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Does Liberal Anti-semitism exist?
Last edited Sat Jul 26, 2014, 01:58 PM - Edit history (1)
This is from 2009. I began to wonder if attitudes toward Israeli policy bleed into our attitudes toward it's people, if liberal anti-semitism exists as the piece suggests. I do not really believe that it does exclusively as a byproduct of liberals supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israeli policy. But if there is anti-semitism on the left, how does it play into and effect our positions on the ongoing conflict and the Palestinians plight as a whole?
excerpt
Mikey Weinstein is President and Founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. A Jew, a former Reagan Whitehouse attorney and an honors graduate of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he spends his days fighting back against what has been called an "Evangelical coup" in the U.S. Military. (See Jesus Killed Mohammed 5/09.) Mikey writes letters, makes phone calls, lobbies and, when all else fails, files lawsuits on behalf of religious minorities and mainline Christians who are being subjected to relentless proselytizing from fundamentalist officers and peers. One routine part of the reaction is letters like the one he received above.
Liberal anti-Semitism is more sophisticated and subtle. Even at our worst, we don't talk about Jews, we talk about 9/11 conspiracies orchestrated by agents of Mossad. We talk, as our medieval Christian and Christian Nationalist predecessors did before us, about undue Jewish control of the monetary system. Mostly we talk about Zionists, and every Jew who has a more complex perspective on the Middle East than Amy Goodman is one.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-tarico/sophisticated-liberal-jew_b_191135.html
65 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
The topic IS NOT "Semites" but "anti-Semitism!"
Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is prejudice, hatred of, or discrimination against Jews as a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.[1] A person who holds such positions is called an "antisemite". As Jews are an ethnoreligious group, antisemitism is generally considered a form of racism.
While the term's etymology might suggest that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic people, the term was coined in the late 19th century in Germany as a more scientific-sounding term for Judenhass ("Jew-hatred"
,[2] and that has been its normal use since then.[3] For the purposes of a 2005 U.S. governmental report, antisemitism was considered "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity."[4]
Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from expressions of hatred of or discrimination against individual Jews to organized violent attacks by mobs, state police, or even military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Although the term did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is now also applied to historic anti-Jewish incidences. Notable instances of persecution include the pogroms which preceded the First Crusade in 1096, the expulsion from England in 1290, the massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, Cossack massacres in Ukraine of 1648–1657, various pogroms in Imperial Russia between 1821 and 1906, the 1894–1906 Dreyfus affair in France, the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, official Soviet anti-Jewish policies and Arab and Muslim involvement in the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism
Pedophilia
Pedophilia or paedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, generally age 11 years or younger. As a medical diagnosis, specific criteria for the disorder extends the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13.[1][2][3][4] A person who is diagnosed with pedophilia must be at least 16 years of age, but adolescents who are 16 years of age or older must be at least five years older than the prepubescent child before the attraction can be diagnosed as pedophilia.[1][2]
Pedophilia has a range of definitions, as found in psychiatry, psychology, the vernacular, and law enforcement. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) defines it as a "disorder of adult personality and behaviour" in which there is a sexual preference for children of prepubertal or early pubertal age.[5] It is termed pedophilic disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and the manual defines it as a paraphilia in which adults or adolescents 16 years of age or older have intense and recurrent sexual urges towards and fantasies about prepubescent children that they have either acted on or which cause them distress or interpersonal difficulty.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophile
Pedophilia or paedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, generally age 11 years or younger. As a medical diagnosis, specific criteria for the disorder extends the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13.[1][2][3][4] A person who is diagnosed with pedophilia must be at least 16 years of age, but adolescents who are 16 years of age or older must be at least five years older than the prepubescent child before the attraction can be diagnosed as pedophilia.[1][2]
Pedophilia has a range of definitions, as found in psychiatry, psychology, the vernacular, and law enforcement. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) defines it as a "disorder of adult personality and behaviour" in which there is a sexual preference for children of prepubertal or early pubertal age.[5] It is termed pedophilic disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and the manual defines it as a paraphilia in which adults or adolescents 16 years of age or older have intense and recurrent sexual urges towards and fantasies about prepubescent children that they have either acted on or which cause them distress or interpersonal difficulty.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophile
Pedo- from the Greek, meaning "child." -philia, also from the Greek, meaning "friendly love" or "friendship." Do you think we should call people who are fond of children, but not child rapists/abusers, 'pedophiles', because the etymology of the word indicates that a "pedophile" is actually a "child lover"?!
