In my previous communique, I used Roth and Hirsh as models for a critique of antisemitism, its uses and abuses and its relationship to the anti-Zionism of sections of the Western left.
I have received another extremely thoughful and subtle article on the same subject - see below. I really cannot find anything with which I would be in serious disagreement. Despite its length and somewhat rarified tone I strongly suggest everyone reads it in full.
kind regards
Mike Berger
Legacy of Hope: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Resistance Yesterday and Today.
27 January 2010
Robert Fine, UCU member and Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick.
Thanks to the UCU executive for organising this series of important meetings on antisemitism and for inviting me to speak on this occasion.
Re-remembering the Holocaust
When we remember the Holocaust, what is it that we try to keep in mind? Remembering the past is an act of investigation, study, selection, comparison, interpretation and reflection. The past is past but how we understand it has much to do with the present.
When I teach my course on the Sociology of the Holocaust I often refer to passage from Hannah Arendt’s fine book on the Eichmann trial where she writes:
‘the supreme crime it (the court) was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people, and … only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and antisemitism’.
The passage is not simple to decode but its gist,as I understand it, is this: the physical extermination of around six million Jewish people was both a crime against Jews and a crime against humanity; it was derived from the long history of European antisemitism and it was an attack on human plurality as such; it had to do with Europe’s longest hatred and also with Europe’s capacity to dehumanise other people. It has a particular meaning for Jews and a universal meaning for humanity.
Holocaust education has to do two things at once. It has to bring out the universal lessons of the Holocaust – about racism, ultra-nationalism, genocide, the role of ordinary men, etc. – and it must tell the story of what happened to Jews. These tasks are not remotely contradictory – any more than a focus on what happened to Armenians in Turkey or Moslems in Bosnia or indigenous peoples in South America lies in opposition to universal history.
In the aftermath of the war the antisemitic dimension of the destruction of European Jews was largely subsumed to narratives concerning the struggles of European nations against the Nazis. In some instances this allowed for new antisemitic campaigns to be waged under the umbrella of anti-Nazism or antizionism. After the Eichmann trial the old biblical term ‘Holocaust’ was recovered to refer to the destruction of Jews and to bring to the fore the antisemitic dimension of this event. There followed a tendency to sacralise the Holocaust, or if we use the phrase of my late friend and colleague, Gillian Rose, to preach a kind of ‘Holocaust piety’. The difficulty we all face today is how to combine the specificity of the event with its universal resonance.
Today we hear another yet more troubling refrain. It is that Holocaust memory has become exclusive: that it’s all about Jewish suffering; that it ignores the non-Jewish people who were also murdered by the Nazis; that Jews have become obsessed by their own suffering at the expense of others; that no longer is any universal meaning drawn from collective memory. It is said that today we suffer from a surfeit of Holocaust museums, films, histories and stories as if this were the only injustice we need to remember. It is said that it is inconsistent to make Holocaust-denial illegal but not genocide denial more generally. It is said that the Holocaust is now used instrumentally to protect Israel from criticism and justify the crimes Israel commits. At the extreme it is said that what Israel does to Palestinians is ‘like’ the Holocaust or that the victims of the Holocaust have now become the victimisers of the Palestinians.
These criticisms are alluring because they appear universalistic. Most of us would agree that memory of the Holocaust ought not to privilege the suffering of Jews at the expense of other sufferings. The cry of ‘Never Again’ ought not to be converted into an injunction that ‘never again’ refers only to Jews. Memory of the Holocaust ought not to protect Israel from criticism. Concern over antisemitism ought not to blind us to other racisms. Collective memory of the Holocaust should not make us blind to the suffering of others. Emphasis on Jewish suffering should not subvert the universal meaning of the Holocaust. And to misquote W H Auden, those to whom evil is done should certainly not do evil in return.
We may all agree that memory of the Holocaust should serve rather as a ‘fire alarm’ alerting us all human atrocities and our need to confront them. But who says otherwise? Who does not share this view? I hear some of my colleagues say: ‘they’ are sensitive only to the mass murder of Jews, ‘they’ turn the Holocaust into an excuse to ignore other crimes, ‘they’ shout antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends Palestinians; ‘they’ instrumentalise the Holocaust for their own political purposes. Who are the ‘they’ in question? The amorphousness of the ‘they’ designation is part of the problem.
There are, to be sure, certain Jewish ultra-nationalists who think only of Jewish suffering and ignore the suffering of others. Such blinkered views are generally true of how nationalists respond to racism against their own people. They do so in nationalistic ways. There is nothing I know that marks out Jewish nationalists here from the general phenomenon that opposition to racism against one’s own people can be nationalistic rather than antiracist, particularistic rather than universal. A critique of Jewish ultra-nationalism only makes sense alongside a critique of other forms of ultra-nationalisms in Europe and the Middle East. It must be distinguished from the notion that Jews or Israeli Jews think only of their own people and nothing of the suffering of others. This problem is not resolved by saying that the ‘they’ who ignore the suffering of others are ‘Zionists’ and ‘defenders of Israel’. We can of course defend the right of the state of Israel to exist and not be threatened by its neighbours without endorsing the views of Israeli ultra-nationalism. Slippage of this sort takes us from the realm of political argument into that of vilifying a whole nation.
2. Denying antisemitism
A now familiar refrain among ‘critics of Israel’ is that the question of antisemitism is only raised to devalue or deflect criticism of Israel. Within our own union I frequently hear this refrain. A UCU motion of 2007 on Israel included the words: ‘criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitic’ and a motion of 2008 repeated that ‘criticism of Israel or Israeli policy is not, as such, antisemitic’. It seems fitting on this occasion that we reflect carefully about this refrain and what it means.
One colleague I was reading the other day wrote that ‘antisemitism charges are just part of the deal for anyone who speaks out for Palestine’ and added that ‘the important point in all this is that we keep speaking out for Palestine’. Well, it is important to speak out for Palestinians. But in the eyes of this colleague at least it is clear that he should not worry about antisemitism since the charge of antisemitism functions in his view only or mainly to demonize opposition to Israel.
Another colleague wrote that the term ‘antisemitism’ has become little more than a rhetoric used to translate what one is actually hearing, say a protest against the killing of children and civilians by the Israeli army, into hatred of Jews. Another laments that ‘by shouting antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians’, defenders of Israel rob the word of its universal resonance.
The feeling expressed in all these statements is that the accusation of antisemitism is now used to trash anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government. It seems that the value of this coinage is undercut by its over-use. The struggle against antisemitism, once seen as central to the construction of a new Europe after the war, is increasingly disavowed since the charge of antisemitism merely serves to deflect or devalue criticism of Israeli occupation, Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli racism toward Arabs, and Israeli military force in Lebanon and Gaza. It would seem that the trouble with Europe is no longer antisemitism but talk of antisemitism. Sometimes we hear people speaking ‘as Jews’ and offering the authority of their Jewishness to confirm that criticism of Israel is not in fact antisemitic.
This emphatic insistence that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic but is labelled antisemitic by ‘defenders of Israel’ seems to me hugely problematic. Let me offer three reasons why I think we should reflect very hard about what’s going on.
First, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic is a way of saying that people only raise concerns and fears about antisemitism in bad faith. It insinuates that those who, rightly or wrongly, raise concerns over antisemitism, are not really concerned about antisemitism at all but only about defending Israel at all costs. It implies that since we cannot defend Israel overtly, we do so covertly and deceptively. The premise is that individuals and organisations which express a sense of alarm about the re-emergence of antisemitism in Europe are dishonest – especially when they connect antisemitism with ‘criticism of Israel’. Since there are a large number of bona fide bodies that have expressed alarm about the ties that bind criticism of Israel with antisemitism, it appears that they are conniving toward the same dishonest end.
Second, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic represents a disturbing tendency in some quarters to wear the charge of antisemitism as almost a badge of honour. It appears as a sign that you are a true friend of the Palestinians, rather than as a stimulus to self-reflection. Refusal to take antisemitism seriously must be a problem for a movement committed to antiracism, that is to say, to opposition to all forms of racism and not only to some. It represents a real regression from the principle established by the McPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 that if people sees themselves as victims of racism, this does not mean that they are victims of racism but it does mean that there is a duty on institutions to take seriously what is alleged. Emphatic denial of antisemitism encourages institutions not to take allegations of antisemitism seriously whether or not they are directly to do with Israel. There is no doubt in my mind that this has been a major problem within our own union.
Third, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic refuses to distinguish between legitimate and antisemitic criticism of Israel. Let me exemplify the problem by reference to the reports of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism and the OSCE. These reports have all accepted that criticism of Israel is not as such antisemitic but warn that criticism of Israel can and does sometimes overlap with antisemitism. No one who looks, for example, at David Duke’s website should need further persuasion on this issue. They say that criticism of Israel can become antisemitic if it takes the form, for example, of selecting Israel as uniquely evil or violent among nations, or holding Jews or Israeli Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, or comparing the military occupation of Palestine with the Nazi extermination of Jews, or representing Israel through long established antisemitic myths of world conspiracy, control of the media, murder of non-Jewish children, etc. In such cases they maintain that the substitution of the word ‘Zionists’ for ‘Jews’ makes little substantial difference to the hostility in question. They also say, on an issue that is closer to home, that to campaign to boycott Israeli universities but no other overseas universities in the world is discriminatory and falls foul of anti-discrimination legislation.
These more or less official reports raise the issue of where legitimate political criticism of Israel stops and antisemitism kicks in. They may or may not have got it right; we may want to draw the line elsewhere; but let us not disavow the question itself. If we accept that some kinds of ‘criticism’ of Israel are manifestly antisemitic, for example, criticism based on the notion that Jews as such, by virtue of their Jewishness, are indifferent to the suffering of non-Jews, then the question is where we draw the line – not whether we draw one.
The reduction ad Hitlerum that we find in recent representation of Israelis as blood-thirsty Nazis laughing at the misery of Palestinians is a way of wiping the Israeli Jew off the moral map. There is a worrying tendency either to ignore these inquiries altogether or to deny the message they bring by trashing the messenger. Within two radical Jewish organisations, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices, colleagues have argued that the commissions that produced these reports were influenced by the ‘Israel lobby’, that they grossly exaggerated the threat posed by antisemitism in Europe, and that they gave excessive weight to the subjective claims of Jews to suffer from antisemitism. The punch line of all these criticisms is that the reports are wrong because they give credence to the notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
If the outcome of these meetings is that we no longer hear the words: ‘criticism of Israel is not or is not as such antisemitic’, this would be hugely worthwhile. For at best such statements are glib and unserious. At worst, they sanction antisemitism in a way that we would never sanction racism.
3. On European self-identity
I never cease to be amazed at the ability of Europeans to recreate ourselves as the civilised continent, the ones who have learnt the universal lessons of the Holocaust, and to treat Jews as those who have failed to learn the lesson. European hubris sometimes takes the form of a constantly repeated narrative of progress which pays tribute to the success of the new Europe in transcending its longest hatred. It acknowledges that antisemitism was a monstrous feature of Europe’s past but insists that the conditions that gave rise to antisemitism have now come to an end with the defeat of Nazism, the rise of the European Union and the reunification of Europe. How often do we hear it said that in the new Europe antisemitism has been marginalised and delegitimised to such an extent that there is now no need to confront it.
The more radical discourse I hear is one that resists this liberal faith in progress and is far more sensitive to the recurrence of racism in European societies. It may declare that antisemitism has been replaced by Islamophobia as the real racism of the moment but it shares the conviction that antisemitism itself has run its course. The race question, we are told, is no longer whether Jews can be good Germans or good Brits but whether Muslims can be good Europeans. Either in its liberal or radical forms, the factual claim that antisemitism is no longer a problem in Europe only serves to exclude antisemitism from the list of racisms Europe now has to confront if a new postnationalist Europe is to be built. This rewriting of history, based on the assumption that antisemitism has been well and truly overcome in the new Europe, leaves out the multiple ways in which the past weighs upon the present.
Today we see the re-emergence of ultra-nationalist parties in Europe. We might think, for example, of the Tories’ new friends in the EU, the Conservatives and Reformists grouping, led by the Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who began his political journey in a neo-Nazi organisation, wore fascist antisemitic symbols and continues to hold that Poles should not apologise for the 1941 pogrom at Jedwabne until Jews have apologised for the wrongs they inflicted on Poles. Or we might think of the Latvian affiliate to this grouping, the For Fatherland and Freedom party, which has been a prime mover behind annual parades celebrating the Latvian legion of the Waffen-SS. We know that Kaminski and the For Fatherland and Freedom party are but the tip of a large and ugly iceberg of a growing nationalist politics in Europe.
It would be foolish to see the liberal establishment as exempt from antisemitic temptations. The new Europeans are quite capable of re-creating a moral division of the world between themselves and others that stigmatises others as ‘nationalist’ as much as it idealises themselves as ‘postnationalist’. It is not inevitable that the new Europe must be exclusionary in this way, witness the considerable efforts being made to monitor and combat racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, but the urge is internal to it. The representation of Israel in particular as the incarnation of the negative properties Europe has succeeded in overcoming is a case in point. ‘Israel’ and ‘Zionism’ serve as vessels into which the new European can project all that is bad in European history – its colonial past, ethnic divisions, institutionalised racisms, excesses of superfluous violence, etc. – and preserve the good for themselves. In European thought there has long existed a conviction that if we can only rid ourselves of some alien element – be it the bourgeoisie, parasites, terrorists or Jews – then all will be well with the world. Representation of Israel as a pariah state or even a pariah people can perform a similar mythic function for a European consciousness anxious to divest itself of the legacy not only of its own past but also its present.
Antizionists ‘conspire’ just as Zionists do but the denial of antisemitism can no more be explained in terms of any conspiracy theory than can new antisemitism theory. Conspiracies exist but conspiracy theory explains nothing. The antisemitism denial of which I speak cannot be explained by any conspiracy to forge an anti-Israel alliance. Its roots are far more mundane and socially grounded. They lie in the experience most of us have that antisemitism have not been a day to day problem in much of Europe or the UK. They lie in the identity politics embraced by many radical Jews who are intent on absolving themselves, declaring they are not like the ‘Zionists’, making it clear that what the Jewish state does is not done in their name. They lie on the Left in a politics of anti-imperialism which divides the world between oppressor and oppressed nations without allowing any complication or indeed any intersubjective dynamics to enter this binary dichotomised picture of the world. They lie in the idealist philosophy of Rawlsian liberalism that measures the constitution and actions of a particular state against the ideal of what a rational state ought to be without comparing the justice and injustices of the Jewish state against the material practices of other states. They lie finally perhaps in the dynamics of political argument itself which tends to divide the world into opposing camps, leads the members of one camp to caricature the beliefs of the other, and to raise an essentially local struggle into the emblem or signifier of the camps themselves. Which side you are on is determined by your stance on Israel: ‘support’ it and you believe in racism and ethnic cleansing; ‘criticise’ it and you are on the side of progress.
4. Antisemitism and criticism of Israel
I have focused in this polemic on Europe but let me end on this note. The struggle for justice for Palestinians and the struggle against antisemitism often seem worlds apart but this is not so. They belong to one another and draw from the same sources. As far as justice for Palestinians is concerned, the antisemitism question is not a red herring. It is a key to breaking out of the current impasse.
Antisemitism does no favours to the Palestinian cause. In Europe it diminishes support for Palestinian rights because until now at least most people, consciously or intuitively, won’t have anything to do with a movement that has a whiff of antisemitism around it. In Israel it reinforces the grip of ultra-nationalists and religious extremists who know very well how to exploit antisemitism for their own ends. In Palestine it reinforces the grip of fundamentalist leaderships that threaten the freedom of Palestinians from within as much or more than they threaten the existence of Israel from without. In surrounding Arab states it allows reactionary rulers to divert social and political opposition into hatred of Jews and somehow to receive little international criticism for so doing. In the world generally it allows people to blame Israel and Israel alone for the suffering of Palestinians as if the end of Israel and beginning of justice for Palestinians were one and the same thing. It diverts from the real responsibilities of power that Israel is failing to meet.
