Obama and Farrakhan are not related

I'm getting a fair number of hits from google searches on Obama and Farrakhan leading to this article. I wasn't as adamant as many people who attacked journalist Richard Cohen when he wrote an article called "Obama's Farrakhan Test." Partly, I focused more on objecting to the ways in which Cohen was being attacked, which often centered on his Jewishness. Also, I wasn't as adamant because the situation was a bit different then. Obama's pastor had just endorsed Farrakhan, and I thought there was some room to disagree on how strongly that linked Obama, even though no one seriously thought they hold similar views, to Farrakhan. But, since it was clear that Obama didn't share Obama's opinions about Jews, I did side with those who said Cohen's article smacked of McCarthyism and racism.

At this point, there is no further excuse for asking Obama about Farrakhan, and to do so is no longer understandable. It's just plain racist.

Yes, Farrakhan has a terribly ugly side. He's a bigot. But he is a more complicated figure in the black community (where his good and bad sides are understandably weighed a bit differently than I would), and it is unfair to ask anyone to denounce the entirety of his being. It is especially unfair now that Obama has made his own views crystal clear and even gone so far as to speak out specifically against antisemitism in the black community.

On the most basic level, Obama and Farrakhan have only two things in common. They're both black, and they're both opposed to racism against blacks. To insist on an inability to distinguish between them based on just that is to insist that all blacks are alike. And that's just plain racist.

Drag against the occupation

Gotta highlight this, which comes to me via Engage:

A full dance floor in a South Tel Aviv nightclub, replete with its share of drag queens. Ostensibly another Friday night of gay men having a good time. But this is not an ordinary party of this sort. Palestinians and Jews are dancing together, the music is Arabic, several of the drag performances have a political content, and even the time of night - from the early evening until before midnight - is designed so the celebrants can get home at a reasonable hour without being asked too many questions.

Is "Israel" the same as "World Jewry"

Consider the statement, "World Jewry has a stranglehold on the American Congress." Most people with even a passing familiarity with antisemitism would consider that a typically antisemitic comment. On a scale of 1 to 100, it's pretty high up there. Keep in mind the idea of that scale and rate for yourself the following statements.

First, just a tiny, little change. "The international Jewish community has a stranglehold on the American Congress." It's really not much of a change in meaning, so, perhaps being generous we might call it a tiny bit less antisemitic.

"Zionists have a stranglehold on the US Congress." Probably worse than "The international Jewish community..."

"The Israel lobby has a stranglehold on the American Congress." It's not immediately clear to me (based on just the words themselves) that this statement is even meant to be any different in content than any of those above, except that it's meant to not be understood as antisemitic. But if it isn't immediately clear that the content is significantly different, shouldn't we be at least a little suspicious?

Yet, I think a lot of people would have immediately thought to themselves that the statement is fundamentally different. Mearsheimer and Walt put it this way in their famous article on the Israel lobby London Review of Books:

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.

Well, they say "AIPAC" rather than "the Israel Lobby," but I don't think that's really so important. At once it's a more concretely defined object, but obviously less powerful than "organized Jewry" could be. And if we recognize that we ought not to say that organized Jewry controls Congress, why would we think that it makes so much more sense to say that a less powerful group has that much power. Ultimately, M&W rely on the full "Israel lobby" to try to explain AIPAC's power, anyway, so it becomes the same with a simple, logical substitution. (The phrase "de facto agent for a foreign government" is also really problematic, but we'll save that for another time.) A lot of people wrote that no matter how much antisemites might enjoy and profit from Mearsheimer and Walt's work, it's clearly not antisemitic.

But how can this be clearly not antisemitic if the only difference is a (superficial?) substitution of a few words. In a world where Canadian can be used to mean "black", how can we ever think that substituting just a few words could change meaning so much as to render such a statement objectively and unquestionably not antisemitic? Instead, I think it would serve us well to recognize that Israel often functions in the same was as "World Jewry" used to within antisemitism. So, if substituting one for the other makes a statement blatantly conspiratorial, we should probably be especially aware of the possibility.

Tony Greenstein banned from Indymedia UK for being Jewish

What's happened to Tony Greenstein, now banned from Indymedia UK, is a lot like what's happened to me. Expect more Jews to be discriminated against in the future.

Greenstein has been the most high-pitched and abusive of those who say that when AWL argues against left anti-semitism, we are just belabouring an invented straw man, and de facto helping the ruling circles in Israel.

Well, now Greenstein himself - a vehement supporter of boycotting Israel, etc. etc. - has fallen foul of people on the left who take even further the idea that Israel is a nation so bad that it cannot be allowed to continue to exist.

He has been banned from the left-wing Internet network Indymedia for protesting - obstreperously, to be sure, but that is the right way to protest in such cases - at Indymedia carrying anti-semitic comments from ex-Israeli musician and SWP associate Gilad Atzmon.

