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One of the more common questions we get pertains to how CiF Watch is making an impact or, indeed, how we quantify that success.
Our many supporters are typically quite curious regarding the degree to which our efforts at combating antisemitism at the Guardian are producing results.
In response we typically point to our increased web traffic; our greater presence, and overall “buzz”, on Twitter, Facebook and other social media; ‘Comment is Free”s relative improvement in more promptly removing antisemitic comments beneath the line; as well as the curious absence over the last year or so, on the pages of ‘Comment is Free’, of some of the more notorious antisemitic commentators.
However, a recent post by the Guardian’s Chris Elliott, the paper’s Readers’ Editor, “On averting accusations of antisemitism“, Nov. 6, was an even clearer indication that our blog is indeed making an impact.
Specifically, Elliott sought to address “complaints that it is carrying material that… lapses into language resonant of antisemitism or is antisemitic”, citing “organisations monitoring the Guardian’s coverage” which “examine the language in articles – and the comments posted underneath them online – as closely as the facts.” [emphasis mine]
While there is much in Elliott’s polemic which is off the mark – and he doesn’t nearly go far enough in calling out the frequent antisemitic tropes found at the paper – he did single out a few especially egregious examples of antisemitic rhetoric by Guardian writers for opprobrium: namely, Deborah Orr’s mocking use of the phrase “the chosen” (to evoke the notion that Jews are inherently racist), and their deletion of the term “slavish” (used to describe the US relationship with Israel) from two CiF essays.
However, regarding the former, as Harry’s Place noted, though the Guardian now appears to admit that it is antisemitic to use the phrase Chosen People falsely to attack Jews as supremacists, here is Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, the play which is online, in print and video, at the Guardian’s own website:
“…tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.”
As Anthony Julius wrote of the play:
“In this play, Jews confess to lying to their own children and killing Palestinian children. They also confess to something close to a project of genocide. And they freely acknowledge the source of their misanthropy to be Judaism itself.”
And, as I noted in my Jewish Chronicle essay today, another dangerous dynamic at the Guardian, which Elliott didn’t address, is the licensing of commentators with an undeniable record of antisemitism, while justifying their politics as merely anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian.
For instance, Ben White, published regularly at CiF, wrote that, given Israel’s behavior, he can certainly understand why some people are antisemitic, condemned the “widespread bias and subservience to the Israeli cause in the Western media” and recommended an essay by a well-known Holocaust denier.
An even more egregious example is the Guardian’s decision to publish a letter by Gilad Atzmon – a writer who has accused Jews of literally controlling the world and frequently advances other odious Judeophobic narratives which are indistinguishable from far right antisemitism.
Indeed, another troubling issue which Elliott didn’t discuss is the paper’s continuing antisemitic sins of omission in their characterizations of Israel’s opponents.
As the prolific Tom Gross pointed out for The Commentator,:
“Hamas master terrorist Nizar Rayan, who directed suicide bombers (including his own son) to murder and injure dozens of Israeli civilians, and who described Jews as a “cursed people” whom Allah changed into “apes and pigs,” was portrayed in The Guardian as someone who was “highly regarded” and “considered a hero” (Jan. 3, 2009).”
Further, the Guardian’s coverage of the UK’s detention of Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement’s northern division in Israel, was as obsessive as it was at pains to white wash (or ignore) the extremist preacher’s undeniable record of antisemitism – which included a sermon where he advanced the blood libel and an interview in which he endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories about 9/11.
Indeed, one of Salah’s chief defenders in the UK has been CiF contributor Daud Abdullah, director of the Islamist, openly pro-Hamas, organization MEMO. In 2009 Abdullah signed the so-called the Istanbul Declaration which included a passage justifying attacks on Jewish communities all around the world.
Elliott concluded his post, thusly:
“I have been careful to say that these examples may be read asantisemitic because I don’t believe their appearance…was the result of deliberate acts of antisemitism: they were inadvertent. But that does not lessen the injury to some readers or to our reputation…Reporters, writers and editors must be more vigilant to ensure our voice in the debate is not diminished because our reputation has been tarnished.”