We have to be careful not to invert the problem we are addressing. If ultra-nationalists in Israel racialise Arabs and turn them into a unitary category, the temptation is to respond with an act of reversal that turns ‘Zionists’ into an equally ‘otherised’ unitary category. We also have to be careful not to place Palestinians in a single identity script as victims and hear only the voice we want to hear. I am not suggesting that Palestinians are not victims but they are not only victims and not only victims of Israel. The problem we need to tackle is that our sense of injustice about the treatment of Palestinians can incline those who feel compassion for them to see this injustice as the formative experience in their lives and replace recognition of their agency with contempt for the people we charge with excluding and oppressing them. No human being is entirely ‘other’ than another, even where unequal social structures make this hard to see. No human being is entirely in solidarity with a whole people, however much he or she affords herself the right to speak on their behalf.
In Europe and the Middle East we see the rise of ultra-nationalism taking many forms – all of which are deeply threatening to our own universal values. What we call ‘antizionism’ today is an anti-nationalism of fools. It casts all the sins of ultra-nationalism onto Zionists and Israel. It won’t see antisemitism because it breaks their world view. In the past antisemitism provided a unifying ideology for a very diverse array of social and political grievances. Today the danger is that ‘antizionism’ may provide a point of unification around which sections of the far right, the anti-imperialist left, radical Islam and even the liberal establishment might coalesce.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Roth, Hirsh and Antisemitism
I have not posted to this blog since June last year. I'm not entirely sure it serves a purpose but producing the occasional bulletin for distribution at least helps me clarify my own thoughts. So my newsletter has been coming out at rather irregular intervals without actually being posted to this blog. From here on I will make a point of ensuring that the blog is updated whenever I actually get around to putting pen to paper.
In the meantime it accumulated a few comments - 6 from David Zinn who is so incorrigibly abusive and compulsively one-track that I will no longer bother with him. There is enough abysmal trash on the Internet without adding more garbage.
There was a comment from Steven Robins which I will try to add here and address. If it does not appear it is because I cannot access it any longer. My apologies for that, but the post below actually addresses some of his issues - albeit indirectly.
I will continue to publish comments - supportive, analytical or critical - where I deem them to have merit. I will also either answer them personally or publish worthwhile responses from others.
Roth, Hirsh and Antisemitism
Those at the top of the celebrity food chain are painfully exposed to the fickleness of public opinion; Tiger Woods and Blair come to mind but the list is a long one. From hero to zero is not really a danger to those of us at the bottom of the celebrity ladder, but even we know that we get undeserved bouquets and brickbats at times. This is probably the reason Kipling called “success” and “failure” the two imposters.
Speaking from a personal perspective, the task of countering the persistent and insidious anti-Israel media bias, can lead to errors of fact, emphasis and judgement. Besides the failure of the media to provide a balanced treatment of the multi-faceted and convoluted conflicts which flourish within the Middle East hothouse, one needs to deal with more-or-less orchestrated campaigns from activists who for various reasons (psychological and ideological) and are committed to unending propaganda warfare against the state of Israel. Truly reliable facts are difficult to come by, space is immensely limited and the level of debate is generally polarised and abysmally low. Fatigue, the pressures of time and simple irritation compound the problem.
Thus I hope to occasionally use this newsletter/blog to bring to your attention some of the better articles and books pertaining to Israel or to Jewry more broadly and to raise issues which are neither suitable nor possible to deal with properly in the popular press.
It is important to frame this within the context of an Israel engaged in an existential war against those who like to destroy it altogether. Some of our co-religionists, who have arrogated to themselves the mantle of universal ethical spokespersons, would like to you to believe this assertion is paranoia or simply a device to silence criticism. It is neither. There is more than sufficient evidence ranging from the actual statements of those who make their ambitions quite plain all the way through to actions whose only consequence is in fact the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. The fact that in narrow military terms Israel is considerably stronger than her enemies, does not make their intentions any less sinister. Nor is the military battlefield the only arena in which this conflict is being fought. As important are the arenas of demography, geostrategic resources and public opinion – to mention only some. In all of these Israel’s enemies are equal or superior with extremely important implications for Israel’s’ security, and indeed for the security of global Jewry.
Nor does the fact that Israel is engaged in an existential struggle absolve it from criticism. But it does make it imperative that those who claim to support it take great care not to become the handmaidens of Israel’s enemies – a topic I have discussed previously and do not wish to revisit here.
The first theme of this issue is the question of anti-semitism arising, strangely enough, out of a novel, which many of you may have already read, and I have belatedly got around to finishing. I’m referring to Philip Roth’s “The plot against America”. I came away overwhelmed by its extraordinarily ambitious scope – a combination of an acutely observed socio-political treatise on an adolescent and still raw America, a polemic, a scrupulous and partly autobiographical examination of character, all embedded in an imaginative and complex narrative rich in incident and unexpected twists. Despite its polemical undertone at no stage did this undermine the honesty with which Roth parades his vast cast of Jewish and non-Jewish characters before us; nor does he rub our noses in the lessons to be drawn from them but allows the reader to form his own conclusions.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true anti-semitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe?
While Roth’s answer is indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausible and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. In some way the ability to detect and decipher the true meaning lies within the Jewish psychological DNA, honed by centuries of uncertainty and oppression. Such gut recognition can be blocked by excessive education laced with ambition, vanity and arrogance, represented by the oleaginous and politically adroit, Rabbi Bengelsdorf - whose career of pandering and sycophancy comes to a satisfyingly nasty end by the end of the book.
Nor are the Jews the only ones who understand the code. The anti-semites and opportunists within the American population also understand the new licence to take out their prejudices on their fellow Jews. But Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil irrespective of their religious ethnic affiliations, none of which undermines the central insight: that anti-semitism can come cunningly disguised, perhaps especially to the anti-semite himself. This does not mitigate its profoundly sinister origins in the darker reaches of the human psyche or the dangers it holds for Jew and non-Jew alike.
Of course, this analysis is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the Jews of America, Israel is an imperfect society despite its enormous successes. Corruption is rife especially within its political space. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality is becoming worse and education, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthily excessive influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to deal more humanely and effectively with its minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t solved the problem of ruling, however distantly and indirectly, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given Israel’s history, the neighbourhood in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some are utterly intractable.
But none of Israel’s failures, imperfections and transgressions remotely justify the obsessive and unbalanced criticism leveled at it. These, like the anti-semitism of Lindbergh’s America, reflect the psychological twists and political agendas of Israel’s critics rather than an objective view of Israel itself. The carefully calibrated and disguised criticisms of some of its more sophisticated enemies are clearly and correctly understood both by the ordinary Jew and by those who wish Israel harm as threats. Only those blinded by some combination of denialism, internalised and unexamined anti-semitism, free-floating guilt, vanity, ignorance or simple ambition and greed can believe otherwise.
Some of this is put extremely well by David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08, and I quote extensively from it below..
“Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East where not all the rights and wrongs are on one side, where neither nation has always acted wisely and where in the absence of peace, things can only get worse.
When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a
narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism.
Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest.
In Britain we have dealt a fairly heavy blow, for the moment, to the boycotters. In my view the main manifestation of antisemitism in the near future is going to be conspiracy theory.
The kind of antisemitism which really worries me is the kind which is difficult to spot. Governments can imprison those who commit racist assaults and they can ban hate-speech. But we cannot shut down the Guardian newspaper or my
trade union or the Green Party.
Why not? Because contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic.
We can respond that according to the EUMC working definition this or that piece in the Guardian is in fact antisemitic, irrespective of what people think. But the counter-response will be “of course, you wrote it”.
I am not against bringing legal or bureaucratic power to bear against antisemitism when that is possible – interestingly the boycott in my own union was ended with the help of a combination of the two. But we have to lead with a political fight, by making and winning arguments.
We should not base our strategy on the assumption that the powerful in the world - or in America - will be prepared to oppose antisemitism. We should not act as though the "lobby" rhetoric was true. It isn’t. Moshe Postone tells us that antisemitism can appear to be anti-hegemonic. But we shouldn’t act as though antisemitism was in fact anti-hegemonic.
We don’t aim to change the mind of Ilan Pappe or Saumas Milne but we do aim to change the mind of those who may be influenced by them. Yesterday John Mann said that the boycotters are afraid of us. And I think they are. They’re not afraid of being denounced as wild-eyed leftists or as antisemites or as self-haters. They love that.
But they are afraid of coming up against people who have a chance of influencing their own followers or of sewing (sic)doubt amongst those who they aim to influence. This is a difficult job. ...
The contemporary way of doing antisemitic conspiracy theory was given a stamp of professorial legitimacy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in 2006. They created a vocabulary which one could use to express conspiracy theory and which did not seem to be antisemtic.
Conspiracy theory is nearly always, today, articulated using the Livingstone Formulation, which claims that Jews play the antisemitism card in bad faith in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli human rights abuses. In this way, anyone who raises a worry about contemporary antisemitism already stands accused of doing so maliciously; and they stand accused of doing so as part of a common plan with others. Livingstone’s formulation also denies the distinction between criticism and demonization.
Thursday’s Guardian had the rhetoric and the images of antisemitic conspiracy theory running through it, from the front page to the inside pages, to the leader. Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”
I will leave this theme here. The message is to all of us is that it is not necessary to believe Israel is perfect or wholly right to support or defend it. It is not necessary to believe or claim others are intrinsically evil or that they have no legitimacy in order to oppose them. The story of Israel and the Palestinians contains hurts suffered and wrongs committed by both sides. But until the Palestinians can free themselves from the narrative of endless victimhood, the ideologies and anti-semitism of the Western left and the Muslim world, the medieval visions of Jihadi Islamism and the corrupt gangsters ruling over them, their ability to find creative solutions to their existential problems will remain stillborn.
Israel, hopefully, will continue to avoid that trap as they have managed so far at least partially. They have a recent history of heroic achievement to provide them with the confidence to get beyond their own fears and prejudices and fulfill their destiny.
I would be interested in other people’s perceptions of the issues discussed in this post.
Mike Berger
In the meantime it accumulated a few comments - 6 from David Zinn who is so incorrigibly abusive and compulsively one-track that I will no longer bother with him. There is enough abysmal trash on the Internet without adding more garbage.
There was a comment from Steven Robins which I will try to add here and address. If it does not appear it is because I cannot access it any longer. My apologies for that, but the post below actually addresses some of his issues - albeit indirectly.
I will continue to publish comments - supportive, analytical or critical - where I deem them to have merit. I will also either answer them personally or publish worthwhile responses from others.
Roth, Hirsh and Antisemitism
Those at the top of the celebrity food chain are painfully exposed to the fickleness of public opinion; Tiger Woods and Blair come to mind but the list is a long one. From hero to zero is not really a danger to those of us at the bottom of the celebrity ladder, but even we know that we get undeserved bouquets and brickbats at times. This is probably the reason Kipling called “success” and “failure” the two imposters.
Speaking from a personal perspective, the task of countering the persistent and insidious anti-Israel media bias, can lead to errors of fact, emphasis and judgement. Besides the failure of the media to provide a balanced treatment of the multi-faceted and convoluted conflicts which flourish within the Middle East hothouse, one needs to deal with more-or-less orchestrated campaigns from activists who for various reasons (psychological and ideological) and are committed to unending propaganda warfare against the state of Israel. Truly reliable facts are difficult to come by, space is immensely limited and the level of debate is generally polarised and abysmally low. Fatigue, the pressures of time and simple irritation compound the problem.
Thus I hope to occasionally use this newsletter/blog to bring to your attention some of the better articles and books pertaining to Israel or to Jewry more broadly and to raise issues which are neither suitable nor possible to deal with properly in the popular press.
It is important to frame this within the context of an Israel engaged in an existential war against those who like to destroy it altogether. Some of our co-religionists, who have arrogated to themselves the mantle of universal ethical spokespersons, would like to you to believe this assertion is paranoia or simply a device to silence criticism. It is neither. There is more than sufficient evidence ranging from the actual statements of those who make their ambitions quite plain all the way through to actions whose only consequence is in fact the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. The fact that in narrow military terms Israel is considerably stronger than her enemies, does not make their intentions any less sinister. Nor is the military battlefield the only arena in which this conflict is being fought. As important are the arenas of demography, geostrategic resources and public opinion – to mention only some. In all of these Israel’s enemies are equal or superior with extremely important implications for Israel’s’ security, and indeed for the security of global Jewry.
Nor does the fact that Israel is engaged in an existential struggle absolve it from criticism. But it does make it imperative that those who claim to support it take great care not to become the handmaidens of Israel’s enemies – a topic I have discussed previously and do not wish to revisit here.
The first theme of this issue is the question of anti-semitism arising, strangely enough, out of a novel, which many of you may have already read, and I have belatedly got around to finishing. I’m referring to Philip Roth’s “The plot against America”. I came away overwhelmed by its extraordinarily ambitious scope – a combination of an acutely observed socio-political treatise on an adolescent and still raw America, a polemic, a scrupulous and partly autobiographical examination of character, all embedded in an imaginative and complex narrative rich in incident and unexpected twists. Despite its polemical undertone at no stage did this undermine the honesty with which Roth parades his vast cast of Jewish and non-Jewish characters before us; nor does he rub our noses in the lessons to be drawn from them but allows the reader to form his own conclusions.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true anti-semitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe?
While Roth’s answer is indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausible and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. In some way the ability to detect and decipher the true meaning lies within the Jewish psychological DNA, honed by centuries of uncertainty and oppression. Such gut recognition can be blocked by excessive education laced with ambition, vanity and arrogance, represented by the oleaginous and politically adroit, Rabbi Bengelsdorf - whose career of pandering and sycophancy comes to a satisfyingly nasty end by the end of the book.
Nor are the Jews the only ones who understand the code. The anti-semites and opportunists within the American population also understand the new licence to take out their prejudices on their fellow Jews. But Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil irrespective of their religious ethnic affiliations, none of which undermines the central insight: that anti-semitism can come cunningly disguised, perhaps especially to the anti-semite himself. This does not mitigate its profoundly sinister origins in the darker reaches of the human psyche or the dangers it holds for Jew and non-Jew alike.
Of course, this analysis is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the Jews of America, Israel is an imperfect society despite its enormous successes. Corruption is rife especially within its political space. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality is becoming worse and education, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthily excessive influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to deal more humanely and effectively with its minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t solved the problem of ruling, however distantly and indirectly, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given Israel’s history, the neighbourhood in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some are utterly intractable.
But none of Israel’s failures, imperfections and transgressions remotely justify the obsessive and unbalanced criticism leveled at it. These, like the anti-semitism of Lindbergh’s America, reflect the psychological twists and political agendas of Israel’s critics rather than an objective view of Israel itself. The carefully calibrated and disguised criticisms of some of its more sophisticated enemies are clearly and correctly understood both by the ordinary Jew and by those who wish Israel harm as threats. Only those blinded by some combination of denialism, internalised and unexamined anti-semitism, free-floating guilt, vanity, ignorance or simple ambition and greed can believe otherwise.
Some of this is put extremely well by David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08, and I quote extensively from it below..
“Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East where not all the rights and wrongs are on one side, where neither nation has always acted wisely and where in the absence of peace, things can only get worse.
When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a
narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism.
Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest.
In Britain we have dealt a fairly heavy blow, for the moment, to the boycotters. In my view the main manifestation of antisemitism in the near future is going to be conspiracy theory.
The kind of antisemitism which really worries me is the kind which is difficult to spot. Governments can imprison those who commit racist assaults and they can ban hate-speech. But we cannot shut down the Guardian newspaper or my
trade union or the Green Party.
