This article appears in the current issue of Progress Magazine
By denying the right of Israel to exist, anti-Zionists on the British left are in danger of pandering to anti-semitism, believe Jane Ashworth and David Hirsh
When British Jews gather to worship, sing songs or educate their children, they have to be guarded by armed police and community security people. Cars are discreetly placed across entrances to impede suicide bombers. Attacks on Jews and synagogues and Jewish cemeteries are still at a much lower level in the UK than other racist attacks, but they are growing year-by-year, and anti-semitic attacks peak at times when the Middle East is in the news.
Anti-semitic worldviews and narratives have also been making a comeback within and around the labour movement. There have been a number of angry controversies about the legitimacy of Israel, about the use of particular kinds of metaphors and images and about the role of Jews in relation to global imperialism and the Bush regime. Jews have been held responsible for taking the world into unjust wars – in which they themselves are unwilling to fight – and for forcing the great powers to alienate Muslims by supporting Israel. The integrity of Labour activists and progressive journalists has been called into question. Either the ‘Zionists’ – that is the epithet thrust onto people who think that Israel has the right to exist – are guilty of conspiracy, racism, imperialism, genocide and taking over other people’s countries, or there is a problem of anti-semitism on the left.
“Anti-Zionism creates a movement and a worldview that singles out Jews as being a central force for evil and imperialism in the world”
Some recent incidents, like the nighttime stripping of the Trade Union Friends of Israel stall at TUC Conference, are fairly trivial and may only be evidence of isolated cases of hysteria. Some, like the Labour general election campaign pigs and Fagin posters, are open to other than anti-semitic interpretations. But Ken Livingstone’s warm embrace, on behalf of London, of Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an openly anti-semitic cleric, shows a disregard for the importance of anti-semitism. The campaign for a boycott of Israeli artists, teachers, musicians, writers and researchers, which had some short-lived success in the Association of University Teachers, similarly refused to recognise the significance of singling out only Jews and the Jewish state for special punishment.
During the David Irving defamation trial in 2000, in which he denied there were Nazi gas chambers and claimed that the Holocaust had been invented by Jews and Zionists, there was a widespread mood of ambivalence, disquiet and cynicism. Holocaust denial has re-emerged recently with a call on the government to recognise the conflict between Israel and Palestine as being similar to the industrialised rounding-up and killing of millions of Jews, gays, Roma, Poles and Russians by the Nazis.
Each example of anti-semitism should sound alarms, but add them together and a serious structural problem begins to emerge. There is a problem of anti-semitism in British society and parts of the left peddle a particular version.
These days, nearly all anti-semitism is expressed in the language of anti-Zionism. Now, skinheads in Berlin affect a concern for Palestinian rights; Tory grandees and Republican isolationists worry that the existence of Israel is pulling the world into new global wars; open racists like David Irving and David Duke parrot George Galloway’s arguments for opposing the war in Iraq; Hizb'ut Tahrir and other fundamentalist groups make openly anti-semitic propaganda. It seems that everyone is now an ‘anti-Zionist’.
It is in this context that genuine friends of Israeli-Palestinian peace and those of us who want to support the Palestinian struggle for statehood operate. We, therefore, have a particular responsibility to be clear in our own minds where the boundaries lie between legitimate criticism of some of Israel’s oppressive actions and the demonisation of Israel, ‘Zionists’ and Jews. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves in the history of anti-semitism, in the way that anti-semitism operates now and has operated in the past and, especially, in the way that it has infected parts of our own left tradition.
It is sobering, therefore, that many people in the Palestine Solidarity Movement take the opposite view. Many deny that anti-semitism is a problem nowadays, particularly in relation to ‘real’ racism. Jews are not ‘oppressed’ and Jews do not suffer from social exclusion or particular poverty, they say. Anti-Zionists may sometimes get a little over-enthusiastic, they admit, but this is caused by Israel, by those who try to silence all criticism of Israel as anti-semitic. Besides, it is not real racism; it will disappear when the Jewish state is destroyed and there is justice for Palestinians.
The anti-Zionism that worries us is not the same as criticism of Israel. Israel is occupying and settling Palestinian land. In order to sustain this occupation, it uses racist violence and humiliation against the people that live in the West Bank. The occupation and some of Israel’s actions should be, and are, criticised by a large number of Israelis, Jews, and people around the world who are bothered by injustice. It is not those who protest against the injustice of the wall and the checkpoints, which control every stretch of road in the West Bank, who we worry about. It is not the just Palestinian aspiration to independence and statehood that worries us.
