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One of the defining characteristics of the hard/Guardian-style Left is their moral vanity, as well as an unwillingness to engage in the same level of self-reflection that they’re often demanding of others.
By moral vanity I’m referring the desire to not just pursue justice in the world, but be seen as pursuing justice in the world – as influenced by the desire to maintain the mantle of righteousness as they are by the wish to engage in the just act itself.
The second dynamic – the absence of self-reflection – allows those who have become accustomed to believing that they possess this political advantage from engaging in serious thought about their own moral imperfections or blind spots.
Thusly, many who see themselves – and those they view as their political allies – as upholding progressive values of anti-racism, have become so accustomed to the social benefits this halo effect affords them that they don’t respond well when their moral edifice is challenged.
These dynamics seem quite evident in Michael Tomasky’s post regarding revelations that Nir Rosen found humor in the brutal sexual assault of CBS News Reporter Lara Logan. (CiF, Feb. 17)
While Tomasky correctly points out that another commentator, Debbie Schlussel, also engaged in horribly insensitive remarks about Logan’s horrific ordeal, its in his gross mischaracterization of Rosen’s political views – describing them as merely “controversial” – where the intellectual tick described above is most glaring.
Indeed, Tomasky’s blog posts at the Guardian often show him quite uncomfortable with the notion that those on the political far-left can be as hateful and intolerant as those on the far-right. He, like many on his end of the political spectrum, seem desperate to hold on to the illusion that progressive thought is inherently resistant to the hatred and bigotry they are so fond of exposing on the right. Thus, Rosen’s long and well-documented flirtations with political extremism, and rank bigotry, can be whitewashed as merely “controversial”.
Indeed, looking at Rosen’s Tweets, and commentary, suggests the fundamental truth of the axiom that left-wing and right-wing hate are merely flip sides of the same coin.
As we noted in our post yesterday, Rosen’s political leanings demonstrate a palpable animosity towards progressive democracies (like the United States and Israel) and, inversely, an appalling empathy for reactionary terrorist movements.
Just a few of Rosen’s comments along this vein should have long disqualified him as a “progressive” in good standing. (You can find his Tweets here.)
He Tweeted, on the anniversary of 9/11, that:
“[It's] hard to disagree with much of the Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan [Taliban] Statement Regarding The Anniversary Of The 9/11 Event.”
He then linked back to the Taliban statement.
Many of his Tweets are given over to expressions of hatred of Israel, and the desire for its destruction. One, which we posted yesterday, refers to Israel’s very existence as a “blight upon the nations”, and in another Tweet he hoped for Israel’s “speedy demise”.
He also openly advocates for violence against Israel, Tweeting:
“Yes to a 3rd Intifada. This time hopefully with the support of the Palestinians citizens of ‘Israel.”
And, there was this Tweet, from December 3rd, 2010:
“On Hannuka, Just think, if only the Greeks had been better at counterinsurgency we wouldn’t have these problems today. Where was Petraeus?”.
As Jeffrey Goldberg noted, “Hanukkah marks the defeat of a Syrian-Greek empire by a Jewish insurgency. If the Greeks had won, the Jews would have been slaughtered.”
In an essay he wrote in 2002, for the radical site Dissident Voice, he said the following:
“I find myself in the unique and painful position of calling for international sanctions against Israel and wondering if a punitive bombing of Tel Aviv, the city I love, until it complies with international law, might be a good (albeit quixotic) idea.”
I don’t know how much clearer the case needs to be. Those who express sympathy towards Hezbollah and the Taliban and openly wish for the destruction of Israel – even if they’re self-styled “progressives” - aren’t merely “controversial”.
They’re vile racists.
What about that doesn’t Michael Tomasky understand?
(Update: Here are some snapshots of Rosen’s Tweets and Facebook comments quoted above)
CiF’s Jewish Israel defamers
When joining the team here at CiF Watch, and attempting to understand why Jewish writers for the Guardian are often among the most vociferous in expressing their contempt for Israel, and so willing to demonize the state’s Jewish supporters, I had to get up to speed on the term “Theobald Jew.”
I soon learned that:
According to the Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth in his The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich (1173), it was an apostate Jew, a certain Theobald, who, swore that Jews had killed twelve-year old William, a tanner’s apprentice, to fulfill their “Passover blood ritual” in the fateful year of 1144—the first recorded such episode in a long line of murderous defamations.