As Simon Plosker observed for Honest Reporting, the Guardian seems “more concerned that anti-Semitism appearing on The Guardian’s pages is bad for the paper’s reputation rather than concern about anti-Semitism itself.”
As such, Gross, in his Commentator essay, notes, “The [Guardian] likes to think of itself as a bastion of liberalism, fairness and anti-racism…”
So, while we certainly welcome the Guardian’s acknowledgement that the arguments this blog advances have merit – and, indeed, in my communication with Elliott, I’ve always found him to be fair, professional, and respectful – it still doesn’t seem that his institution can wrap their mind around the notion that those of a leftist persuasion can be afflicted with anti-Jewish racism.
As Anne, of the blog Anne’s Opinion’s, wrote about the Guardian semi-apology:
“Let us hope that this marks the beginning of a recalibration of their editorial standards.”
In the meantime, however, our work monitoring the Guardian and ‘Comment is Free’ for antisemitism continues unabated.
CiF Watch is dedicated to the modest proposition that expressions of hatred against Jews, whether emanating from the right or the left, are never justified, is inherently inconsistent with genuine progressive thought, and must always be exposed and fiercely combated.
Additional articles on Elliott’s post on antisemitism at the Guardian:
- They just don’t get it – tolerance of Jew-hate set to live on (My essay for The Jewish Chronicle)
- Guardian: ‘reputation tarnished’ (The Jewish Chronicle)
- The Guardian acknowledges a degree of antisemitism (Tom Gross for The Commentator)
- The Guardian’s strange response to antisemitism (Harry’s Place)
- The Guardian acknowledges antisemitism..or does it? (Honest Reporting)
- Guardian Readers’ Editor’s half-hearted apology for antisemitic reporting (Anne’s Opinions)
- UK Guardian owns up to inadvertent cases of antisemitism (Ha’aretz)
I haven’t read some of the more chilling anti-Semitic lines in Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children – which is posted to this day on the Guardian’s website – in quite a while.
To those who may have, like myself, nearly forgotten how insidious the play truly is, here is Anthony Julius’s reply, in today’s Guardian, to Caryl Churchill’s letter from last week defending her work from Julius’s characterization of it in his book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England.
In Trials of the Diaspora, I argue that Caryl Churchill‘s play Seven Jewish Children is antisemitic. Churchill (Letters, 4 March) denies this characterisation, writing that I rely on the line “tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies?”.
I had in mind the following lines, among others. “Tell her we killed the babies by mistake / Don’t tell her anything about the army.” “Tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.” “Tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out.” “Tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people.”
In this play, Jews confess to lying to their own children and killing Palestinian children. They also confess to something close to a project of genocide. And they freely acknowledge the source of their misanthropy to be Judaism itself.
None of this seems to bother Churchill – nor, indeed, the Guardian. As she correctly notes, the play is available on your website.
Anthony Julius
London
Here is a powerful new essay by Ruth Wisse on anti-Semitism. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and is the author of, among other books, Jews and Power. The present article is based on a talk delivered in August at the Conference of the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism. Here she argues that: (a) that anti-Semitism cannot be arrested by any remedial action of the Jews; (b) that there are harmful consequences for pretending that concessions from Jews can stop the aggression against them; and (c) that anti-Semitism forces a choice between protection of the Jews and, under the guise of liberalism, complicity with their enemies.
Why can’t we set ourselves the goal of eradicating anti-Semitism? All across the civilized world, people track anti-Semitism, expose it, oppose it, decry it. And yet no one seriously considers the possibility of bringing about its end. Is this because of some lack of capacity or courage? Or do we face in anti-Semitism something, to use the phrase of the Yiddish writer L. Shapiro, as eternal as the eternal God?
Two other scourges of modern times have seen their power greatly diminished if not eliminated. Fascism was crushed in World War II, and Communism lost its political base in 1991. These movements still have their adherents, but their sustaining polities went down to defeat. Yet anti-Semitism, which figured prominently in both, has metastasized and, according to one of its foremost historians, Robert Wistrich, “will probably get worse.”