The anti-Zionism that worries us does not object to the policies of Israeli governments in the way that we might object to our own government’s policies. Rather, it understands those policies to be the necessary outcome of the existence of Israel. No other Israeli policy is conceivable to the anti-Zionists. So they do not criticise what Israel does. Rather, they criticise Israel’s very existence.
We are worried by the anti-Zionism that asks Israeli Jews – who are nearly all descended from victims of anti-semitism in Europe, in the Middle East and in Russia – to give up any aspiration to the possibility of self-defense by becoming the first nation in the world to voluntarily disband. If they refuse to do so, then the anti-Zionists would support the military conquering of Israel and its destruction as a nation state. Israel, and Israel alone for the anti-Zionists, must be incorporated by force into some larger political form.
We also worry when people are so much more enthusiastic in their anti-Zionism than they are in their criticism of regimes and movements that carry out much greater human rights abuses than Israel. Why do they seem unable to muster similar enthusiasm for criticism of China’s occupation of Tibet, for criticism of Saudi Arabia’s gender apartheid or for criticism of ethnic cleansing in Darfur? The list of more serious human rights abusers than Israel is long.
Left anti-Zionism inflates Israel into a symbol for all that is wrong with a world dominated by US imperialism. The details of the Roadmap or other actual, real-life political developments are rendered insignificant because the conflict is understood only though this symbolism. It is Manichaeism: the world is a great struggle between heroes and villains, only to be resolved by a great revelation and final undoing.
Conversely, the Palestinians have come to symbolise all victims, and their struggle has become the defining struggle against imperialism. Symbolic Zionists and victims replace real Jews and Palestinians in the left anti-Zionists’ imagination.
Some on the left seem to think that the only role that Muslims are able to play in this global showdown is to transform themselves into human bombs. They imagine glorious and tragic deaths as the only option left open to Muslims. The anti-Zionist imagination is filled with hopes for a symbolic victory over imperialism rather than with the actual struggle for a real Palestinian state alongside Israel. But painting Israel as an inhuman demon damages this real-world aspiration.
Terrorism may express anger and desperation but it, as the Palestinian leadership often points out, is not in the Palestinian national interest. The heroes of Palestine are not those who encourage teenagers to end their lives with a dramatic act of hatred and revenge. The real heroes are those Palestinians who find ways to educate the young, to look after the sick, the hungry and the desperate, to make links with anti-racist Israelis, and to invigorate the peace process. Real Palestinian heroes also engage in the political fight against those who want to build a new Palestine that is free of Jews, where women are barred from public life, where homosexuality is punished by death and where the rulers will be men of power who claim the right to speak on behalf of God.
We worry about the anti-Zionists that declare Jewish nationalism and only Jewish nationalism to be essentially racist. The reality is that Jewish nationalism, like all nationalism, contains an inter-woven tapestry of different threads and traditions. Some of these are right wing, some are ultra-nationalist, and many more are routine mixes of romance, desperation and abstract notions of nationhood mixed with a nod in the direction of a better tomorrow. Historically, many Israeli nationalists, thought of themselves as socialists. They wanted to build a new kind of state where Jews would work for themselves and would neither exploit nor be exploited.
Anti-Zionists, however, use a simple shorthand: Zionism equals racism. The effect of this is to encourage and to license people to treat those Jews who think that Israel has the right to exist as though they were racists. And the vast majority of Jews do support the right of Israel to exist. Many think of Israel as protection from a future genocidal threat. In this way, anti-Zionism sets itself up for a fight with Jews.
Anti-Zionism is not motivated by anti-semitism. It is motivated by concern for the oppressed. But it nevertheless creates a movement and a worldview that singles out Jews as being a central force for evil and imperialism in the world. Naturally, such movements are beginning to spawn people who are indeed motivated by anti-semitism. And this is where anti-Zionism begins to borrow from older forms of anti-semitism. It insists that Israel’s privileged role as the partner of American imperialism is protected by Jewish influence amongst the neo-conservatives and in American public life more generally. This easily sounds like, and becomes like, the Jewish conspiracy that was the myth at the heart of the ‘protocols’. It still sounds like it, and becomes like it, even if the word ‘Jew’ is replaced by the word ‘Zionist’.