The CiF contributors I refer to include Naomi Klein, Neve Gordon, Richard Silverstein, Antony Lerman, Seth Freedman, Tony Greenstein, among others. These Jewish writers don’t merely critique Israeli policy, but routinely engage in hyperbole, vitriol, and gross distortions. Their rhetoric is often spewed with hate towards the Jewish state, all but ignoring the behavior of her enemies - the terrorist and reactionary movements who openly seek her annihilation. Such commentators often infer that the democratic Jewish state (the most progressive nation, by far, in the region) is almost always in the wrong, is usually motivated by a hideous malevolence, and represents a national movement which they, as Jews, are ashamed to be associated with.
Freedman, for instance, has suggested that Israel is a theocracy – one which is on moral par with Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Gordon has on several occasions accused Israel of ethnic cleansing - once advancing such an ugly calumny in the radical anti-Zionist magazine, Counterpunch. Tony Greenstein has ardently defended the ugly comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, typically advanced by extremists. Richard Silverstein has called the behavior of Israelis serving in the IDF “subhuman“, and has defended Hamas from “charges” that they are an extremist movement. Naomi Klein actually accused Israel of being so cruel and sadistic as to “bury children alive in their homes.”
While, for the Guardian, employing the services of Theobald Jews serves to inoculate them from charges of anti-Semitism, such Jewish writers, in return, receive the progressive and universalist credentials they so eagerly seek.
This is a guest post by AKUS
In April, Israeli Nurse wrote of the impending changes at the Guardian, following the departure of Georgina Henry to the “Culture” section of the Guardian, which apparently was in need of extra clicks that can only be ensured by posting the anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian articles that are so successful in bringing out the Israel-bashers on CiF’s Middle East section.
Although Georgina Henry was a hard act to follow for sheer malice and double-talk, the Guardian appears to have scored a home-run with the idea of bringing in a feminist Jewish editor to replace Georgina – Katharina Viner (see also ‘She never hated men’ – “But the death at the age of 58 of ‘the most maligned feminist on the planet’ has deprived feminism of its last truly challenging voice, says Katharine Viner”).
We now have a female as-a-Jew leading the charge for endless articles intended to delegitimize and denigrate Israel. Viner sees herself as the torchbearer for Rachel Corrie, the American inadvertently killed as she tried to protect an arms-smuggling tunnel with her body in Gaza.
Viner has quickly equipped herself with a stable of equally biased, fringe female Jewish contributors. There is the deplorably uninformed Mizrachi Shabi. Viner introduced us to new face on the block (see the parrot on Viner’s shoulder), Florida native Guarnieri,(“a Tel Aviv based journalist”), an ultra-leftist new arrival in Israel thoroughly disgraced in her CiF debut by chortling CiFers when she revealed a total lack of understanding of the issue of global foreign worker regulations – and Israel’s adherence to widely accepted policies. A US native, and now, apparently, Israeli immigrant taking advantage of the right-of-return to condemn her new country, as-a-Jew Guernieri performed the remarkable feat of avoiding any mention of what is happening to Mexicans back home in Arizona in her eagerness to condemn Israel for proposing to implement the same rules applied across the Western world.
Occasionally, thinly veiled covers for anti-Semitic invectives wear down, and the explicit hate is laid bare for all to see. Many of us have noted a disturbing ideological trend, in which classic anti-Semitic tropes about the dangers of Jewish power and influence in politics have become increasingly popular by some on the Left - rendering such bigotry nearly banal within some circles.
Typically, this narrative is advanced using the rhetoric of human rights and anti-imperialism, and carefully avoids making such charges against Jews as such – referring instead to the injurious effects of the “Israel Lobby.”
Glenn Greenwald, who blogs at Salon.com, (and is a member in good standing of the Walt and Mearsheimer brigade of “dissidents” who bravely “expose” the injurious effects of the organized Jewish community on the American body politic) has honed such furtive rhetoric to an art.
However, even his respectable veneer has occasionally been eroded. In 2007, he said
“…the influence of self-proclaimed “pro-Israeli” American Jewish groups in helping to push the country into what looks more and more every day to be an inevitable conflict with Iran is very significant and cannot be ignored.”
Antony Lerman, writing in Comment is Free, in defense of C4s documentary which “investigated” The Israel Lobby, stated cooly that wealthy British Jews are indeed linked to “payments of large sums of money to politicians, power and influence.”
And, as any reader of CiF Watch is well aware, reader comment threads in response to almost any Israel-related essay at Comment is Free often reveal a slew of vile accusations that the UK is held captive by the organized Jewish community.