Many reasons—historical, religious, sociological, ideological, even epidemiological—have been adduced for the persistence of what Anthony Julius has termed the “sewer” of anti-Semitism. All have merit. But the one reason that remains but dimly understood, and even stubbornly resisted, is the political—and yet it is the one, I believe, that accounts for the phenomenon’s continuing success. Politically, anti-Semitism succeeds by working through misdirection, and its opponents no less than its adherents tend to be taken in by some of its deceptive strategies.
A good place to begin probing the resiliency of anti-Semitic deception is with the origin of Zionism. Zionism arose, in part, as a response to modern political anti-Semitism, but the movement’s history reveals an early and profound misdiagnosis of the problem.
It was first and foremost a movement of national self-determination, a familiar force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But unlike other national movements, whose efforts to liberate subjugated peoples was opposed by existing polities—-nations and empires—Jews confronted a transnational political force that would come to be known as “anti-Semitism.” Zionists believed that the way to address the problem was by normalizing the political condition of the Jews themselves. Jews had been for too long a dependent minority in other people’s lands. Since anti-Semitism attacked Jews as usurping aliens, the provocation would presumably be removed once the Jews packed up and went home. It seemed to make independent sense, at a time of proliferating nation-states, for Jews to re-establish their homeland: once they did so, logic suggested, they would at last become a politically unexceptional people.
Zionism achieved its primary goal. I will not dwell here on the marvels of Israel, except to emphasize that Zionism succeeded in accomplishing whatever depended on Jewish effort, energy, and will alone. But what about the expectations of political normalization its founders and builders possessed so fervently? Those who settled the land and attained sovereignty were entitled to expect that they, like the populaces of other new nations, would be accorded “normal” treatment commensurate with international custom.
In this, Zionism proved mistaken.
Read rest of essay, here: wisse2
The following is a review of Anthony Julius’s book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, by Jonathan Freedland, writing for The New Republic. While the book itself should be read by anyone concerned about ant-Semitism in the UK – and the Guardian in particular – this review (as effective literary criticism can often do) represents a great primer on the subject. While this blog typically shies away from such lengthy essays, our mission – exposing anti-Semitism at the Guardian and their blog, Comment is Free – occasionally necessitates such in-depth and comprehensive analyses of the broader phenomenon of anti-Semitism in British society. As such, Freedland’s review provides the reader with a good summary of Julius’s study on the British contribution to “the world’s longest hatred”.
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England
By Anthony Julius
(Oxford University Press, 811 pp., $45)
I.
Anthony Julius begins his magisterial and definitive history of a thousand years of anti-Semitism in England with an anecdote from his childhood. He is riding on a train to the English Midlands with his father, who is in conversation with “Arthur,” a non-Jewish business associate. Arthur, keen to ingratiate himself with his companion, remarks that his daughter recently had a little Jewish girl over to their house for tea. “I must say,” Arthur adds, beaming, “the child has got the most beautiful manners.”
Julius recalls that, even at the age of ten or eleven, he had a “sense of the temperature in the compartment rising.” His father says nothing, refusing to confront Arthur over his remark. It is clear that fear plays no part in this decision. Julius père does not lack courage. “It had instead something to do with an unwillingness to condescend to being offended, a refusal to acknowledge the hurt caused by the insult implicit in Arthur’s remarks—that it is always noteworthy when Jews behave well.”
It may seem an odd starting point for a book that is, for the bulk of its eight-hundred-odd pages (including two hundred pages of footnotes), rigorously scholarly rather than personal. But it is fitting. Everything about that early encounter is English: the cramped train compartment, the embarrassment, the stuffiness, what is unsaid signifying more than what is said. And the subject at hand—English anti-Semitism—often operates in the nebulous, subtle, implicit register typified by Arthur’s remark. Indeed, Julius devotes an entire chapter to the “mentality of modern English anti-Semitism,” to the slippery, subcutaneous prejudices and assumptions, the slights and the snubs, that have informed centuries of English social life.