Israel did not come into existence because of the utopian nationalist longings of early Zionists like Herzl. It came into existence because Europe tried to sweep itself clean of Jews. European fascism and anti-semitism transformed Israel from an idea into a reality. It is particularly unpleasant, then, when some anti-Zionists argue that Israel is a colony of European settlers representing European ideals of ‘progress’ and racism.
We learnt these lessons as children (when we read the Silver Sword), as teenagers (when we watched Cabaret and read Isherwood) and as grown-ups (when we read Jewish writers of fiction and twentieth century histories). It would be reasonable to expect products of such a liberal education to have a self-awareness that sets off alarm bells when anti-Zionism functions as a racist conduit. We might have expected political people to notice the racism of the movement around them. That this self-awareness or safety mechanism does not cut-in is testament to the power and pervasiveness of the anti-Zionist story.
Engage, an organisation dedicated to combating anti-semitism on the left, co-ordinated the campaign against the boycott in the AUT. Engage realised that a boycott is more likely to promote anti-semitism in the UK than it is to help Palestine. Engage was particularly disturbed by the boycotters’ analogy with apartheid South Africa. Like the analogy with Nazism, it is not intended to illuminate the problem of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but rather to demonize Israel. The boycotters’ argument was simple and effective. That Israel is an apartheid state is ‘demonstrated’ by an emotional speech giving a few nasty examples of Israeli institutional racism. We know what to do with an apartheid state: we boycott it. Discussion finished. It relies on the certainty of our hatred of apartheid and it links this with a half-accurate nostalgia of a victorious campaign.
In South Africa, the fight against apartheid was the fight to remove the white monopoly of political control and to create a new democracy – in effect to make a new type of country with a new political class. In Israel, the task is to force a negotiated withdrawal to the 1967 borders and to create a Palestinian state. The analogy relies on ignorance.
Writing for Engage, John Strawson explained the difference: ‘The whole argument about South Africa in the apartheid years was that it was quite exceptional. The racial classification board declared your race at birth, which would decide where you would live, what school you would attend, what job you could have, what wages you would earn, whether you could vote and what papers you carried. This does not happen in Israel, where Palestinians do have the vote and do participate in elections in all parties. Higher education is quite integrated. There are discriminatory laws, there is social discrimination and there is equivocation for equal rights on the designation of the state as ‘Jewish’. However, this is not apartheid South Africa where any organization opposed to the regime was banned and criminalized.’
The pro–boycotters have declared their intention to mobilise again in the universities. Some boycotters will be Jewish, some will certainly not be anti-semitic, but they will rely upon anti-semitic justifications. They will find amongst their friends and allies people who hate Israel more than they love Palestine. And they will find amongst their opponents anti-racists who will not tolerate their threat to create an anti-semitic current within the British labour movement.
Jane Asworth and Dr David Hirsh
SOURCE
------------
Excellent article. A great summary of the position, I think.
Showing posts with label left antisemitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label left antisemitism. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Monday, 21 June 2010
Left antisemitism - Augean Stables
Post-Modern Antisemitism: Leftist Anti-Zionism
By Richard Landes - theaugeanstables.com
The exception to the rule for my reading of anti-Semitism [largely a “right-wing” phenomenon from people opposed to the liberal impact of Jews on prime-divider cultures] comes when I try to explain the anti-Zionism of progressives. According to my analysis, those who favor the humanistic commitments of civil society – government responsible to the people, freedom of expression, treating the life of commoners as a valuable social good, broad empowerment of populations, both as individuals and as groups, women’s rights, etc. – should side unequivocally with the Israelis. Indeed this is the common cry of Israelis when they appeal to the West for support.
And yet the opposite has happened. Rather than the morality tale I describe above, a radical inversion has occurred in the retelling of this story in modern progressive (leftist) circles. The toxic imperialism and fascist nationalism with genocidal tendencies so prominently on display in the Arab world, appear now as Israeli traits. The Zionists are an imperialist settler colony like the Boer in South Africa or the pilgrims in America. Israel, in this narrative, represents only the latest of that vicious imperialism and nationalism that Europeans and Americans, as they increase their commitments to civil values, come more and more to regret – slavery, genocidal policies that killed millions of natives, ruthless suppression of indigenous culture. The Palestinians, in this reading, represent the oppressed people trying valiantly to free themselves from European-style occupation.