Oliver Stone – film-maker, conspiracy enthusiast, and ardent defender of South American Narco-Terrorist Movements - has recently “revealed” the real reason there is so much “talk” about Jewish victims of The Holocaust. (Hint: It apparently has nothing to do with natural human compassion for the millions of innocent victims, which included 1.5 million children, slaughtered by the Nazi regime.)
This is a guest post by AKUS
There’s a well-known radio show in the US featuring Garrison Keillor called “A Prairie Home Companion” that has a weekly roundup of generally depressing news from a little town called Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” There were a few things happening in a couple of our favorite British media sources that for some reason made me think of Lake Wobegon – the home of some of the “frozen people”, as Garrison likes to call his fellow Lutherans.
The Guardian, a paper at Loch Wobegan known familiarly as the Daily Groan for its rich helpings of Lutheran-like misery-guts reporting, where it often seems to me that none of its women (or men) are good-looking, even if they are strong, and certainly many of its columnists are not above average, had one of its faux-pas moments when it printed a report by the Press Association on a fascinating study of the attitudes of British Jews towards Israel just released by the British research group, JPR . (Yes – that JPR – the one Antony Lerman spends so much of his time attacking after he left). The study included the responses from 4081 self-selecting Jews out of a population of, say 300,000, a number which provides a margin of error of only 1.5%.
To put the rigor of the JPR study in context, many polls carried out in the US regarding important issues such as, say, the President’s popularity or Lindsey Lohan’s jail time will include less than 1,500 responses and have a margin of error of 3%. The JPR survey is far more rigorous than the incredibly cooked and utterly unrepresentative effort put together in the US by JStreet which has been so widely circulated. It was puffed up by the Guardian – e.g., this article by none other than Antony Lerman. CiF Watch noted a poll the Guardian ran “under a picture of a torn and tattered Israeli flag” about JStreet at Enforcing the GWV: the Guardian J Street Poll . That JStreet study had 800 respondents representing a population of 3 million US Jews. The small sample size, unlike the large British sample size, did not permit a really good breakdown by various Jewish subgroups, and on two of the most critical questions about the I/P issues only 354 responses were collected. The margin of error is at least 5%, very significant when so many responses on critical issues involving Israel in that study hovered around the 50% mark.
This is a guest post by Bataween of Point of No Return
When Georgina Henry moved from the Comment is Free Middle East desk to edit the Culture Section at the Guardian, CIF Watch predicted that Henry would turn her new fiefdom into a cesspool of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. And so it has come to pass. Henry’s latest commission: Tariq Ali’s review of “The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives” by Gilbert Achcar scrapes the barrel of malevolent ignorance and Orwellian misrepresentation. But wonder of wonders, the readership aren’t having it.
The book in question, is itself a scurrilous work of revisionism, intended by a ‘professor of International Relations at SOAS’ partly to demolish the sacred cow of Arab complicity with the Nazi Holocaust. Like all anti-Israel propaganda, it tries to turn fact into controversy – declaring, as the book’s subtitle denotes, a ‘war of narratives’. Downplaying Arab antisemitism and support for the Holocaust exonerates Arabs from any responsibility for Israel’s establishment.
Tariq Ali, venerable Pakistani Marxist anti-Zionist and warrior against US imperialism, applauds Gilbert Achcar’s ‘systematic and scholarly refutation of the simplistic myths that have arisen from the formation of Israel’. The book, which is being published in an Arab edition, is a ‘valuable corrective’, drawing on such ‘objective’ sources as Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, Gabriel Piterberg and Amira Hass. But Ali’s review does not make clear where Achcar’s opinions begin and Ali’s views end.
Reading Antony Lerman’s latest CiF offering was about as productive as plaiting sawdust.
Lerman’s attempts to present Zionism as some sort of reactionary stance which is toxic to any green shoots of peace in the Middle East by citing supposed foundations for his view from sources such as Moshe Arens, through the World Zionist Congress to Peter Beinart fall as flat as an under-baked soufflé due to his usual stubborn insistence upon avoiding any mention of the full range of factors which have contributed to the failed peace-making attempts of the past two decades.