Why not? Because contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic.
We can respond that according to the EUMC working definition this or that piece in the Guardian is in fact antisemitic, irrespective of what people think. But the counter-response will be “of course, you wrote it”.
I am not against bringing legal or bureaucratic power to bear against antisemitism when that is possible – interestingly the boycott in my own union was ended with the help of a combination of the two. But we have to lead with a political fight, by making and winning arguments.
We should not base our strategy on the assumption that the powerful in the world - or in America - will be prepared to oppose antisemitism. We should not act as though the "lobby" rhetoric was true. It isn’t. Moshe Postone tells us that antisemitism can appear to be anti-hegemonic. But we shouldn’t act as though antisemitism was in fact anti-hegemonic.
We don’t aim to change the mind of Ilan Pappe or Saumas Milne but we do aim to change the mind of those who may be influenced by them. Yesterday John Mann said that the boycotters are afraid of us. And I think they are. They’re not afraid of being denounced as wild-eyed leftists or as antisemites or as self-haters. They love that.
But they are afraid of coming up against people who have a chance of influencing their own followers or of sewing (sic)doubt amongst those who they aim to influence. This is a difficult job. ...
The contemporary way of doing antisemitic conspiracy theory was given a stamp of professorial legitimacy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in 2006. They created a vocabulary which one could use to express conspiracy theory and which did not seem to be antisemtic.
Conspiracy theory is nearly always, today, articulated using the Livingstone Formulation, which claims that Jews play the antisemitism card in bad faith in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli human rights abuses. In this way, anyone who raises a worry about contemporary antisemitism already stands accused of doing so maliciously; and they stand accused of doing so as part of a common plan with others. Livingstone’s formulation also denies the distinction between criticism and demonization.
Thursday’s Guardian had the rhetoric and the images of antisemitic conspiracy theory running through it, from the front page to the inside pages, to the leader. Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”
I will leave this theme here. The message is to all of us is that it is not necessary to believe Israel is perfect or wholly right to support or defend it. It is not necessary to believe or claim others are intrinsically evil or that they have no legitimacy in order to oppose them. The story of Israel and the Palestinians contains hurts suffered and wrongs committed by both sides. But until the Palestinians can free themselves from the narrative of endless victimhood, the ideologies and anti-semitism of the Western left and the Muslim world, the medieval visions of Jihadi Islamism and the corrupt gangsters ruling over them, their ability to find creative solutions to their existential problems will remain stillborn.
Israel, hopefully, will continue to avoid that trap as they have managed so far at least partially. They have a recent history of heroic achievement to provide them with the confidence to get beyond their own fears and prejudices and fulfill their destiny.
I would be interested in other people’s perceptions of the issues discussed in this post.
Mike Berger
Monday, June 15, 2009
David Zinn in his own words
David Zinn in his own words
Ryan Rutherford, aka David Zinn, (for reasons unknown to me at least) challenged me to reproduce his immortal thoughts in my blog, in his normal courteous manner - which I reproduce here here for your edification “I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?”
Of course it requires little bravery from me since there are few things which better convict the fanatic than their own words. To be honest I have not read through it since I catch the drift fairly early on; perhaps some of you will be hardy enough.
Needless to say I will not be responding but this blog is open to anyone who wishes to respond, or indeed to support Zinny. I will not include any more of Zinny on my blog. He can be found in full torrent on IAS and probably elsewhere.
I am prepared to take considered input, critical or otherwise, minus undue ad hominem irrelevancies and preferably moderately brief.
Mike Berger (aka SOLAR PLEXUS www.froggyfarm.blogspot.com )
Dear Mr Berger
Firstly, let me just say that I feel somewhat honoured that your blog reflects a newfound obsession with my words and what you presume to be my outlook. Your references to me as Zinny are too precious for words, so thanks for the smile that this nickname engendered when I first read it on your blog.
I was also going to apologise profusely for implying that you were a liar, rather than sticking with just gullible, because we really are so poorly served by the mainstream media so it is often difficult, without a bit of work, to know what’s going on in the real world. However, after reading through your take on some of my comments I have begun to wonder whether dishonesty isn’t an integral part of your strategy, which is far from unknown among Zionists.
Let’s now deconstruct, or perhaps reconstruct, those quotations of mine that you referred to in the relevant blog entry.
I wrote that “Israel is a colonialist, deeply racist and apartheid-style state is plainly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country and isn't a rabid right wing pro-Israel apologist”, and I absolutely stand by this comment based on extensive and wide ranging research on the issue. You are also correct that I don’t need any conference or HSRC report to tell me about what sort of country Israel is. I’m glad that the HSRC has compiled such a report as now there is yet more ammunition against the pro-Israel apologists of this world though, true to form, they’ve gone on the hysterical defensive trying to slander the researchers. The only element of this comment that I admit was rather ill-judged was my reference to “rabid right wing pro-Israel apologists” because there are people who are quite liberal in their outlook who still defend Israel, usually because of their Jewish heritage, or because they are simply ignorant about Israel’s actions. So apologies for having smeared everyone who supports Israel as being ultra right wing extremists.
You go on to quote me as having written “Ahmadienjad doesn’t really wish to eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’ – that is, as a Jewish State. His comments have been misrepresented”, which is a ridiculous distortion of what I actually wrote. In the relevant article on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ you are quoted as having written “Ahmadinejad's threat to reality, namely, the elimination of Israel as we know it”. Now this term, “as we know it”, is admittedly vague so I presumed you were referring to his misquoted statements that he wished to “wipe Israel off the map”. As I pointed out in my post, there is no such expression in Farsi and that Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hoped the “regime in Jerusalem would vanish from the pages of history”, a quotation carrying a very different meaning to the one generally ascribed to Ahmadinejad. I pointed out twice in the relevant thread that to refer to Ahmadinejad’s quote, even if we concede that he used the term “wipe out” or something similar, by not referring to the context is to perpetuate a falsehood. For the record here is my reference to the issue in its entirety:
“…Ahmadinejad never ever proposed "the elimination of Israel as we know it". The mainstream media incorrectly reported that he had threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" which was a woefully inaccurate translation of the Farsi. In fact, this language has no such expression. Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hopes that "the Zionist regime in Israel vanishes from the pages of history". There's a massive difference between this and hoping for some genocidal elimination of all Jews. He was basically saying, and by extension so was Ahmadinejad, that the State of Israel as it is now constituted must change, a sentiment which I and all humane people throughout the world share. Just as calling for an end to Apartheid was not suggesting that white people be wiped out, so calling for Israel to no longer be a racist Zionist state is not wishing for the Jews to be vanquished from this earth”.
You write that Ahmadinejad is “developing a nuclear weapon as fast as he can” though strangely you provide no proof of this. Have you heard of the NIE, aka the National Intelligence Estimate, which is an intelligence report compiled by 16 US intelligence agencies? In late 2007 they released a report that Iran stopped developing its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.
Considering how you’ve misrepresented me I find it altogether rather rich that I am accused of misrepresenting you. I will concede that I should have taken more care in noting the ambiguity in your original statement which referred to Ahmadinejad wishing to “eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’”. I just assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were trotting out that much circulated canard against the Iranian president. Your blithe reference to a “Jewish state” also needs some clarification, so perhaps you’d care to do so. I mean if Israel withdrew from the Occupied Territories tomorrow and worked actively to assist the Palestinians in setting up an independent state, Israel would still remain “Jewish” by virtue of the majority population being of this cultural/religious persuasion. As a result of this action I seriously doubt one would hear many pronouncements from Ahmadinejad, or any other major figures in the Middle East, about Israel being “wiped out”, or at least these figures would have their real agendas exposed as there would no longer be any real world ammunition to fuel the fire of people in the region. You see, Mr Berger, the question isn’t about Israel being “Jewish” so much as it is about being a brutal occupying power and terror state.
You quote my statement that “I find it interesting that people like John Dugard are described as "ideologues" because they take "anti-Zionist positions", which suggests that to be pro-Zionist one would be free of ideology”, yet fail to tackle it in any meaningful sense, instead you just repeat that Dugard, like myself and Virginia Tilley evidently, are “ideologues”. Under that sweet photo of yourself on your blog you have written that the “blog subscribes to an inclusive Jewish identity and support for the right of Israel to exist in security and peace”. Elsewhere you express predictable sympathy for the “Zionist project”, which is by definition an ideological enterprise. I harbour no such allegiance to any state or political philosophy, except perhaps for universality, in other words applying to ourselves the same standard we apply to others. In Jesus and Confucius’ formulation this is known as the “golden rule” while Kant referred to it as the “categorical imperative”. So why don’t you point out what my ideology is, seeing as though you seem to be an expert on the issue.
I also don’t “hate Israel”, anymore than I “hated” South Africa because of the Apartheid government. I have a problem with many states around the world, but that doesn’t mean I hate the entire population. I have English heritage on my father’s side, and am still in regular contact with my family in England, but that doesn’t mean I somehow excuse that terrorist Tony Blair from illegally invading another country, nor do I ever make apologies for Britain’s horrific imperial history. The idea that one should either hate or love a particular state, without any nuance allowed, is a textbook case of ideological identification.
I did indeed write that “Just because Sudan has a horrendous human rights record does that magically exculpate Israel from any and all abuses against the Palestinians? Ditto for the question of ‘xenophobic hatred’ in South Africa, and on and on.” And you respond that “no-one said it did”. If you go back to the original thread you will notice that I was responding to the following comments from Sun:
“South Africa aint gonna spend no dollars on research into what makes the Sudanese Arabs hate, disposses and kill black (Muslim) Sudanese now will they?
Maybe even a proper funding of research into what lay behind the xenophobic hatred last year. No siree.”
So yes, someone, namely Sun, encouraged me to ask the quoted question as this was what he was seemingly implying. By referring to “Chechnia (sic), Tibet and Sri Lanka” you simply confirm the observation I implied in the above quotation and yet again fail to answer the question.
Your last quote has me observing that “Instead of fixating on who wrote and funded the HSRC report, why not actually review the report and tackle it on the basis of facts, and not mere ad hominem attacks. Or is this just standard operating procedure for pro-Israel zealots who cannot address factual information and must constantly go on the offensive with smear campaigns against those who disagree with their perspective of Israel as a paragon of purity?” and once more you fail to address the issue and confirm what I wrote by contending that the report is “fruit of a poisoned tree”. You also seem to think I’m motivated by “negative obsessions” without specifying what these are, and even imply that I am akin to a Holocaust denier like David Irving. You really do appear to harbour a pathological hatred for me, and by extension I presume you exhibit similar hatred towards all critics of Israel.
I notice with some interest that your latest blog entry is entitled ‘Ideologues and Bigots’ which is a perfect description of yourself. You clearly hold to a rigidly doctrinaire belief system and don’t seem too upset by the treatment of the Palestinians, past or present. You have a lot to say about the HSRC and the likes of Virginia Tilley, but where is your outrage at some of the pronouncements of Avigdor Lieberman, surely one of the most repugnant individuals to ever be part of the Israeli government? He has said that if Arabs in Israel don’t give a loyalty oath to Israel they should be expelled, and has proposed dropping all Palestinian prisoners in the ocean to drown. Where’s the indignation, Mike? Or does bigotry only apply to statements that are critical of poor little old Israel?
I’m not sure what’s more revolting, equating me to that despicable anti-Semite Irving or with those racist right wing rejects who Max Blumenthal interviewed in Jerusalem. The first thuggish lowlife he interviews says that Obama is a “f&*$head who should be shot” while others say that Obama should go and “f^$# himself”. The same fine gentleman who eagerly desires to see the President of the United States assassinated later says “white power…f*%^ the niggers”. An overweight and unattractive young woman says that Obama is “a Muslim for sure, and who even knows if he was born in the United States?…we haven’t seen his birth certificate…he’s like a terrorist”, thus revealing her ignorance and bigotry in one foul sweep. One clearly drunk buffoon called Obama a “p*#$y and faggot”, while another repeatedly said “f&$# Obama”. Yet another fine specimen of American Jewish youth said that he’d like to eat a watermelon with Obama who is “another nigger from the town”.
When have I even remotely expressed such sentiments? You have repeatedly asked, in a highly arrogant manner, who I am as if I first have to pass some Mike Berger test before I can say anything about the Israel/Palestine conflict, so why not actually try and find out who I am and what values I hold before making such sick, disgusting, utterly egregious and deeply reprehensible comparisons between me and some asinine scumbags who don’t deserve to scrub my shoes or work in my garden, let alone have a conversation with me. People, furthermore, whose entire value system I loathe with all my being and who should make all decent people sick to the core of their stomach. You may quibble with my interpretation of your person based on what I assumed you wrote, but at least I took your words on, and didn’t begin spewing all manner of obscene insults based on no evidence whatsoever.
On the “Guess who’s coming to SA” thread you write that you “don't really wish to get into the F(inkelstein) - Dershowitz or F(inkelstein) - anyone debate”. Could this be because you’re afraid that Finkelstein will be shown to have destroyed the likes of Dershowitz who is so loved by the Zionist brigade? It is actually very important to compare the work of Dershowitz and Finkelstein because then one will be able to see that the former is nothing but a liar, fabricator and outright propagandist. Dershowitz even relied largely on another hoax, namely Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, for his famous book The Case for Israel, which should suggest the kind of scholarship that the famous litigator is responsible for. He even made changes to his book for the paperback addition after Finkelstein had exposed some of his fraudulence.
Instead of hurling insult after insult, clearly something of a speciality with you, such as calling me and others “Hyde Park corner nutters” and “grade A paranoids”, perhaps you might like to provide a critical assessment of Finkelstein’s work and to show where he displays all this so-called “paranoia”. As Woody Allen once said, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you”. In all seriousness, paranoia usually implies that someone holds a belief with virtually no correlation to the real world. Considering that Finkelstein has displayed a consummate scholarly skill in his work that has been lauded by many experts on the Israel/Palestine issue, while exposing others as frauds and fabricators, the charge of paranoia doesn’t fit all that well without clear substantiation. The US is a major terror state, and Israel’s international terrorism, while on a much smaller scale to that of its chief donor, is also very well-known. To acknowledge this point, whether one is Norman Finkelstein or David Zinn or Nigel Parry or Pete Sampras, isn’t to display paranoia but mere acknowledgement of the world as it actually is. Considering how you’ve displayed yourself to be the consummate ideologue and also a disgraceful smear merchant, I realise that reality rarely intrudes upon your warped brain and that for you those who live in the real world are to be reduced to objects of your vile scorn.
I can’t help but notice the irony that you accuse others of paranoia yet you are one of the chief contributors to a site devoted to “Exposing anti-Israel bias in the South African media and promoting a balanced South African foreign policy towards the Middle East”. If anything, the media in South Africa isn’t critical enough of Israel, nor is our government, at least not publicly among the top echelons. I am also rather curious as to what you could possibly mean by “balanced”, seeing as though you and most of those on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ appear to be uncritical adherents of everything Israel does and never utter so much as a peep about the sickening violations of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories or within Israel proper. It seems that “bias” and “balanced” have very different meanings for ideological extremists and those who hold to a higher standard of factual integrity.
I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?
I eagerly await your response.
Regards
David Zinn
Ryan Rutherford, aka David Zinn, (for reasons unknown to me at least) challenged me to reproduce his immortal thoughts in my blog, in his normal courteous manner - which I reproduce here here for your edification “I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?”
Of course it requires little bravery from me since there are few things which better convict the fanatic than their own words. To be honest I have not read through it since I catch the drift fairly early on; perhaps some of you will be hardy enough.
Needless to say I will not be responding but this blog is open to anyone who wishes to respond, or indeed to support Zinny. I will not include any more of Zinny on my blog. He can be found in full torrent on IAS and probably elsewhere.