The difficulties of such a reading are immense. They necessitate:
• Romanticizing of the past in which the Arabs of the region were living in an egalitarian society (rather than being occupied by their own elites), in which Muslims and Jews got on famously
• Reversing the vectors of action in which the Israelis initiate the aggression and the Arab violence is a reaction to that aggression
• Viewing the aggressors in the conflict as innocent by virtue of their loss, and the defenders as guilty by virtue of their victory
• Ignoring, or lightly condemning all of the immensely depraved actions of the Arab leadership (killing their own “dissidents”, imprisoning and immiserating their “refugees”, suicide terrorism) as “understandable” given their frustration and “lack of hope” while criticizing every Israeli act against these deeds as inexcusably disproportionate aggression.
• Accepting the statements that Arabs make in English as an index of their intentions, and ignoring what they say in Arabic, thus dismissing any possibility that they still harbor desires to wipe out Israel. (As one confident analyst put it on NPR: “Any Palestinian with a three-digit I.Q. knows that Israel is here to stay.”)
Such readings are possible. Indeed there is a whole academic literature dedicated to just such analyses, and a press that generally covers the events essentially from this framework, and a large body of left-wing and pro-Arab ideologues who assume it is true. It results in a widespread consensus that views events in an “even-handed” manner, one in which both sides have reasonable positions (even if the Palestinian position must be attributed to them in order to make it reasonable), both have done reprehensible things, and both should just sit down and work this out in negotiations. Such thinking, generous in its belief in the good intentions of both sides, results in astoundingly inaccurate and harmful analyses. By failing to distinguish between a shame culture dominated by a political prime-divider on the one hand, and a guilt culture, organized by the principles of a civil society – indeed projecting onto both sides the same liberal values and commitments – progressives undermine the very forces they believe they strengthen.
• they systematically misread events, assuming that, for example, the Israelis must be guilty of the pain and suffering of the Palestinian refugees, since who would imagine that the Arabs would do this to their own people.
• they fall prey to the use of Western liberal language by people who have no commitment to it, believing, for example that the Palestine Liberation Organization is dedicated to freeing the Palestinian people, not destroying the Israelis
• they adopt the demonizing narrative of the Arab elites, reinforcing their grip on the populations that they victimize in the name of fighting the Zionist imperial entity
• they abandon one of the rare independent cultures that share their progressive values, excoriating them for their lack of restraint precisely where they demonstrate a level of restraint no Western country has ever shown
• they justify behavior (terrorism, especially suicide mass murder) as “legitimate expressions of frustration” that set a catastrophic precedent for the dangerous and delicate task of globalization that faces us in the coming decades and centuries.
• They label as racism any attempt to point out the violent, hate-mongering racism of the Palestinians and Arabs.
One might ask, why such self-destructive behavior? Why attack those who represent the very cutting edge of the culture you have worked so hard to create? Why side so enthusiastically with people who despise you and your culture, and want nothing more than to dominate you? Why empower a narrative and an elite that treats its own with such merciless cruelty?
At one level, one can analyze this as an honest mistake, one that systematically underestimates the difficulty of achieving a civil society, and assumes that such “rational” behavior lies within the grasp of any culture. Thus, the Palestinians would love to build a civil nation if only the Israelis would leave them alone (end the occupation), and as soon as the Israelis make enough concessions, the Palestinians will respond accordingly. Similarly, Arabs value the lives of their children just as much as Israelis do, or, in Ted Koppel’s words, “I refuse to believe that Palestinian mothers mourn their dead children any less than Israeli mothers.” Indeed to suggest otherwise would be racist.
This of course means that one must look away from the behavior of mothers who, their daughters killed by their husbands and sons for having “shamed” the family, insist that they do not mourn. They may indeed mourn as Ted Koppel (and I) suspect, but the public culture demands that they do not, and they comply. When we look away from such profoundly different cultural phenomena, we fail to ask such pertinent questions as: If these violent men will kill their own children for shaming them, what would they do, could they, to the Israelis for shaming their culture and religion? Similarly, when reporters do not know about honor killings, they cannot understand the attitudes of families toward suicide “martyrs.”