“Israel may show all the signs of being a typical westernised, post-ideological society. But in response to growing international pressure over recent years and with the country’s centre of political gravity drifting to the far right, Zionist ideology appears to be playing an increasingly important role in decision-making and in determining the face that Israel presents to the world. “
With typical sleight of hand, Lerman in this opening paragraph attempts to persuade the reader that there is a link to be made between Zionist ideology and the ‘far right’, thereby attempting to discredit the former by linking it to something the reader will instinctively reject. This does not stand up to scrutiny from any angle: Zionism is something which transcends or precedes political viewpoints for most Israelis and is the mesh which holds this truly multi-cultural and far from ‘post-ideological’ society together.
Neither is it any more true to say that Israel has moved to the right from a political point of view than to make the same statement about the United Kingdom based upon the results of the recent elections there. The party which received the most votes in the last Israeli elections was Kadima, but coalition building sometimes produces strange bed-fellows as the British people should now be finding out. Both the current Likud-led government and the vast majority of the Israeli people today accept and support the concept of a two-state solution; thirty years ago this was an eccentric fringe opinion in Israeli society. If anything, Lerman would be more correct if he pointed out that as in many European countries, the Left in Israel has caused itself to become increasingly less relevant and centrists either mildly to the right or left, but with little to distinguish between their policies and principles, command the majority vote.
Tony Lerman is still Israel-bashing on CiF, and readers may judge for themselves whether he is telling us anything new or interesting. The article reflects his own conflicted and tortured relationship with his Jewishness and Zionism (he used to be a youth leader in a Zionist youth group) when he tells us (yet again) that the “cherished assumptions of Zionism” are being questioned by Jews themselves – nothing new here, Jews are nothing if not critical thinkers – and again he pushes his own agenda for a one state solution to the conflict. There is precious little new there and I do not propose to go further into it.
The whole thread is, however, a prime example of the sort of confusion brought about when a moderator/staff member is allowed to comment freely and give opinions on the thread. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, this, from a person whose agenda is plain and who is more powerful than the commenters whose contributions he can easily get removed, is neither professional nor ethical. Lerman seems unable or unwilling to defend himself, so Matt Seaton has once again taken upon himself the mantle of his rescuer. The result is highly educative about the “group mind” of CiF and is painful and hilarious by turns. It seems that Seaton still has not learned to stop digging when he is in a hole.
There seem to be two parallel themes in this thread – one being the deletion of MarkGardner1′s post (Mark Gardner is Director of Communications at the Community Security Trust): His post, which follows, was deleted but subsequently reinstated following an appeal to the moderators by Seaton:
Seaton’s comment about Mark Gardner’s post follows. I would imagine that the moderators were wobbled by Mark Gardner’s notion that people should make up their own minds. Note also that Seaton says that the moderators “have exercised some latitude” presumably about what is or is not off-topic It would appear so, otherwise most of Seaton’s subsequent comments to the following might have been deleted too:
Oh dear it seems Berchmans (who comments here as Heres to Davy and Abandon Hope) got a bit of a drubbing on the Lerman thread from Mark Gardner, Communications Director of the CST.
Here’s the pertinent part of Mark Gardner’s response:
I remember Berchmans comment, the one you said “was something like…
‘Scotland in all it’s history never had a single recorded anti semitic incident until the 2006 Israel/Hezbollah war when a Jewish child was attacked’ “.
I remember it because I nearly fell off my chair when I read it. Not at all wishing to sound like someone who obsesses about his childhood, (because I really, really don’t, and my memories are overhwelmingly positive) but Berchmans obviously wasn’t there when my Jewish primary school cap used to get thrown into the traffic by kids from other schools, along with the antisemitic abuse.
Glad to hear he wasn’t hiding in the secondary school toilets when the other kids made disparaging remarks about my mis-shapen shmeckl; and obviously he wasn’t acting as a mere bystander when the local NF kid tried to beat me up in the corridor; nor was he in the park on the numerous occasions when I was subject to antisemitic abuse and threats of violence; nor in the Chinese takeaway when the same thing happened etc etc etc
I didn’t report any of the above to police, teachers etc, because I just thought it was normal. At school, there were casual antisemitic remarks on as many days as there weren’t. (I went to a pretty bad state secondary school.)
I repeat, I am not, to the best of my knowledge, psychologically scarred by it, or at all bothered by it, and this is the first time I’ve thought about it all for many years: because at the time it felt just like being called ‘specky’ or ‘plooky’ (trans: ‘spotty’) or whatever.
But the notion that there has been (and is) no antisemitism in Scotland is very very stupid indeed: and is far stupider than even Tony Lerman’s part-hidden underlying suggestion that those who express concern are merely some kind of Zionist frauds.