I am prepared to take considered input, critical or otherwise, minus undue ad hominem irrelevancies and preferably moderately brief.
Mike Berger (aka SOLAR PLEXUS www.froggyfarm.blogspot.com )
Dear Mr Berger
Firstly, let me just say that I feel somewhat honoured that your blog reflects a newfound obsession with my words and what you presume to be my outlook. Your references to me as Zinny are too precious for words, so thanks for the smile that this nickname engendered when I first read it on your blog.
I was also going to apologise profusely for implying that you were a liar, rather than sticking with just gullible, because we really are so poorly served by the mainstream media so it is often difficult, without a bit of work, to know what’s going on in the real world. However, after reading through your take on some of my comments I have begun to wonder whether dishonesty isn’t an integral part of your strategy, which is far from unknown among Zionists.
Let’s now deconstruct, or perhaps reconstruct, those quotations of mine that you referred to in the relevant blog entry.
I wrote that “Israel is a colonialist, deeply racist and apartheid-style state is plainly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country and isn't a rabid right wing pro-Israel apologist”, and I absolutely stand by this comment based on extensive and wide ranging research on the issue. You are also correct that I don’t need any conference or HSRC report to tell me about what sort of country Israel is. I’m glad that the HSRC has compiled such a report as now there is yet more ammunition against the pro-Israel apologists of this world though, true to form, they’ve gone on the hysterical defensive trying to slander the researchers. The only element of this comment that I admit was rather ill-judged was my reference to “rabid right wing pro-Israel apologists” because there are people who are quite liberal in their outlook who still defend Israel, usually because of their Jewish heritage, or because they are simply ignorant about Israel’s actions. So apologies for having smeared everyone who supports Israel as being ultra right wing extremists.
You go on to quote me as having written “Ahmadienjad doesn’t really wish to eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’ – that is, as a Jewish State. His comments have been misrepresented”, which is a ridiculous distortion of what I actually wrote. In the relevant article on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ you are quoted as having written “Ahmadinejad's threat to reality, namely, the elimination of Israel as we know it”. Now this term, “as we know it”, is admittedly vague so I presumed you were referring to his misquoted statements that he wished to “wipe Israel off the map”. As I pointed out in my post, there is no such expression in Farsi and that Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hoped the “regime in Jerusalem would vanish from the pages of history”, a quotation carrying a very different meaning to the one generally ascribed to Ahmadinejad. I pointed out twice in the relevant thread that to refer to Ahmadinejad’s quote, even if we concede that he used the term “wipe out” or something similar, by not referring to the context is to perpetuate a falsehood. For the record here is my reference to the issue in its entirety:
“…Ahmadinejad never ever proposed "the elimination of Israel as we know it". The mainstream media incorrectly reported that he had threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" which was a woefully inaccurate translation of the Farsi. In fact, this language has no such expression. Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hopes that "the Zionist regime in Israel vanishes from the pages of history". There's a massive difference between this and hoping for some genocidal elimination of all Jews. He was basically saying, and by extension so was Ahmadinejad, that the State of Israel as it is now constituted must change, a sentiment which I and all humane people throughout the world share. Just as calling for an end to Apartheid was not suggesting that white people be wiped out, so calling for Israel to no longer be a racist Zionist state is not wishing for the Jews to be vanquished from this earth”.
You write that Ahmadinejad is “developing a nuclear weapon as fast as he can” though strangely you provide no proof of this. Have you heard of the NIE, aka the National Intelligence Estimate, which is an intelligence report compiled by 16 US intelligence agencies? In late 2007 they released a report that Iran stopped developing its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.
Considering how you’ve misrepresented me I find it altogether rather rich that I am accused of misrepresenting you. I will concede that I should have taken more care in noting the ambiguity in your original statement which referred to Ahmadinejad wishing to “eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’”. I just assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were trotting out that much circulated canard against the Iranian president. Your blithe reference to a “Jewish state” also needs some clarification, so perhaps you’d care to do so. I mean if Israel withdrew from the Occupied Territories tomorrow and worked actively to assist the Palestinians in setting up an independent state, Israel would still remain “Jewish” by virtue of the majority population being of this cultural/religious persuasion. As a result of this action I seriously doubt one would hear many pronouncements from Ahmadinejad, or any other major figures in the Middle East, about Israel being “wiped out”, or at least these figures would have their real agendas exposed as there would no longer be any real world ammunition to fuel the fire of people in the region. You see, Mr Berger, the question isn’t about Israel being “Jewish” so much as it is about being a brutal occupying power and terror state.
You quote my statement that “I find it interesting that people like John Dugard are described as "ideologues" because they take "anti-Zionist positions", which suggests that to be pro-Zionist one would be free of ideology”, yet fail to tackle it in any meaningful sense, instead you just repeat that Dugard, like myself and Virginia Tilley evidently, are “ideologues”. Under that sweet photo of yourself on your blog you have written that the “blog subscribes to an inclusive Jewish identity and support for the right of Israel to exist in security and peace”. Elsewhere you express predictable sympathy for the “Zionist project”, which is by definition an ideological enterprise. I harbour no such allegiance to any state or political philosophy, except perhaps for universality, in other words applying to ourselves the same standard we apply to others. In Jesus and Confucius’ formulation this is known as the “golden rule” while Kant referred to it as the “categorical imperative”. So why don’t you point out what my ideology is, seeing as though you seem to be an expert on the issue.
I also don’t “hate Israel”, anymore than I “hated” South Africa because of the Apartheid government. I have a problem with many states around the world, but that doesn’t mean I hate the entire population. I have English heritage on my father’s side, and am still in regular contact with my family in England, but that doesn’t mean I somehow excuse that terrorist Tony Blair from illegally invading another country, nor do I ever make apologies for Britain’s horrific imperial history. The idea that one should either hate or love a particular state, without any nuance allowed, is a textbook case of ideological identification.
I did indeed write that “Just because Sudan has a horrendous human rights record does that magically exculpate Israel from any and all abuses against the Palestinians? Ditto for the question of ‘xenophobic hatred’ in South Africa, and on and on.” And you respond that “no-one said it did”. If you go back to the original thread you will notice that I was responding to the following comments from Sun:
“South Africa aint gonna spend no dollars on research into what makes the Sudanese Arabs hate, disposses and kill black (Muslim) Sudanese now will they?
Maybe even a proper funding of research into what lay behind the xenophobic hatred last year. No siree.”
So yes, someone, namely Sun, encouraged me to ask the quoted question as this was what he was seemingly implying. By referring to “Chechnia (sic), Tibet and Sri Lanka” you simply confirm the observation I implied in the above quotation and yet again fail to answer the question.
Your last quote has me observing that “Instead of fixating on who wrote and funded the HSRC report, why not actually review the report and tackle it on the basis of facts, and not mere ad hominem attacks. Or is this just standard operating procedure for pro-Israel zealots who cannot address factual information and must constantly go on the offensive with smear campaigns against those who disagree with their perspective of Israel as a paragon of purity?” and once more you fail to address the issue and confirm what I wrote by contending that the report is “fruit of a poisoned tree”. You also seem to think I’m motivated by “negative obsessions” without specifying what these are, and even imply that I am akin to a Holocaust denier like David Irving. You really do appear to harbour a pathological hatred for me, and by extension I presume you exhibit similar hatred towards all critics of Israel.
I notice with some interest that your latest blog entry is entitled ‘Ideologues and Bigots’ which is a perfect description of yourself. You clearly hold to a rigidly doctrinaire belief system and don’t seem too upset by the treatment of the Palestinians, past or present. You have a lot to say about the HSRC and the likes of Virginia Tilley, but where is your outrage at some of the pronouncements of Avigdor Lieberman, surely one of the most repugnant individuals to ever be part of the Israeli government? He has said that if Arabs in Israel don’t give a loyalty oath to Israel they should be expelled, and has proposed dropping all Palestinian prisoners in the ocean to drown. Where’s the indignation, Mike? Or does bigotry only apply to statements that are critical of poor little old Israel?
I’m not sure what’s more revolting, equating me to that despicable anti-Semite Irving or with those racist right wing rejects who Max Blumenthal interviewed in Jerusalem. The first thuggish lowlife he interviews says that Obama is a “f&*$head who should be shot” while others say that Obama should go and “f^$# himself”. The same fine gentleman who eagerly desires to see the President of the United States assassinated later says “white power…f*%^ the niggers”. An overweight and unattractive young woman says that Obama is “a Muslim for sure, and who even knows if he was born in the United States?…we haven’t seen his birth certificate…he’s like a terrorist”, thus revealing her ignorance and bigotry in one foul sweep. One clearly drunk buffoon called Obama a “p*#$y and faggot”, while another repeatedly said “f&$# Obama”. Yet another fine specimen of American Jewish youth said that he’d like to eat a watermelon with Obama who is “another nigger from the town”.
When have I even remotely expressed such sentiments? You have repeatedly asked, in a highly arrogant manner, who I am as if I first have to pass some Mike Berger test before I can say anything about the Israel/Palestine conflict, so why not actually try and find out who I am and what values I hold before making such sick, disgusting, utterly egregious and deeply reprehensible comparisons between me and some asinine scumbags who don’t deserve to scrub my shoes or work in my garden, let alone have a conversation with me. People, furthermore, whose entire value system I loathe with all my being and who should make all decent people sick to the core of their stomach. You may quibble with my interpretation of your person based on what I assumed you wrote, but at least I took your words on, and didn’t begin spewing all manner of obscene insults based on no evidence whatsoever.
On the “Guess who’s coming to SA” thread you write that you “don't really wish to get into the F(inkelstein) - Dershowitz or F(inkelstein) - anyone debate”. Could this be because you’re afraid that Finkelstein will be shown to have destroyed the likes of Dershowitz who is so loved by the Zionist brigade? It is actually very important to compare the work of Dershowitz and Finkelstein because then one will be able to see that the former is nothing but a liar, fabricator and outright propagandist. Dershowitz even relied largely on another hoax, namely Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, for his famous book The Case for Israel, which should suggest the kind of scholarship that the famous litigator is responsible for. He even made changes to his book for the paperback addition after Finkelstein had exposed some of his fraudulence.
Instead of hurling insult after insult, clearly something of a speciality with you, such as calling me and others “Hyde Park corner nutters” and “grade A paranoids”, perhaps you might like to provide a critical assessment of Finkelstein’s work and to show where he displays all this so-called “paranoia”. As Woody Allen once said, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you”. In all seriousness, paranoia usually implies that someone holds a belief with virtually no correlation to the real world. Considering that Finkelstein has displayed a consummate scholarly skill in his work that has been lauded by many experts on the Israel/Palestine issue, while exposing others as frauds and fabricators, the charge of paranoia doesn’t fit all that well without clear substantiation. The US is a major terror state, and Israel’s international terrorism, while on a much smaller scale to that of its chief donor, is also very well-known. To acknowledge this point, whether one is Norman Finkelstein or David Zinn or Nigel Parry or Pete Sampras, isn’t to display paranoia but mere acknowledgement of the world as it actually is. Considering how you’ve displayed yourself to be the consummate ideologue and also a disgraceful smear merchant, I realise that reality rarely intrudes upon your warped brain and that for you those who live in the real world are to be reduced to objects of your vile scorn.
I can’t help but notice the irony that you accuse others of paranoia yet you are one of the chief contributors to a site devoted to “Exposing anti-Israel bias in the South African media and promoting a balanced South African foreign policy towards the Middle East”. If anything, the media in South Africa isn’t critical enough of Israel, nor is our government, at least not publicly among the top echelons. I am also rather curious as to what you could possibly mean by “balanced”, seeing as though you and most of those on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ appear to be uncritical adherents of everything Israel does and never utter so much as a peep about the sickening violations of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories or within Israel proper. It seems that “bias” and “balanced” have very different meanings for ideological extremists and those who hold to a higher standard of factual integrity.
I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?
I eagerly await your response.
Regards
David Zinn
Friday, June 12, 2009
Ideologues and Bigots
Ideologues and Bigots.
One of the things that time teaches, if we’re willing to learn, is that human affairs are conducted in a permanent mist of uncertainty and confusion. Such is the complexity of human motivation, the diversity and multiplicity of actors, the unavoidable uncertainty surrounding key psychological, sociological and even material factors and the inherent unpredictability of events, we inevitably operate behind an opaque veil of ignorance.
Except for a relatively small number of genuine experts, such ignorance is compounded by our distance from the issues and personalities involved. Our information is second-hand and frequently distorted by the spin imparted by those responsible for processing the news and analysis. Our own perceptions are heavily skewed by unconscious or poorly understood emotional responses conditioned by our upbringing, our identity, our pervasive modes of cognition and belief systems and by self-interest and social dynamics.
Yet, despite all this, we are compelled to make decisions and form opinions. Most “sensible” people do so with some degree of humility – by that I mean they are aware they may be wrong, that they are willing to learn and to change and that even people with whom one profoundly disagrees may have a point. In the cut and thrust of debate, that realisation may be lost at times, but it is a mark of balance and maturity that sooner rather than later one returns to a measure of humility.
Of course, this can be a recipe for fence-sitting in situations in which such passivity or ambiguity is dangerous or wrong or both. In general, I believe that it important to form, and hold, hard-edged but not immutable opinions. Over the years I have moved from an instinctively leftwing position to a far more centrist and realistic perspective.
It is informed by a belief in the moral values of truth, justice and long-term rationality insofar as humanly possible, but is also conditioned by other beliefs and identities. These include an identification with the broad Jewish community and its history, a secular cosmopolitan predisposition, a somewhat pessimistic view of human nature coupled, at the same time, to a cautiously optimistic belief (or is it hope?) in the possibility of progress. I believe that freedom and democracy is important to all human beings but also in the stabilizing influence of tradition. I have seen that power corrupts and so does powerlessness. I believe that all human beings deserve the dignity of respect unless by their actions they unequivocally forfeit that right. Finally, I believe that we have the duty to fight for our rights and for justice but that extremism and greed will ultimately bring disaster down on the heads of those who go beyond the limits of fairness and a decent respect for other human beings.
All this corncob philosophy brings me to the issue of ideologues and bigots. Clearly, as I have described for myself, none of us come as blank slates to the political arena. But the hodge-podge of broad and often mutually contradictory principles and commonsense the “balanced” person brings to the table, is a far cry from the fixed, obsessive lens through which the true ideologue views the world.
Like pornography it is a question of degree and one can make a mistake. But generally one recognises the ideologue by the utter predictability of their responses, their extremism, their compulsion to revile those who differ from them and their total resistance to contrary facts. Of course, the ideologue and the bigot are kissing cousins. By definition almost, the true ideologue is always a bigot since they dismiss any person or viewpoint which deviates slightly from their own. But bigotry, in my lexicon at least, tends to be prejudice without the support of an intellectualised (religious or secular) belief system which the ideologue uses to support their fixed views.
In my experience, such people almost always respond to disagreement with personal abuse. The greater the public posture of moral sanctimony often the greater the degree of private intolerance and rudeness. It’s a kind of statistical law. I had always expected that from the rightwing and was shocked when I encountered it from the left – but no longer.
In my Quote du Jour on Solar Plexus (http://froggyfarm.blogspot.com) I gave some publicity to comments by Ron Kampeas of the JTA because, though I have some reservations, in broad terms he articulated something which we need as a Jewish pro-Zionist community to get to grips with. Please go and read it and my previous post on the above link
In short, I feel that something needs to be said about some “noisy” Zionists who by their words, and sometimes actions, do almost as much to discredit Zionism as the most fanatical of anti-Zionists. There is no reason to believe that miraculously the Jews, alone amongst the peoples of this world, will be free of stupidity, fanaticism and bigotry. But perhaps it is possible to persuade at least some of them to reconsider their behaviour if only to stop providing ammunition to those who would stigmatise a whole people and Israel itself because of the attitudes of some.