The result becomes profoundly superficial and subtly racist. When, as many will profess in an almost off-handed way, suicide bombers are the expression of hopelessness – “what else can they do?” – one assumes two terrible things about the antagonists. First, one assumes that the Jews are as evil as the Palestinians present them, ruthless, genocidal killers who throttle any decent desire for independence among Palestinians; and second one assumes that Palestinians have so impoverished a moral culture that they have no choice but to engage in the most depraved and vicious form of child sacrifice in the recorded history of mankind in order to get their way. Deconstructed, such banal remarks underscore the poverty of such off-hand sympathy for the “poor Palestinians.”
Nowhere does the intellectual and moral failure of even-handedness appear more blatantly than on the question of racism. Jews and Israelis often accuse the Arabs of being anti-Semitic. No, reply the Arabs, for we too are Semites, so how can we be anti-Semitic? Facetious, perhaps, but nonetheless an argument that seems to carry weight. Rather than accept the argument, however, it should then shift our attention from the specifically racist quality of late 19th and 20th century antisemitism to the more general demonizing hatreds of medieval and early modern antisemitism.
Rather than moving in such a direction however – again a desire to avoid the unpleasantness of accusing a whole culture of hatemongering – the discourse then takes a stunning turn. Not only are the Arabs not antisemites, the Israelis are racists. This accusation, which is patently false – no country in the world has as much racial, religious, and cultural diversity as Israel – and even wrong where the Israeli’s treatment of their Arab Muslim and Christian minorities are concerned (our society would, as Scott Andersen recently admitted on NPR, have produced vigilante groups to intimidate any group that dared to attack our civilians in the manner of the suicide bombers, who get a 80% approval rating among their fellow Arabs).
And yet the accusation carries great weight, not only in organizations like the UN which voted in 1985 under the presidency of a former and unrepentant Nazi, Kurt Waldheim to condemn Zionism as racism, but also in the widespread parallels drawn between South African apartheid and Israeli treatment of Palestinians. The appalling logic here came to a stunning climax just after the second Intifada, in the summer of 2001 at Durban, a conference supposedly dedicated to fighting racism around the world, but which spent most of its time dealing with Arab denunciations of Zionist “racism,” and ended with condemnations of the Atlantic slave trade (i.e., historical European trade) and no mention of the Indian Ocean slave trade (i.e., current Arab trade). The fact that the Arabs demonized the Jews should not have surprised anyone who follows the narratives that dominate Arab press, academic, and political discourse, but the acquiescence, even the enthusiastic support of NGOs, the self-appointed bastions of civil society around the world, deserves pondering. Even liberals with enough sense to see the excessive nature of the attack, preferred to regret the excess as an “unfortunate distraction,” than focus on the revealing contradiction of demonizing racists successfully accusing others of racism.
SOURCE : the augeanstables.com READ MORE
I have certainly been guilty of this - out of ignorance and a desire to be "even-handed". A mistake, in practice: mea culpa.
By Richard Landes - theaugeanstables.com
The exception to the rule for my reading of anti-Semitism [largely a “right-wing” phenomenon from people opposed to the liberal impact of Jews on prime-divider cultures] comes when I try to explain the anti-Zionism of progressives. According to my analysis, those who favor the humanistic commitments of civil society – government responsible to the people, freedom of expression, treating the life of commoners as a valuable social good, broad empowerment of populations, both as individuals and as groups, women’s rights, etc. – should side unequivocally with the Israelis. Indeed this is the common cry of Israelis when they appeal to the West for support.
And yet the opposite has happened. Rather than the morality tale I describe above, a radical inversion has occurred in the retelling of this story in modern progressive (leftist) circles. The toxic imperialism and fascist nationalism with genocidal tendencies so prominently on display in the Arab world, appear now as Israeli traits. The Zionists are an imperialist settler colony like the Boer in South Africa or the pilgrims in America. Israel, in this narrative, represents only the latest of that vicious imperialism and nationalism that Europeans and Americans, as they increase their commitments to civil values, come more and more to regret – slavery, genocidal policies that killed millions of natives, ruthless suppression of indigenous culture. The Palestinians, in this reading, represent the oppressed people trying valiantly to free themselves from European-style occupation.