Funny how Berchmans went conspicuously silent and turned up in the thread a day later right at the end only to ignore Gardner’s comment.
Theobald Jew, Tony Lerman, caused quite a stir yesterday with his article minimalizing antisemitism in Scotland.
It triggered a scathing response from Mark Gardner, Communications Director of the CST, which I’m reproducing in full here:
There are a number of problems with this article, some of which derive from the author being over-reliant on sketchy newspaper reports, some of which derive from the author only knowing one part of a fairly complex story, and some of which derive from the author’s own motivation in turning this into a political argument: whilst accusing others of doing precisely that.
To begin, Tony Lerman fails to mention his own relations with GJEF. Given how much innuendo the article contains, and his commitment to truth seeking, this is odd.
The part of my speech that Tony Lerman quotes from (and then builds insinuations from) was given in reply to a question asking how Scotland compared with the rest of the UK re antisemitism.
I said that last year’s statistics showed a three fold increase in incidents and said that whether you thought it was a big deal or not, it was still obviously a considerable percentage increase – and that if you or your children were one of the very small number of people who had suffered then you might believe it to be something of importance.
I said that statistically the incidents were little different per head of population to other parts of the UK, but pointed out that Scotland had relatively few people who were visibly Jewish. (And who suffer a disproportionate number of antisemitic attacks as a consequence.)
I praised the efforts of the SNP to build an inclusive nationalism and stressed the sincerity that they had shown in all of the dealings that I have had with them. I noted the positivity of Scotland’s self-image as being a tolerant country, but said that since moving from Glasgow to London I had come to appreciate that there is a very real difference between multiculturalism and tolerance, which implies a willingness to put up with something.
I stressed that the vast majority of Glasgow’s Jews are not visibly Jewish, and lead a comfy enough existence in largely white middle class neighbourhoods where street thuggery, street crime, gangs, racism and antisemitism were very rare. I noted that many of them would drive to work in their cars and did not have to use public transport.
It would seem that Antony Lerman is all at sea, having lost his bearings once and for all. In his latest CiF offering he really scrapes the barrel by offering links from ‘Intifada voice of Palestine’ and ‘Ibn Kakfa’ as ‘proof’ of his rickety points. He employs innuendo, deliberately places parenthesis around words such as “lynching” and peppers his article with half-truths and downright lies such as the claim that “[b]y late Tuesday afternoon, Israel had still not provided a list of names or locations of the injured; there was no official number or list of the deceased” as though this were some kind of deliberate policy on Israel’s part.
In fact, many of the detained and dead were not carrying passports or any kind of identification papers and some refused to disclose their identity to the Israeli authorities, which made their identification, and therefore the compilation of any kind of list, somewhat challenging to say the least. Lerman goes on to claim that “And those arrested, detained or in hospital were still being denied unrestricted access to lawyers, relatives and consular representatives” , although I personally watched extensive TV coverage of a visibly embarrassed Turkish Ambassador visiting injured citizens of his country in an Israeli hospital on the news.
Does Lerman really need to stoop so low? The answer is obviously yes, because trying to justify the unjustifiable results in some pretty tortuous contortions. Like King Cnut commanding the tide to halt at Bosham, Lerman cuts a pretty pathetic figure in his vain battle to turn white into black and day into night.
Most of the world understands perfectly well by now precisely what occurred aboard the Mavi Marmara, and yet tragically for him, Lerman’s unbalanced anti-Israel stance has lead him even as far as engaging in the delusionary act of trying to whitewash the terrorist connections of the IHH. Even the Palestinian press is reporting that “[t]hree of the four Turkish victims of the Israeli attack wished to die as “Shahids” (Martyrs)”, and yet Lerman is still re-hashing the feeble points made in the seemingly endless tide of Guardian articles on the subject of the flotilla and vainly trying to deflect the discussion to the subject of PR by claiming that “[r]eporting by mainstream media on the Gaza flotilla attack was unbalanced and dominated by Israel’s edited version of events”. In actual fact it is he who has psychologically edited the events to such a degree in order to make them fit his somewhat eccentric world view, that his divorce from reality is frankly quite worrying.
