On antisemitism and Indymedia: a follow-up

Hello again

About three and a half years ago I did a long piece on the red line between criticism of Israel and antisemitic rhetoric, how to spot it, and how to keep from crossing over it, and why you're an idiot if you think it doesn't matter.

A recent post on Indymedia UK has made me think it's time for an update.

Don't Let the Door Hit You

Now, I should start by saying, if you're the sort of person who automatically presumes that the only possible reason that anyone ever brings up antisemitism on the left is as a cynical gambit to deflect criticism of Israel, that the left is magically clean and pure as snow and has absolutely nothing to worry about, and that I must be a Mossad agent to even suggest otherwise, well, you might as well stop reading now, because you're part of the problem. Your knee has already jerked.

What I'm On About

I grew up in Springfield, Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator," a town now getting ready to mark the centennial of its darkest day, an infamous race riot in which two black men were lynched for having white wives. That's my home town, folks, not some cotton state deep in Dixie. There's a walking tour now, one that goes by the multimillion-dollar Lincoln Presidential Library; just follow the signposts and you too can retrace the path of Springfield's murderous mob.

That's a measure of the strength, the raw destructive force of race hate. The power of the historical fear of miscegenation is so real -- and so powerfully destructive -- that even Abraham Lincoln's very own home town and burial place sent innocent blacks to their graves for it.

By far, the most controversial advertisement in the 2006 Congressional campaigns has been the one the Republican National Committee ran in Tennessee against the African-American Democratic candidate for Senate, Harold Ford, Jr. The ad's gotten international coverage as the worst of the worst, even catching the attention of Auntie Beeb.

What's so wrong with this ad? It's spelled out very plainly by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne (Oct. 31): "To claim that an ad depicting a pretty blond woman coming on to an African American politician does not play on the fears of miscegenation on the part of some whites is to ignore history."

That is, it positively beggars belief to think that the Republican National Committee simply, you know, forgot about the elephant in the room, the long and enormously destructive history of the lynching of blacks for having real or imagined sexual designs on whites. It's simple too big a part of the tragic history of racial strife in the US. The RNC ad instantaneously backfired, received national (and international) condemnation, gave its intended target a little kick up the polls, and was gone in two days.

The message is clear: you cannot simultaneously play even indirectly with long-established and destructive ethnic stereotypes and claim clean hands, even if you only address the stereotype glancingly. You cannot claim the moral high ground simply because you've been careful to craft a message that sounds neutral when taken out of historical context, when its your full intention to use that message in historical context. You cannot pretend you don't see the elephant in the room, especially when it and you are heading in the same general direction.

This piece is about another elephant in the room.

What Constitutes Antisemitism?

I tried in my earlier piece to give a rough working definition of what does or doesn't constitute antisemitic discourse. I gave a link to that story above, but there's something better, more authoritative, and more concise (although being more concise than me is not a tough thing to do). It's a document produced by the European Monitoring Commission on Racism and Xenophobia, a panel set up by the European Union. I've copied the full text of their March 2005 document, "A Working Definition of Antisemitism," here.

Some of these points, stripped of historical context, may seem bizarre. But remember the racist RNC ad; it was designed to look race-neutral when stripped of context but is patently not neutral when placed in the context in which it actually appears. Similarly, there are some forms of "anti-Zionist" rhetoric which look neutral on the antisemitism issue until they are examined in their historical context.

The central historical backbone of antisemitic rhetoric (outside the church, that is) is the charge of the Great International Jewish Conspiracy. This is the "Protocols of the Elders" charge; this is the charge of Henry Ford's "The International Jew"; this is the charge of Hitler and Goebbels; this is the charge of Stalin's "Doctor's plot"; this is the charge of Holocaust-denial whackos like David Irving. (The Church long had its own version of the Great Jewish Conspiracy, of course, a conspiracy so powerful that it somehow even managed to kill God, which is presumably no mean trick. This teaching is dying but not yet dead.)