The difficulties of such a reading are immense. They necessitate:
• Romanticizing of the past in which the Arabs of the region were living in an egalitarian society (rather than being occupied by their own elites), in which Muslims and Jews got on famously
• Reversing the vectors of action in which the Israelis initiate the aggression and the Arab violence is a reaction to that aggression
• Viewing the aggressors in the conflict as innocent by virtue of their loss, and the defenders as guilty by virtue of their victory
• Ignoring, or lightly condemning all of the immensely depraved actions of the Arab leadership (killing their own “dissidents”, imprisoning and immiserating their “refugees”, suicide terrorism) as “understandable” given their frustration and “lack of hope” while criticizing every Israeli act against these deeds as inexcusably disproportionate aggression.
• Accepting the statements that Arabs make in English as an index of their intentions, and ignoring what they say in Arabic, thus dismissing any possibility that they still harbor desires to wipe out Israel. (As one confident analyst put it on NPR: “Any Palestinian with a three-digit I.Q. knows that Israel is here to stay.”)
Such readings are possible. Indeed there is a whole academic literature dedicated to just such analyses, and a press that generally covers the events essentially from this framework, and a large body of left-wing and pro-Arab ideologues who assume it is true. It results in a widespread consensus that views events in an “even-handed” manner, one in which both sides have reasonable positions (even if the Palestinian position must be attributed to them in order to make it reasonable), both have done reprehensible things, and both should just sit down and work this out in negotiations. Such thinking, generous in its belief in the good intentions of both sides, results in astoundingly inaccurate and harmful analyses. By failing to distinguish between a shame culture dominated by a political prime-divider on the one hand, and a guilt culture, organized by the principles of a civil society – indeed projecting onto both sides the same liberal values and commitments – progressives undermine the very forces they believe they strengthen.
• they systematically misread events, assuming that, for example, the Israelis must be guilty of the pain and suffering of the Palestinian refugees, since who would imagine that the Arabs would do this to their own people.
• they fall prey to the use of Western liberal language by people who have no commitment to it, believing, for example that the Palestine Liberation Organization is dedicated to freeing the Palestinian people, not destroying the Israelis
• they adopt the demonizing narrative of the Arab elites, reinforcing their grip on the populations that they victimize in the name of fighting the Zionist imperial entity
• they abandon one of the rare independent cultures that share their progressive values, excoriating them for their lack of restraint precisely where they demonstrate a level of restraint no Western country has ever shown
• they justify behavior (terrorism, especially suicide mass murder) as “legitimate expressions of frustration” that set a catastrophic precedent for the dangerous and delicate task of globalization that faces us in the coming decades and centuries.
• They label as racism any attempt to point out the violent, hate-mongering racism of the Palestinians and Arabs.
One might ask, why such self-destructive behavior? Why attack those who represent the very cutting edge of the culture you have worked so hard to create? Why side so enthusiastically with people who despise you and your culture, and want nothing more than to dominate you? Why empower a narrative and an elite that treats its own with such merciless cruelty?
At one level, one can analyze this as an honest mistake, one that systematically underestimates the difficulty of achieving a civil society, and assumes that such “rational” behavior lies within the grasp of any culture. Thus, the Palestinians would love to build a civil nation if only the Israelis would leave them alone (end the occupation), and as soon as the Israelis make enough concessions, the Palestinians will respond accordingly. Similarly, Arabs value the lives of their children just as much as Israelis do, or, in Ted Koppel’s words, “I refuse to believe that Palestinian mothers mourn their dead children any less than Israeli mothers.” Indeed to suggest otherwise would be racist.
This of course means that one must look away from the behavior of mothers who, their daughters killed by their husbands and sons for having “shamed” the family, insist that they do not mourn. They may indeed mourn as Ted Koppel (and I) suspect, but the public culture demands that they do not, and they comply. When we look away from such profoundly different cultural phenomena, we fail to ask such pertinent questions as: If these violent men will kill their own children for shaming them, what would they do, could they, to the Israelis for shaming their culture and religion? Similarly, when reporters do not know about honor killings, they cannot understand the attitudes of families toward suicide “martyrs.”
The result becomes profoundly superficial and subtly racist. When, as many will profess in an almost off-handed way, suicide bombers are the expression of hopelessness – “what else can they do?” – one assumes two terrible things about the antagonists. First, one assumes that the Jews are as evil as the Palestinians present them, ruthless, genocidal killers who throttle any decent desire for independence among Palestinians; and second one assumes that Palestinians have so impoverished a moral culture that they have no choice but to engage in the most depraved and vicious form of child sacrifice in the recorded history of mankind in order to get their way. Deconstructed, such banal remarks underscore the poverty of such off-hand sympathy for the “poor Palestinians.”