The anti-Israel crowd’s fixation with the subject of PR indicates just how little they, including Lerman, actually understand of the Middle East in general and the I/P conflict in particular. Israel’s aim in preventing the ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla from breaking the naval blockade had nothing whatsoever to do with PR aspirations; it was about the long-term protection of Israeli citizens in the best possible manner with minimum casualties on both sides. Obviously, this is a tricky one for Antony Lerman to understand, but it is as plain as day that those aboard the Mavi Marmara did not have the same intentions as those aboard the other boats in the flotilla and no amount of Lerman spin or denial can change that. Israel is at war, and some of those aboard the flotilla were passively helping her enemies, even if through ignorance or extreme naivety, whilst others –including those who died in the process – not only knew exactly what they were doing, but actively sought out the confrontation because they were terrorist sympathisers or worse.
Lerman’s closing claims of having “deeply troubling evidence, albeit not exactly new, of the lack of a moral compass among the country’s leadership” take on an all the more grotesque hue when one begins to appreciate that he cannot distinguish between real peace activists and terror activists. Fortunately, Israel and its navy can make that distinction, as evidenced by the fact that the five other boats in Monday’s flotilla and later the ‘Rachel Corrie’ were all brought into Ashdod port peacefully and without incident.
Antony Lerman and his fellow travelers at the Guardian need to urgently open their eyes to the blindingly obvious fact that those on board the Mavi Marmara who shouted ‘Khaybar ya Yahud’ were not referring to Israelis alone. Until they fully recognize the real meanings and implications of that fact, it is their moral compass which can no longer find True North and inevitably, they will remain all at sea.
Antony Lerman wrote in “Comment is Free” today “[a]n extremely counterproductive development has been the touting of the working definition of antisemitism drawn up by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now the Federal Rights Agency) as a document carrying virtually legal force. This has wrongly branded antisemitism as certain comment about Israel that is extremely critical, but in itself does not display any kind of antisemitic tropes.”
So I guess in Lerman’s book, the following two comments that were posted in the comment thread were just extreme critiques of Israel.
(Notice the similarity to Mearsheimer’s little list in the above posts)
Remember Antony Lerman is the man who thinks that the following cartoon is not antisemitic (despite the obviously antisemitic Nazi trope):
And the man who openly endorsed Peter Oborne’s documentary on the so-called pro-Israel lobby in Britain (despite the obviously antisemitic Jewish conspiracy trope):
As Omri Ceren over at MereRhetoric puts it:
This nudge-wink “it’s just anti-Zionism” game has always been a little surreal. No newspaper would ever publish an article accusing a black politician of “publicly lynching his opponent in the press.” The unseemliness of inverting the history of anti-black violence would border on bigotry. And no newspaper would ever print a cartoon that depicted cascading Sub-Saharan instability as a black male “Africa” assaulting a white female “Europe.” Invoking racist tropes to incite public outrage is, well, racist.
But Israeli Jews as baby-killing Nazis? That just sophisticated and brave anti-Zionism.
The truth is Antony Lerman’s attack on the EUMC Working Definition is nothing but a thinly disguised attempt to promote the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state euphemistically known as the one-state solution.
A modern day Theobald is our Tony.
From the recent Kahn Harris/Schalit thread:
Before…
After…
Before
After…
Note that both cited posts by georgefromcochin remain undeleted.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
The Guardian and America’s “slavish subservience” to Israel
January 12, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antony Lerman, Comment is Free, Cross Post, Guardian, Jewish Conspiracy, John Whitbeck, The CST | by Guest/Cross Post | 6 comments
This is cross posted from the blog of the CST.
The myth of Jewish power dominates antisemitism.
The myth finds its strongest mainstream resonance in grotesquely overblown claims about Zionists, or Israel, controlling America.
For example, the Guardian Comment is Free website saw fit to run an article on 29 December 2010 that stated America has
Indeed, the article was sub-headed (presumably by Comment is Free staff, taking this as the salient part of the article)
The purpose of American enslavement to Israel?
The shape of things to come?
I emailed the Guardian Readers Editor on 30 December to ask how they could publish such garbage about Israel controlling America. My email said
I received an automated reply, saying that the Readers Editor would return to work on 4 January 2011. I have received no further response. Instead, the original article and its sub-header remain under the Guardian banner.
Antisemitism reveals the mythical Jew of the antisemitic imagination, not actual Jews. Yes, you can point at real Jews to try and defend your claims, but that doesn’t prove a conspiracy theory. For example, Jewish Communists didn’t make Communism a Jewish conspiracy any more than Jewish bankers made capitalism a Jewish conspiracy. Today, the USA is the country (barring Israel) with the highest numbers of politically and economically active Jews; and today, the USA is the primary target for the acceptable modern variations of the old, nasty, Jewish conspiracy theory.
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