's expedition against the al Qaeda and the Taliban and, on the other hand, Israel's against the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

But the response of some of the newspapers suggests people are starting to look deeper and to perceive, at the bottom of this swamp, the same old hatreds that have been around for centuries. It's enough to generate at least some hope that this time around, the gentlemen's agreement won't be so gentlemanly.

Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.