As good a starting point as any is the Cairo speech by Obama. It reflects a major policy initiative and represents a decisive step away from the isolationist and confrontational policy of the Bush years. Every word was carefully calculated and, within the bounds of human capability, it accurately reflects the broad policy strategy to be pursued by the Obama government vis-à-vis the Muslim world.
This has been summed up by Bicom in the following terms (shortened by author):
• It is remarkable that in a speech designed to recalibrate relations between the US and the Islamic world, Obama spent significant time challenging anti-Semitism, busting the myth of Holocaust denial, condemning terrorism and emphasising the unbreakable bonds between Israel and the US.
• There was no detailed policy plan, but the speech combined Obama's ideals with a hard-headed, realist view of the US interests. It was a direct challenge to the idea of a ‘clash of civilizations' between the West and Islam.
• The speech was directed at Muslim people, rather than their governments. The US went to considerable length, by flying in journalists, to ensure it was heard by Muslim people around the world.
I would add to that (see the speech in full, the BICOM article and many others) that Obama went to considerable lengths to reassure the global Muslim community of two things: firstly, that the USA both respects the Muslim world and has no desire to set the West up in opposition to Islam and, secondly, that the USA will act decisively against all forms of terrorism, including that coming from Islamic sources.
Of course it included other themes, including specifically the interconnectedness of the global community, but I am mainly concerned with Israel. It was not intended as a detailed blueprint but as a call for imagination and for transcendence of religious, cultural and political differences through a common commitment to humanity.
I thought it was brilliant. It is easy to dismiss this as mere rhetoric signifying nothing, but I would differ strongly. Words are terribly important for both good and ill, and the Obama speech called to the best of our common humanity. It was an attempt to undercut extremists of all stripes and to appeal to the commonsense and decency of the ordinary man in the street.
Who knows whether it will succeed? There are those who are so ideologically wedded to their positions, that they are simply incapable of seeing a wider picture. They immediately focused on a small part of the speech in order to construct a narrative to take issue with. One commentator suggested that Obama drew moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering. He did no such thing.
Another suggested that Israel did not come into being as the result of centuries of European persecution (as Obama suggested) but because of its unbroken spiritual connection to the land. You could have fooled secular Herzl or the many religious Jews who for decades opposed the creation of a Jewish state…some still do.
All this could be dismissed as plain silliness, except that it is designed to herd Jews into a obdurate fanatical camp who see the conflict in apocalyptic terms of good versus evil. In this they become the mirror image of some of their opponents. A plague on both their camps.
It is, of course, quite reasonable to challenge parts of the Obama speech; for instance his strong stance on the settlements. There are some real inconsistencies in his position and it is difficult to see how Netanyahu can comply fully with the Obama demands without collapse of his fragile coalition. But already Mitchell is softening the harsh rhetoric and Netanyahu understands the symbolic importance of the settlements in undermining extremist positions on the Arab-Muslim-Palestinian and Western leftwing fronts.
We need reciprocity on both sides and Obama is well aware of this and the legitimate Israeli fears over security. What he, and all those who understand the long-term need for accommodation, reject is the use of legitimate concerns to buttress extreme rejectionist attitudes. Unless of course you are one of those who believe that Jews can only survive as an embattled people fighting against enemies – real or created. So at varying levels of sophistication, they insist that the Jews (and/or the West) are engaged in an inevitable, apocalyptic battle against Islam or the latest incarnation of antisemitism. This is dangerous nonsense, but words and actions can make it a reality.
All this is bad enough but there is a significant camp within the Zionist camp who adopt puerile, provocative and derogatory terms when referring to Obama or to Arabs or Muslims. We have them here and elsewhere. There is a truly repulsive video on YouTube (http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/05/1005678/best-take-so-far-on-blumen-journalism) which has apparently over 100 000 hits already. The bunch of noisy, bigoted, ignorant and profoundly stupid Jews depicted there are of course not representative. But they do exist and there are too many within the pro-Zionist camp, where I locate myself, to be ignored.
We need to insist that Israel can and must be defended with honour and dignity and with the appreciation that we are all part of a common humanity. When members of our camp descend to the levels of the worst of our opponents, we do our cause a profound disservice and lend ammunition to the malicious forces who instigated the HSRC Symposium.
Back to Obama for a moment. His fine words will need to be matched by an equally subtle but realistically toughminded appreciation of the obstacles to moving towards his dream of global peace based on mutual tolerance, accommodation and commitment to a universal humanity. Such an outcome is far too Utopian but genuine progress towards resolution of some of the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere is possible. Let’s challenge and resist his strategy where appropriate but keep our hearts open to his intent and call to a common humanity.
Let us also hope, for all our sakes, that Obama will succeed with our help.
Mike Berger (SOLAR PLEXUS)
One of the things that time teaches, if we’re willing to learn, is that human affairs are conducted in a permanent mist of uncertainty and confusion. Such is the complexity of human motivation, the diversity and multiplicity of actors, the unavoidable uncertainty surrounding key psychological, sociological and even material factors and the inherent unpredictability of events, we inevitably operate behind an opaque veil of ignorance.
Except for a relatively small number of genuine experts, such ignorance is compounded by our distance from the issues and personalities involved. Our information is second-hand and frequently distorted by the spin imparted by those responsible for processing the news and analysis. Our own perceptions are heavily skewed by unconscious or poorly understood emotional responses conditioned by our upbringing, our identity, our pervasive modes of cognition and belief systems and by self-interest and social dynamics.
Yet, despite all this, we are compelled to make decisions and form opinions. Most “sensible” people do so with some degree of humility – by that I mean they are aware they may be wrong, that they are willing to learn and to change and that even people with whom one profoundly disagrees may have a point. In the cut and thrust of debate, that realisation may be lost at times, but it is a mark of balance and maturity that sooner rather than later one returns to a measure of humility.
Of course, this can be a recipe for fence-sitting in situations in which such passivity or ambiguity is dangerous or wrong or both. In general, I believe that it important to form, and hold, hard-edged but not immutable opinions. Over the years I have moved from an instinctively leftwing position to a far more centrist and realistic perspective.
It is informed by a belief in the moral values of truth, justice and long-term rationality insofar as humanly possible, but is also conditioned by other beliefs and identities. These include an identification with the broad Jewish community and its history, a secular cosmopolitan predisposition, a somewhat pessimistic view of human nature coupled, at the same time, to a cautiously optimistic belief (or is it hope?) in the possibility of progress. I believe that freedom and democracy is important to all human beings but also in the stabilizing influence of tradition. I have seen that power corrupts and so does powerlessness. I believe that all human beings deserve the dignity of respect unless by their actions they unequivocally forfeit that right. Finally, I believe that we have the duty to fight for our rights and for justice but that extremism and greed will ultimately bring disaster down on the heads of those who go beyond the limits of fairness and a decent respect for other human beings.
All this corncob philosophy brings me to the issue of ideologues and bigots. Clearly, as I have described for myself, none of us come as blank slates to the political arena. But the hodge-podge of broad and often mutually contradictory principles and commonsense the “balanced” person brings to the table, is a far cry from the fixed, obsessive lens through which the true ideologue views the world.
Like pornography it is a question of degree and one can make a mistake. But generally one recognises the ideologue by the utter predictability of their responses, their extremism, their compulsion to revile those who differ from them and their total resistance to contrary facts. Of course, the ideologue and the bigot are kissing cousins. By definition almost, the true ideologue is always a bigot since they dismiss any person or viewpoint which deviates slightly from their own. But bigotry, in my lexicon at least, tends to be prejudice without the support of an intellectualised (religious or secular) belief system which the ideologue uses to support their fixed views.
In my experience, such people almost always respond to disagreement with personal abuse. The greater the public posture of moral sanctimony often the greater the degree of private intolerance and rudeness. It’s a kind of statistical law. I had always expected that from the rightwing and was shocked when I encountered it from the left – but no longer.
In my Quote du Jour on Solar Plexus (http://froggyfarm.blogspot.com) I gave some publicity to comments by Ron Kampeas of the JTA because, though I have some reservations, in broad terms he articulated something which we need as a Jewish pro-Zionist community to get to grips with. Please go and read it and my previous post on the above link
In short, I feel that something needs to be said about some “noisy” Zionists who by their words, and sometimes actions, do almost as much to discredit Zionism as the most fanatical of anti-Zionists. There is no reason to believe that miraculously the Jews, alone amongst the peoples of this world, will be free of stupidity, fanaticism and bigotry. But perhaps it is possible to persuade at least some of them to reconsider their behaviour if only to stop providing ammunition to those who would stigmatise a whole people and Israel itself because of the attitudes of some.
As good a starting point as any is the Cairo speech by Obama. It reflects a major policy initiative and represents a decisive step away from the isolationist and confrontational policy of the Bush years. Every word was carefully calculated and, within the bounds of human capability, it accurately reflects the broad policy strategy to be pursued by the Obama government vis-à-vis the Muslim world.
This has been summed up by Bicom in the following terms (shortened by author):
• It is remarkable that in a speech designed to recalibrate relations between the US and the Islamic world, Obama spent significant time challenging anti-Semitism, busting the myth of Holocaust denial, condemning terrorism and emphasising the unbreakable bonds between Israel and the US.
• There was no detailed policy plan, but the speech combined Obama's ideals with a hard-headed, realist view of the US interests. It was a direct challenge to the idea of a ‘clash of civilizations' between the West and Islam.
• The speech was directed at Muslim people, rather than their governments. The US went to considerable length, by flying in journalists, to ensure it was heard by Muslim people around the world.
I would add to that (see the speech in full, the BICOM article and many others) that Obama went to considerable lengths to reassure the global Muslim community of two things: firstly, that the USA both respects the Muslim world and has no desire to set the West up in opposition to Islam and, secondly, that the USA will act decisively against all forms of terrorism, including that coming from Islamic sources.
Of course it included other themes, including specifically the interconnectedness of the global community, but I am mainly concerned with Israel. It was not intended as a detailed blueprint but as a call for imagination and for transcendence of religious, cultural and political differences through a common commitment to humanity.
I thought it was brilliant. It is easy to dismiss this as mere rhetoric signifying nothing, but I would differ strongly. Words are terribly important for both good and ill, and the Obama speech called to the best of our common humanity. It was an attempt to undercut extremists of all stripes and to appeal to the commonsense and decency of the ordinary man in the street.
Who knows whether it will succeed? There are those who are so ideologically wedded to their positions, that they are simply incapable of seeing a wider picture. They immediately focused on a small part of the speech in order to construct a narrative to take issue with. One commentator suggested that Obama drew moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering. He did no such thing.
Another suggested that Israel did not come into being as the result of centuries of European persecution (as Obama suggested) but because of its unbroken spiritual connection to the land. You could have fooled secular Herzl or the many religious Jews who for decades opposed the creation of a Jewish state…some still do.
All this could be dismissed as plain silliness, except that it is designed to herd Jews into a obdurate fanatical camp who see the conflict in apocalyptic terms of good versus evil. In this they become the mirror image of some of their opponents. A plague on both their camps.
It is, of course, quite reasonable to challenge parts of the Obama speech; for instance his strong stance on the settlements. There are some real inconsistencies in his position and it is difficult to see how Netanyahu can comply fully with the Obama demands without collapse of his fragile coalition. But already Mitchell is softening the harsh rhetoric and Netanyahu understands the symbolic importance of the settlements in undermining extremist positions on the Arab-Muslim-Palestinian and Western leftwing fronts.
We need reciprocity on both sides and Obama is well aware of this and the legitimate Israeli fears over security. What he, and all those who understand the long-term need for accommodation, reject is the use of legitimate concerns to buttress extreme rejectionist attitudes. Unless of course you are one of those who believe that Jews can only survive as an embattled people fighting against enemies – real or created. So at varying levels of sophistication, they insist that the Jews (and/or the West) are engaged in an inevitable, apocalyptic battle against Islam or the latest incarnation of antisemitism. This is dangerous nonsense, but words and actions can make it a reality.
All this is bad enough but there is a significant camp within the Zionist camp who adopt puerile, provocative and derogatory terms when referring to Obama or to Arabs or Muslims. We have them here and elsewhere. There is a truly repulsive video on YouTube (http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/06/05/1005678/best-take-so-far-on-blumen-journalism) which has apparently over 100 000 hits already. The bunch of noisy, bigoted, ignorant and profoundly stupid Jews depicted there are of course not representative. But they do exist and there are too many within the pro-Zionist camp, where I locate myself, to be ignored.
We need to insist that Israel can and must be defended with honour and dignity and with the appreciation that we are all part of a common humanity. When members of our camp descend to the levels of the worst of our opponents, we do our cause a profound disservice and lend ammunition to the malicious forces who instigated the HSRC Symposium.
Back to Obama for a moment. His fine words will need to be matched by an equally subtle but realistically toughminded appreciation of the obstacles to moving towards his dream of global peace based on mutual tolerance, accommodation and commitment to a universal humanity. Such an outcome is far too Utopian but genuine progress towards resolution of some of the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere is possible. Let’s challenge and resist his strategy where appropriate but keep our hearts open to his intent and call to a common humanity.
Let us also hope, for all our sakes, that Obama will succeed with our help.
Mike Berger (SOLAR PLEXUS)
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Sinister Symposium
This post is largely concerned with an upcoming HSRC Symposium on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is important to read through this post carefully since every South African Jew (and citizen) should be aware of the activities of anti-Zionist activists in South Africa. By the shrill and extremist nature of the South African dialogue we find ourselves in serious opposition to the pragmatic and conciliatory tone adopted by Obama.
I also respond briefly at the end to some comments by David Zinn - whoever he may be. I don't usually respond to stupid negativity (in the course of a comment on It's Almost Supernatural he called me a liar and/or a gullible fool) but there are a couple of assertions in his post which require some response. In passing, it is quite amazing how often self-styled moralists on the left resort to vicious ad hominim insults. Jung had it right when he talked about the "shadow". Give me an honest sinner any time.
For those who don’t know, the HSRC (or Human Sciences Research Council) is a statutory body (that is, a Government sponsored and funded organisation) whose core function is, in its own words, “…is to conduct large-scale, policy-relevant, social-scientific projects for public-sector users, non-governmental organisations and international development agencies.”
It is worth expanding on this briefly (again drawn from its website at - http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Corporate_Information-45.phtml) : “…Our commitment to cutting-edge research which supports development nationally, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in Africa…”. “As the national social science council of South Africa, the HSRC wishes to serve as a knowledge hub to bridge the gap between research, policy and action; thus increasing the impact of research. This is achieved through collaboration with key constituencies, including government, other research organisations, multinational agencies, universities, non-government organisations, and donor and development organisations.”
“Its four multi-disciplinary research programmes, two cross-cutting research units and three research centres are focused on user needs. The following units make up the HSRC.
Research programmes:
Child, Youth, Family and Social Development
Democracy and Governance
Education, Science and Skills Development
Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS and Health (including the Africa-wide research network, SAHARA)
Cross-cutting units:
Policy Analysis and Capacity Enhancement Unit
Knowledge Systems
Centres:
Centre for Education Quality Improvement
Centre for Poverty, Employment and Growth
Centre for Service Delivery”
It is clear from this self-description, that the HSRC is a research organisation supposedly devoted to issues pertaining to the social and political development of a newly emergent democracy with vast inequalities in the realms of wealth and social development, a contentious and divisive history and numerous challenges in the form of education and skills development, health, crime and corruption, substance abuse and the abuse of women and children and in strengthening and consolidating democracy in a volatile and underdeveloped region.
None of this would seem to have anything to do with the complex and historically rooted issues in the Middle East, but if we go to its webpage dealing with Democracy and Govenance (http://www.hsrc.ac.za/DG.phtml) we find advertised two new items, namely:
• Conference: Re-Envisioning Israel-Palestine, 12-14 June 2009 , Cape Town
• Report on Israeli Practices released: Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid.