More specifically, the central antisemitic charge is this: a secret Jewish shadow government, international in scope, determines the true course of history through its control of international finance, the press, and national governments (which are simply false fronts meant to disguise and thereby protect Jewish power). No Jew is to be trusted, they say, because every Jew's main allegiance is not to his nation but to the Jews alone, and every Jew regards every non-Jew as something less than human.

Well, after centuries of getting shot, gassed, and hung over countless variations on this myth, it's understandably a sore point with us. And it's not exactly just ancient history either: if you were born before 1976, then fewer days passed between the day Auschwitz was liberated and the day you were born than have passed between the day you were born and today. To demand that the Jews should not be deeply affected by having one third of their number wiped out so recently is to demand the Jews not be human.

But Wait, Isn't This Bait And Switch?

So far, we've been talking about Jews, not Zionists. Now we come to the stumbling block. Here is the part in which you prove whether or not you mean it when you say you're against racist rhetoric in all its forms.

Here are three statements.

• (a) Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank and Gaza has been a disastrous mistake from the very beginning.
• (b) Zionist organizations, through their uncountable wealth, run the world's media, financial institutions, and political parties (and thereby governments) as part of a secret global hegemony designed to further their own interests at the expense of the world at large.
• (c) The International Jew, through its uncountable wealth, runs the world's media, financial institutions, and political parties (and thereby governments) as part of a secret global hegemony designed to further their own interests at the expense of the world at large.

Here's the question. Does (b) bear any resemblance to (c), or is it as innocent of antisemitism as (a)?

And the answer is that (b) is only unrelated to (c) only if you ignore centuries of murderous antisemitic rhetoric. The anti-Ford ad didn't mention race, but it was racist. Similarly -- and this is such an easy, elementary point I'm disappointed at ferociously with which some people attack it -- you don't have to mention Jews at all to make an antisemitic statement.

If you take a copy of "Mein Kampf" and replace every occurance of "Jew" within it with "Zionist," you have not cured it of antisemitism and transformed it into a "progressive" work; you've simply given the antisemitism a helfpul fig leaf because it still relies on the old tropes of the international shadow government, the financial hegemony, the threat to world peace, and so on.

Similarly, if you take the classic canards of antisemitism, many of them expressed in (c), and you apply them unaltered to "the Zionists," as in (b), then you are doing to antisemitic stereotypes what the RNC did to anti-African-American stereotypes: bringing them back to life, even if in a subtler form. You're breathing new life into old bigotry, even if you don't mean to. And saying you don't mean it isn't very persuasive if you don't stop.

There are plenty of ways to criticize Israel, Israel's policies, Israel's politics, Israel's supporters, without riding the elephant in the room, even if you believe you are doing that riding innocently. An appeal to antisemitic stereotypes doesn't have to be intentional to be wrong.

If you see a family resemblance between (b) and (c) and mention it on Indymedia, however, someone will automatically call you a rabid right-winger or even an Israeli spy. I can tell you that from experience. This is like those people who claimed that Harold Ford, Jr. was crying crocodile tears over the RNC ad, because who could possibly be offended by it except a partisan Democrat looking for an excuse to shriek "racism"?

Any person of good will who discovers that he is playing in the shadow of a horrifically destructive antisemitic stereotype should demonstrate that good will by moving away from the stereotype, not embracing it and defending it and claiming to be martyred by the very same great international conspiracy the stereotype invokes.

Is this a plea to stop criticizing Israel? Absolutely not. Of course not. This is a plea to frame your criticism without recourse -- intentional or unintentional -- to historically destructive antisemitic stereotypes.

And this is where you demonstrate whether "anti-racism" is simply an empty formula when it comes from your lips, and whether you believe some forms of anti-racism are more equal than others.

An Illustrative Moment

If you're familiar with the history of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, you may know that the entire Czechoslovak cabinet disappeared for several days, not a single one making a public appearance, while international concern rose.

