Skip to main content

When the term antisemitism is cheapened by false usage on the right, it gives cover to the real antisemites

Hatred of Jews terrifies me. So do false accusations of antisemitism.
 
by Aaron Freedman

On 27 June 1941, the Nazis marched into the Polish city of Bialystok. In this once vibrant, cosmopolitan city where Jews had made up two-thirds of the residents, German troops went door to door, pulling Jews into the streets. The lucky ones were shot. Much of the rest – including my great-great-grandparents, their children and their grandchildren – were packed into the Great Synagogue.

The doors were locked. Grenades were tossed into the building. And then, my family was burnt alive.

For years I had almost forgotten this story. But last fall it came violently into my mind, as I read the reports of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. It has haunted me ever since, though most intensely since the synagogue shooting in Poway, California, last month. And all of a sudden, I am feeling something that I never could have imagined before: the same antisemitism that so horrifically massacred my family, rendered them as less than human, was alive in America.

So when the influential conservative commentator and publisher of the Federalist, Ben Domenech, tweeted last week that late-night host Seth Meyers was an antisemite, it should have carried all the grave seriousness of these past few months.

Instead, Domenech’s ire was provoked by … Meyers asking some tough questions of his guest, political commentator Meghan McCain. Who’s not even Jewish. Who’s Domenech’s wife.

It’s easy to dismiss Domenech’s since-deleted tweets as the ridiculous product of one hot-headed husband. Unfortunately, they’re not. For while rightwing violence against Jews has been on the rise in the US, conservative and centrist commentators have increasingly used the label of “antisemitism” for everything but.

As someone who is intimately familiar with the dehumanizing violence that antisemitism entails, it is not only offensive to see the term cheapened by false usage on the right: it terrifies me for that cover it gives to the real antisemites who want to see me dead.

The roots of this disconnect between media discourse on antisemitism and the reality of Jew-hatred go back years. In the 1990s, white supremacists became increasingly reliant on antisemitism – using Jews as a scapegoat for the success of the civil rights, women’s rights and LGBT rights movements. Sometimes, their hateful ideology inspired violence and bloodshed, as happened in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Meanwhile, right-leaning academic and cultural circles began to coin a new term: “new antisemitism”. But it wasn’t to describe the resurgence of far-right Jew hatred. Rather, it was flung at a burgeoning movement in the US and UK to hold Israel responsible for the apartheid it was perpetuating in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Anti-Zionism became conflated with antisemitism, and by the 2000s and the effective collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the narrative was pervasive. It was in that context that I was branded a “self-hating Jew” at my Jewish day school for supporting the liberal Zionist group J Street.

Over the past decade, this obsession with anti-Zionism being antisemitism took over even ostensibly liberal outlets like the the New York Times and the Atlantic, which devoted far more column inches to pro-Palestinian college students than the budding online communities of the alt-right. The “new antisemitism” gained influence at the expense of investigating – and stopping – the real antisemitism.

The cost of this misdirected interest was made clear in Donald Trump’s election following a campaign of racist dog whistling. As the violent neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville made clear, antisemitism was very much alive in the US – just that it wasn’t activists with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement who were shouting “Jews will not replace us.”

The Pittsburgh shooting, committed by an avowed white supremacist, should have woken the country up. Instead, the opposite happened: pundits doubled down on calling everyone except those responsible “antsemites”. First it was academic Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired by CNN for espousing a position that Jews have held for longer than the state of Israel: there should be one, democratic, multiethnic state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Next was Representative Ilhan Omar, whose innocuous critiques of the pro-Israel lobbying group Aipac led to a campaign of character assassination – and now, literal assassination attempts – based on her alleged antisemitism. And it didn’t stop there: pundits like Meghan McCain, who is not Jewish, even went so far as to compare Omar to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

Then, last week, Stanford University Republicans accused the Jewish comic artist Eli Valley of antisemitism. His crime? He had drawn a caricature of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, mocking his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Though he embodies a Jewish tradition of internal debate and fiery critique going back to the rabbis of the Talmud, Valley was branded an antisemite by the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. She is coming out with a hotly anticipated book on antisemitism this year.

But Monday the absurdity reached a fever pitch, with Trump and Republicans slamming Representative Rashida Tlaib as an antisemite for praising Palestine’s welcoming of Jewish refugees after the Holocaust. Teeming with Islamophobia, these charges are so delusional that they border on the surreal.

