[DEBATE] : 21st-century anti-Semitism?

[Patrick Bond]

Louis Proyect's antidote to this gibberish is below:

grinker at mweb.co.za wrote:
> Monday 19 January 2009
> After Gaza: what’s behind 21st-century anti-Semitism?
> Anti-Israel sentiment is morphing into anti-Jewish sentiment, as more and more people project their disdain for the modern world on to ‘the Jew’.
> Frank Furedi 
>   

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/spiked-onlines-obsession-with-anti-semitism/:

I am somewhat ambivalent about answering Spiked online since so few 
people nowadays, especially them, view it as having anything to do with 
the left. With the exception of James Heartfield, just about every 
contributor to Spiked has stopped pretending to be part of the left. 
However, since they are in the habit of writing “critiques” of the left, 
particularly the activist sector that organizes mass demonstrations 
against the war in Iraq and more lately the war on Gaza, it is worth 
responding to them.

Since Spiked online accuses protesters of adapting to anti-Semitism, a 
charge that is almost as serious as the one being mounted at notoriously 
pro-imperialist outlets such as Harry’s Place in which the 
demonstrations themselves are described as anti-Semitic, it is worth 
countering them here. Ultimately, one of the main defenses of the 
Zionist propaganda machine is that Israel’s critics are anti-Semitic. It 
is rather sad that ex-leftists involved with Spiked can get on board the 
Zionist propaganda machine but this would not be the first time that 
radicals have traveled this route. Just read Richard Seymour’s “The 
Liberal Defense of Murder”, a book that I am about half-way through now, 
to get the big picture.

It is worth noting that Professor Frank Furedi, the founder of their 
current, has had another major complaint about the Israel-Palestine 
dispute apart from the specious “anti-Semitism” question. This is from a 
piece that Frank Furedi wrote for the U. of Kent departmental newsletter 
several years ago:

Tuesday: I am in a quiet state of agitation. The headlines are dominated 
by the outbreak of violence in the Middle East and no matter how hard I 
try, I cannot remember the name of the right-wing Israeli politician, 
whose visit to the Muslim shrine (whose name I can also not recall), 
sparked the whole thing off.

Wednesday: More violence in Israel. But things are looking up — the 
debate on sex education is in the news. That’s more my kind of issue. 
Now if only there was another nice controversy about something with a 
sociological edge.

Thursday: I am feeling depressed. The violence in the Middle East 
dominates the news. The media have dropped the sex education debate.//

/ /

One supposes that Furedi would be happier if the demonstrations taking 
place during the war on Gaza had been organized on behalf of how to 
achieve simultaneous climax during intercourse, but fortunately the 
activists have a better sense of where their priorities lie.

Thankfully, Furedi’s “After Gaza: what’s behind 21st-century 
anti-Semitism? 
<http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6117/>” makes no 
mention of sex education, but it is a bit fucked—to use the vernacular. 
Its most egregious error is to consider the question of anti-Semitism 
ahistorically. For example, when windows are broken at a Starbucks 
because the president is an outspoken Zionist, Furedi worries that a 
Kristallnacht is in the offing.

Increasingly, protesters are targeting Jews for being Jews. They have 
agitated for the boycott and even harassment of ‘Israeli shops’, but in 
practice this means boycotting and harassing Jewish-owned shops, such as 
Marks & Spencer (some of whose stores have been barricaded by 
anti-Israel protesters) and Starbucks (a number of whose coffee shops 
have been attacked in London and elsewhere). Some protesters in Italy 
don’t share the linguistic subtlety of those ostensibly calling for a 
boycott of ‘Israeli shops’. Giancarlo Desiderati, spokesman for the 
trade union Flaica-Cub, has called for a boycott of Jewish businesses in 
Rome. A leaflet issued by his union informed Romans that anything they 
purchase in Jewish-owned shops will be ‘tainted by blood’.

Once upon a time, when Furedi was a Marxist rather than the libertarian 
that he is today, he might have considered the question of the economic 
crisis that fueled anti-Semitism. The likelihood that Jews will be 
persecuted in the same way that they were in Germany during the 1930s is 
almost nil. Instead, the likely victims will be Arab and African 
immigrants. For example, Great Britain’s largest fascist organization, 
the BNP, has been virulently opposed to the left-wing protestors 
targeted by Furedi:

/I/ndeed, the destruction of Israel (which is the generally stated aim 
of all the far-left and Muslim demonstrators screaming and on occasion 
rioting outside the Israeli Embassy in London, and the generally 
unstated aim of the far smaller number of neo-Nazi cranks siding with 
them on the Internet) would most definitely not placate a single 
hardline Muslim.

One of the fundamental lessons of the West’s long and at times desperate 
defence against Islam’s institutionalised aggression, sexual predation 
and imperialism, is that every victory for Islamic fighters reinforces 
the hysterical certainty in the word of the Prophet and in Islam’s 
self-proclaimed destiny to conquer the entire world.