As Aleksandr Dubcek later wrote in his autobiography (published in English as "Hope Dies Last"), there was a simple problem: the Soviets had taken them to Moscow and offered them a deal -- "Let us keep this one guy for a trial, the other ten of you agree to it, and you can go free." The one the Soviets chose was, by no great coincidence, the only Jewish one, a guy named Kriegel. And the charge they wanted to hang him for: Zionism, naturally.

The Czechoslovak cabinet, to their everlasting credit, refused. And Kreigel ended up a Czech hero; in fact, the dissident Czech human rights organization Charter 77 -- vaguely analogous to Poland's Solidarity -- named their top prize after Kriegel for his refusal to sign a document legitimizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

As long as the word "Zionism" has existed, the formulation "anti-Zionism" has been used as a crude cloak for antisemitism, such as the Soviet attempt to lynch the Jew Kreigel. This is not to say -- because I absolutely don't! -- that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same thing. It is to say that the urgency of my call to separate the two modes of thought comes from a historical knowledge that the two are not always automatically separate; I've chosen only one of many possible examples. Hell, even David Irving claims to be "anti-Zionist." And anybody want to guess how many times the word "Zionism" shows up on the BNP site (if they have one)?

So, Finally, The Article

So, now, let's take a look at the article that set me off.

Its use of antisemitic riffs against Zionists is enough by itself to condemn the piece for its antisemitism. But it doesn't even do that -- it uses antisemitic riffs against the Jews! Its very title makes it clear that the target of his standard-issue antisemitic boilerplate is Jewish.

What do we have?

What "Lobby" is he talking about? Does he mean "the Zionist Lobby"? No, the phrase "Zionist Lobby" does not appear even once in his bit. Does he mean the "pro-Israel Lobby"? No, that phrase only occurs three times, all of them in the section attacking Chomsky, and even there it only appears because it's Chomsky's terminology. But "Jewish Lobby" occurs sixteen times (including the anti-Chomsky section). Sixteen to three to zero -- what "Lobby" is this article about? The "Jewish Lobby."

Do we have antisemitic noodling on the stereotypical theme of the Rich Zionist? No, worse, we have direct ruminations on the Rich Jew: "He cites Forbes magazine that reported 25 - 30% of the wealthiest families here are Jewish despite the small percentage of Jews in the population overall. They include billionaires with enormous influence"

Do we have antisemitic noodling on the stereotypical theme of the Zionists who control the government? No, worse, we have direct ruminations on the Jews who control the government: "Because of the Lobby's power, Petras reports, the US has unconditionally supported Israel's wars of aggression since 1967." Which "Lobby"? He's already told us he's talking about the "Jewish Lobby."

Do we have antisemitic noodling on the stereotypical theme of the Zionists who run the media? No, worse, we have direct ruminations on the Jews who control the media: "The Lobby's influence is broad and deep enough to include officials at the highest levels of government, the business community, academia, the clergy (especially the dominant Christian fundamentalists/Christian Zionists) and the mass media." Which "Lobby"? Check the previous sentence: "the Jewish Lobby."

Do we have antisemitic noodling on the stereotypical claims of Zionist perfidy, putting Zionist aims above those of their own country? No, we have direct ruminations on Jews who put their aims about those of their own country: "It also shows the power of the Jewish Lobby in the US that supports Israel's long-term aim to attack Iran no matter how grim the fallout from it may be."

In short, even if he were saying this stuff about Zionists, his constant crossing of the red line into antisemitic rhetoric would be unsupportable.

But he doesn't even use the fig leaf! He says this all directly about Jews!

Conclusion

The UK Indymedia article by Lendman is unquestionably antisemitic. Not because it criticizes Israel -- you can after all criticize Israel plainly and strenuously without descending to antisemitic rhetoric. The article is antisemitic because it's clotted with statements resonating like a tuning fork tuned to the pitch of standard-issue antisemitic claptrap.

Indymedia UK has, after more than one request, not taken the article down, instead hiding the responses of those calling the article out for what it is. I think they need to give their approach a rethink.

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