But the memory of that train journey with “Arthur”—a name that centuries ago stood as the very acme of Englishness—lingers over the entire book for a less direct reason. The clue lies in the prose of Anthony Julius, a London-based polymath who made his name twice over—as the literary critic who deconstructed the anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot, and then, to a much wider public, as the lawyer who represented Princess Diana in her divorce from the heir to the English throne. That prose is cool and precise, never anything but fully in control of the extraordinary breadth of material under review—from medieval church history to the rantings of the early twenty-first-century blogosphere, with Chaucer, Donne, both Eliots, and many other figures along the way. The episode on the train almost has one wondering if this is an author determined to prove that a Jew can write on English history as soberly and thoroughly as any Englishman—with, as it were, the most beautiful manners. But the coolness of Julius’s prose suggests something more, too: a man, like his father, unwilling “to condescend to being offended.”
Accordingly, Julius digs up and holds to the light a litany of murderous crimes committed against the Jews and then, in later centuries, one vicious quotation after another, discussing the evidence he has exhumed in a tone of bemused detachment rather than righteous fury. He serves up, for example, a choice passage from J.B. Priestley, one rich in the hoariest stereotypes, before merely and drily noting that “Priestley’s concessions to everyday anti-Semitic sentiment might surprise contemporary readers.” Perhaps that is the voice that a fine legal training inculcates. But one suspects it is also the voice of a man who learned long ago to be anything but the angry Jew.
The result is a meticulous taxonomy of prejudice, written as if with a pair of surgical gloves, the better to handle a particularly revolting set of specimens. “All versions of anti-Semitism libel Jews. These libels may be grouped under three headings: the blood libel … the conspiracy libel … the economic libel.” A series of distinctions between categories, so fine they might border on the legalistic, follows. The chapter on the mentality of modern anti-Semitism describes four types of English anti-Semitic intellectual: A, B, C, and D. Category B further subdivides into categories B1 and B2.
Not that Julius fails to supply many an arresting, plain-spoken sentence. Several passages of argument culminate in a line memorable and true—indeed, memorable because true. Thus he denies anti-Semitism the status of an ideology, maintaining that it merely allows lumpen-thinkers to barge into intellectual debates that are beyond them: “Anti-Semitism has a place in the history of ideas only in the sense that a burglar has a place in a house.” In a similar vein, Julius offers this on “the new anti-Zionism”: “It inhabits those grooves along which received thought—and non-thought—moves. It is, so to speak, the spontaneous philosophy of … those who do not philosophize, and the spontaneous history of many of those who know no history.” He is particularly scathing about the more extreme Jewish critic of Zionism, upending one of the more clichéd insults often hurled in their direction: “The Jewish anti-Zionist scourge is not a self-hater; he is enfolded in self-admiration. He is in step with the best opinion.”
For those of you that haven’t heard yet, there is a must read new book that is coming out next month: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England by the estimable Anthony Julius.
Philip Roth describes the book in the following glowing terms:
“This is an essential history and so it’s fortunate it has been written by a man with the extraordinary fluency,staggering erudition, scholarly integrity, intellectual acumen, and moral discernment of Anthony Julius.”
Similarly, Nick Cohen had the following to say:
“Anthony Julius has produced a brilliant and readable account of a shameful stain on the national reputation. The best dissection I’ve seen of Britain’s oldest and least acknowledged racial prejudice. “
You can pre-order a copy at Amazon UK by clicking here.
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March 31, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Anthony Julius, Comment is Free, Guardian, Keith Kahn-Harris | by Israelinurse | 10 comments
I haven’t yet got round to reading Anthony Julius’ new book ‘Trials of the Diaspora’ , but from what I have heard and seen so far, I am sure that it is going to be fascinating. Keith Kahn-Harris’ recent article about the book on CiF does not detract from the anticipation, but knowing CiF as we do and reading the comments on his piece, one has to conclude that Kahn-Harris was more than a little naive to think that this was the right place for a serious discussion about Anthony Julius’ book.
Less sympathy can be accredited to whoever commissioned this article because, given the hothouse of antisemitic bigotry which CiF is cultivating, it must have been crystal clear what the reactions of the CiF regulars would be. True to form and predictable as ever, on an article about a history of antisemitism, some of the comments (far too many to reproduce here in their entirety) were antisemitic. In fact, should Mr. Julius ever wish to write a post script to his work, he need look no further for suitable subject matter.
Some try to re-define antisemitism in order to suit their political motives.
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