Sean Wallis

Here, Wallis writes,

One minute’s reading of the source blog above shows that it is the original reporter who introduces the very anti-semitic slur that I am accused of.

I wasn't entirely sure what slur he denies, so I stuck a tack in it. Now that David's addressed it, I thought I was going to be a "moderate" voice. David caught a similar denial, but one a bit less specific. I could add a bit more info and perhaps nuance, since Wallis actually references a "slur" in my quote.

However, at the "source blog" Wallis writes,

At the time of speaking I was not alluding to a conspiracy theory which I have since discovered to be in circulation on the internet.

However much clearer this is, it's still very odd. He most definitely does not deny having said what he said, only that it references a particular circulating "slur." It seems Wallis is denying a belief that Jews secreted away large sums of cash from Lehman Brothers before its collapse. Clearly, Wallis is not accusing Jews of having the sort of advance knowledge of conspirators. And yet, he sees absolutely no problem voicing a charge that rich Jews -his reference to Lehman Brother's was absolutely about the stereotype of the parasitic, rich Jew who didn't earn his money; just not about a conspiracy of parasitic, rich Jews- are unfairly interfering in the matters of the UCU. Except..

That unfair interference seems awfully conspiratorial.

I'm confused again. What he said was about lawyers with -and here's the actual quote he doesn't deny-

bank balances from Lehman Brothers that can’t be tracked down.

My impulse is always to assume a difference of narrative and consequent misunderstandings. I'd figured he had a different idea of antisemitism and the problem was bound up in that. I was prepared to argue that point, but now I'm starting to think he's just being maliciously dishonest. It's really rare for me to have any such suspicions about people, and perhaps someone can clear this up for me.

Is it perhaps that, rather than a limited conspiracy of a few Jewish lawyers, he actually associates Jews more generally with a corrupt financial system? Is that a way of avoiding charges of conspiracism? Or perhaps he's not talking at all about Jews, except so far as the powers that be happen to be Jews? Can one even delude oneself into thinking that's not an antisemitic charge of Jewish power? Or am I just veering into incoherence trying to understand what Wallis might think he meant to say?

I guess my "nuance" isn't so "moderate."

Burn After Reading

Saw Burn After Reading by the Coen Brothers over the weekend. The following contains mild spoilers.

It begins with a God's-eye view descending into a CIA building in DC. Inside, the camera follows, from floor-level, someone. Because the camera is so low, we are necessarily looking up at this person, giving them a sense of stature and importance. Yet we can hardly see above his knees. Immediately, the film jokes by contrasting the all seeing, which lacks detail, with the all-detailed, which lacks context.

It's a farce about middle aged characters, most of whom are sleeping around with each other, all of whom are trying to assert control over their lives and world around them. The MacGuffin is a CD-Rom with, as Brad Pitt's character puts it, "intelligent shit" from the CIA. So in addition to being a sex farce, it also works as a spy farce. While everyone strives for control, nobody, not even the CIA, has any idea what's going on. It's a perfect parody of conspiracism.

Turns out this person we're following, played by John Malkovich, wearing a 3-piece suit and bow tie, enters a meeting where he is demoted. The stature and importance the camera gave to him in the hallway is a bit of a joke. A coworker accuses the Malkovich character, Ozzie Cox, of being a drunk. The accusation is true (a later allusion to the Rio Bravo scene where Dean Martin pours a shot of whiskey back into the bottle without spilling a drop makes this clear), but Cox responds by accusing his Mormon coworker of seeing everyone as a drunk. Cox claims in the meeting he is being crucified.

At home, his wife walks in and asks if he picked up the cheeses. It's intentionally difficult to hear, as his wife is at the front door while the audio is from the kitchen. It wasn't just me - after the reference to crucifixion in the previous scene, Soo also heard some mumbling about "Jesus" instead of "cheeses." The mishearing speaks to limited information with which to understand the world, undermining notions of knowability.

Later, after meeting the Frances McDormand character, after her insurance company has refused to cover several cosmetics surgeries, she is seen with her head down and palms up as if pleading in frustration. On the wall behind her is a meditating Buddha, head up and palms on knees, which really digs in at her inability to accept change.

All of these references to religion so early on -counting liberally, there's 5 that I mentioned; to be overly conservative, there's at least 3- made me wonder if the Coens were saying something from a Jewish perspective. We know they picked up the adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, so it seems they'd like to say at least a little from that particular perspective. The timing is about right for the film to be a response to Mearsheimer and Walt. But I doubt it. It seems like an over-determined reading.