Pretty much by definition, a racist is not a liberal.
A better question perhaps, is "are there anti-semites with some other, liberal positions?" pretty certainly. or "Are there anti-semites who pretend to be liberals?" - yup, I've met them, among other creepy people who pretend to be liberals. I've even met plenty of antisemites who pretend to be Jews. The anonymity of the internet leads to some amazingly perverse things, as captured in the wild-eyed screed heading the article you linked.
Unfortunately the article doesn't seem to have any strong basis for its claims.
Even at our worst, we don't talk about Jews, we talk about 9/11 conspiracies orchestrated by agents of Mossad.
"whatreallyhappened" is a "liberal" website? news to me. What liberals are claiming Mossad orchestrated this? I've seen it from a few Paulbots, but even then it was because of my nosing into some of the creepier portions of internet discussion.
We talk, as our medieval Christian and Christian Nationalist predecessors did before us, about undue Jewish control of the monetary system.
Who is this "we?" Is it like, the royal we? Our Christian nationalist predecessors? Is this where she finds the roots of liberalism? If so, i have suspicions about her information.
Mostly we talk about Zionists, and every Jew who has a more complex perspective on the Middle East than Amy Goodman is one.
Again with this "we." i find it strange that a woman I've never heard of is telling me what I supposedly think, because I'm a liberal, so i must think this. Which carries a certain irony in the context of her assertion on this one.
What I can say is that the comment threads often make my stomach hurt--and not because of what is going on in Israel and Palestine. Here is the one that triggered this post.
Huffpo's comment section is of course known for its erudition and place as a liberal stalwart, and is in no way shape or form a largely unmoderated wilderness populated by low-information trolls, libertarian woo-peddlers, and Whoever Shows Up.
*cough*
Really, liberals are being characterized by the comments section of huffpo. if I had known this is how I would be judged, I would have stayed a damned socialist
Yes, the plight of the Palestinians is anguishing. And yes, Israel has violated international law and may well be guilty of war crimes. But at a visceral level I often have a hard time experiencing my own pain and moral sensibilities about the Middle East situation. I get so overwhelmed by the flood of thinly veiled Jew-loathing that I can't respond to anything else.
Wow. For those playing the home game, let's parse this.
Yes, the plight of the Palestinians is anguishing. - good, admitting the problem is the first step towards fixing it.
And yes, Israel has violated international law and may well be guilty of war crimes. - well damn.
But - oh lawd. There it is.
But at a visceral level I often have a hard time experiencing my own pain and moral sensibilities about the Middle East situation. I get so overwhelmed by the flood of thinly veiled Jew-loathing that I can't respond to anything else.
Yeah, forget all that bullshit about the plight of Palestinians, and possible Israeli war crimes. What about Valarie Tarico's feelings?! That's what's really important. That's the discussion we need to have. You can look at dead Arabs in Gaza any old time, let's take a break to discuss the tender sensibilities of this person writing on huffpo about what a shit place huffpo is.
If her goal is to expose someone's thinly-disguised bigotry, well fucking bravo lady. Too bad about the misfire, but you still succeeded!
No examples of this "Jew-loathing," of course, even though it's apparently so prevalent that it characterizes American liberals.
a distancing from Israelis explicitly or Jews more broadly as people, an exceptionalism that characterizes liberal American disgust at and demands of Jews
See?