(It may be useful to read How Indymedia UK Lost Its Way and became a safe haven for Anti-Semitism at Socialist Unity for some background.)

Tony Greenstein's case is sharper than mine, but I'd like to draw connections between them and view them together. It's useful to note both a case in Britain with an explicitly leftist site banning an anti-Zionist Jew together with a case in the US with a mainstream site recently bought by MSNBC banning a left-Zionist Jew. I think that helps to suggest the scope of the problem is or is becoming both global and mainstream.

The debate over at Engage has questioned whether Tony Greenstein is worth defending. [Update: The page has been accidentally deleted. Here is a google cache of the discussion page.] The general response has been that he is in this case because he is being attacked for his Jewishness. In that way, it is an attack on every Jew. If attacking Indymedia while refusing to defend Greenstein means that we should defend him as a Jew without defending any of his arguments, I would agree. His venomoous anti-Zionism only serves to demonstrate how outrageous his banning is. But to defend Jews against antisemitism is to defend Tony Greenstein here.

On the other hand, a friend suggested that in some way Greenstein's case is worse. It is certainly sharper and more obvious because Greenstein himself is someone few Jews could be comfortable with. In fact, a commenter at Engage quotes Greenstein:

Tony Cliff said many years ago "If i saw a bunch of skinheads beating up a rabbi , i'd beat up the skinheads , then i'd beat up the rabbi"
In other words defend the rabbi against an antisemitic attack , then beat up the rabbi for being a rabbi.

And Gilad Atzmon, whom Greenstein attacked for being an antisemite, is a prominent antisemite so that the stakes are a bit higher there. It's like saying a white supremacist is a multiculturalist because he doesn't want to participate in a lynching. But we cannot allow some border where the inclusion of antisemitic stereotypes or the exclusion of Jews is acceptible so long as it isn't too extreme. It would be like saying McCarthyism is okay if people really are a bit pink. Or allowing "There's blacks, and there's n*****s. I only hate n*****s."

While Greenstein was surely obstreperous -which is not only his right (in the circumstances) but also his style regardless- it was made quite clear to me that my being disrespectful to others, for which I was banned from Newsvine, amounted to nothing more than to use the word "antisemitism."

Presentographies

I recently linked to Benny Morris's article on how history is used to demonize Jews. The same sort of thing happens often with the present. Consider the case of the IAEA reports and the US National Intelligence Estimate when it comes to Iran. So much contextualization and minimization (in the name of not demonizing anyone) gets used to demonize Israel and Jews who are worried about the very real threat posed by Iran. Instead of dealing with the facts of the matter, Jews are accused of acting out of that "2,000 year old panic" (as it's described in Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite recently reviewed by Christopher Hitchens on the occassion of its re-release). The facts, as related in a New York Times article here at Middle East Analysis: the IAEA did write that Iran cooperated -in part, but not on some particularly concerning matters. And the NIE report not only concluded that Iran had been, at some point, working on nuclear weapons; it concluded that Iran was still working on part of its nuclear program:

Since the intelligence report came out, America's allies have spun all kinds of theories about the internal machinations that led to it, including that intelligence analysts were boxing Mr. Bush in, preventing him from taking military action against Iran's nuclear sites.

Officials who worked on the report have denied any such intent. The director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told Congress he now regretted how the intelligence estimate was presented, saying it failed to emphasize that Iran was moving ahead with the hardest part of any bomb project: producing the fuel.

Thich Naht Hahn dharma talk

Being Peace, .mp3, via Zencast

Are you now, or have you ever been Jewish? (I mean Zionist, of course.)

Malcolm Hoenlein has been telling everyone who will listen that something dangerous is happening among the American elite. A short version of his view holds that pro-Israel positions among American Jews are being delegitimized by being defined as "anti-American."

Of course, even if most Americans disagree, it is hardly un-American to hold an unpopular political opinion in America. In fact, protection for unpopular, political views is (theoretically) enshrined in our most basic values.

Yet it happens to be that most Americans happen to hold pro-Israel views. So what does it mean when the views of Jews are seen as illigitate even as they coincide with the views of most Americans? It is the Jewishness of those Jews holding such opinions that is being attacked.

Via Orthodox Anarchist, who also expresses concern about the rumors about Dennis Kucinich and AIPAC:

Before the rumor started circulating that Kucinich threw AIPAC out of his office, his Congressional campaign had no cash on hand. The following week, after the rumor had burned through the web leaving a trail of anti-Jewish outpourings in its wake, he had $4 million.

Among people donating to Kucinich, of course, there's likely to be a repudiation of all Americans holding pro-Israel views. But are most Americans getting called un-American for it?