Except for one minor character being Mormon, all of the religious references -even the cheeses- speak directly to power and control, obvious themes in the film. So they don't really push for a "Jewish" interpretation. Unless we deny that the Mormon reference can just be folded into the others. (For what it's worth, there's no reason to think religion should suggest morality. There is no sense of morality, just absurdity and irony.)

I wonder if anyone else would argue for the film as a response to antisemitic conspiracism?

On the power of complaining II

Yesterday, I put up a picture - showing an ADL jackboot stomping on a Christian Church, it reads "Hate Crimes Legislation is Just a Ruse for Censorship" - to illustrate a post, and got two comments asking where it came from. I first found it from a post at Judeosphere (unfortunately, now retired from blogging), called "Progressive" Website Posts Neo-Nazi Cartoon. It appears to come originally from the website Rense.com.

It is, of course, a major theme in antisemitic conspiracism that Jews control the media. The meaning of this is, I think, often understated today. It means Jews have a special ability to reach into American livingrooms with Judaizing hypno-rays, but that's a mocking description. A great deal of less unreasonable thought from the Left as well as genuinely necessary scholarship, can feed into the view that this is possible. Chomsky not only argues that the elite manipulate the ideas common people have by determining the "legitimate" field of debate, but also that the phrase "conspiracy theory" is a ruse of the elite (not that I want to pick on him here). So I don't think the idea that Jews control the terms of debate - whether stated in blatant far right terms, in relatively sophisticated pseudo-post-modern language, or in milder forms such as what I quoted - can be so easily divorced from antisemitic conspiracism.

Now, the individual I quoted is as far from a Neo-Nazi as could be. He is, in fact, a left-Zionist of the sort with which I would generally agree. He does argue that antisemitism has played a large part in the debate over Israel (though certainly not that it is the only relevant bias), and so I don't think he himself would argue for including more blatant antisemitism in the debate. A big part of the reason I didn't cite that person or link to the quote was to avoid conflating him with the sort of people who would post the picture I showed without embarrasment. But I think it does show how common this view is that Jews control the terms of debate over Israel by disingenuously charging antisemitism.

I'm probably pretty radical in refusing to accept any claim that Jews silence debate. I've seen far too often that this charge silences Jews (including me). And, frankly, I've looked at a lot of examples offered by others and generally found there was a real reason to talk about antisemitism. One example that stands out in my mind was a conversation between Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch and the New York Sun, published in the paper as a series of letters. Roth, himself an observant Jew and child of Holocaust survivors, was accused of writing "a slur on the Jewish religion itself that is breathtaking in its ignorance." In fact, Roth had written a variation on the phrase "an eye for an eye," calling it "primitive" and implying that this was the basis of Israeli policy in it's war with Lebanon.

Mr. Bell's distortions do Israel no service. Israel could have maintained the moral high ground if it had responded to Hezbollah rocket attacks by targeting only Hezbollah military forces. Instead, whether by design or callous indifference, Israeli bombing has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians and left much of the country's infrastructure in ruins. Yet Mr. Bell's see-no-evil defense only encourages more such slaughter. An eye for an eye - or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye - may have been the morality of some more primitive moment. But it is not the morality of international humanitarian law which Mr. Bell pretends to apply.

I do think the Sun editors were right that this is a breathtakingly ignorant slur on Judaism. Further, it implies that observant Jews today are primitive. What's especially strange is that Roth should know he was misinterpreting the phrase as it's understood in Judaism, as a way of determining the amount of monetary compensation in certain confusing cases.

But allowing that there may be cases here or there where people are unjustly silenced by being called antisemitic, and allowing that such cases may even rise to a level of significance on occasion - Morton Klein of the ZOA is a notable idiot - it is still important that a response be measured. It is not remotely acceptable that criticism of figures like Klein should be scattershot so as to silence Jews generally. It is necessary that such criticism should be distinguishable from conspiracism. And that does mean being more careful than to use constructions like this:

the organized Jewish community quite often does try to shut down debate over Israel, and often employs the accusation of anti-Semitism to do so.