A political teammate couldn't see the difference between Obsession's bitter flow of misogynist verses and the forged conspiracies in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Maybe because both are fictionalized and hugely exaggerated reams of bullshit designed by bigots to incite people against the targets - in once case Muslims, in the other, Jews. Apparently only one of these two is worth worry to Valerie Tapico - bet you can't guess which one!
1. The failure to focus on the log in our own eye. Two towers come down and 4000 people die, and the majority of our population (who suddenly feel unsafe) give their blessing to the destruction of 100,000 Iraqi citizens, their basic infrastructure, their museums and their schools. Yet we mock the Israelis' sense of threat and demand inhuman perfection in their reaction. Granted, American liberals have worked long and hard against war in Iraq, but we were more conflicted about Afghanistan. And in both cases the protests lacked the absolutism of our reactions to Israel. I hear the Israeli attack on Gaza described as genocide. I never hear the American attack on Iraq described that way.
If you never heard what we did in Iraq characterized as genocide, then you never fucking listened. But then we've already covered that this writer hears the screams of Arabs and wishes they would shut the fuck up so we can talk about how she feels about the tone of the discussion about those screaming Arabs, so this lack of involvement is no surprise. And if you think this genocide only started in 2002, well damn, you need to learn some shit.
But okay. "Log in the eye." American wrongdoing means Americans should ignore Israeli wrongdoing? Wow. Really? is it only Israel we should ignore then, when they fail to rise to our level of criminality? 'Cause you know, the US kind of obliterated fifteen million Native Americans and was deeply involved in the transport of ten million Africans in chains, both of which we continue to reap a plethora of benefits from without any move towards rectification... If we're to ignore every criminal act that falls below our own, well shit, we might as well retire from the world.
Also what's this bullshit, she's trying to throw liberals in with the people who cheered on the war in Iraq while trying to cover her ass saying Liberals opposed it. Which is it? Eat your cake or look at it. Can't do both.
I'm starting to get the idea that this writer knows about "liberals" mostly from reading Ann Coulter's bibliography, it's truly perverse and distorted.
2. Our silence when it comes to the role of the surrounding countries, who want the Palestinians to remain right where they are as pawns in a global power struggle. Palestinians don't have the option to leave because Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and others don't give them that option any more than we do. Israeli-Gaza border closures work only when Egypt keeps her border closed as well. Within any group of refugees there are those who don't want to sacrifice their children on the altar of their politics--who simply want to leave and start a better life. But they are denied resettlement rights elsewhere. The Palestinian people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations.
I could go on forever unraveling the bullshit here. In fact I'm certain I've done so elsewhere on DU. So some cliffnotes version.
Egypt: Read up on the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
Everyone else mentioned: Have no option to restore Palestinian refugees to their homes. only Israel can do that, whether to Israeli territory, or Palestinian territory, as Israel controls the flow of people into both nations.
Resettlement: With the exception of Lebanon and Kuwait, every nation hosting Palestinian refugees has offered them citizenship in that nation, as obligated for host nations under international law. Some accept the offer. Some do not. No nation can legally strip these people of their Palestinian or refugee status without the individual agreeing to it (thus, Jordan's mass citizenship declaration is not actually legally binding, for example)
Again we have the narrative of the damn dirty scheming Arab surfacing. Kind of ironic in context.
3. Our indifference to Jewish post traumatic dynamics and conditions that reactivate trauma. In Israel, men who spent their teenage years dragging bodies out of gas chambers and burying them in trenches are only just dying off. To make matters worse, threats of annihilation are ongoing. When a woman who has been molested has someone hit on her, she often gets triggered, under or over reacting because she is re-experiencing the earlier trauma. When people who have been the targets of genocide hear surrounding leaders pledge their extinction, I might imagine they would get triggered, too. If we Liberals are willing to assume that it takes a people generations to recover from slavery, can we not assume the same of genocide? I grieve at Israeli reactivity just as I grieve when African American young people say that success is White. But grieving and demanding that they be over it are two different things.