Nowhere does the intellectual and moral failure of even-handedness appear more blatantly than on the question of racism. Jews and Israelis often accuse the Arabs of being anti-Semitic. No, reply the Arabs, for we too are Semites, so how can we be anti-Semitic? Facetious, perhaps, but nonetheless an argument that seems to carry weight. Rather than accept the argument, however, it should then shift our attention from the specifically racist quality of late 19th and 20th century antisemitism to the more general demonizing hatreds of medieval and early modern antisemitism.
Rather than moving in such a direction however – again a desire to avoid the unpleasantness of accusing a whole culture of hatemongering – the discourse then takes a stunning turn. Not only are the Arabs not antisemites, the Israelis are racists. This accusation, which is patently false – no country in the world has as much racial, religious, and cultural diversity as Israel – and even wrong where the Israeli’s treatment of their Arab Muslim and Christian minorities are concerned (our society would, as Scott Andersen recently admitted on NPR, have produced vigilante groups to intimidate any group that dared to attack our civilians in the manner of the suicide bombers, who get a 80% approval rating among their fellow Arabs).
And yet the accusation carries great weight, not only in organizations like the UN which voted in 1985 under the presidency of a former and unrepentant Nazi, Kurt Waldheim to condemn Zionism as racism, but also in the widespread parallels drawn between South African apartheid and Israeli treatment of Palestinians. The appalling logic here came to a stunning climax just after the second Intifada, in the summer of 2001 at Durban, a conference supposedly dedicated to fighting racism around the world, but which spent most of its time dealing with Arab denunciations of Zionist “racism,” and ended with condemnations of the Atlantic slave trade (i.e., historical European trade) and no mention of the Indian Ocean slave trade (i.e., current Arab trade). The fact that the Arabs demonized the Jews should not have surprised anyone who follows the narratives that dominate Arab press, academic, and political discourse, but the acquiescence, even the enthusiastic support of NGOs, the self-appointed bastions of civil society around the world, deserves pondering. Even liberals with enough sense to see the excessive nature of the attack, preferred to regret the excess as an “unfortunate distraction,” than focus on the revealing contradiction of demonizing racists successfully accusing others of racism.
SOURCE : the augeanstables.com READ MORE
I have certainly been guilty of this - out of ignorance and a desire to be "even-handed". A mistake, in practice: mea culpa.
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Guardian's Nick Cohen
“The leaders of Ba’athist Syria or theocratic Iran or monarchical Saudi Arabia do not faithfully reproduce the fantasies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion solely because they hate Jews. They need a conspiracy theory to divert the attention of their subject populations from the failures of their rule as badly as the tsars did in the 1900s and the Nazis in the 1930s. Then, as now, the ability to brand political opponents as Zionist fifth columnists and liberal principles as decadent Jewish ruses that divert the faithful from fulfilling their religious or racial destiny are essential aids to the maintenance of their power.
Hamas, around which the disputes about aid to Gaza rage, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which fused fascist and radical Islamist ideas during the German push into the Middle East during the Second World War. Large chunks of its constitution are lifted from European racism – Jewish money controls the world’s “media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations”; the Jews were behind “the French revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about” and so on.
As with the European reactionaries of the 20th century, Islamists do not stop with Jew hatred. Advances for radical Islam are always disasters for women, homosexuals, democrats, socialists and free thinkers. Put like this, the behaviour of European liberals seems more reprehensible than ever.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/06/israel-gaza-blockade
Hamas, around which the disputes about aid to Gaza rage, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which fused fascist and radical Islamist ideas during the German push into the Middle East during the Second World War. Large chunks of its constitution are lifted from European racism – Jewish money controls the world’s “media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations”; the Jews were behind “the French revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about” and so on.
As with the European reactionaries of the 20th century, Islamists do not stop with Jew hatred. Advances for radical Islam are always disasters for women, homosexuals, democrats, socialists and free thinkers. Put like this, the behaviour of European liberals seems more reprehensible than ever.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/06/israel-gaza-blockade
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