Once again, we search the rest of the page in vain for any indication which suggests that the HSRC has a legitimate concern with such issues. Indeed it explicitly states the following: “...The Democracy and Governance (D&G) programme examines issues that contribute to and constrain democratisation in South Africa and around the African continent.”
In short the mandate of the HSRC contains nothing to suggest it has a legitimate interest in Middle Easten issues. But the clue and the (fake) justification comes in the wording of the second item listed above “Report on Israeli Practices released: Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid”. I strongly recommend readers to visit the site for themselves.
Somehow its mandate to research and encourage democracy and good governance in South Africa, specifically, and Africa generally (a region in clear and desperate need of such attention), has now mutated into a obviously partisan polemic against Israel.
This conclusion is further buttressed by the following introduction to the report, “The project was suggested originally by the January 2007 report by eminent South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council, when he indicated that Israel practices had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid.”
In short, it is clear not only that this entire exercise has nothing whatsoever to do with the core function of the HSRC but contary to its alleged status of a serious research institutions, has allowed itself to be hijacked to serve the objectives of known ideologues and activists with strongly held and openly voiced anti-Zionist positions – like Dugard himself.
In case one has any doubts the following statement from the same webpage in all its unctuous dishonesty clarifies the position: “... The Middle East Project of the HSRC is an independent two-year project to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly (my emphasis) resource for the South African government and civil society and the concerned international community.”
In summary
• The project is funded by South African taxpayers,
• It is not scholarly as reflected in its clearly biased original terms of reference, its original motivation (by John Dugard), its selective and partisan sponsors (scholars and international lawyers based at the HSRC, the School for Oriental and African Studies (London), the British Institute for International and Comparative Law, the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (Durban), the Adalah/Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and al-Haq/West Bank Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.) and the equally selective and partisan composition of the research team, headed by Virginia Tilley, a well-known (more appropriately, notorious) shrill and adamant anti-Zionist activist. Her position was sponsored by Stephen Friedman and later by Ronnie Kasrils, both of whom are openly and vehemently hostile towards Israel.
• In no way does the report provide pragmatic and useful guidelines for a foreign policy stance by the South African, but is a pseudo-judicial, one-sided demonisation of Israel using terms deliberately designed to promote ostracism and punitive action by the international community. It has nothing whatsoever to do with impartial research and scholarly activity.
In the Symposium there are 4 theme chairmen/keynote speakers:
1. John Dugard whose anti-Israeli stance is well kn and needs no further explication here.
2. Prof Nadim Rouhana His views in a recent article (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nadim-rouhana-this-suppression-is-symbolic-of-a-state-that-fears-its-past-1693156.html) are “For the Palestinian citizens of Israel, life is becoming a collective Kafkaesque experience. For years, their state has been determined to buttress its Jewish identity by legal, constitutional, cultural, and political means, in spite of the fact that one in five of its residents is an Arab. This latest series of bills is just another part of that effort.”
3. Dr Leila Farsakh “I just say that the struggle of our people for achieving an independent state is over. We must start again by resisting the occupation and colonialism, while formulating a new strategy relying upon the concept of citizenship not being fastened any longer to the idea of historical Palestine’s partition. Do forty years of struggle ¬since the occupation of the Territories in 1967 ¬deserve perhaps a State which would be nothing but a set of Bantustans in Israeli territory without any territorial continuity?”
4. Dr Gerhard Mare He is Director, Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity, University of KwaZulu Natal (Durban, South Africa). As far as I know he has not expressed any views on the Middle East based on my superficial research.
But there is no need – the terms, the sponsors and the other particpants will ensure that Symposium will promote the theme of the Report on which it is based.
This brief review only scratches the surface. We need to ask the following information:
Who (or what group) motivated and promoted this project within the HSRC despite its irrelevance to the core mandate of that body?
Who selected the researchers? What are their credentials in this field and what are their prior positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was any serious effort made to select researchers with views which ran contary to the apriori terms of reference of the Report?
If the project was an exercise to provide useful information to the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, why is it necessary to hold an open Conference (at considerable expense no doubt) to publicise its finding in an already biased South African media environment? While the Symposium is supposedly designed to promote fresh thinking, the Report is to provide the foundation on which it is structured and will thus frame the entire debate
Where in the report is there a serious attempt to provide the South African government with impartial, scholarly and pragmatically useful information concerning the history of the conflict, the positions of the protagonists and outside powers in the region to help guide the relevant ministry in its dealings with both Israel and the Palestinians?
This entire exercise by a supposedly scholarly, statutory body of the South African Government is nothing but a thinly disguised, pseudo-academic witchhunt, supported by taxpayers, designed to promote the agendas of known anti-Zionist activists. It deserves the widest possible exposure and unequivocal condemnation irrespective of one’s position on the issues in the Middle East.
Mike Berger (SOLAR PLEXUS)
The ink has hardly dried on my previous post but I feel it necessary to follow up with further brief comment. Firstly I would like to thank David Abel for drawing this entire sinister enterprise to my attention in the first place.
Secondly, it should not only be called "sinister" for its modus operandi and objectives, but also SMART. Let us be quite clear: this symposium is NOT some spontaneous cry of moral outrage but a carefully planned, costly, meticulously implemented strategy of demonsisation of Israel in pursuit of a clear political agenda. In case anyone should be in doubt what that is let me spell it out briefly. It is to set the stage for global ostracism and punitive action against Israel with the intention of bringing Ahmadinejad's threat to reality, namely, the elimination of Israel as we know it. This is to be accomplished not through nuclear weapons (Israel can respond effectively to such dangers) but by the cummulative impact of isolation, sanctions, boycotts and moral opprobrium.
It avoids the crudities of Durban I with its anti-semitic street theatre or the Ahmadinejads and Hugo Chavezs of this world. By enlisting the support of sympathetic academics, both individuals and organisations, and using the jargon and trappings of genuine scholarly discourse, it provides a thin but superficially effective cover for its sinster political agenda. It is, in a sense, the Cape Town I answer to the emasculation of Durban II under pressure from Western countries. There will be no Ahmadinejad to open the conference and thus give the game away (at least in Western eyes), but there will be a sympathetic Western press in the form of the Independent group, the M & G and others to ensure that its findings and conclusions receive a wide hearing.
This requires wide exposure and concentrated attention. While clever, the motivation and deceptive modus operandi is obvious to careful scrutiny. Equally, the content, despite their academic and quasi-judicial tone, is clearly partisan, selective and falls far short of genuine scholarly standards in order to find in favour of a predetermined verdict.
I trust that the influential academics and commentators amongst the recipients of this newspetter will ensure that this nasty and dishonest anti-semitic and anti-Zionist project is exposed and nullified.
Mike Berger
PS Firstly, my thanks to Steve Magid of It's Almost Supernatural for his own trenchant comments and for reproducing my Newsletter in its entirety.
Now to Zinn.
Zinn comment numero uno: “That Israel is a colonialist, deeply racist and apartheid-style state is plainly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country and isn't a rabid right wing pro-Israel apologist.” Goodness gracious why on earth do we need a Conference with so much intellectual firepower and at such expense, when our Zinn absolutely knows the truth without any shadow of a doubt? Please write to the HSRC and instruct them to call the whole thing off.
Zinn comment number two: Ahmadienjad doesn’t really wish to eliminate Israel as “we know it” – that is, as a Jewish State. His comments have been misrepresented. Yes folk, you read that right: that’s what the man said. Ahmadinejad supports Hamas, Hizbollah, and other anti-Israel terror groups. He runs a conference (strictly scholarly of course) questioning the Holocaust. He is developing a nuclear weapon as fast as he can. But no, he does not want to eliminate Israel as a Jewish State. But please go and read Zinn’s comment on “Supernatural” and watch how he misrepresents what I said in order to contradict me. And he calls me a liar. But it is too boring to to waste more energy on such rubbish.
Zinn again “I find it interesting that people like John Dugard are described as "ideologues" because they take "anti-Zionist positions", which suggests that to be pro-Zionist one would be free of ideology. This really tells me all I need to know about the sort of mindset that underpins this website.” John Dugard (like Zinn, Virginia Tilley et al) is an ideologue. That’s OK. I don’t really like ideologues with their fixed, selective and shrill opinions, whether of the left or the right. But my gripe is that the HSRC Conference and the Report on which it is based has been motivated for, framed and shaped by ideologues of a particular stripe designed to promote the agendas of those who, like Zinn, hate Israel That is not what the HSRC was designed to do, it is not good use of taxpayer’s money and it is grossly dishonest to represent it as scholarly, impartial exercise.
Zinn weer: “Just because Sudan has a horrendous human rights record does that magically exculpate Israel from any and all abuses against the Palestinians? Ditto for the question of "xenophobic hatred" in South Africa, and on and on.” No Zinny, no-one said it did. But is is a far more suitable subject for our HSRC than the Middle East. Oh, and by the way, Zinny, what about Chechnia, Tibet and Sri Lanka to name just a few spots which could do with a “scholarly conference” - not to mention mass marches, boycotts and threats of “to the gas”.? I do hope you write to the HSRC suggesting it expand its horizons further since Africa does not provide the scope it needs for its wide-ranging moral concerns.
Last word from Zinn: “Instead of fixating on who wrote and funded the HSRC report, why not actually review the report and tackle it on the basis of facts, and not mere ad hominem attacks. Or is this just standard operating procedure for pro-Israel zealots who cannot address factual information and must constantly go on the offensive with smear campaigns against those who disagree with their perspective of Israel as a paragon of purity?” If it were a genuine scholarly project and not one motivated by the same negative obsessions which so captivate Zinn, I would agree. But it is the “fruit of a poisoned tree” (I think that is the legal phrase) and as such does not deserve the attention of genuinely impartial and informed scholars. It is a bit like David Irving – he pushed his deeply anti-semitic treatment of Holocaust history to the point of a legal confrontation against genuine scholars – and came seriously unstuck. But, of course, that did not stop the Holocaust deniers, just as it will not stop the Zinns of this world. So I suppose it will be necessary for busy and intelligent, informed people to waste their time responding to the content, but it will have at most minimal impact. For the whole matter has little to do with external reality but with internal reality – that is, psychological obsessions on which facts have little influence.
I also respond briefly at the end to some comments by David Zinn - whoever he may be. I don't usually respond to stupid negativity (in the course of a comment on It's Almost Supernatural he called me a liar and/or a gullible fool) but there are a couple of assertions in his post which require some response. In passing, it is quite amazing how often self-styled moralists on the left resort to vicious ad hominim insults. Jung had it right when he talked about the "shadow". Give me an honest sinner any time.
For those who don’t know, the HSRC (or Human Sciences Research Council) is a statutory body (that is, a Government sponsored and funded organisation) whose core function is, in its own words, “…is to conduct large-scale, policy-relevant, social-scientific projects for public-sector users, non-governmental organisations and international development agencies.”
It is worth expanding on this briefly (again drawn from its website at - http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Corporate_Information-45.phtml) : “…Our commitment to cutting-edge research which supports development nationally, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in Africa…”. “As the national social science council of South Africa, the HSRC wishes to serve as a knowledge hub to bridge the gap between research, policy and action; thus increasing the impact of research. This is achieved through collaboration with key constituencies, including government, other research organisations, multinational agencies, universities, non-government organisations, and donor and development organisations.”
“Its four multi-disciplinary research programmes, two cross-cutting research units and three research centres are focused on user needs. The following units make up the HSRC.
Research programmes:
Child, Youth, Family and Social Development
Democracy and Governance
Education, Science and Skills Development
Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS and Health (including the Africa-wide research network, SAHARA)
Cross-cutting units:
Policy Analysis and Capacity Enhancement Unit
Knowledge Systems
Centres:
Centre for Education Quality Improvement
Centre for Poverty, Employment and Growth
Centre for Service Delivery”
It is clear from this self-description, that the HSRC is a research organisation supposedly devoted to issues pertaining to the social and political development of a newly emergent democracy with vast inequalities in the realms of wealth and social development, a contentious and divisive history and numerous challenges in the form of education and skills development, health, crime and corruption, substance abuse and the abuse of women and children and in strengthening and consolidating democracy in a volatile and underdeveloped region.
None of this would seem to have anything to do with the complex and historically rooted issues in the Middle East, but if we go to its webpage dealing with Democracy and Govenance (http://www.hsrc.ac.za/DG.phtml) we find advertised two new items, namely:
• Conference: Re-Envisioning Israel-Palestine, 12-14 June 2009 , Cape Town
• Report on Israeli Practices released: Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid.
Once again, we search the rest of the page in vain for any indication which suggests that the HSRC has a legitimate concern with such issues. Indeed it explicitly states the following: “...The Democracy and Governance (D&G) programme examines issues that contribute to and constrain democratisation in South Africa and around the African continent.”
In short the mandate of the HSRC contains nothing to suggest it has a legitimate interest in Middle Easten issues. But the clue and the (fake) justification comes in the wording of the second item listed above “Report on Israeli Practices released: Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid”. I strongly recommend readers to visit the site for themselves.
Somehow its mandate to research and encourage democracy and good governance in South Africa, specifically, and Africa generally (a region in clear and desperate need of such attention), has now mutated into a obviously partisan polemic against Israel.
This conclusion is further buttressed by the following introduction to the report, “The project was suggested originally by the January 2007 report by eminent South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council, when he indicated that Israel practices had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid.”
In short, it is clear not only that this entire exercise has nothing whatsoever to do with the core function of the HSRC but contary to its alleged status of a serious research institutions, has allowed itself to be hijacked to serve the objectives of known ideologues and activists with strongly held and openly voiced anti-Zionist positions – like Dugard himself.
In case one has any doubts the following statement from the same webpage in all its unctuous dishonesty clarifies the position: “... The Middle East Project of the HSRC is an independent two-year project to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly (my emphasis) resource for the South African government and civil society and the concerned international community.”
In summary
• The project is funded by South African taxpayers,
• It is not scholarly as reflected in its clearly biased original terms of reference, its original motivation (by John Dugard), its selective and partisan sponsors (scholars and international lawyers based at the HSRC, the School for Oriental and African Studies (London), the British Institute for International and Comparative Law, the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (Durban), the Adalah/Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and al-Haq/West Bank Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.) and the equally selective and partisan composition of the research team, headed by Virginia Tilley, a well-known (more appropriately, notorious) shrill and adamant anti-Zionist activist. Her position was sponsored by Stephen Friedman and later by Ronnie Kasrils, both of whom are openly and vehemently hostile towards Israel.
• In no way does the report provide pragmatic and useful guidelines for a foreign policy stance by the South African, but is a pseudo-judicial, one-sided demonisation of Israel using terms deliberately designed to promote ostracism and punitive action by the international community. It has nothing whatsoever to do with impartial research and scholarly activity.
In the Symposium there are 4 theme chairmen/keynote speakers:
1. John Dugard whose anti-Israeli stance is well kn and needs no further explication here.
2. Prof Nadim Rouhana His views in a recent article (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nadim-rouhana-this-suppression-is-symbolic-of-a-state-that-fears-its-past-1693156.html) are “For the Palestinian citizens of Israel, life is becoming a collective Kafkaesque experience. For years, their state has been determined to buttress its Jewish identity by legal, constitutional, cultural, and political means, in spite of the fact that one in five of its residents is an Arab. This latest series of bills is just another part of that effort.”
3. Dr Leila Farsakh “I just say that the struggle of our people for achieving an independent state is over. We must start again by resisting the occupation and colonialism, while formulating a new strategy relying upon the concept of citizenship not being fastened any longer to the idea of historical Palestine’s partition. Do forty years of struggle ¬since the occupation of the Territories in 1967 ¬deserve perhaps a State which would be nothing but a set of Bantustans in Israeli territory without any territorial continuity?”