I can certainly understand PTSD from abuse, firsthand. I'm an abuse survivor, myself. When it's triggered, my response is rage, and it's fucking horrifying. I am not someone who should have a nuclear arsenal at hand. or any kind of military hardware, frankly. I shouldn't be in charge of a nation. Certainly not a nation that is ruling over people beyond my nation's borders with application of military force.
Victims and survivors need support and help. They need aid to recover. They don't need some asshole handing them weapons and entrusting them with the lives and well-being of people who pose, you know, a trigger risk.
Thus while I can certainly understand the argument, I think it's a poor one to be made in defense of the actions of the eleventh-strongest military force on earth, y'know?
4. A double standard for Middle Eastern Countries. When Arabs or Muslims engage in mass political extermination, we say little. The same with smaller cruelties. Yet we hold the Israelis to a higher standard. Why is this? Why do we scream about Israeli rockets and yet we're mum when Hamas and Fatah are murdering each other? How about the slaughter of the Kurds or on a smaller scale, the execution of female teachers in Afghanistan. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually a form of racism against Arabs and Muslims, like when we assume that a kid is fated to be a low-achiever and we write them off. But consider: How would we react if the Israelis treated their women like Saudis do? If they treated their Hindu servants like Omanis do? If they treated their religious minorities like the Iraqis do? If they pledged the extermination of Palestinians the way that Hamas pledges itself to the extermination of Jews?
Arabs and Muslims of course, clumped together here. Never mind that most Muslims in the world aren't Arabs, or that a sizable minority of Arabs aren't Muslims. Same thing, right? Again, subtle bigotry is being exposed, just... not the one she's aiming for.
This whole argument is of course a red herring - "yeahbutwhatbout!" Similar to the first presented, it presumes wrongdoing perpetrated by someone the writer favors should be ignored in order to give attention to wrongdoing from someone she disfavors. also i live that apparently there is no liberal criticism of Saudi treatment of women, or slavery in the gulf states - also that Bush and Reagan era policy (the arming of Fatah against Hamas and the blind eye to Saddam's killing of Kurds, respectively - she left out Bush the First's blind eye to the massacre of Shia, but the Shia of Iraq were Arabs, so, you kno, she doesn't give a fuck) is now suddenly a "liberal" hallmark or something.
How would we react if the Israelis treated women like the Saudis do? Well, dunno, it doesn't happen, good for Israel. But you know what we do when Arab states invade and try to annex territory outside their borders? We do this to them. Followed by this. Culminating, of course, with this. Little bit of perspective there, for the next time someone might want to whine that Israel is "picked on' and that "Arabs get a free pass."
5. Our lack of comparable passion about other suffering in the world. How come the Palestinian plight taps deep feelings for so many liberals, and yet brutalities in Sudan or Sri Lanka don't have the same power to arouse us? To draw an analogy from my anti-fundamentalism work, when Evangelicals cite Leviticus to justify their attitudes toward homosexuals but then ignore the rest of Mosaic Law, something other than biblical literalism is at play. When the suffering of the Palestinian people arouses venom that seeps through in Liberal rants while other suffering leaves us cold, something other than compassion is at play.
More "yeahbutwhatabout" BS. Three times in five points, that's just sad. I guarantee that you will find liberals just as involved in these topics. There's two points of trouble here.
First is selection bias. if you're complaining about attention paid to Israel-Palestine, then you're probably paying a lot of attention to the subject, and are ergo more likely to notice people talking about that than you are to notice people talking about the coup in Thailand or something. Why? because if they're talking about the coup in Thailand, they're probably not engaged in your discussions about Israel and Palestine, they're over somewhere talking about Thailand. Since you don't see them due to your own narrow focus, you presume they don't exist, which reaffirms your whining that "too much attention" is paid to the situation you are focusing all of your attention on.