Now these are the real successors to Adolph Hitler, not the left-wing 
protestors who break a Starbucks window. While it is obviously wrong to 
target Jewish-owned businesses, the main activity being carried out 
today by the left are mass demonstrations demanding an end to the 
Israeli assault on Gaza. If Furedi and his co-thinkers were half as 
worked up by entire city blocks being leveled by IDF bombs as they were 
by a broken Starbucks window, they would be taken more seriously by 
their readers. For long-time monitors of this peculiar British group, 
such as me, the last thing we have learned to expect from them is a 
desire to engage with the left. They are much happier in the role of 
nose-thumbing contrarians, even when this means being wrong 99 percent 
of the time.

Most of Furedi’s article is about attitudes toward the Jews of Europe 
rather than anti-Semitism as an institution. In early 20^th century 
history, Jews suffered institutional oppression just as Blacks in the 
U.S. did. For example, Hitler enacted laws that were modeled on Jim Crow 
laws in the U.S. Also, before the Bolshevik-led revolution, Czarist 
Russia was rife with anti-Semitism. For example, Jews were forced to 
live in the “Pale of Settlement” and pay twice the tax that a Christian 
paid. In other less repressive countries, Jews suffered job 
discrimination and were excluded from educational institutions. In 
France, the Dreyfus affair in France epitomized the tendency for Jews to 
be singled out and punished.

What is missing from Furedi’s analysis is the /role of the state/. If 
anti-Semitism were a real threat today, there would be evidence of 
proposed legislation to punish Jews as Jews. No such evidence exists, 
nor is there evidence that Jews are being excluded from professions or 
universities because of their ethnicity or religion.

If anything, raising “anti-Semitism” as some sort of impending threat is 
just another example of the public relations campaign that gets mounted 
whenever Palestinians are asserting themselves. During the spate of 
suicide bombings in Israel taking place in 2001, a major campaign 
against alleged anti-Semitism on American campuses was organized. It was 
transparently clear that the real target of this campaign was the 
anti-Zionist left, as I tried to make clear to one of the signatories of 
an open letter on anti-Semitism that appeared in the N.Y. Times:

Open Letter to Bard College President on “Anti-Semitism” on campus

Oct. 8, 2002

Dear Leon Botstein,

I hope everything is going okay with you and your master plan for 
turning Bard College into a first-rate American institution. No doubt 
the new Performing Institute designed by megastar Frank Gehry will 
catapult Bard into the stratosphere even though to me it looks like a 
melting gingerbread house designed by somebody who ate one too many 
peyote buttons. But–hey–what do I know. For me, some of the most 
emblematic buildings at Bard during my stint (1961-1965) were the 
barracks that had been constructed after WWII for returning veterans. 
They might have looked like dormitories for migrant farm laborers, but 
they did contain some extraordinary students. Other times–other places.

But the reason I write you now is to express my disappointment that you 
would jump on the “Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism” bandwagon. Surely, you 
must understand that this was the purpose of the full-page ad in the NY 
Times, even though it was framed in terms of protecting Jewish students 
from another Kristallnacht. Here at Columbia University, where I have 
worked for the past 10 years, you can find a vibrant anti-Zionist 
movement that is spearheaded by Jews in fact. Now maybe they are in some 
sort of dark conspiracy to punish their co-religionists but mostly they 
seem intent on raising fellow students’ awareness of what Gush Shalom 
leader Uri Avnery calls “a cruel, brutal and colonizing state.”

When you turn to the Chronicles of Higher Education (Oct. 4) article on 
“anti-Semitism” on campus, the evidence is pretty thin. Your fellow 
signatory Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College of Columbia 
University, said that he noticed a graffiti on a men’s-room wall that 
said, “Let’s kill the Jews.” He said he looked in several stalls and 
found other graffiti, both anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic.

Now my offices are in Teachers College and I have had occasion to visit 
many of their facilities on account of my chronic irritable bowel 
syndrome. But I have never seen such graffiti myself. Is it possible 
that President Levine is manufacturing evidence like the Gulf of Tonkin 
incident? I wouldn’t rule this out myself.

(I would hasten to add that the only threatening graffiti I spotted was 
“Death to Short People”, which is on the first floor of Thorndike, in 
the rightmost stall in the bathroom near the photocopying room. I often 
go there to do my business and read a little CLR James while I’m at it. 
Now I have never felt threatened by this graffiti, even though I barely 
reach 5′6″.)

On the other hand, there are lots of real attacks taking place against 
professors and students who are protesting Israeli brutality. I am 
acquainted with Mohammad Alam, an economics professor at Northeastern, 
whose “dossier” has turned up in a website run by Daniel Pipes. Along 
with institutions such as my employer Columbia University, these voices 
are being singled out as virtually in league with suicide bombers.

I think you probably understand why this point of view is being policed 
right now. The Zionist establishment is deathly afraid that a divestment 
movement might take root among Jewish progressives on campus. My 
suggestion to all the esteemed college presidents who signed the ad is 
to use their good influence to stop Israel from acting like apartheid 
South Africa. That is surely the best way that such a movement can be 
preempted.

Respectfully yours,

Louis Proyect, class of 1965