4. Dr Gerhard Mare He is Director, Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity, University of KwaZulu Natal (Durban, South Africa). As far as I know he has not expressed any views on the Middle East based on my superficial research.
But there is no need – the terms, the sponsors and the other particpants will ensure that Symposium will promote the theme of the Report on which it is based.
This brief review only scratches the surface. We need to ask the following information:
Who (or what group) motivated and promoted this project within the HSRC despite its irrelevance to the core mandate of that body?
Who selected the researchers? What are their credentials in this field and what are their prior positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Was any serious effort made to select researchers with views which ran contary to the apriori terms of reference of the Report?
If the project was an exercise to provide useful information to the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, why is it necessary to hold an open Conference (at considerable expense no doubt) to publicise its finding in an already biased South African media environment? While the Symposium is supposedly designed to promote fresh thinking, the Report is to provide the foundation on which it is structured and will thus frame the entire debate
Where in the report is there a serious attempt to provide the South African government with impartial, scholarly and pragmatically useful information concerning the history of the conflict, the positions of the protagonists and outside powers in the region to help guide the relevant ministry in its dealings with both Israel and the Palestinians?
This entire exercise by a supposedly scholarly, statutory body of the South African Government is nothing but a thinly disguised, pseudo-academic witchhunt, supported by taxpayers, designed to promote the agendas of known anti-Zionist activists. It deserves the widest possible exposure and unequivocal condemnation irrespective of one’s position on the issues in the Middle East.
Mike Berger (SOLAR PLEXUS)
The ink has hardly dried on my previous post but I feel it necessary to follow up with further brief comment. Firstly I would like to thank David Abel for drawing this entire sinister enterprise to my attention in the first place.
Secondly, it should not only be called "sinister" for its modus operandi and objectives, but also SMART. Let us be quite clear: this symposium is NOT some spontaneous cry of moral outrage but a carefully planned, costly, meticulously implemented strategy of demonsisation of Israel in pursuit of a clear political agenda. In case anyone should be in doubt what that is let me spell it out briefly. It is to set the stage for global ostracism and punitive action against Israel with the intention of bringing Ahmadinejad's threat to reality, namely, the elimination of Israel as we know it. This is to be accomplished not through nuclear weapons (Israel can respond effectively to such dangers) but by the cummulative impact of isolation, sanctions, boycotts and moral opprobrium.
It avoids the crudities of Durban I with its anti-semitic street theatre or the Ahmadinejads and Hugo Chavezs of this world. By enlisting the support of sympathetic academics, both individuals and organisations, and using the jargon and trappings of genuine scholarly discourse, it provides a thin but superficially effective cover for its sinster political agenda. It is, in a sense, the Cape Town I answer to the emasculation of Durban II under pressure from Western countries. There will be no Ahmadinejad to open the conference and thus give the game away (at least in Western eyes), but there will be a sympathetic Western press in the form of the Independent group, the M & G and others to ensure that its findings and conclusions receive a wide hearing.
This requires wide exposure and concentrated attention. While clever, the motivation and deceptive modus operandi is obvious to careful scrutiny. Equally, the content, despite their academic and quasi-judicial tone, is clearly partisan, selective and falls far short of genuine scholarly standards in order to find in favour of a predetermined verdict.
I trust that the influential academics and commentators amongst the recipients of this newspetter will ensure that this nasty and dishonest anti-semitic and anti-Zionist project is exposed and nullified.
Mike Berger
PS Firstly, my thanks to Steve Magid of It's Almost Supernatural for his own trenchant comments and for reproducing my Newsletter in its entirety.
Now to Zinn.
Zinn comment numero uno: “That Israel is a colonialist, deeply racist and apartheid-style state is plainly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country and isn't a rabid right wing pro-Israel apologist.” Goodness gracious why on earth do we need a Conference with so much intellectual firepower and at such expense, when our Zinn absolutely knows the truth without any shadow of a doubt? Please write to the HSRC and instruct them to call the whole thing off.
Zinn comment number two: Ahmadienjad doesn’t really wish to eliminate Israel as “we know it” – that is, as a Jewish State. His comments have been misrepresented. Yes folk, you read that right: that’s what the man said. Ahmadinejad supports Hamas, Hizbollah, and other anti-Israel terror groups. He runs a conference (strictly scholarly of course) questioning the Holocaust. He is developing a nuclear weapon as fast as he can. But no, he does not want to eliminate Israel as a Jewish State. But please go and read Zinn’s comment on “Supernatural” and watch how he misrepresents what I said in order to contradict me. And he calls me a liar. But it is too boring to to waste more energy on such rubbish.
Zinn again “I find it interesting that people like John Dugard are described as "ideologues" because they take "anti-Zionist positions", which suggests that to be pro-Zionist one would be free of ideology. This really tells me all I need to know about the sort of mindset that underpins this website.” John Dugard (like Zinn, Virginia Tilley et al) is an ideologue. That’s OK. I don’t really like ideologues with their fixed, selective and shrill opinions, whether of the left or the right. But my gripe is that the HSRC Conference and the Report on which it is based has been motivated for, framed and shaped by ideologues of a particular stripe designed to promote the agendas of those who, like Zinn, hate Israel That is not what the HSRC was designed to do, it is not good use of taxpayer’s money and it is grossly dishonest to represent it as scholarly, impartial exercise.
Zinn weer: “Just because Sudan has a horrendous human rights record does that magically exculpate Israel from any and all abuses against the Palestinians? Ditto for the question of "xenophobic hatred" in South Africa, and on and on.” No Zinny, no-one said it did. But is is a far more suitable subject for our HSRC than the Middle East. Oh, and by the way, Zinny, what about Chechnia, Tibet and Sri Lanka to name just a few spots which could do with a “scholarly conference” - not to mention mass marches, boycotts and threats of “to the gas”.? I do hope you write to the HSRC suggesting it expand its horizons further since Africa does not provide the scope it needs for its wide-ranging moral concerns.
Last word from Zinn: “Instead of fixating on who wrote and funded the HSRC report, why not actually review the report and tackle it on the basis of facts, and not mere ad hominem attacks. Or is this just standard operating procedure for pro-Israel zealots who cannot address factual information and must constantly go on the offensive with smear campaigns against those who disagree with their perspective of Israel as a paragon of purity?” If it were a genuine scholarly project and not one motivated by the same negative obsessions which so captivate Zinn, I would agree. But it is the “fruit of a poisoned tree” (I think that is the legal phrase) and as such does not deserve the attention of genuinely impartial and informed scholars. It is a bit like David Irving – he pushed his deeply anti-semitic treatment of Holocaust history to the point of a legal confrontation against genuine scholars – and came seriously unstuck. But, of course, that did not stop the Holocaust deniers, just as it will not stop the Zinns of this world. So I suppose it will be necessary for busy and intelligent, informed people to waste their time responding to the content, but it will have at most minimal impact. For the whole matter has little to do with external reality but with internal reality – that is, psychological obsessions on which facts have little influence.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
A Cause for Optimism?
I think the best news vis-a-vis Israel (and the world) is the walkout and boycott of the UN's repugnant anti-racism charade. It has always been my contention that in the end the excesses of Israel's enemies would be their undoing...and so it is coming to pass. It is another reason why Israel must base her own political behaviour on what might be called tough-minded moral realism. If only for pragmatic reasons, Israel simply cannot afford to imitate the racist intolerance and extremism of her totalitarian enemies, just as it cannot affort the moralistic posturing of her left-wing critics.
And, more subtly, the Obama presidency is potentially GOOD NEWS for Israel, despite the dire predictions of some. It takes the wind out of the sails of the chronic Israel-bashers when an icon of the liberal left shows some realism and common sense - not to mention common decency. He deserves our cautious respect and support for his efforts to breakthrough the wall of ideological extremism and irresponsibility emanating from certain Arab-Muslim quarters. Whether it will gain any purchase remains to be seen, but I suspect he may be tougher than some imagine.
On a different tack, I enclose a quote picked up from Daily Alert
"Robert D. Kaplan: The new Israeli government faithfully represents the Israeli electorate, which is in utter despair over the impossibility of finding credible partners on the Palestinian side with which to negotiate. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Abbas' Fatah movement may be willing to live in peace with Israel, but it has insufficient political legitimacy among Palestinians to negotiate such a deal. With Fatah and Hamas facing off against each other, the Palestinians are simply too divided to plausibly meet Israel across the table.
But there is a deeper structural and philosophical reason why the Palestinians remain stateless, as best explained by associate Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel in "The Power of Statelessness." Statehood is no longer a goal, he writes. Many stateless groups "do not aspire to have a state," for they are more capable of achieving their objectives without one. Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power.
A state entails responsibilities that limit a people's freedom of action. A group like Hizbullah in Lebanon could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Statelessness offers a level of "impunity" from retaliation. The most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space. (Atlantic Monthly)"
So there is a way to go as yet, but we should be permitted a modicum of optimism.
Finally, I attach a letter to the Cape Times which has nothing whatsoever to do with israel...for a change. Hope you like it.
It is one of the many truisms surrounding South Africa that it is so unpredictable and paradoxical a country that almost anything one says will turn out to be wise or foolish with about equal probability. Optimists and pessimists alike can find plenty of evidence to support their views and, of course, South Africans can swing from one extreme to the other depending on the performance of their favourite sports team.
Our politics has been almost uniformly bad whether one considers the white or black sections of our population. Taken for granted are the iniquities of European colonialism and apartheid, but Bantu internecine warfare and displacement of the indigenous San peoples of South Africa were hardly examples of enlightened political behaviour. Furthermore, the past decade of black government has fallen far short of what our liberal and socially progressive constitution portended and the prospect of a Zuma Presidency seems to fulfil dire predictions of yet another failed African state, long on rhetoric and spin but very short on performance and integrity.
Yet we are still here and the centre has not fallen apart, even though worrying cracks are apparent. The DA, which still remains the single most principled and rational of our political parties, has gained significantly under the leadership of a singularly determined and able Zille. Parts of the economy are flourishing and, despite the abuse of affirmative action, a more self-assured and educated black middle class has emerged to counter the primitive populism of the Malema cult with its appeal to impoverished and disempowered young blacks excluded from the post-liberation gravy train.
We still have our wonderful topography and climate, our intoxicating diversity of people, cultures and physical environment. We have our natural resources and a core of resourcefulness, common sense and hardiness which has seen us through many potentially catastrophic crises.
But why do we still need to stray so close to the edge of the abyss? Surely it is about time we aimed for something higher. Forget about the Scandinavian or European models. They are beyond our abilities and are in any case not suitable for a still raw, energetic and heterogeneous country. And certainly the East (Far or Near) is totally alien to the South African temperament.
But why not a United States of South Africa? - untidy and of sometimes questionable morals, but energetic, ambitious, diverse and pulsating with a raw commitment to democracy, opportunity and freedom.
We have what it takes if only we have the imagination and will. But we must first get rid of our residual dependency yearnings for a “strong leader” who will provide for us and through whom we can feel empowered. Such leaders will provide only for themselves and their cronies and will strip us of our self-respect and, ultimately, of our economic prospects and independence. We must also free ourselves of a self-indulgent cynicism and apathy. Our future is in our hands.
The beginnings have been accomplished through the strength of the DA and the emergence of COPE. But besides these vital political developments we must have a strong civil society and insist on delivery whether in fighting crime, providing for the health of our population, stimulating small business and entrepreneurship, protecting our common environment and enhancing our physical and electronic infrastructure.
Once again we are provided with the challenge and opportunity. Let’s start.
Mike Berger
And, more subtly, the Obama presidency is potentially GOOD NEWS for Israel, despite the dire predictions of some. It takes the wind out of the sails of the chronic Israel-bashers when an icon of the liberal left shows some realism and common sense - not to mention common decency. He deserves our cautious respect and support for his efforts to breakthrough the wall of ideological extremism and irresponsibility emanating from certain Arab-Muslim quarters. Whether it will gain any purchase remains to be seen, but I suspect he may be tougher than some imagine.
On a different tack, I enclose a quote picked up from Daily Alert
"Robert D. Kaplan: The new Israeli government faithfully represents the Israeli electorate, which is in utter despair over the impossibility of finding credible partners on the Palestinian side with which to negotiate. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Abbas' Fatah movement may be willing to live in peace with Israel, but it has insufficient political legitimacy among Palestinians to negotiate such a deal. With Fatah and Hamas facing off against each other, the Palestinians are simply too divided to plausibly meet Israel across the table.
But there is a deeper structural and philosophical reason why the Palestinians remain stateless, as best explained by associate Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel in "The Power of Statelessness." Statehood is no longer a goal, he writes. Many stateless groups "do not aspire to have a state," for they are more capable of achieving their objectives without one. Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power.
A state entails responsibilities that limit a people's freedom of action. A group like Hizbullah in Lebanon could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Statelessness offers a level of "impunity" from retaliation. The most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space. (Atlantic Monthly)"
So there is a way to go as yet, but we should be permitted a modicum of optimism.
Finally, I attach a letter to the Cape Times which has nothing whatsoever to do with israel...for a change. Hope you like it.
It is one of the many truisms surrounding South Africa that it is so unpredictable and paradoxical a country that almost anything one says will turn out to be wise or foolish with about equal probability. Optimists and pessimists alike can find plenty of evidence to support their views and, of course, South Africans can swing from one extreme to the other depending on the performance of their favourite sports team.
Our politics has been almost uniformly bad whether one considers the white or black sections of our population. Taken for granted are the iniquities of European colonialism and apartheid, but Bantu internecine warfare and displacement of the indigenous San peoples of South Africa were hardly examples of enlightened political behaviour. Furthermore, the past decade of black government has fallen far short of what our liberal and socially progressive constitution portended and the prospect of a Zuma Presidency seems to fulfil dire predictions of yet another failed African state, long on rhetoric and spin but very short on performance and integrity.
Yet we are still here and the centre has not fallen apart, even though worrying cracks are apparent. The DA, which still remains the single most principled and rational of our political parties, has gained significantly under the leadership of a singularly determined and able Zille. Parts of the economy are flourishing and, despite the abuse of affirmative action, a more self-assured and educated black middle class has emerged to counter the primitive populism of the Malema cult with its appeal to impoverished and disempowered young blacks excluded from the post-liberation gravy train.
We still have our wonderful topography and climate, our intoxicating diversity of people, cultures and physical environment. We have our natural resources and a core of resourcefulness, common sense and hardiness which has seen us through many potentially catastrophic crises.
But why do we still need to stray so close to the edge of the abyss? Surely it is about time we aimed for something higher. Forget about the Scandinavian or European models. They are beyond our abilities and are in any case not suitable for a still raw, energetic and heterogeneous country. And certainly the East (Far or Near) is totally alien to the South African temperament.
But why not a United States of South Africa? - untidy and of sometimes questionable morals, but energetic, ambitious, diverse and pulsating with a raw commitment to democracy, opportunity and freedom.
We have what it takes if only we have the imagination and will. But we must first get rid of our residual dependency yearnings for a “strong leader” who will provide for us and through whom we can feel empowered. Such leaders will provide only for themselves and their cronies and will strip us of our self-respect and, ultimately, of our economic prospects and independence. We must also free ourselves of a self-indulgent cynicism and apathy. Our future is in our hands.
The beginnings have been accomplished through the strength of the DA and the emergence of COPE. But besides these vital political developments we must have a strong civil society and insist on delivery whether in fighting crime, providing for the health of our population, stimulating small business and entrepreneurship, protecting our common environment and enhancing our physical and electronic infrastructure.
Once again we are provided with the challenge and opportunity. Let’s start.
Mike Berger
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Soft Challenges of a PR Warrior
Extracts from a talk presented at the AGM of the Bnoth Zion Association WIZO, 17 Feb 2009.