Second is, of course, media bias - Cali_Democrat and i had a small discussion on this tonight. She feels it's due to the media seeing the conflict as "sexy," and while I don't totally disagree, I think it has much more to do with how central Israel has become to American policy and how the Israeli narrative has been the solitary narrative from the region for so long, that leads to this media focus.
The assumption made - that if you dare give attention ti Israel-Palestine (in any manner that isn't singularly admiring of Israel, at least - fawning admirers can give all the attention in the world) then you MUST be an antisemite" is insipid bullshit.
I loathe the kind of ignorant rant that kicked off this article. But the subtle bigotry of some fellow liberals feels worse. It violates the very humanitarian rhetoric that gives it cover. As a progressive, it shames me. And it makes me scared.
Please, interrupt your mention of Palestinian suffering to prioritize your personal feelings above that suffering. I beg you, please, more. And could you turn "Arab" and "Muslim" into synonyms a few more times? Maybe tell me about the scheming sadistic Arab, amid your defense of "Obsession"? That was my favorite part of you telling me how i'm a liberal so therefore i hate Jews because you saw a nasty post in the huffpo comment sections!
We humans are probably hard-wired for tribalism, and we need little excuse to see the "other" as disgusting or evil. But we also are capable of thinking more complexly. One who suffered much, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had this to say: "If only it were all so simple, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Maybe in addition to looking at the dividing lines in the Middle East we could be looking more at the dividing lines in our own hearts.
It's just not huffpo whining about itself without a meaningless deepity to end with a flourish, is it?
it needs to be recognised that legitimate criticisms of Israel aren't anti-Semitic. There are some difficulties in this area because there is a long, and very ugly, history of anti-Semitism.
For example, saying "The Jewish lobby controls American foreign policy" is anti-Semitic (since it casts Jews as a monolithic group). Saying "AIPAC exerts an undue influence on American foreign policy" is not anti-Semitic (although it's also understandable that some may be suspicious of the motives of those who make such a statement).
Saying "Zionists" or "Jews" when you mean "Israel" (and more specifically "Likud" is, probably, anti-Semitic (since there are differing schools of thought within Zionism, there are anti-Zionist Jews, and not making the distinction doesn't help your arguments).
Things like the following aren't helpful:
Two years ago, Jewish NGO Simon Wiesenthal Center published a controversial 'black list' of the world's ten worst anti-Semites. Number nine on that list: Jakob Augstein, a German journalist and son of founder and publisher of German magazine Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein. In opinion pieces for 'Spiegel Online', Augstein Junior would regularly carry out a critical appraisal of the Palestine policies by the Israeli government. Israel was a democracy that was acting like an occupying force in Gaza, oppressing the Palestinians, Augstein wrote. The result: Augstein was accused of anti-Semitism.
Augstein fired back in 'Der Spiegel': He was aware, he wrote, that as a German he couldn't write about Israel in the same way as somebody from Switzerland or Spain could. As a German journalist, he was experiencing a conflict of roles, he continued. The German in him, he said, was urging him to treat Israel carefully, while the journalist in him wanted to be honest. He went on to demand the right to say so when Israel was in the wrong. Everything else, said Augstein, was neurotic journalism.
http://www.dw.de/criticism-of-israel-or-anti-semitism/a-17807132
Augstein fired back in 'Der Spiegel': He was aware, he wrote, that as a German he couldn't write about Israel in the same way as somebody from Switzerland or Spain could. As a German journalist, he was experiencing a conflict of roles, he continued. The German in him, he said, was urging him to treat Israel carefully, while the journalist in him wanted to be honest. He went on to demand the right to say so when Israel was in the wrong. Everything else, said Augstein, was neurotic journalism.
http://www.dw.de/criticism-of-israel-or-anti-semitism/a-17807132