This recent history shows a vicious cycle: as antisemitic violence on the right gets ever more dangerous, false accusations of antisemitism are weaponized by the right as political cover. And as this slander is repeated more and more, it comes to take over our popular definition of antisemitism, therefore making it harder to recognize, call out and stop the real thing.

When Trump said of Charlottesville there were “very fine people on both sides”, he was rightly condemned by all but his diehard supporters for a dangerous false equivalence between Nazis and anti-Nazis. Yet when critics of Israel (especially those who are women and people of color) are equated with mass murderers, polite society nods its head in agreement.

At best, this is a grave misjudgment. At worst, it is complicity in a rightwing project of ethnic cleansing.

So what is to be done?

Above all, mainstream news outlets need to give greater attention to the diversity of Jewish voices on antisemitism. Right now the most prominent commentators on antisemitism are either avowed conservatives like the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, alt-right darlings like Ben Shapiro or establishment Zionists like Jonathan Greenblatt. Even those occasionally brought in to represent the Jewish “left” have been complicit: the Forward’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, who herself helped start the slander against Ilhan Omar, has now become a regular TV and radio commentator on antisemitism (just this weekend she met widespread condemnation for calling Pete Buttigieg’s critique of Republican billionaire Sheldon Adelson “an antisemitic dogwhistle”).

But a younger generation of American Jews is increasingly critical of Israel, and more fervently progressive than those before us. Groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), IfNotNow, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s Jewish Solidarity Caucus, with their vision of a Judaism grounded in social justice and solidarity with other oppressed groups, are well suited to take on white supremacists like the Poway shooter, who attacked a mosque before the synagogue. Ben Shapiro, whose Twitter feed was frequently visited by the Quebec mosque shooter? Not so much.

Now, more than ever, we need the powerful, historically grounded critique of antisemitism – and path for fighting it – that groups like these provide. Only in attacking antisemitism as part-and-parcel of white supremacy will it be defeated. That is something that my martyred ancestors will never let me forget. The rest of us cannot either.

Source, links:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Oct. 7 Reports Implode: Beheaded Babies, NY Times Scandal, & More

Glenn Greenwald    

Israel’s Descent Into Madness & the Holocaust Comparison

BreakThrough News   Rania Khalek was joined by Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany and associate professor at Koc University in Istanbul, to discuss Israel’s descent into genocidal fascism. Prof. Amar addresses whether it’s useful to make Holocaust and Nazi comparisons and the real reason behind the West’s unshakeable loyalty attitude when it comes to Israel’s barbarism.   

Zionist and US imperialist criminals are about to grab the natural gas off shore Gaza

globinfo freexchange   As the genocide against Palestinians of Gaza is about to be completed with an act of unprecedented brutality by the Zionists and butcher Netanyahu through the bombardment of about 1.4 million civilians in Rafah, it seems that they have already set their next primary goal. Which, in short, is to grab the natural gas resources off shore Gaza, together with their US imperialist buddies whose contribution to the genocide has been undoubtedly critical.     As already reported , in 2007, Hamas came to power and Israel launched an offensive on Gaza Strip, leaving behind 1,400 dead Palestinians, but taking with it the gas fields. Within a year, Israel announced the discovery of the Leviathan natural gas field, which did include Gaza's riches, valued at 453 billion dollars. But Gazans have been denied around 47 billion dollars in revenue. As for Tel Aviv, it's gunning to become a new hub. At that moment in time, that is 2022, Russian oil and gas were sanctioned.

Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland Ends Her Reign: Exposing a Catastrophic Career

Glenn Greenwald    

Τυχαία γεγονότα στην τριτοκοσμική μπανανία των Βαλκανίων

failed evolution   1) Συμβαίνει το μεγαλύτερο σιδηροδρομικό δυστύχημα στην ιστορία της χώρας. 2) Γίνεται αστραπιαία επιχείρηση μοντάζ των συνομιλιών του σταθμάρχη από μηχανισμό του καθεστώτος, πριν ακόμα φτάσει στα χέρια των αρχών, προκειμένου να αποδοθεί η τραγωδία αποκλειστικά σε ανθρώπινο λάθος και να βγουν από το κάδρο οι πολιτικές ευθύνες ανώτατων κυβερνητικών αξιωματούχων. 3) Αναπαράγεται το παραποιημένο υλικό αστραπιαία από ναυαρχίδα της καθεστωτικής προπαγάνδας. 4) Τοποθετείται επικεφαλής στην επιτροπή-παρωδία πρωτοπαλίκαρο του καθεστώτος Μητσοτάκη που εργάζονταν παλιά στην ίδια αυτή ναυαρχίδα. 5) Η επιτροπή κλείνει άρον-άρον την υπόθεση αποκλείοντας ουσιώδεις μάρτυρες που είχαν προειδοποιήσει επανειλημμένα τον αρμόδιο υπουργό για τον κίνδυνο μεγάλου δυστυχήματος. Σταματάει έτσι και η όποια σε βάθος διερεύνηση για την τσιμεντοποίηση του χώρου και την απόπειρα συγκάλυψης της τραγωδίας.  