Conspiracy theories are penis envy

Engage has a good post on conspiracy theories. Mira Vogel writes:

Last night I went to a lecture by Karen Douglas (University of Kent) on conspiracy beliefs from a social-psychological perspective. Theories about the benefits of believing in conspiracies include coming to terms with events beyond your control, comforting yourself that you alone know the truth, justifying a lack of trust in authority without having to take any action... Karen's work (data analysis is ongoing), which investigated believers rather than propagators, found that 'Machiavellianism' (a cynical world-view identified with an instrument designed by Christie and Geis) is a unique predictor of belief in conspiracies. Findings from a further study suggested that people who believe in conspiracy theories do so by making 'mental state inferences' - i.e. projecting their own values and moral standards on the agents at the centre of the conspiracies. Even more interestingly, a question on conspiracy intentions found that the high Machs were more likely to respond affirmatively when asked whether, if they were in the position of the system responsible for a given conspiracy event, they would have done it.

Like I keep saying: it's penis envy.

Journey of an idea

Via Hatewatch: How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.

Antisemitic & Islamophobic conspiracies, take 2

The British journalist/activist Sunny Hundal responded to something I had written a while ago. He writes:

This is a really intelligent point, and one I hadn’t considered earlier. [Thanks! -ig]

Its certainly true that bigotry towards Muslims is primarily couched in terms of ‘they’re different to us and will destroy our lifestyle‘, while anti-semitism towards Jews is much more about how they’ve infiltrated the ruling classes...

But you can also see how hatred of Muslims has also changed. It started back in the days with how the Middle Eastern governments were all backwards and had to be controlled, then kicked off recently with how these people are all terrorists, and rapidly morphed into a general hysteria about how British Muslims were going to destroy this country’s values.

I responded over there, and I hope it becomes an interesting conversation.

Antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracies

I recently came across a somewhat old comment on the blog Liberal Conspiracy (via El Neuvo Pantano):

Furthermore, I find it amusing that when Muslims are associated with conspiracy theories to Islamicise Britain (as Melanie Phillips is frequently liable to claim) or ‘Eurabia’, we don’t see that level of condemnation [as we see of antisemitic conspiracism].

Despite the age of this comment, I think it deserve a reply that it didn't get. (This post is based upon an email sent to the author. From this point, I'll stop amending it for general consumption, and leave in the second-person address.)

Firstly, if you feel that the sort of conspiracy theories directed at Muslims are not sufficiently critiqued, it would certainly be appropriate to say so. I've noticed them and wondered about them, but my perspective is different from yours. As such, I think it would be great if you were to elaborate or invite others to elaborate on them on your blog, which I pay some attention to. However, it is not appropriate to undercut the critiques of antisemitic conspiracism, which, contrary to what you imply, are still absolutely inadequate.

Perhaps more importantly, though, I'm concerned that you might be missing something essential about antisemitic conspiracism. It's dependent upon a view of Jews as too much assimilated. While (many) Muslims are visibly Other, Jews are (to make use of an illustrative but fortunately historical extreme) shapeshifters. Jews, mistakenly perceived in the West as white when not all are, live in the uncanny valley. The more assimilated and successful Jews become, the greater the threat we represent to antisemites. To the best of my knowledge, conspiracism in Islamophobia arises through an Orientalist history that views both Jews and other 'Orientals' as superficially clever, but it does not have the same history in Islamophobia as it does in antisemitism. Because of the rules of evidence employed by conspiracists, always returning to disgraced and discarded ideas like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the disgrace proving the "danger" and hence relevance of the text, conspiracism is heavily dependent on its own antisemitic history. While many Islamophobes view Muslims as conspiring to infiltrate the West, those with the most extreme conspiracist worldviews unanimously view Muslims as (racially inferior to whites) victims of Jewish supremacism. And because the Otherness of Muslims is visually marked, I'm not sure it could change targets even if it that history could be overcome. Instead, I think it's more likely that the successful assimilation of Muslims will be viewed as a Jewish plot --as affirmative action, multiculturalism, the UN, and progressive immigration policies here in the US already are.

That last sentence, as it deals with white supremacists' desire to rank minorities, risks a comparison that I hope I can back away from. I have no desire to pit Jews against Muslims in "the Oppression Olympics." Islamophobia is certainly an important topic these days, and I have no desire to stand in the way of the fight against it. I have no doubt that it has the potential to become actively genocidal in any one of a great many Western nations. I have no doubt that it has informed the current wars that have killed so many people already. I have no desire to stand in the way of the important job of accurately and effectively critiquing Islamophobia. But I do very much doubt that Islamophobia will ever follow an antisemitic logic rather than an Islamophobic one.