HOLOCAUST-INDUSTRY BECOMES ANTISEMITISM-INDUSTRY
Beloofde
Land
Er is geen “beloofd land” er is “gestolen land”. En
het stelen gaat onverminderd door. Wie kritiek heeft op Israel, loopt het
risico als je een Jood bent als zelfhatende Jood te worden weggezet en als Goj als
antisemiet te worden betiteld.
Het artikel van de journalist Jonathan Cook Jonathan Cook: Journalist reporting on Israel and Palestine (jonathan-cook.net) laat zien hoever de Israëlische tentakels reiken en hoe ingrijpend hun inmenging in de persoonlijke levenssfeer kan zijn.
Cook heeft hiervoor een artikel uit de
Israëlische krant Haaretz Haaretz
- Wikipedia
gebruikt. Dit artikel In Germany, a witch hunt is raging
against critics of Israel. Cultural leaders have had enough - Israel
News - Haaretz.com heeft betrekking op de situatie in
Duitsland. Echter deze “heksenjacht” is veel wijder verbreid en Cook gaat daar met name op in.
Antisemitism Claims Mask a
Reign of Political
and Cultural Terror Across
Europe
JONATHAN COOK • DECEMBER 11, 2020
Antisemitism Claims Mask a Reign of
Political and Cultural Terror Across Europe | stan van houcke
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz
has run a fascinating long report this week offering a
disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on
the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political
and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a
resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in
solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.
The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.
The situation reduces to this:
European Muslims have no right to take offence at insults about a religion they
identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offence at criticism
of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the
perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the
sanctity of a militarised state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with
a billion followers.
Guilt by association
This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organisational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.
In the current climate in
Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of
public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an
antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you
will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in
Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that
antisemitism has been politicised and weaponised – a self-evident conclusion
that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you
are Jewish.
The Haaretz story highlights
two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of
intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalised”
in Germany.
Jewish organisations and their
allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponising antisemitism not
only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics, but also to force
out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt
by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.
Cultural associations,
festivals, universities, Jewish research centres, political think-tanks,
museums and libraries are being forced to scrutinise the past of those they
wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited
by local Jewish organisations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid
atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.
But the psychosis runs deeper
still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible
subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political,
academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely.
Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.
A case study noted by Haaretz
is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity
studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last
year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that
he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognised the city’s three religious
traditions, including a Muslim one.
He was immediately accused of
promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter
for Israel’s rightwing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli
government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of
inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from
the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is
that true?”
Schäfer observes:
The accusation of
antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political
elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum
staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do
background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.
Another prominent victim of
these Jewish organisations tells Haaretz:
Sometimes one
thinks, “To go to that conference?”, “To invite this colleague?” Afterward it
means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need
the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of
“anticipatory obedience” or “prior self-censorship”.
Ringing off the hook
There is nothing unusual about
what is happening in Germany. Jewish organisations are stirring up these
“shitstorms” – designed to paralyse political and cultural life for anyone who
engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of
government. Don’t believe me?
Here is Barack Obama
explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb
Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel
lobby:
Members of both
parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as
“anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded
opponent in the next election.
When Obama went ahead anyway
in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:
The White House
phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team
fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations,
prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were
picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.
He observes further:
The noise
orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time,
putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences
with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition
government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the
United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest
allies.
Doubtless, Obama dare not put
down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do
show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on
the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault.
For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.
No free speech on Israel
It was this same mobilisation
of Jewish organisational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and
its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s
five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a
well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.
It is the reason why his
successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organisational
oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board
of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the
Board’s “10 Pledges”.
It is part of the reason why
Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly
reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism
allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and
Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use
antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to
revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties
discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education
secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip
universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.
Two types of Jews
But the Haaretz article raises
another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment
in Europe are politicising antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The
potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who
break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others –
whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticise Israel. These Jewish
dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should
not result in one being tarred an antisemite.
Israel and Jewish
organisations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting
a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good
Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).
Haaretz reports that officials
in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being
allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for
Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those
politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.
Despite Germany’s horrific
recent history of Jew hatred, the German government, local authorities, the
media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures
like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and
working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.
When, for example, a group of
Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about
Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon
broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from
the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site,
while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had
provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions
held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents
antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.
Described as ‘kapos’
So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner.
Haaretz
reports:
The antisemitism
czar, the letter charged, is working “in synergy with the Israeli government”
in an effort “to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies” and is
abetting the “instrumentalization” that undermines the true struggle against
antisemitism.
Figures like Klein have been
so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish
left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to
the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.
Again, the same picture can be
seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a
safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of
Jews critical of Israel and using anti-semitism smears against prominent
anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.
Extraordinarily, Naomi
Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which
supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had
just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism
was being used by Jewish organisations to smear Jewish left-wingers like
herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as
Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration
camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in
the annihilation of their own people”.
In suspending her, Starmer
effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of
incitement against, and vilification of, leftwing Jews.
Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a
distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth
Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group
BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the
left as antisemites.
In keeping with the rapid
erosion of critical thinking in civil society organisations designed to uphold
basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free
speech organisation Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing
criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting
censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing
and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel
over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of
“good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offence”.
Boy who cried wolf
The Haaretz article helps to
contextualise Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone
who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or
associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the
Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by
Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organisations are
playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.
Haaretz rightly fears that the
Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading
the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of
politicising it. Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which
has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European
anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling
neo-Nazis.
If those who support human
rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves
labelled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus
(weaponised) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew hatred from the right. The
antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travellers like Keir Starmer – are
likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Or as Haaretz notes:
The issue that is
bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is
whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of
Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The
argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the
effect of eroding the concept itself.
The Antisemitism Industry
It is worth noting the shared
features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions
of the Holocaust Industry.
In his book, Finkelstein
identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi
death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews,
Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as
they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate
more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were
ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s
representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms
of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.
Instead, the Holocaust
Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust
proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique
solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states
to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry –
very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply
entwined in, and rationalised by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial
project of Israel.
In the case of the
Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt
targets Jewish leftwingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the
occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of
Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to
a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to
self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as
Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.
In contrast to the “bad Jews”,
the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn
about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the
Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them
defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the
Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given
the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another
Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always
have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.
‘Get out of jail’ card
This view, of course, seeks to
ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists,
gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a
competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is
how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the
rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an
ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.
Extraordinarily, as the
Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the
instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the
re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by
the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or
delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least
nourishing, the Jew haters.
In this way, Germany, the UK
and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” –
those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public
space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is
in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily
rejects universal ethics.
What we see here is an
illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism:
Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent
antisemitism if it did not exist.
This is not hyperbole. The
idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew
waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for
Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism
was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of
prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to
Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because
it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.
Antisemitism is Israel’s “get
out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it
structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel
deprived of the misdirection weaponised antisemitism provides.
An empty space
The Haaretz article provides a
genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to
their defence – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To
defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the
same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the
public space.
Haaretz records the effort of
a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line,
against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never
become aware of it.
Once, the “bad Jews” have been
smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with
them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of
Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence
so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because
these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks
with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the
censorship is complete, you will not know it.
There will be no record of
what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where
discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will
hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your
ignorance will be blissfully complete.
(Republished
from Jonathan Cook by permission of author
or representative)