I have been engaged for about 10 years now in the defence of Israel in the context of an often shallow, biased, amoral and actively hostile media environment. Since it is this environment which shapes the views of the South African population, my task entails setting the record straight where it has been distorted, contextualising actions and pointing to lapses in logic or honesty of those who criticise Israel.
Human history is, as we know only too well, littered with miscalculations, wishful thinking, unpredicted consequences and missed opportunities. Afterwards, with time, more information and insulation from the pressures and passions of the moment, it may be possible to point to the mistakes made and options missed. But even these are bitterly contested by scholars with irreconcilable views.
Indeed politics is conducted under a veil of ignorance through which we desperately try to discern a path through an intractable reality.
Few of these difficulties appear in the popular media. If the truth be told, politics is much more complex, subtle and unpredictable than “rocket science”, the supposed gold standard of high intellectual endeavor. The media, however, does not sell hard cognition; it sells emotion.
At its not infrequent worst, it sells indignation, righteous rage, and a sanctimonious sense of self-righteousness. It sells prejudice. It sells softcore and, sometimes, even hardcore political pornography.
I could give you many examples, but I’ll take a recent report from Damascus by a Harvard graduate student conducting research there:
“This morning, while I made my coffee and eggs, I tuned in to the best show on television. ...
The show is the conflict in Gaza. On Al-Jazeera.
Even if CNN could sneak a camera crew through the checkpoints, it's hard to imagine they would produce anything like what's on Al-Jazeera - an all-day, ever-shifting drama that throws war in your face with all its gruesome cruelty. ... Their broadcasts routinely feature mutilated corpses being pulled from the scene of an explosion, or hospital interviews with maimed children, who bemoan the loss of their siblings or their parents – often killed in front of their eyes. Al-Jazeera splices archival footage into the live shots, weaving interviews and expertly produced montages into a devastating narrative you can follow from the comfort of your own home.
This is news without even the pretense of impartiality....”
There is much more to this quote, and Calderwood contrasts it to the “bloodless coverage” in the West. I would challenge him on that. Much of the West’s coverage is softcore as distinct from Al-Jazeera’s hardcore material, but judging by the reaction just as effective.
Of course, as we are only too painfully aware, the IPC receives attention disproportionate to the number of lives lost or damage caused by the struggle in the Middle East. While every life blighted or destroyed is worthy of regret, the painful truth is that any one of a number of African and other conflicts over the past half century have dwarfed the IPC on virtually any measure you may care to use.
One reason is, of course, that the IPC has become both a proxy and a diversion for the wider struggle of fundamental Islam with the West, the “culture wars” within the West itself and the struggle of Islam to modernise and escape the centrifugal pull of the totalitarian Islamist movement. Within the West, the IPC has become the focal point of much progressive activism and is kept alive on campuses and in the media partly through targeted funding from Islamist organisations.
Some indeed see this conflict as the focal point of a global struggle already in progress between opposing civilisations. While that may be a simplification, it is has sufficient truth to account in part for its disproportionate claim on the world’s attention.
So let’s look at the war for public support in the West more closely. Here is an extract of an account from the supposedly hard-headed, objective magazine, The Economist. It is titled “The war of words and images”, and I quote:
“Israel is now better prepared. The tactics it deploys on the media front are as cunning and punchy as those its army has been wielding against Hamas in Gaza”.
In case you missed the subtext in that extract here is more “Yet wider support among the American public for Israel in this conflict appears to be less robust than usual. (“Surprise, surprise” – my comment)...And that was before the bloody attack on a UN school and other such incidents. Global public opinion has also probably shifted against the Jewish state. Even inside Israel, human-rights groups, concerned that much of the normally outspoken local press has turned largely jingoistic, have launched a website to expose the mounting tragedy inside Gaza.” And so the softcore expose continues.
The Economist is not alone amongst the normally sober and balanced media in adopting the dark tools of the propagandist. The equally prestigious Financial Times saw fit to run an article by the Saudi Prince, Turki al-Faisal,entitled “Saudi patience is running out” January 22, 2009. This includes such comments as “In the past weeks, not only have the Israeli Defence Forces murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians, but they have come close to killing the prospect of peace itself. Unless the new US administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the stability of the region are at risk”. And this “Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness, and resolve to rein in the murderous Israeli regime...”.
In case you may have thought, “well this is just the exercise of free and impartial coverage of all perspectives” you would have sought in vain for countervailing comment putting Israel’s case with similar forthrightness. On the contrary, the editorial section simply reinforces the FT’s selectively pro-Palestinian stance. For example, in condemning the BBC’s decision not to run an advert for a Gazan charity, the FT has this to say “Ordinary people, informed not least by the BBC’s own coverage of the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of Gazans, can distinguish for themselves the difference between acute humanitarian need and propaganda”.
Like hell they can and, of course, the FT knows it!
In an article published by The Institute for Global Jewish Affarirs, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin documents on-going anti-Zionist activity on the University of California at Santa Cruz. This involves the intrusion of such material into lectures and courses with little ostensibly to do with the conflict in the Middle East, accompanied by such unreferenced statements as “Israeli massacres are often accompanied by sexual assault, particularly of pregnant women as a symbolic way of uprooting the children from the mother, or the Palestinian from the land.”
A purportedly academic conference entitled “Alternative Histories Within and Beyond Zionism" was recently held which constituted a systematic delegitimization of Zionism. The number of Jewish participants was notably high.
Of course, this material is the relatively polite side of propganda. It can be passed off as “democratic opprobrium”, legitimately evoked by Israeli policies. Who are we kidding?
The mask comes off in many Muslim rallies or rallies in countries not afflicted with lingering guilt over the Holocaust. There chants of “Jews to the ovens” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” are perfectly acceptable. That such slogans are screamed by people who at the same time deny that the Holocaust ever took place should surprise only the incurably naïve. That Israelis are regularly compared to the Nazis and the Gazan invasion evokes comparison to the Holocaust is the stock-in-trade of the more open antisemites.
Prof. Frank Furedi carefully documents how anti-Zionism is increasingly becoming difficult to differentiate from open antisemitism: in his words “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’.” Of course, this does not mean that every criticism or critic of Israel is antisemitic. But, increasingly, the sanctimonious and shallow left, the angry and bigoted right and the Islamic fundamentalist find themselves in bed together and prove amazingly accomodating to their new companions.
This is no longer news to many of us but, understandably, it still elicts great distress and anger.
But anger is not enough. Uncontrolled it leads to stupidity and to worse; becoming the narrow-minded, obsessed fanatic of our own worst nightmares and fulfilling the caricatures of our enemies. Not only would this seriously harm the best Jewish ideals of universality and tolerance, but it is the sure way to losing the battle for survival.
To flourish, Israel will need to continue on the path of idealistic realism. At times this will demand harsh action - hopefully rarely and always tempered by a consideration for human life. Most of the time it will demand firmness and tenacity, clarity of thought and a readiness to grasp opportuniy while not sacrificing appropriate caution.
Despite the sensationalism, I have faith that the universal human respect for honesty and fairness will win out over baser emotions.
(A not added afterwards:
It is my sense that such are the excesses of Israel’s enemies, that the tide is beginning to turn. There may well be a backlash in Europe and other countries against Islamic pressures, partly caused by sheer numbers and partly caused by violent Muslim behaviours both within the host country and elsewhere.
If indeed this does occur, it would relieve the pressure on Israel which most of us would welcome. But it would be a pity to see xenophobic nationalist sentiment return to a part of the world (wider Europe) which has been at the forefront of post-modern cosmopolitanism.
There are many ills in the world, including within the West and Israel itself, which need to be addressed. The atavistic extremism of the West’s enemies makes reform (or some sort of pragmatic justice in the Middle East) suicidal, thus encouraging the most intractable elements within our own societies.
Well at my age, I am neither surprised or disappointed – just vaguely regretful. But first things first. Stop Arab-Muslim extremism and then try to move beyond towards a sustainable raprochement. Neither will be easy and neither seems to be on the cards for the foreseeable future.)
Mike Berger
I have been engaged for about 10 years now in the defence of Israel in the context of an often shallow, biased, amoral and actively hostile media environment. Since it is this environment which shapes the views of the South African population, my task entails setting the record straight where it has been distorted, contextualising actions and pointing to lapses in logic or honesty of those who criticise Israel.
Human history is, as we know only too well, littered with miscalculations, wishful thinking, unpredicted consequences and missed opportunities. Afterwards, with time, more information and insulation from the pressures and passions of the moment, it may be possible to point to the mistakes made and options missed. But even these are bitterly contested by scholars with irreconcilable views.
Indeed politics is conducted under a veil of ignorance through which we desperately try to discern a path through an intractable reality.
Few of these difficulties appear in the popular media. If the truth be told, politics is much more complex, subtle and unpredictable than “rocket science”, the supposed gold standard of high intellectual endeavor. The media, however, does not sell hard cognition; it sells emotion.
At its not infrequent worst, it sells indignation, righteous rage, and a sanctimonious sense of self-righteousness. It sells prejudice. It sells softcore and, sometimes, even hardcore political pornography.
I could give you many examples, but I’ll take a recent report from Damascus by a Harvard graduate student conducting research there:
“This morning, while I made my coffee and eggs, I tuned in to the best show on television. ...
The show is the conflict in Gaza. On Al-Jazeera.
Even if CNN could sneak a camera crew through the checkpoints, it's hard to imagine they would produce anything like what's on Al-Jazeera - an all-day, ever-shifting drama that throws war in your face with all its gruesome cruelty. ... Their broadcasts routinely feature mutilated corpses being pulled from the scene of an explosion, or hospital interviews with maimed children, who bemoan the loss of their siblings or their parents – often killed in front of their eyes. Al-Jazeera splices archival footage into the live shots, weaving interviews and expertly produced montages into a devastating narrative you can follow from the comfort of your own home.
This is news without even the pretense of impartiality....”
There is much more to this quote, and Calderwood contrasts it to the “bloodless coverage” in the West. I would challenge him on that. Much of the West’s coverage is softcore as distinct from Al-Jazeera’s hardcore material, but judging by the reaction just as effective.
Of course, as we are only too painfully aware, the IPC receives attention disproportionate to the number of lives lost or damage caused by the struggle in the Middle East. While every life blighted or destroyed is worthy of regret, the painful truth is that any one of a number of African and other conflicts over the past half century have dwarfed the IPC on virtually any measure you may care to use.
One reason is, of course, that the IPC has become both a proxy and a diversion for the wider struggle of fundamental Islam with the West, the “culture wars” within the West itself and the struggle of Islam to modernise and escape the centrifugal pull of the totalitarian Islamist movement. Within the West, the IPC has become the focal point of much progressive activism and is kept alive on campuses and in the media partly through targeted funding from Islamist organisations.
Some indeed see this conflict as the focal point of a global struggle already in progress between opposing civilisations. While that may be a simplification, it is has sufficient truth to account in part for its disproportionate claim on the world’s attention.
So let’s look at the war for public support in the West more closely. Here is an extract of an account from the supposedly hard-headed, objective magazine, The Economist. It is titled “The war of words and images”, and I quote:
“Israel is now better prepared. The tactics it deploys on the media front are as cunning and punchy as those its army has been wielding against Hamas in Gaza”.
In case you missed the subtext in that extract here is more “Yet wider support among the American public for Israel in this conflict appears to be less robust than usual. (“Surprise, surprise” – my comment)...And that was before the bloody attack on a UN school and other such incidents. Global public opinion has also probably shifted against the Jewish state. Even inside Israel, human-rights groups, concerned that much of the normally outspoken local press has turned largely jingoistic, have launched a website to expose the mounting tragedy inside Gaza.” And so the softcore expose continues.
The Economist is not alone amongst the normally sober and balanced media in adopting the dark tools of the propagandist. The equally prestigious Financial Times saw fit to run an article by the Saudi Prince, Turki al-Faisal,entitled “Saudi patience is running out” January 22, 2009. This includes such comments as “In the past weeks, not only have the Israeli Defence Forces murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians, but they have come close to killing the prospect of peace itself. Unless the new US administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the stability of the region are at risk”. And this “Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness, and resolve to rein in the murderous Israeli regime...”.
In case you may have thought, “well this is just the exercise of free and impartial coverage of all perspectives” you would have sought in vain for countervailing comment putting Israel’s case with similar forthrightness. On the contrary, the editorial section simply reinforces the FT’s selectively pro-Palestinian stance. For example, in condemning the BBC’s decision not to run an advert for a Gazan charity, the FT has this to say “Ordinary people, informed not least by the BBC’s own coverage of the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of Gazans, can distinguish for themselves the difference between acute humanitarian need and propaganda”.
Like hell they can and, of course, the FT knows it!
In an article published by The Institute for Global Jewish Affarirs, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin documents on-going anti-Zionist activity on the University of California at Santa Cruz. This involves the intrusion of such material into lectures and courses with little ostensibly to do with the conflict in the Middle East, accompanied by such unreferenced statements as “Israeli massacres are often accompanied by sexual assault, particularly of pregnant women as a symbolic way of uprooting the children from the mother, or the Palestinian from the land.”
A purportedly academic conference entitled “Alternative Histories Within and Beyond Zionism" was recently held which constituted a systematic delegitimization of Zionism. The number of Jewish participants was notably high.
Of course, this material is the relatively polite side of propganda. It can be passed off as “democratic opprobrium”, legitimately evoked by Israeli policies. Who are we kidding?
The mask comes off in many Muslim rallies or rallies in countries not afflicted with lingering guilt over the Holocaust. There chants of “Jews to the ovens” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” are perfectly acceptable. That such slogans are screamed by people who at the same time deny that the Holocaust ever took place should surprise only the incurably naïve. That Israelis are regularly compared to the Nazis and the Gazan invasion evokes comparison to the Holocaust is the stock-in-trade of the more open antisemites.
Prof. Frank Furedi carefully documents how anti-Zionism is increasingly becoming difficult to differentiate from open antisemitism: in his words “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’.” Of course, this does not mean that every criticism or critic of Israel is antisemitic. But, increasingly, the sanctimonious and shallow left, the angry and bigoted right and the Islamic fundamentalist find themselves in bed together and prove amazingly accomodating to their new companions.
This is no longer news to many of us but, understandably, it still elicts great distress and anger.
But anger is not enough. Uncontrolled it leads to stupidity and to worse; becoming the narrow-minded, obsessed fanatic of our own worst nightmares and fulfilling the caricatures of our enemies. Not only would this seriously harm the best Jewish ideals of universality and tolerance, but it is the sure way to losing the battle for survival.
To flourish, Israel will need to continue on the path of idealistic realism. At times this will demand harsh action - hopefully rarely and always tempered by a consideration for human life. Most of the time it will demand firmness and tenacity, clarity of thought and a readiness to grasp opportuniy while not sacrificing appropriate caution.
Despite the sensationalism, I have faith that the universal human respect for honesty and fairness will win out over baser emotions.
(A not added afterwards:
It is my sense that such are the excesses of Israel’s enemies, that the tide is beginning to turn. There may well be a backlash in Europe and other countries against Islamic pressures, partly caused by sheer numbers and partly caused by violent Muslim behaviours both within the host country and elsewhere.
If indeed this does occur, it would relieve the pressure on Israel which most of us would welcome. But it would be a pity to see xenophobic nationalist sentiment return to a part of the world (wider Europe) which has been at the forefront of post-modern cosmopolitanism.
There are many ills in the world, including within the West and Israel itself, which need to be addressed. The atavistic extremism of the West’s enemies makes reform (or some sort of pragmatic justice in the Middle East) suicidal, thus encouraging the most intractable elements within our own societies.
Well at my age, I am neither surprised or disappointed – just vaguely regretful. But first things first. Stop Arab-Muslim extremism and then try to move beyond towards a sustainable raprochement. Neither will be easy and neither seems to be on the cards for the foreseeable future.)
Mike Berger
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