Το σκάσιμο της φούσκας Μητσοτάκη με νέα επίσημη χρεοκοπία και οριστικό τέλος της μεταπολίτευσης

του system failure   Τα αποτελέσματα των εκλογών της 25ης Ιουνίου ήταν λίγο-πολύ αναμενόμενα όσον αφορά τις πρώτες θέσεις με βάση και τα αποτελέσματα της πρώτης κάλπης του Μαίου. Αν συμπεριλάβουμε και το ποσοστό της αναμενόμενης αποχής, δεν μας έδωσαν κάποια ιδιαίτερη έκπληξη. Αυτό όμως που φαίνεται να αιφνιδίασε ακόμα και το συστημικό κατεστημένο, είναι η είσοδος των δύο υπερσυντηρητικών, ακροδεξιών κομμάτων Νίκη και Σπαρτιάτες, με το τελευταίο να έχει ξεκάθαρες διασυνδέσεις με τον πρώην Χρυσαυγίτη, Ηλία Κασιδιάρη. Παρά τη μεγάλη νίκη Μητσοτάκη, οι μιντιακοί ινστρούχτορες της καθεστωτικής προπαγάνδας εμφανίστηκαν σε γενικές γραμμές "μουδιασμένοι" και αυτό οφείλεται στο γεγονός ότι το συστημικό κατεστημένο (δηλαδή τα μεγάλα οικονομικά συμφέροντα που ελέγχουν και το σύνολο των μεγάλων ΜΜΕ πανελλαδικής εμβέλειας), πέτυχε μόνο έναν από τους τέσσερις μεγάλους στόχους που είχε θέσει εξ'αρχής. Μιλώντας με ποδοσφαιρικούς όρους, ουσιαστικά έχασε με σκορ 3-1.   Ο μεγάλος στόχος πο

The Shadowy, Intelligence-Linked Group Driving the US Towards War With Iran

"United Against Nuclear Iran does not miss an opportunity to try to bring the United States closer to a military conflict with Iran. And on the other side of the equation, they also have worked very hard to oppose efforts to de-escalate the U.S.-Iran relationship."   by Alan Macleod   Part 7 - A Lesson From History   The history of Iran has been intimately intertwined with the United States since at least 1953 when Washington orchestrated a successful coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had refused U.S. demands to stamp out Communist influences in his country and had nationalized the nation’s oil. The U.S. installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a puppet ruler. An unpopular and authoritarian ruler, the Shah was overthrown in the Revolution of 1979. Since then, it has become a target for regime change, and its nuclear program is something of an obsession in the West. Often orchestrated by UANI officials while they were in government, the U.S. has carried

How the CIA oversees the Ukraine proxy war on Russia

Geopolitical Economy Report   Several reports in mainstream US media outlets show how the CIA has helped to direct the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and played a role in causing the conflict in the first place. Ben Norton examines the evidence.   Related: Confirmed: US imperialists wanted to drag Russia into a war with Ukraine since at least 2019

Israel Carries Out Most Sadistic Massacre, Opens Fire On Gaza Aid Convoy

Richard Medhurst  

The Invasion of Gaza's Resources Begins: Jared Kushner, the EU, Egypt & US

Richard Medhurst   Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son in law who previously tried to steal land in the Middle East from Arabs has said that Israel should empty the Gaza strip of civilians. He said that " Gaza's waterfront property could be very valuable ". He then proceeded to suggest ethnic cleansing: " move the people out and clean it [Gaza] up " Simultaneously, the transfer of billions of dollars from the European Union (7.4b EUR), the International Monetery Fund ($8b) and the United Arab Emirates ($32b) to Egypt: an attempt to buy Sisi's silence perhaps? The United States is also shipping 1000 troops and a firm "Fogbow", owned by a former CIA officer and USMC veteran, in order to build a pier in Gaza. These events do not seem like a coincidence. Medhurst explains why this relates to theft of gas and building of a canal in Gaza.   Related: Zionist and US imperialist criminals are about to grab the natural gas off shore Gaza